By Jessica Fender
Effective online correspondence can benefit you in numerous ways: you can get new regular customers, establish better relationships with the business partners and sign profitable agreements with the suppliers. But if you fail to compose great formal emails, you miss all these fabulous opportunities. Check the following useful tips, which will help you to improve your business writing skills.
Craft a powerful subject line
If you believe that subject line is not that important, you are totally wrong. Busy people don’t like to spend their time trying to figure out why they did get your unnamed email. For this reason, you should never forget to state a purpose of your message in a title line.
“Business people get a dozen new emails daily. They don’t have time to read them all and, so they skip letters with the unclear subject lines. Don’t be surprised that you haven’t got a reply on a perfectly crafted message, if you didn’t state its topic” – says James Daily, Payoneer contributor and author of Brainished blog.
Create a clear structure
When it comes to the business writing, structure of email plays a crucial role. You should start your letter from an appropriate salutation. After that, you should clearly announce your position before going deep into details (as shown in this guide from Carnegie Mellon University).
Your task is to organize your thoughts in the best way possible and make sure that your message is 100% understandable. Don’t jump from one topic to another – be consistent. In the end of the letter, you can ask your addressee a question, say “thank you for attention” and add a closing.
If you feel that you have a lack of business writing skills, don’t hesitate to utilize services like MailMentor. It’s much better to craft an ideal email with the outside help, than compose a poor unstructured text, which will spoil your reputation.
Keep email short
If you want to create a great business email, you should keep it short and consistent. Stop beating around the bush and clearly state the reason why you’re writing this very letter. The word count of a good email has a limit of 150 words, so you should be as precise as possible to avoid the usage of the unnecessary phrases, which don’t add any value.
Amanda Sparks, professional content marketer and author at TopDownWriter blog states: “Time is money, so don’t make an addressee waste his precious minutes on reading too long emails. Try to express your thoughts and ideas in the few short sentences.” Brevity is the soul of wit, isn’t it?
Check the style and tone of the voice
Business writing significantly differs from the basic email writing, because it requires using an appropriate style and tone of voice. You should choose every word wisely to sound professional and confident. You should clearly understand that both: good and bad emails greatly influence your fragile reputation.
If you use Gmail service, you can install Just Not Sorry plug-in, which will check your emails automatically and provide you with the valuable advices. Also you can get assistance from the online resources like Fiverr or BestWritersCanada, which employ the experts in business email writing.
Proofread carefully
Spelling errors and typos are not acceptable in business writing, so you should proofread and correct your text at least twice. This is a time-consuming, yet very important task, which you should never skip.
The more you write and read in your everyday life, the better your grammar is. However, we are only humans after all, and we make mistakes. If you find it difficult to notice your own errors, feel free to use online grammar checker like Grammarly or visit websites like CanadaWriters or Email Excellence.
Be polite
Courtesy is an essential part of the business writing. You should always be polite and show respect to your clients, business partners and suppliers. It doesn’t mean that you must stick to the formal language all the time, but you should be very careful using jargon and slang.
When it comes to communication with the foreigners, you should polish your email even more precisely. In order to overcome the issues connected with the language barrier and cross cultural differences, it’s better to translate your letter using tips from experts.
In Conclusion
There is no room for a doubt that business writing skills are important for your career, so you should try your best to boost them. Fortunately, you live the in information age and have an access to the numerous tools and services, which can help you to reach your goal.
If you can’t write a perfect letter from the first try, don’t worry – you need time to master your new skills. Success doesn’t come to those, who wait and complaint; it comes to those, who act. So, if you will continue working on development of your hidden talents, you will become a very successful person.
Jessica Fender is a professional freelance writer and chief content officer at StudyClerk. She is passionate about content marketing and leading other marketers to succeed in this new age of digital marketing. You can find her articles on Freelancer.com and Addicted2Success. Or follow her on Twitter @fender_jess.
Email stock photo by Selenophile/Shutterstock
