Want To Write A Professional Email

Email is one of the most widely used means of communication for professional and personal use. Owing to its speed and efficiency you are sure to use it irrespective of your role or your industry. Professional emails are written for a variety of reasons like for sending the minutes of the meeting, exchanging some information, convey some important updates to your team, your introduction letter or sometimes you may write it to a company you wish to work.

Professional emails, needless to say, are different from the personal ones. You need to follow a certain fixed format. The mail should be clear, to the point, friendly and the message should be conveyed well to the reader. No doubt mastering it takes some time but as we all know practise makes a man perfect. 

There are certain steps for writing an effective, professional email. Here we have mentioned the entire steps required to write an effective email. 

1. Your aim or Purpose of the email

Whenever you start with anything you should know what the purpose of the email is? What do you want to convey to the reader? Once you have the answers to these questions you can write a perfect email. For example, if the purpose of your email is to review the reports that you have attached, then your email must clearly state it. Write properly why you need the reports to be reviewed, exactly what particularly you want them to review and the time frame by which you are expecting the completion of the task. 

2. Take into Consideration the Audience

After the purpose, the next thing to consider is your audience because they need to understand what you are saying. For example, if you are writing the mail to some business executive your email should be polished and free of any informal conversations or jokes. If you are writing to a colleague with whom you enjoy a friendly relation, you might use a friendly, less formal approach.  

3. Size of the Mail

No one is interested to read long stories in the professional email. Your email should thus be as concise as possible but without missing out any key information. Take care that your email doesn’t address too many issues at the same time as it makes the email lengthy and even difficult to understand. Use short and simple sentences. No need to display your command over the language. While editing your email, remove the irrelevant information. This will make your email brief.

4. Proofreading

Grammatical errors in your email don’t go well.  An error-free email is a sign of your professionalism and diligence. Therefore before sending it across, proofread it. Take a minute check for spelling mistakes, grammatical errors or syntax errors. Also, check if you have unknowingly used any informal words or slangs. One more thing that is to be double-checked is that you have added the attachmentsif any. Now, if you are sending the email to your client or stakeholders or anyone critically important to your work, it is a good habit to get it proofread by your reporting manager or a trusted colleague.

5. Be Courteous

Include proper courteous greeting in the beginning and end of the email to sound polite and friendly. One more thing is, be considerate of the person and their time you are sending the mail to.  Avoid sending emails asking for something after the working hours or while the person is on leave, unless and until it’s an emergency. These etiquettes should be followed.

6. Follow-up

People might miss your email or forget to respond to it as they receive many emails daily. The best practice is to wait for two working days and then reaching them back with a follow-up email. The follow-up email should have a friendly tone with no harsh words.

These are the general aspects that you should consider while writing an email. Now let us see how to format the email. There are some elements like the subject line, body and closing. Let us see these elements in detail

1. The Subject Line – This communicates the purpose of your email. It should be a short sentence that summarizes the email. While writing a professional email, it is important to write the subject so that the recipient knows what the mail is all about. For example, if you need the reports to be reviewed, the subject line should be Reports Review. 

2. Greeting – This is the first line wherein you have to address the person. It is like greeting the person. For example:“Hi Mr Jones.”

3. The Body – This is the part where you will write your message. It should be concise, to the point and devoid of any grammatical errors. Let us continue the reports to be reviewed example.

“Our sales reports have been generated for this quarter. I thus request you to go through it once and share if any corrections needed. I have attached the reports and request you to do the needful within a couple of working days.’

4. The End – This is the last line of your email and it should wrap up the message. Also, this is the part where you can repeat the requests you made in the body of your email.

For example: “Waiting to hear from you by Friday. Many thanks!”

5. Signature – The signature is your identification. You can identify yourself by your name, title and your office. Many of the email programs give you the liberty to set a fixed signature that automatically gets added to the end of every email.

“Sincerely,

Kate Ross

Senior Sales Executive,

ABC Company”

To conclude this general format of writing the email should be followed irrespective of whether you are just entered the official scenario or you are a well-experienced person. By following the above tips and instructions you can be a pro in composing an effective message quickly. If you want to know more on this or anything related to job search in the Philippines, your one-stop shop is jobaxy.com.

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