Email Fails

Hey everybody, this is Tim Downs and I'm Dr. Tom Barrett and we are the Communication Guys And welcome to episode number one hundred fifty three of the Communication Guys Podcast where we help you become a more Confident compelling and creative communicator in whatever you do we help you connect with your world and today We're looking at email fails or how to write an email that someone might actually read you know in our world today Email has just become an essential form of business communication the average worker sends it receives 105 emails each day now by the way, that's not you know emails that we didn't want we're not talking about Junk email these are business emails 105 a day, but when you break that down that takes up 28% of the average person's work week at a normal 40 hour work week that would be over 11 hours and so I hear that Tim and I think that myself email may be an essential part of business communication But it's increasingly an exhausting one as well an email used to be so romantic You've got mail it was electronic mail and you'd open up that laptop or actually a desktop at the time and couldn't wait To see if you got a message from someone now you know time you don't be able to laptop and you're praying that nobody sends you email Because email has become a form of pollution even though it is an essential form of business communication And the truth is listeners you receive so many emails that you never bother to read and you have sent so many That were probably never replied to and what we're saying here today is look if we're going to actually invest one quarter of our work week sending and receiving emails Then we should learn to write them so that someone else will read them and that's the topic of today We're going to discuss five principles for writing emails that actually get read And let's begin with the obvious point one keep it brief Dan Arieli is a behavioral economist at Duke and he's the author of a book that Tim and I both love called predictably irrational Now recently in an interview in the Atlantic He said and I quote I care about the ways in which we mismanage our health mismanage our money and mismanage our time From all of those time is probably the easiest place to make some substantial improvements See one of his concerns has been the role of email in business and email related stress and time inefficiency So Dan Arieli did something interesting He posted a survey on his blog asking his readers to go back and take a look at the last 40 emails that they had received Now this does not include spam These were 40 emails from legitimate business communicators What they were supposed to do is take a look at each of those 40 emails and ask How long could I have waited to read it now? You know the problem that it was addressing here And that is when an email arrives in your inbox you might have notifications set up though There's an announcement that there's a new email that's arrived in other words when it comes to notifications All emails are created equal What Dan Arieli wanted to figure out is do they all demand your attention? Are they worth a shift in focus? How many of these could have been waited on to read and this is what he found out Only 12% of them his respondents said needed to be read immediately and here's the big takeaway 35% of those emails didn't need to be read at all In other words the arrive in the inbox notification popped up It demanded their attention or a shift in focus from whatever else they were doing But 35% of them it turned out they never needed to be read So for us what that means is that the reality of today is that people in business are bombarded by Emails and they do know that many of them are unnecessary. So the question becomes how do you get yours read in if it's going to get read It needs to be brief and to the point. I mean all of us know what it's like to open an email And we see the text scrolling away and when we see that we do an instant mental calculation How much time and metal energy will it take to read this? Well, we do that with other people's emails. We don't want them to do that with ours So we want to make sure that our emails are not abandoned to the read later folder Or the deleted folder and remember listeners almost 50% of emails now are read on a mobile device So that is smaller screen and that makes long text look even more formidable So if you want to increase the odds that your email actually gets read keep it short That may be a problem if you are a verbose individual Love to express yourself. You're going to have to edit it down and be brief And another way to increase the odds of your email being taken seriously and being read is don't Bury the lead It's worth your time to just ask yourself. What is the big idea of this email? What do I want? What is the action point? What needs to happen? You might want to take a principle from journalism and that is don't Bury the lead Yeah, you know in journalistic writing listeners You can't afford to spend the first three paragraphs just creating atmosphere Setting the mood describing your surroundings and editor would say nope. You're burying the lead If an editor scans which you've written and finds the biggest idea of your article for that magazine or newspaper Three paragraphs down they'll cross out the first two paragraphs and they'll want you to have the lead up front And that's the idea that we're suggesting to you when it comes to your email Don't take time to get to the point state the big idea up front and then expand as you need to Remember this is a form of business communication even if you're more personal in your style What you want to do is take a lesson from newspapers You keep the important content above the fold you know what that means of course when a newspaper is on the news stand It's folded in half when you browse a newspaper you pick it up and you tend to read above the fold And far fewer people will actually flip that paper and read what's below the fold So that's an expression we still use today We take it from newspapers, but apply it to other forms of writing if you want your writing to be read Get the big idea up front on top above the fold hey by the way time I'd like to remind people of this This is a pet peeve