Tips on Creating Better Emails

Some companies use email to augment their collection efforts. It is important that credit professionals generate businesslike messages and avoid certain relatively common problems with emails. Here are some ten tips to improve your outbound emails

Do not use ALL CAPS. In email, this is the equivalent of yelling.
Do not populate the TO: address until you have reviewed the email. This way, there is no chance of sending out a half-finished, or otherwise unprofessional document.
Don’t use emoticon in business correspondence. They are unprofessional.
Don’t use commonly used abbreviations in business correspondence, no matter how cordial your working relationship might be. Example, ending an email with BFN – an abbreviation for Bye For Now – is not business approrpriate.
Use spell check. There really is no excuse for spelling errors when spell check is a click away.
With the previous recommendation in mind, re-read your emails before sending them. Spell check does not catch everything. My favorite example follows: The sentence “Thank you for all your help” would also pass spell check as “Thank you for all your hell.”
Be carefully about who you copy on emails and why. Remember that anyone cc’d can see the names of everyone else cc’d. If you do not want recipients to know who else received the email, list their addresses in the bcc meaning blind cc address line.
Be wary of forwarding lengthy messages without reviewing the entire e-mail string. Sometimes, information you would prefer not to share with others is part of a long email string, especially one that has bounced around your company.
Read e-mails one last time before sending them. I can pretty much guarantee that even if you do not find any blatant errors, and will often decide to rewrite a sentence or even an entire paragraph.
If you have included an attachment, specifically reference that fact in the body of the e-mail. Don’t assume that the recipient will automatically open it, or even notice that there is an attachment.