What is the core purpose of a Subject Line? [please choose one] 1. To inform the recipient of your email’s content 2. To motivate them to read the email Your Subject Line is the ‘headline’ for your email. So in some ways, informing the reader seems to make sense. After all, it’s there to give Read More
Category: Emails
Happy with your inbox?
What’s the first thing you do when you open your inbox in the morning? That’s right, DELETE. It’s an automatic response, to only leave you with the messages that are relevant, useful or meaningful. We can show you how your emails can avoid this fate. How to stand out amid the clutter of your audience’s Read More
Social Media and the Law – Elearning course now live!
Do you really know what you can and can’t post? Take our elearning course for just £9.99 and find out. Read More
Think about your reader – again
Think about what your reader will be looking for. It’s advice worth repeating (which is why I keep repeating it). That means forgetting all the things you know that you reader might not and putting yourself in their place. Take this email from the Royal Opera House: It talks about BP’s Big Summer Screens but Read More
Making information accessible
The key to making information accessible is a simple question: Why does this matter to the reader? Answering this can help you overcome the all-too-human temptation to deluge the reader with as much information as you can find, without bothering to tell them why they should care. Let’s say you’ve been asked to recommend whether Read More
What’s in a word?
Well, I think practically everything. I’m helping a client to recruit at the moment, and I’d almost forgotten what a depressing exercise it can be in so many ways. Politely acknowledging every single application, without giving away too much, or innocently exposing yourself to some speculative lawsuit because you have somehow omitted a specific aspect Read More
Proofing your own writing
Have you ever counted up how long you spend writing each day? I’m guessing it adds up to quite a sizeable chunk of time. People may talk about the death of print, but many of us spend our working days generating far more text than ever before. Jess Cartner-Morley’s piece in the Guardian about the Read More
LOL he exclaimed!
Have you noticed how even the smallest change in punctuation or emphasis utterly transforms the tone, and therefore the meaning, of an email? As an example, let’s take the case of a very brief reply to an associate, confirming the time and place for a meeting: OK, it’ a date I received this yesterday, and it Read More
Does email need etiquette…?
I have a friend whose emails always impress me. He never wastes a single word, yet all of his messages are entertaining, informative, brief, and usually very, very amusing. He has a real talent. As a writer I try to take great care of my emails, so always spellcheck them, for example. Once with the built-in spellchecker, then again using my own Read More