Email Etiquette

319 billion emails are sent a day. Love them or hate them, emails are here to stay, and they

will be probably the primary means of communication that you will interact with your

employer. It’s very easy to email but also very easy to mess up emails.

Below are a few tips on how to send emails and what to do.

Try and make your subject lines as clear as possible so as to give context to the recipient as to what is going on and what the email is about. Try not to make the subject too long though. But remember that on an average day, a person could get over 50 emails so make it easier for them to find it with a clear subject line.

A salutation is the first bit of the email that you write to greet the recipient. As seen below:

You have to learn how to skirt the line between friendly and warm. Generally speaking, try and steer away from using the words “Dear Sfiso” as this is super formal or “Good day Kopano”. But don’t get too friendly by saying “Yo Lerato” if it’s your first time emailing the person. Using “Hi Busi” or “Hey Ditebogo” are super safe salutations.

Also, “I hope this email finds you well” or “I hope this email finds you in high spirits” can be sent the first time you are emailing a person, but generally, after you have spoken to this person a number of times, ditch this greeting, especially if you are responding to a thread (more of that anon).

Set the tone correctly from the moment the recipient opens up the email and it’ll go a long way to making sure that your email is taken seriously.

Every email you send should have a signature and you have to include some key information in your email. Here is an example of mine:

You can see there I have included my name, surname, phone number, email address, and also links to my social media sites. Why do I do this?

It makes it easier for people to reach me and if my email does get forwarded to someone else, that person has my details.

You can set up most emailing apps to include your signature at the end of your emails.

Steer away from using images as a signature, they may look cooler but are incredibly impractical as some email applications don’t show images also when someone wants to try and access the links in your signature, they can’t, because it’s an image.

Try to always sign off your emails, don’t just have a couple of paragraphs of text and then click on send. Here is an example of an email sign-off:

There are a number of ways to send an email, they include but are not limited to, “Kind regards”, “Best regards”, “Regards”, “Sincerely”. Please don’t use these:

Studies have found that simply sending “Best” and then your signature is one of the best ways to send an email. It’s short and sweet and is both friendly and formal. But choose what works for you besides the ones in the list above!

When sending an email to multiple people, you can use CC or BCC to send it to the other people, but the question you may be asking is when do I use this and which one do I use when? Well, that’s what we are here for, let’s go!

CC means “carbon copy”. CC is more a matter of etiquette than anything. The general rule is that the “To” field is reserved for the main recipients of your email. You then CC other interested parties so they can have their own copy of the email.

CCing other parties also make it clear to all involved that the email has been seen by everyone.

BCC stands for blind carbon copy. BCC is a way of sending copies of an email to other people. The difference between the two is that, while you can see who else has received the email when CC is used, that is not the case with BCC. It is called blind carbon copy because the other recipients won’t be able to see that someone else has been sent a copy of the email.

You should use BCC when you don’t want the other recipients to see that you have sent the email to someone else. The benefit is that when someone does click on reply, that person won’t be included in the email thread.

This is linked to the topic discussed above. When someone has sent you an email that includes people that are copied in the email, you can either reply, reply to all or forward the email. You can see if someone has sent an email and copied people in the “to” line as seen below:

You have two ways to respond to an email. If you click on the arrow (labeled as 1 above) you will respond only to the person who sent the message. If someone is copied in the email, click on reply all because they would probably want to be included in the email thread.

If you click on the three dots (labeled as 2 above) you will open up a menu as seen below:

Clicking on reply will only respond to one person, if someone is copied in the email, click on reply all because they would probably want to be included in the email thread. It’s the same as clicking on the arrow.

Clicking on reply to all will reply to every person including those that are copied but not those that are blind copied.

Another tip for time-saving is that when you want to continue a conversation with a person, reply to the same email thread instead of starting a new one. This means that when the person receives the email, they have context as to what you guys were chatting about.

If they have taken too long to respond, send them something like this, “just responding to this email so it doesn’t get lost in your inbox”

This email is a game-changer as it normally makes people move fast because they feel embarrassed for not replying and also, they can easily see the context of what you were chatting about when they didn’t reply.

PROOF READ YOUR EMAILS. There are a few things as bad as seeing spelling and grammar errors in an email. English is not everyone’s first language so if you need some assistance, there is an awesome tool called Grammarly which you can add as an extension that will assist you in checking for errors and it will even tell what tone you are using.

Also, try and keep your formatting good, so the whole email should have one font size and font style, and use spaces and paragraphs!