Say less in your emails, get more replies (2017)

People are notorious for not reading or responding to email. Even business email, about topics vital to their job.

If a reply is needed, they'll address either the first or last point raised. Never, ever all the points. Never completely.

No wonder people tend to call so many meetings. They can corner colleagues, get a complete, coherent response to complex issues.

I wonder if Slack is any better? Do folks respond better to one question at a time?

A style I picked up from a relative, who is a lawyer, is to make bullet points with minimal other fluff:

  Addressee,
   - Do this
   - Then that
   - Be sure to be aware of this

I found it impersonal at first, but it's very effective in calling out the things that need attention

Notice the asymmetries in work, you send an automated mail with zero load for you, and, interested or not, the user should have to read all your mail, and decide that there is even more work to do if he wants to reply. You have minimum effort in one side, maximum in the paying other. With a short mail at least the reading work is not so bad, but you still have the analysis one.

But giving out information that should matter to your particular client, like personalized info on how things are for his user (like how his account is using the service provided, and some hints on how to improve on that with new offerings) may deserve some more thought, even if that report/mail was generated by an script. Give more effort to your side. Even if is longer or require more work for the end user.

The converse lesson here is also important: If you don't want a response to your email, barrage the recipient with text.

I'm sure that part of it is that receiving a long email with lots of social niceties makes me feel like my reply needs to be an equivalently long considered email, which takes more time and mental effort to compose than a terse one line response, or a few bullet points.

This is a great case of actually putting in the steps to prove something many people implicitly or observationally assume is true. You only have a few seconds (at best) to grab someone's attention, so it stands to reason that a short email will be more focused and likely to grab their attention.

I'd be curious to see how this works in an internal corporate setting. I tend to notice that 1+ page email blasts about some technical or process change at my employer (who I do not speak for) tends to get ignored. If you ask people if they know about the process change, they generally have no idea what I'm talking about. A quick email that says "Hey we've migrated the schmission engine from forkilate to quantilate, please stop using forkilate by August 7th" tends to get a lot of attention!

This is good advice for all types of email; especially work email.

When an email really does need lots of detail, I’ve made a habit of always including a BLUF, or “bottom line up front” - kind of like a TL;DR but more focused on identifying the key things I want the reader to know if that’s the only paragraph they read.

I also try to structure and label my emails to make it obvious which parts are “please read all of this” and “the rest is here in case you’re curious”.

The trouble is that saying less often takes far more time, and people don’t bother trimming things as a result. But this “saved” time almost always gets spent later anyway when that email that no one read now requires a meeting since the transfer of information wasn’t successful.

(2017)

Think maybe people's email habits/use has changed a bit since? (for the worse, in this use case)

I have sent lots of emails with simple, short paragraphs. I take the time to edit my drafts and remove anything superflous. Judging by the replies, 50% of users dont read the second paragraph. The remaining 50% dont read past the subject.

Personally I'd love if people just learn how to quote and how to NOT keep an entire thread in quotes because of some crappy MUA do so by default...

LLMs will soon be reading a user's emails, both incoming and outgoing, adding what they learn to the user's personal memory file.

_I would have written a shorter email, but I didn’t have the time._

Just a heads up: The ...

- https://www.gkogan.co/question-for-saas-trial-users/

... URL linked to from "Take your welcome or onboarding email — [start here] if you don’t have one" is 404ing for me.-

[Let's see if this works]

Hi