When to Send an Email

As I’m doing some reading on my next blog post I came across this tongue in cheek post by Seth Godin on WHEN to send an email and to go with it and even funnier infographic below (or use link for bigger format).    On a more serious note, but no less insightful, a post by Chris Anderson with some really good points to consider.  

My biggest email pet peeve that makes my toes curl is when someone sends an email with the message: “see below” or worse: “FYI”.  “FYI” what? The attachment, the 10 pages of correspondence below, that fact that you just outed yourself as a complete moron?  You have no CLUE what you’re fishing for. 

I remember being yelled at (yes, in all CAPS) by a vendor (no less) for continuing a conversation with his technician but on a different topic and not changing the subject line.  In hindsight I agree with him totally (minus the yelling) when he chided us that he would be misfiling our email conversation if it didn’t have the right subject line.  I had to ruefully think of him recently when I took advantage of a new (at least to me) feature on Outlook where email ‘conversations’ get bunched together.  It was a great feature until I sent out a whole bunch of emails with the subject line “thank you”, (this to be filed under: no good deed (thanking someone) goes unpunished). My ‘thank yous’ where very varied and the different conversations had no businesses being all bunched together under one conversational string, but that’s exactly what outlook did (and don’t tell me that’s a PC thing, ‘cause it ain’t). Totally idiotic. 

As for cc’ing: most people’s banes of existence are all the cc emails that need to be digested.  Here I’m of the mind that today where I do not necessarily sit in the same office with my production team anymore I want to be cc’ed on EVERY email.  Yes, a lot of reading but it makes up for not being in the same room or office suite anymore. It keeps me in the loop, but that might also have to do with my line of business.

Next time I send out a marketing email from Clock Wise I’ll try to look at my email addresses a bit more carefully (yuikes).

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