21 Ways to Avoid Business E-mail Disasters by Bill Ringle Robert was a 6 year account executive with a Pittsburgh-based financial services firm. He considered himself savvy in both the industry and the tools of the trade that allowed him to be successful within his company and serve his client base well. On a hotel shuttle ride to the airport one afternoon, he happened to strike up a conversation with a manager of a company that Robert wanted to establish greater inroads with. At the conclusion of the conversation, the two exchanged business cards. As the manager tucked the card in his jacket pocket and picked up his laptop to go, he said to Robert, "I'll e-mail you the phone number of the person you'll want to talk to," and stepped off the shuttle. The doors closed, and Robert's anxiety level rose along with the shuttle's speedometer. His e-mail address isn't printed on his business cards, he realized! Business blunders like this occur every day. None is likely to be a deal-killer by itself, but in combination with other missteps, or the same mistake repeated over time, will hurt you as an individual and your company, as well. Below is a guide to 21 common ways that business people shoot themselves in the foot with e-mail on a regular basis, with recommendations for better business conduct on the Information Superhighway. Personal effectiveness Take a close look at how you use e-mail when communicating with just one other person. These tips are particularly important with your one-on-one correspondence. - Be hard to reach via e-mail. This is easy to recognize. Your business cards are missing this important line. If you've just gotten a new batch of cards printed (or you have a supply on hand), reprinting with the e-mail address may not be a short-term option. To bridge the gap, I've seen businessmen and businesswomen successfully use pre-printed clear label stickers to add their e-mail address and company web site. If you are conscientious and have easy-to-read handwriting, you can get away with writing your e-mail address on the back of your card in many cases. Bonus tip: Always check business cards you receive and if an e-mail address is mission, offer to write the person's e-mail address on the card before tucking it away. - Use terrible subject lines. When e-mail arrives, people use two ways of determining its importance: who sent it and the subject line. A message that says, "reminder" as a subject line is treated quite differently than one that says, "Reminder: Meeting on 3/12 at 2:30pm in Conference room". Additional examples can be reviewed at the business e-mail web site (www.starcomm.com/BusinessEmail/). - Be informal, even jocular, as a rule. This is a subtle one because each of us thinks that our messages will be understood exactly as we intended when we wrote them. To avoid misinterpretations, lean toward straightforward communications with individuals you do not know well. This is twice as important when sending a group message. If someone in marketing sends you a message saying that over 50% of existing customers will pay for the new product being discussed, you may wish to register your skepticism. Responding with a sarcastic "Right!" is far more ambiguous than saying, "I think that claim may be exaggerated. Care to back it up?" - Who needs to proofread? The loss of credibility due to a mistyped or misspelled word is below the radar screen for most busy professionals. In other words, you probably don't know it when you blow it. Take the extra minute or two to a) use the spelling checker of your e-mail package, and b) to reread the message to make sure it is coherent and accurate. Typos happen. Proofreading prevents you from embarrassing yourself. - Use e-mail as PageMaker. As e-mail packages start to get feature-heavy, users sometimes get seduced by the ability to change fonts, text color, and paragraph alignment. It's remarkable how slick you can make a message look these days. The consideration that's often missing is how the message looks when it is received. Not every e-mail client supports all these formatting features, and when they don't, your recipient gets mail that looks really messed up! A better approach is to use e-mail for text messages. When you need additional formatting, create a word processing file and send it as an e-mail attachment. - Print out every message to review it. That's a good way to waste your company's paper and your time! Instead, develop methods of storing your incoming and outgoing messages in relevant mail boxes, such as "staff meeting minutes", "Q2 transactions", and "hot leads". Learn how to mark-up and transfer just the pertinent portions of a message to appropriate places, such as meeting information to your online calendar or datebook. Programs such as Eudora (www.Eudora.com) and Lotus Notes (www.Lotus.com) offer automatic sorting of e-mail based upon keywords in the sender, subject, or body text of messages. - Rely on others to keep a copy of messages you send. In the online executive education course I teach, a VP of Sales confessed, "I thought it was like printing -- doesn't the file say on the hard drive when you send it via e-mail?" No, not necessarily. And many e-mail packages install with the default to NOT save copies of outgoing e-mail. To avoid the mess of looking for mail that you sent and not finding it, some people always cc themselves. A better way is to take a moment and verify that your e-mail software is configured to save outgoing copies. - Check for new messages when the mood strikes you. Come on, you know the drill on this one. E-mail makes it so easy to communicate within a corporation, to your vendors, suppliers, consultants, and customers that professionals expect you to be checking your e-mail regularly. Three times a day, spaced out by a couple of hours, is a good start. If you have a full-time connection to the Internet, set your software to check every 15 minutes for you unless your IS department has specified otherwise. In business, replies to messages (even if they're just acknowledgments) are expected within 1 business