In the day and age we live in, where technology is very present everywhere you turn it so important to be able to communicate properly through email. Although I do not use email that often to message back and forth with others I do know what it takes to communicate effectively. I have gone through my multiple emails and came up with three that I felt had some sort of good communication to it and three that really did not.
Three Effective Emails
The first email I decided to talk about is one that I received when I was being hired at my job. I am going off of the email I received right after my interview, from the HR representative. Basically it was a follow up email. She thanked me for meeting them and gave me the next steps. She advised me to fill out the application and then to email her after it had been done so that way we could move forward. This email had a pleasant opening , “Hi Alyssa, it was nice to meet you yesterday”. She also had a pleasant closing, “Let me know if you have any questions, Thanks!”. The other thing she did to ensure ease of reading was a complete, professional signature line. It had the business logo and all of her information as well as the business information on it.
As I have previously mentioned I do not communicate with email very often at all. Most of my emails from the past six months or so have been with wedding vendors so I am also going to use them in these examples. The second email I have received that I thought had good communication was from our venue owner and operator. Ten days before the wedding she sent me an email to check on everything and give me last minute details. Through her email she maintained professionalism and appropriate formality. The email itself looked very professional and used paragraphs to ensure its ease of reading. There were no spelling, punctuation or formatting errors and she used my name several times throughout the document, making me feel like it wasn’t the same email all of the other brides got.
The third and final email I am going to discuss that I felt showed communication was from my boss. She is the type of person who has to sit at her computer quite often and email back and forth for hours, so it is not surprise to me that she possesses effective email traits. She sent me an email that was a list of all the things that she needed me to do on a particular day. Email was the best choice for this because as a text message it would have been far too long. She provided me with a clear, detailed subject line “To Be Done 5/15”. I had a few questions about the things she had sent to me and she responded back very quickly with answers. This shows respect for me time. Her email was short and effective including the subject line, greeting, message, closing, and signature block.
Three Ineffective Emails
The first of three emails that I felt had several aspects of an ineffective email comes from a co-worker. She sent me an email that said “Can you take my shift the 23rd?”. That was it. There was no formal structure, subject line or anything like that. She didn’t provide enough details in her email for me even really to want to consider taking this shift. She didn’t include the time of the shift, the location (we have two stores that employees bounce back and forth from), and although unnecessary it would have helped her to include why she needed the shift covered. It was a very casual, unprofessional email.
The second email I will be discussing comes from another wedding venue. When I started the process of wedding planning I was sending several emails a day to different vendors, to get things like timeline ideas, price quotes, etc. I noticed the problem I am going to discuss in several of the emails that I received but just picked this example to use. I sent an email to a wedding venue asking about available dates and quotes and to get more information. They didn’t send me an email back for three weeks. At this point it doesn’t matter how good their email was because I had already chosen another venue to go with. This to me felt like they didn’t respect my time. It was unprofessional that a business with a good name and high class took that long to reply.
The third and final email I am going to discuss comes from my grandma actually. She sent me a timeline for our upcoming vacation. There wasn’t a subject line, however she did have a good greeting and closing. But half way through the email, which was also a little long and had quite a bit of extra information that wasn’t needed, she must have hit her caps lock because all of the letters were upper cased. I am not sure how she missed that, but it is much harder to read when you felt like all the words were angry.
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