of mine and my wife's We've sent emails to people where we will ask three questions So number one how old are you number two? Where are you from number three? How's the weather there and we'll get a response back and it'll say 45 and I want to write back and say and there were three questions in my email Why do people respond to only one? Well, you know, it's a great example of this people skim and scan So they're skimming they're scanning they see the first question and they think oh a question I need to send an answer and they'll never even see the other two and that's a good reminder Lissars that's how people read that's how you read so we have to be careful not to bury the lead Yeah, isn't it true to him that when it comes the email nowadays all of us want to be minimalists You know, we want to get to the point we want to find it in the email that we were sent We hope the lead wasn't buried we don't want to hunt for what is the requester point of this email And also we want to be minimalist in our response So what is the quickest response I can give and sometimes we give such quick hurried responses We actually missed the point of the email or in your case Subpoints within the email because we're all trying to scan and move as quickly as we can and get on to the next one And that's a good summary that we're all minimalist as readers and that means we have to all be minimalist as writers as well And that brings us down to our second point in email fails and that is Make it personal, but not too personal We're all familiar with auto correct and that was that innovation several years ago where computer power and processing speed allowed software to actually watch what you were writing And compare each word to an entire dictionary and decide whether or not you actually meant to spell that last word with Four cues or three teas in it and auto correct has been very helpful It's also led to some really hilarious and sometimes annoying results as well Well as computing power and software constantly improves auto correct Has gone on to become smart reply and if you're a gmail user, you know what smart reply is gmail is scanning that email that came in if it senses it's a question A request made of you at the bottom of your gmail You'll find three quick suggestions that are likely responses It might say something like sounds good or count me in or I'll get back to you on that and you don't have to type a reply You don't have to think at all. All you have to do is point at one of them and smart reply sends that for you Well, then we've got artificial intelligence and even more sophisticated software and now smart reply has an evil step child called smart compose And smart compose is using the power of artificial intelligence to actually analyze you your individual writing style and guess how you might want to complete a sentence. So you can start to type a sentence and it will make suggestions for how you might want to complete it. All you've got to do is type the first few words and then one click and your sentence is completed for you and you got to wonder where does this end up. You know, when I'm an old guy and I want to write my autobiography and I sit down and type, I was born and then Smart Compose suggests the rest of my autobiography. I just click a button and I've got a 300 page book. It's an amazing thing. Well, the truth on this is while artificial intelligence is so astonishing in its capacity and what it's able to do, the complaint is that entire communications are beginning to be computer generated. I mean, let's be honest, we've all received emails that pretend to be personal but we quickly abandon them because we realize, no, no, no, there's nothing human or personal about this. It was indeed computer generated and we dismissed them because we actually want to connect with other human beings, not with what a computer wrote. So if you want your emails to actually be read, consider taking an extra moment to write something personal, something as simple as good to talk to you last week or saw your new car or something that says this is from a human being, something that causes people to go a real person with a real thought and some real content but humanize it and don't get over dependent on the efficiency of computer generated text. So make it personal listeners, but here's the cautionary note, not too personal. You need to remember that email is a permanent record because we type it quickly into a computer and it disappears into the multiverse. We think it's vaporized, oh no, it exists forever on a server somewhere. And we'd like to point out, as a form of business communication, your company owns the computer you're working on, they own the servers that store the emails that you send and they have the legal right to access the content from their servers. And more and more attorneys are pointing out these days when there are lawsuits, fraud suits, legal challenges, emails and texts are always part of the chain of evidence. And it's so amazing to me, Tim, that people forget the balance that's necessary. Keep it personal, but like you say, not too personal. So our caution here is simply be careful about revealing personal information or slamming your company or a coworker or admitting to questionable activities, avoid all of this. And in fact, a good rule of thumb for business is if you don't want to see it on the front page of the New York Times, don't put it in an email. And our challenge is when we're moving fast, it is easy to forget this caution. And sometimes people go, oh, I wish I would have thought before I wrote and hit send. So we're talking today about email fails. And we've covered three points so far. Number one, keep it brief. We all skim and scan. We've said, so if you want your email to be read, you can't run on and on. If that's your style, then you need to write a book. You want to keep your emails brief. Number two, we said, don't bury the lead. Sometimes in our style of writing, we want to expand and roll into where we're going with this. Take a lesson from journalists, writers of magazines and newspapers, put the big idea up front and then expand as necessary. Tip number three, we said, make it personal. Let people know that it's from a human being. Make some