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Do's an Dont's When Composing Emails
Posted June 10, 2021
by Curt Price
Are you someone who tries extra hard to get the attention of & drive home the point to those who are reading your emails?
Good. Because this article may be for you.
Have you ever received a work email that looks like a rainbow threw up all over it, has big, small, large, super large, & extra tiny text sizes, and 3 or 4 different fonts? If you didn't know any better, you'd think it was a scammy/shady-looking chain email, right?
Good. Because you'll be happy this article exists.
Ok... we all want to craft an email that grabs the attention of those we're sending it to. That's the goal, right? Well, some people try so hard to make things stand out, that nothing stands out, and readers end up with a headache.
Here are some friendly Do's & Dont's:
DON'T
DON'T Use various colored text in your email
You don't want one paragraph red, another blue, another yellow. Making a word red, or a link red, or a heading a different color can be ok...but less is really more here. Be VERY selective on what you want to emphasize with color.
DON'T Use different size text all over the body
I've seen emails come through that had one sentence super big and the next one super small to where you almost couldn't read it. This isn't a good look and is hard to read. Try sticking with one font size font for the body (paragraph) content of an email.
DON'T Paste text directly into an email
This could be the cause of most of the issues. When pasting text into an email, ALWAYS choose the "paste as plain text" option. Which can usually be selected by right clicking within the body of the email and selecting "paste as plain text" or from the "Edit" pulldown menu. Pasting as plain text will remove all of the formatting from the previous location so your content will remain consistent with the default style values.
DON'T Use more than one font in an email... ok, MAYBE two... but you had better have a good reason!
Less is more with font usage. Limit your font usage to the default font. And be consistent. If you find yourself wanting to change the font within your email to make it more "fun" or "interesting"... umm... don't. ;)
DON'T Put the body of your email in the subject line
Why do people do this? It's rather confusing to the reader. The subject is for the subject of the email and the body is for the body content.
DO
DO Format your emails
Format your emails using 'Bold', 'Italicize' and headings and maybe SOME text color if absolutely needed, but do so very sparingly and smartly. These options are here to emphasize words and to make things stand out. But if you overuse these options, then nothing stands out and it looks like a clown car... unless of course, you're composing an email about a clown car, then the subject matter may dicate the format... so in those rare cases, maybe it's ok to go a little crazy.
DO Keep your email informative, but not overly wordy
There is a nice balance you want to achieve here. It's certainly better to have too much information than not enough, because you don't want a bunch of email responses asking questions because your email was too vague... BUT, if you have a Mt. Everest wall of text, people aren't going to want to read all of that just to find out which room the meeting with Marketing is in.
DO Reduce the length of super long links
Some links are hundreds of characters long. If you have one of those, create some text that essentially titles the link, highlight it and make THAT a link. That will make your email look much cleaner.
DO Spellcheck
I don't think I need to explain this one. :)
In the end, we're shooting for a professional, clean, smart looking email. Hopefully these DO's & DONT's can help guide some folks into a world of visually appealing emails.