day. Group Communications This category focuses on messages sent to a group of colleagues. Usually, this involves putting more than one e-mail address in either the To line, Cc line, or Bcc line. An address put in any of the three lines delivers the message to the recipient, so what's the difference? Here are a few guidelines to help you become a more discriminating e-mailer. The To line in business e-mail is for people who are directly involved in a message. Each has a need to know and possible action items from the communication that you're sending. When you want to keep someone in the loop, but this person is not directly affected by the news, information, or instructions in a message, put that person in the Cc line. (Cc stands for carbon copy, a holdover from the old typewritten memo days -- but you knew that!) So, if you are following up on a client's behalf, you might Cc the client on the mail you send to your manager. Doing so sends a signal to your client that you're following through as you promised. If you want to include someone on a message, but risks giving the message a tone that might be misinterpreted by some members of the group, then put that person on the Bcc line (blind carbon copy). Say that you're sending a notice to a vendor who hasn't delivered as promised. You may want to include other team members, or your comptroller, on the communication so they know that the vendor is on a short leash until coming through with the goods. However, by using the Bcc line, you avoid the impression that you are "ganging up" on the vendor, and the vendor is not left wondering who those other people are and can focus on getting your delivery to you. Below are seven mistakes to avoid when sending e-mail to groups. - Only respond to e-mail sent to you. Let's get this problem out of the way first. E-mail is meant to be interactive. You're supposed to send mail. Your partners and clients will wonder about you if they never receive messages. Remember, it's not like TV -- you get to send as much mail as you like. Overcome any reticence by asking yourself whether what you're going to send will give direction to your team, share valuable information with your colleagues, inform your customers, or build other valuable relationships. E-mail often bypasses secretarial gatekeepers. Learn to take advantage of it, because your competition certainly is going to. -Let it grow, let it grow. Pop quiz: You and 4 other managers receive a message requesting your input on ten line item questions. Three of those questions fall under your area of responsibility. How much of the original message do you send back? Answer: Just enough of the message that is pertinent to your reply. Include the questions that you are answering and your replies. You are well within your rights to clip and delete the part of the message that is extraneous to your contribution. This holds so long as the list of people you are replying to includes all the people who received the original message. - Let 'em have a piece of your mind! This is a related problem that quite a few former managers wished they understood prior to sending a heated e-mail message. In short, do not ever send anything via e-mail that you would not mind printed on the front page of tomorrow's newspaper. E-mail is wonderful, convenient, and a great boon to business communications. It is also easily forwarded (either deliberately or accidentally) to groups of people at no material cost (personal cost is a different story). It's OK to write a heated reply to let off some steam, but rather than sending it, save it review it after you've cooled off. A tip to prevent premature sending is to remove the address lines until you're ready to ready to send a message. - If in doubt, count him out. Have you ever been on a group distribution list to suddenly find yourself out of the loop? This is a classic problem, especially in large organizations. Say that John is part of a To list with 12 other people. He thinks of a clever thing to say to his peers regarding the latest posting, but he doesn't want to send it to management. So, he simply replies to the group and deletes the manager's e-mail addresses from the To and Cc lines. The joke is funny and his peers get a kick out of it. However, the problem comes when one of John's peers uses this abbreviated list to send serious input to what he thinks is the whole group. One solution is to use a descriptive subject line and opening sentence. The new subject line lets the group know that your message is not a continuation of the previous discussion, and the opening line could announce that this message isn't to the whole group (and probably shouldn't be circulated!). - Pack that cc line. After all, if the software developer though it would be a bad idea, why would they have left all that room? Well, not exactly. In fact this can be a real pain for many users who have gotten 3 pages of address lines to find a one paragraph message at the bottom of the e-mail. If the group is fewer than 10, leave them in the Cc line. Between 10 and 30, add them to the Bcc line so that they receive the message, but each message doesn't contain the distribution list. More than 30 participants, or if the group membership changes often, or if the group contains members outside your organization, then you should start asking your IS department about using special software for handling these situation easily, called a listserver. - Be a "me too!" in online discussions. This is one of the Seven Deadly Sins of business e-mail that we discuss in StarComm's executive development seminars. You recognize this type of message by its total lack of contribution to a discussion. You avoid it by thinking of the New Hampshire farmer's motto: "I'll speak when I think it will improve upon the silence." - Be generous with spam. Here's another mistake that many a well-meaning professional commits. You get a message that seems amazing and you either want to share it with your pals or help out someone appealing for you to take some action. For your information, the Mrs. Fields Cookie