Make People Respond To Your Emails and Retain Them Better

Ping! Ping!! Ping!!! A few more and your inbox will with some unread emails. Whether you are a manager, a developer, marketer, or whatever, emails are an inseparable part of everyone’s work life. Sometimes it is hard to manage so many emails and respond to all.

Lack of management is one other thing, but what if an email does not interest you? There are always some important emails that need to be responded to in time. The best way to do that is to spare an hour for them to go through all your emails and respond to necessary ones. This process is long and a little frustrating, and you may not want to frustrate your customers too much at this point as this will return nothing from your emails.

So let me tell you how you can cut the noises from your emails, and make them short, simple yet informative for your audiences. To achieve all these, all you need to do is follow up on the instructions that I am going to mention in this article. And the first one is:
 

To get an immediate reply from someone, whether customers or colleagues, you need to keep your emails short. So, if your emails are four to five lines long, then it is easy for anyone to read those emails right away. Emails like this will inspire them to respond as quickly as possible.

You really do not need to write a descriptive report into the email. What an email should be containing are just heading and important bullet point like sentences to cover the main talk of the topic.

So, if you are writing an email asking about the admission process, you should only mention important information like this:

Hello Ma’am/ Sir,
I am a student of science and want to pursue engineering at your university. I went through your brochure and videos, and I have made up my mind now. Can you tell me about the admission process, please?
Thank you for your time.

If I ever get this mail as an institute administrator, I will send a brochure or required information in a minute or two. But, if the same mail is one page long, I might mark it again as unread and leave it for later.

Even while writing this article, I am making sure of line spacing, paragraph spacing, font size, and other formatting. I am doing this so that my colleague can easily distinguish between what is what. If my article looks like just a pile of some words, not even my team is going to read it.

Unformatted emails are just the same. People do not show their interest in it quickly. Also, it makes it hard to understand what you are trying to say. Like the way, I am breaking my paragraphs here to help you focus on things that will help your readers to get the right information in less time.

A separate call to action, bold, italic, short sentences/ paragraphs can make your emails readable and more appealing.

Why are you writing that particular mail? What is your goal or motive here? First, clear these questions out. Writing a clean email will save your and readers’ time. Putting a lot of information will only cloud the thought of the reader. It can also cause confusion at some point even if your email is of short length.

Here is how an unclear email looks like:

Hey, I am a teacher at XYZ school, and we are trying to conduct online classes due to the pandemic. I have a class of 65 students. I do not want to suffer their studies, and this led me to the conclusion that I should use video conferencing software. Can you please help me out here with your video conferencing software, Wave?

I know it is short but can it immediately tell you what the user wants here? No. This email could’ve been like this:

Hey, I am a teacher and want to conduct online classes with a class of 65 students. How should we use Sarv WAVE for the same? Please guide us.

If you really have to put a lot of information in the email, try to put your call to action sentence on top or in a separate first paragraph. Writing this way will help you get a quick response from the recipient.

Creating a mail and sending it off is a barely 30 seconds task but it takes up to an hour to get a decent reply for that email. For example, if you want a user to give feedback for your product, then you must specify for which feature you want their review. Like do you want their review on the new functionality you added or a feature that you improved in the past days?

If you just tell them to review your software, it will be hard for them to do that because they might not have explored it fully yet, and writing a full review is a time-consuming process. Making your audience focus on your request will help you get quick responses.

Do not expect that a user is going to figure out where do you want their focus then do whatever you requested them to do. Do not make your email a brain-picking exercise because it is neither good for your audience nor your business.

Time, we all have limited time, and we all want to invest it in the best way possible, which applies to emails too. Like, if we talk about reviews, why should someone tell you how they experienced and what made them feel terrible? Are you going to change that? Are you going to improve their future experience?
These things should be in that mail. Make them realize that the time they are investing in you is going to pay off. Tell them how it will help them in getting a better user experience if they help you with the review.

By keeping transparency for things like this with your audience, you make them feel that you value their time.

If they see that you do not listen to them, it will become a negative remark on your brand. So email responsibly.

These are a few of my words on how you can improve your email strategies and get more responses than before. Also, share your experience with us soon.