Basic Email Etiquettes In Corporate World

Presence of multinational companies and technological boom has changed the face of business. Employees across the globe need to stay connected in spite of difference in the time zones. Telephonic conversations are not always feasible in such situations. Corporate giants and executives rely heavily on emails and official chat services to interact with each other. Emails are a part of everybody’s daily life. Many times, people do not understand the seriousness of this electronic medium. Companies have started imparting email etiquette training to its employees in order to create awareness about the same. Here, are some basic rules that one must keep in mind while composing or replying to official emails.

Subject line: Most of the times, subject line decides the fate of the email. Corporate users receive about 100 emails on a daily basis. Employees decide to read the mail immediately if the subject line indicates importance or urgency. One must strictly avoid using subject lines like Hi, Hello, IMP, Please reply etc. These subject lines are vague. Reader might choose to read such mails at a later part of the day as they do not indicate a purpose. Subject line of the email should indicate the purpose or the content of the email in brief. For example if the mail contains information on price of high security registration plates process and benefits, then the subject line should be Details on high security registration plates .

Salutation: One must avoid Hi or hey as a form of greeting in official emails. Never start the email by addressing the person with his name. One can start the email by using greeting like Good morning, Good afternoon, hello, dear etc. it is good to use a person’s first name or last name after the salutation.

Composition of the mail: Avoid using one-liners to deliver the message. First two lines of the mail must provide an insight to the content of the email. Next paragraph should describe the situation or main objective of the email. Last paragraph should have a call for action. Dividing the email in the above-mentioned manner helps the reader in understanding the mail in detail.

Language: SMS has become an integral part of everybody’s life. One must steer away from the SMS lingo while drafting official mails. Using abbreviations like “c u soon”, “TTYL”, “1 sec” etc should not feature in the official mails.

One must avoid hitting ‘reply all’ option when the response needs to be delivered to a single person. Using the “reply all” option unnecessarily will only end up spamming everybody’s inbox.