recipe story is a hoax. The report of a man getting a mickie in his drink at a bar and finding himself stranded the next morning in a bathtub of ice, with a note saying one of his kidneys have been removed is an urban legend. It's amazing how normally skeptical people would dismiss these types of messages if they received them via a phone call asking for money or through bulk mail, but when received in an e-mail seems perfectly reasonable to forward widely. Solution: don't forward get-rich quick schemes, lose weight plans, or anything that seems too good to be true. Advanced Tips Below are some additional tips and distinctions that will propel you past the blunders to greater efficiency and effectiveness with e-mail. - Never pass up the chance to retype a person's address. It doesn't matter how fast you type or how good your memory is, this is a time-wasting habit. Instead, learn to use your address book. When StarComm designed and delivered an e-mail transition seminar to 1,200 professionals at one multinational company in 1998, our trainers recommended that every person sit down for 30 minutes to "populate" their address book with commonly used individual and group e-mail addresses. It will save you a great deal of time in the weeks ahead. - Have multiple e-mail accounts for business. That's a sure, fast way to add stress to your life! The professionals who are most susceptible to this are the early adopters who recognized the value of e-mail ahead of their corporate IS department. So, instead of waiting for IS to catch up, the Information superhighway road warriors started giving out their personal AOL or ISP accounts to associates, clients, and vendors. The problem came when the company caught up and established e-mail systems, and now the busy professional has multiple places to check for e-mail, remember where inbound messages are filed, and what you wrote to whom just last week. The solution is to have a single e-mail account for business and one for personal/other communications, and do what it takes to have people use the appropriate account. This is what a friend of mine does this with e-mail from his air force reserve colleagues. Reducing your e-mail anxiety will make your life both at work and at home much easier to manage. - Keep it all in one pile. OK, just for fun, how many messages are in your In box? More than 5? 15? 25? 50? Really, what in the world for? Unless someone has appointed you the company's e-mail archivist, you're putting a drain on your productivity each time you've got to scroll down this list because you've got to make a decision about each mail item over and over again. The better solution is to create new mailboxes or e-mail folders to be used within the e-mail client. Current versions of nearly every e-mail package supports this feature. Simply label and sort your mail as it comes in, and you'll be well on your way to better organized messages and a more manageable In box. It won't be long before you want to learn more about the filtering feature, that uses rule-based commands for automatically sending mail to the box you've determined that it should go to. - Save and forget. Technology's great stuff, so how would it go wrong? Murphy tells us that anything that can go wrong will go wrong. This particular problem plagues mobile computer users who write or reply to e-mail while in airports or in hotel rooms. (As PDA devices such as the Pilot become more popular, this will become more important to a greater number of professionals who find being connected invaluable.) What happens is that you'll write your message, and rather being able to send it when your laptop isn't connected to either the office network or a phone connection, you simply save it in your out box. The problem is that saved mail doesn't get sent when you reconnect to the Internet. Queued messages do. Make the distinction, and be sure to make the choice you really intend. - Attach files recklessly or not at all. This is one of the most powerful capabilities of e-mail: it elevates a workgroup above the need to exchange files via floppy disk and takes care of any cross-platform issues. Yet, like other powerful tools, when it goes awry, it goes awry quickly and badly. Here are three tips to encourage file exchange, safely and successfully. 1) Always label the specific application you used to create your file in your e-mail message. For instance, "Enclosed is the latest business plan for our department in Word 99 format. Standard fonts were used." 2) If a file is larger than 500k, use compression software. WinZip is built into most operating systems, but Aladdin Stuffit is preferred by many Internet users (www.AladdinSys.com). - Spend no more than 5 minutes learning your software; your time is too valuable. This is an attitude engendered by that overused phrase from the 80's: user friendly. Forget it! Today's applications are sophisticated. If you want to have any hope of tapping the potential of these tools, you've got to crack open the manuals. Here's another acronym for you from the world of support desk help lines: RTFM. It stands for Read the Fine Manual. When help desk workers get overwhelmed, the language may get a little stronger, but the sentiment is still the same. You can learn a lot by flipping through the manual when you first get new software, or when you have a question about its use or capabilities. Granted, this may have been an amusing reinforcement of many of the good habits you've developed and bad habits you've sidestepped. But perhaps it's an article you can send to someone who could use these "reminders" (know any Roberts?). © 2000 Bill Ringle. All rights reserved. Bill Ringle runs the Internet consulting company StarComm Development and its subsidiary, LearnWell.com, that work with organizations that want to use technology to develop greater innovation and profitability. You are invited to join Bill's online newsletter, TechEdge eNews, by sending a message to enews-on@starcomm.com from your e-mail program. Visit www.starcomm.com/businesstips/ for more links related to this article.