{"id":3991,"date":"2011-05-26T23:59:30","date_gmt":"2011-05-27T06:59:30","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.bspcn.com\/?p=3991"},"modified":"2011-05-27T00:22:57","modified_gmt":"2011-05-27T07:22:57","slug":"10-business-e-mails-you-shouldnt-send","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/2011\/05\/26\/10-business-e-mails-you-shouldnt-send\/","title":{"rendered":"10 business e-mails you shouldn’t send"},"content":{"rendered":"

Written by Andrea Bartz & Brenna Ehrlich<\/a><\/p>\n

Imagine a tiny boat afloat on a thrashing sea, water pouring through a gaping hole in the hull.<\/p>\n

A sailor is frantically bailing dark, angry water, but no matter how much he scoops, the water line never seems to recede — more waves just pummel him in the face like a particularly insecure middle-school bully.<\/p>\n

That, my friends, is our metaphor for the average worker’s e-mail inbox.<\/p>\n

Yeah, we know, there are tons of new communication technologies out there, but e-mail still reigns supreme in the worker realm: A recent study<\/a> even shows that e-mail eats up the most mobile time among Americans.<\/p>\n

Which is why we think it’s high time to outline some of the most annoying practices when it comes to business e-mails — practices that might make your compatriots drown themselves in frustration.<\/p>\n

\"See<\/p>\n

See the e-mail above? Don’t ever send anything like this<\/p>\n

Read on to avoid making these 10 mistakes:<\/p>\n

1) “YELLING”<\/strong><\/p>\n

Ever get an e-mail like this?<\/p>\n

Subject line: MY CLIENT URGENTLY NEEDS TO SPEAK WITH YOU!<\/p>\n

Hot tip: When you type in all caps, you’re basically likening yourself to those crazy dudes who yell about the End Times on the subway (who are perhaps a bit subdued at present). Yeah, no one wants to talk to you.<\/p>\n

2) Going all kindergarten with your fonts<\/strong><\/p>\n

Remember when LeBron James spurned the Cleveland Cavaliers and joined forces with the Miami Heat, prompting Cavaliers owner Dan Gilbert to pen a long letter on the team website tearing into James?<\/p>\n

Remember what font Gilbert used? That’s right, Comic Sans<\/a> — aka “The Great Underminer.” Stick to Helvetica, folks, and people will remember your sentiment instead of your poor choice of typeface. (To say nothing of pink fonts and Word Art-like signatures splashed across floral graphics.)<\/p>\n

3) Misnomers<\/strong><\/p>\n

Unless you are supremely stupid, senile or illiterate, there is no real excuse for getting a business contact’s name wrong, because it’s right there in his\/her e-mail address. Consider this cautionary tale.<\/a><\/p>\n

If you’re prone to typos, well, then, that’s what copy-paste is for.<\/p>\n

4) Emoticons<\/strong><\/p>\n

As we have stated in the past — back when we called for a brief break from the smiley<\/a> — emoticons have reached “STD-like proportions since their inception, spreading from one person to another like particularly expressive herpes.”<\/p>\n

OK, we can see the necessity of using a placating “smiley” in an e-mail to a contact who might need a spoonful of sugar to make the “your idea sucks” medicine go down. But nix emoticons from any initial e-mails with new contacts.<\/p>\n

5) Overly informal greetings<\/strong><\/p>\n

“Helloz Sar-Sar! Imma tell you about a super rad product that, let’s face it, all of us gurlz should totally peep if you have a burnin’ hot love life but want to avoid burnin’ hot other things (you know what I’m talkin’ about!).”<\/p>\n

No one has a strong enough stomach to deal with epistles of this sort on a daily basis. Save the LOLCat speech for when you’re old and gray and shooting off adorable, kitten-packed e-mails to your grumbling grandkids. They can’t fire you for being obnoxious.<\/p>\n

6) Rambling<\/strong><\/p>\n

Allow me to narrate the internal dialogue of the average desk-bound minion: “Spreadsheets sure have a lot of lines… I’m hungry… I hope no one notices this hickey that Joe from accounting gave me after Happy Hour last night…. I’m hungry… Look! There’s a blue bird outside and it cocked its head at me!”<\/p>\n

Get to the point. You have approximately three sentences to cut through said desk worker’s mental clutter before she — Oh, someone sent me a video of a dog hugging a turtle!<\/p>\n

7) Unclear subject lines<\/strong><\/p>\n

Do you have important news? Then, by all means, say so in your subject line. Hiding a vital correspondence behind a “Subject Line: Hey” is not doing anyone any favors — except for your competition.<\/p>\n

8) Sending too many e-mails in a row<\/strong><\/p>\n

You probably spend, oh, 20 hours per day glued to some form of computer-esque device (soon the machines will destroy us all), which means that when you don’t receive an immediate response to your e-mail, it’s possible to, well overreact — much like a clingy lover waiting for an answer on that “Dinner tonight, then a different kind of spooning?” text.<\/p>\n

Don’t be a desperate loser. Wait at least 24 hours before sending a follow-up e-mail, unless it’s an emergency, in which case there’s this handy thing called the phone or, you know, the five-second walk over to your co-worker’s desk. Yeah, we know, real life communications are hard.<\/p>\n

9) Clip art<\/strong><\/p>\n

I imagine most of you are intelligent enough to figure out why this is not OK.<\/p>\n

10) Not using the right method of contact<\/strong><\/p>\n

Never message a business contact on Facebook. Seriously. Why? Because Facebook is where you go to look at pictures of people from high school when you’re drunk — there’s even a plug-in to prevent you from ruining your social media life whilst whiskey-soaked<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Sending a business-oriented message via Facebook is like wandering into a debauched party and expecting everyone to listen to you when you start talking about sales figures.<\/p>\n

If you’re having issues finding someone’s professional contact info, sure, send him\/her a message on Facebook or Twitter asking them for that info, but don’t carry on a whole convo right then and there.<\/p>\n

Unless you’re looking for dirt on said contact, in which case be sure to send the ol’ message at around 4 a.m., when his defenses are down.<\/p>\n

Bonus: Flee ohio<\/strong><\/p>\n

\"Flee<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Written by Andrea Bartz & Brenna Ehrlich Imagine a tiny boat afloat on a thrashing sea, water pouring through a gaping hole in the hull. A sailor is frantically bailing dark, angry water, but no matter how much he scoops, the water line never seems to recede — more waves just pummel him in the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3991"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3991"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3991\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":3992,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3991\/revisions\/3992"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3991"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3991"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/localhost\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3991"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}