There are a lot of articles on the Web on how to write effective business e-mails. All articles, either coming as 10 or 20 steps to write an effective e-mail or as e-mail templates, or anything else I found them missing more or less in harvesting the most obvious source of inspiration: your own older e-mails.
Just some days ago, an older business contact decided to get back into contact and continue the discussions. More or less forced by this situation, I had to look in my e-mail archive, to see what have been already discussed. After reading the first 2-3 mails I immediately realized that:
- My older e-mails were not so “good”
but
- They had very good and elaborated sections
After seeing and realizing how interesting would be to evaluate some of my older e-mails, I continued to read some more; first, reading some e-mails which were not so “great”, I carefully looked for things that might have been done better (and which at the moment of writing were not obvious). And I made a list. Second, my older e-mails were dealing with some business aspects or ideas which I continue to have today. I’ve made another list with reusable items. This resulted in a personal list of do’s and don’ts – no article in the world could have been more precise and more enlightening in providing such valuable information on writing a better and nicer business e-mail.
I will do that every six months. It also gives you a feeling of accomplishment if your current e-mails are better, so why not give it a chance?
If you’re not ready to self-evaluate, give search a try and read some articles. Here