reference to something that says this isn't just computer generated, but cautionary note, not too personal. Keep in mind the fact that emails are forever on the server somewhere. And that brings us to point number four, time. And that is space it out. Tim, do you remember when we were in grade school and that we've gone from young children's books that might be full of pictures and just a few words? And then sometime in grade school, the books change. And all of a sudden we open a book and there are fewer or no pictures and simply a solid block of text that looks unbelievably formidable. And there's that sense of, oh my, there's visual overload and we want to make sure we don't recreate that experience in our emails. And listen, can you recall that experience of opening a book and there's a solid page of text there and back at you and there's that sense of immediate fatigue. Oh, do I want to wait it? How long will it take me to read that page? And what you might have done is flip the page to see how long would you have to go before there was a picture, something visual to break up all that text. Have you noticed listeners how email marketers write in their emails they send to you? Have you noticed that a paragraph never contains more than two sentences and often contains only one? And that's because they want to space it out. They want to make it visually appealing. So they're spacing it out into bite size chunks. Now my daughter is an amazing graphic designer and this is what she has to wrestle with all the time because people will give her all kinds of content and say here pack this into this brochure or load all this into a slide and she has to educate them about the value of white space. And that's what we're saying is space it out visually so it doesn't look tiresome. Hey, by the way, time I've been using an app lately called spreeter and it's very interesting spreeter is based on this idea that the reason people are slow in their reading and the reason people have a hard time focusing and get tired is because of eye movement. You have to move your eyes constantly sweeping back and forth across the page with spreeter what you can do is load an article or even an entire book into their app and it actually shows you one word at a time like flashcards and it flashes them very, very fast and all you have to do is hold your eyes still and read one word after another. But by doing it that way, you can actually read faster than you can, sweeping your eyes back and forth across the page. They're just addressing this idea of visual tiredness that everybody struggles with. And as I listen to that, I'd love to see that by the way, Tim, I'm not familiar with that but I'm thinking have we reached a new height in the genius of technology or have we reached a new low and the effort we're willing to put into reading? Do you mean I'd have to move my eyes to read this? Don't count me out, I'm taking a nap. I don't know if that's good news or bad news but actually I would like to see that I'm fascinated by it. So let's move over to point number five and that is make the subject line count. You know, it's fascinating that email marketers, they estimate that 50% of their subscribers decide whether or not to open an email simply based on the subject line alone. Well if we want people to read our emails, maybe we need to give it some thought. And so one of the things that we all need to remind ourselves of is avoid the vague comments like a couple of reminders or thought you should see this or one that was recently voted most hated in the header of an email per our conversation. And you know, avoid those that sound like a hallmark card rather than a business communication, thinking of you today on this special day. Remember make it count, but it's a business communication. So how do you make a subject line count? Well, make it concrete. Make your subject line immediate and make it action oriented. So what would that sound like? Well instead of writing in your subject line need to meet with you, which is vague, how about something more like can you meet at 11 tomorrow? We'll talk about not burying the lead your entire request is actually in the subject line. Or instead of writing in the subject line need your input, how about writing something like need answers to these three questions by five. Now that's specific, it's concrete and it allows someone to look at the subject line and weigh the email and know how much trouble it's going to take to respond to this. Remember the survey from Dan Arieli that we referenced earlier in the podcast. He asked people to go back and review the last 40 emails that they had received not spam, but emails from legitimate business contacts. And people said that 35% of those emails didn't even need to be read. Well, listeners, your subject line needs to say needs to be read. So often subject lines are an afterthought something to paste on before you hit send. What we're trying to say is you spent some time writing the email, now spend some time making sure somebody opens it by paying attention to what's in that subject line. So as we think about this whole idea of how to write an email that may actually be read, there's one final thought that you might want to consider. And that's to ask the question, does this email even need to be sent? Cell has become the business default mode, but that doesn't mean that it's always the best form of communication for us. Every now and then we need to ask ourselves what a phone call will be better. How about a personal conversation? Remember, whenever you can, go human. Well, thanks for joining us today. You know, if you're like us, you listen to podcasts on the go in the car on the job at the gym. So you'll be glad to know that we took notes for you today. And if you'd like a son. summary of the highlights of today's communication guys podcast. You can find show notes and any sources we mentioned at communicationguys.com. And the communication guys podcast is produced every Monday. And if you liked what you heard here today, why not drop by Apple podcasts and subscribe. And while you're there, please leave us a favorable review. Have you got a message, a passion, a really great idea? Well, don't keep it to yourself, get out there and tell the world.