10 reasons your emails don’t get reply

Take-Away:

* We live in the noisiest time in history
* In digital and email, everyone is competing for your attention and nobody has the time to read what you are sending
* Not getting replies to email messages you send? Here are 10 potential reasons why

#1: The email you sent me was TOO LONG.

IMPORTANT TAKE-AWAY POINT: In the Kingdom of Overload, BREVITY RULES.

SOLUTION:

- Treat email like it’s SMS text messaging on the phone
- If you want a faster reply from someone, give yourself a maximum cap of one paragraph or 3 to 6 sentences and be happy with a short reply or pick up the phone.

#2. The email you sent was in HTML FORMAT.

Yes, I do understand that this is the 21st century and that we can now safely send colored text, images in our email signatures and gorgeously formatted fonts using HTML email.

IMPORTANT TAKE-AWAY POINT: Just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.

#3. The email you sent did not have an accurate and descriptive subject line.

SOLUTION:

- Keep the Body of the message short and the Subject line descriptive
- If you’re replying to a message I sent you, and you’re now changing the topic of what we are discussing, please do me the courtesy of giving it a new and descriptive Subject line
- Sometimes you can send your entire short message in the Subject line and put (EOM) or [EOM] at the end of the Subject line to indicate End Of Message, that there is nothing more in the Body, so no need to open it up.

#4. Your task list is not necessarily receiver’s task list.

The email that took you 45 seconds to compose and send, asked for has created 30 to 60 minutes of work for the receiver.

And so again, what you sent is either deleted (the ever-elusive “Non-Response”); or is left in the Inbox for “Later”.

#5. The email you sent had multiple topics and jumped around too much.

SOLUTION:

Again, treat email like SMS text messaging. If you have 3 topics you want to discuss with me, I would much prefer to receive 3 very short messages, each with its own descriptive subject line. This way you see, when I look at our discussion in Gmail, I can see it as a thread, I can look at the history. It’s not just a jumble of junk and I’m able to clearly follow it and identify any action items from it.

#6. You never asked for a reply.

These days it’s all people can do to stay afloat with email, to keep their head above water. So many times people will scan it, read some of it and then delete it or archive it without replying to it. We call this a “Non-Response”.

#7. The email you sent was difficult for me to SCAN.

We’re starting to hear this a lot on the web lately: People no longer READ. They SCAN.

#8. The email you sent was mislabeled as SPAM by my email service provider, my corporate mail filters or my email client/program/application and I never actually received it.

This is actually happening quite often these days, so it’s worth mentioning.

#8. Your email signature was TOO LONG and it contained TOO MANY calls to action.

Make up your mind. Do you want me to follow you on Twitter? Or do you want me to call you? Or do you want me to be your friend on LinkedIn? Or do you want me to call you on Skype? Or do you want me to go read your blog? I’m guilty of doing this myself, so every few weeks I review my own email signature.

IMPORTANT: Keep It Simple.

With me? I like Twitter, so many times my email signature may simply be my contact information and a call to action to follow me on Twitter at http://twitter.com/adamboettiger.

#9. I get way too much email, so your message is competing for my limited time and attention.

For those of us who work in the online sector, we have limited control over how much email is sent to us, the volume of messages that we receive daily. There are things that we can do to minimize the flow, but by and large, it comes with the territory and is part of doing business online.

SOLUTION:

- Pick up the phone and call me. My voicemail # is 503.946.6450. Sure that’s not my cell phone number, it’s my public number that you can use to leave a voicemail message. When you do so, you immediately remove yourself from the other 400 messages in my Inbox and you stand out.

Now, keep in mind, everyone is different. There are some people who abhor the phone. They prefer digital and avoid voicemail as much as possible, giving strong preference to SMS text messages and email. It is really for those people that I write this article, that they in turn can share it with their followers so that we all can understand how to tame this email beast by sending better email messages.

#10. The email you sent STILL never got a reply.

That’s okay. Leave it alone or send a short follow-up note.

It’s called a “Non-Response”. People use it to avoid confrontation at times. They don’t like to say “NO”, so they don’t. They just delete your message if they’re not interested. And that’s okay. Don’t feel bad. Maybe they didn’t have time. Maybe they were focused on other things. Maybe they’re too busy. Maybe their dog died. Who knows?

SOLUTION:

Use this free service (http://www.followupthen.com/)
- When you send your SHORT, wonderfully descriptive email, in the BCC: area, put: 3days@followupthen.com and in 3 days, you’ll magically be sent that same message back to yourself, reminding yourself to follow up by phone with the person or nudge them again.
If you use email daily for business, this service is MISSION CRITICAL. It is currently free, but I would pay for it and I use it daily for follow-up reminders from 3 days to a month to six months. It keeps things from falling through the cracks.

Courtesy:@AdamBoettiger

 


... Making SENSE of digital revolution!