Sometimes email messages can get quite long, especially when you quote much of the material that has been sent in previous emails. Also, emails often get long if you have a lot to say or you need to give a comprehensive overview of a particular business situation.

Most people tend to find that the letters and emails they receive that are short are the ones they responded to most positively and had the best feelings about. Long letters do get a positive response - however, almost invariably, long communications are only given a positive rating if we have a very close and warm relationship with the person who has written to us. We rarely feel positive towards acquaintances and people we do not know, who send us long letters or emails. This has important implications for people using email in business. The vast majority of your emails at work are going to be sent to people you do not know or have only the slimmest of relationships with. Hence anything other than a short email is likely to lead towards a negative feeling in your reader. Play safe; keep it short!

This is all very well in theory, of course, but in practice, particularly at work, you need to include a lot of material. The answer is to treat the email as though it were a covering letter. Then attach the main text as a separate word processor document. All email programs can attach files to them, yet vast numbers of emails are sent without using this facility. The advantage of putting your main material in an attachment is that your recipient immediately views your message in a positive light because it is short and to the point. You should summarise the content of the attachment in a sentence or two - in that way your reader can gain all they need to know, without having to open the attached file. However, if they need more depth you have provided it for them.

One technique you can use for shortening your email is to write the main message in your word processing software, with all the detail you need. Then take a break, do something else and later on, read through your text. Now try to summarise it in a few sentences - that summary should be the main part of your email. Trying to summarise something you have just written is difficult as all the detail will still be in your mind. That's why taking a break can help you as you leave your mind uncluttered and make summary writing much easier. Your summary email, together with the word processor document as an attachment is much more likely to please your recipient. This means there is considerable value in taking time to construct your email properly, rather than just dashing something off.

Another way in which you can be sure of keeping emails short is to avoid "quoting" vast amounts of previous emails. One of the benefits of the "reply" button on email programs is that you can quote the previous email. In this way the recipient can easily see what you are responding to. However, since many emails go back and forth between various people, the message can quickly become very long indeed — even though most of it is material from previous messages. The answer to solving this is to only quote what you need to send someone in order to make your reply understandable. By all means, press the ‘reply’ button to quote the original email, but then go through the quoted text and delete everything that is irrelevant to what you are going to write about. Doing so is seeing the message from your reader’s viewpoint - they don’t want to wade through the original text (their own!) just to see which point you are commenting on. It is much easier from their viewpoint if your reply is clear. In other words, only use selective quoting - not wholesale quoting of emails as is the most common practice.

An additional reason why some emails are so long is because the author is trying to cover various topics. They are almost ‘brain dumping’ everything they can think of that is important or relevant to the reader. Meanwhile, the poor recipient has to work their way through this mess to try and find out what is important. Good communication, particularly to people we don't know, is focused communication. That means, in essence, that each email should be about one topic and one topic only. A hint to this is given in the email software itself where you have to type a "subject" for your email.

If your emails are about more than one subject - stop! Each email should only be about one subject. Your recipient will react far more positively if you sent four separate short emails about four subjects than trying to cram all the material into one, inevitably longer message. Also, when these separate messages get replied to, the quoted material is shorter. Hence, think always, one message - one email.

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Your business needs a rapid response email system. Without such a service your company or organisation will lose reputation as well as custom. In other words if you do not have a rapid response email system in place, you will lose money and could damage the entire future of your business.

Research suggests that customers want you to respond within one hour of their email. They find that waiting any longer is annoying and is deemed rude. So if you do not reply within the hour you are damaging your reputation and storing up negative feelings about your company within your audience.

So how do you organise a one-hour response system? There are two difficulties that you will face however you do this. Firstly, you may work alone or in a small organisation where one-hour responses are difficult to organise as you have so much else to do. Secondly, your business may be so busy generally that you cannot cope with the volume of emails you receive and that need answering within an hour.

The first step to take is to analyze the kind of emails you receive from customers. Do they ask similar questions? Are they on recurring topics? Who are they addressed to? What are the most frequent things you are asked about?

Once you have done some analysis of your emails you can then work out what to do with them to reduce the volume that you need to handle, but also to ensure that people get a reply within the hour. The best way of doing this is to publish several different email addresses that will focus on the specific areas your customers want to contact you about. Then each email address should be set up as an autoresponder so that an immediate response is provided.

An example of a rapid response email system
Here is an example that will help you see what you can do to improve your email response.

An Internet marketer sells information in a subscription-only membership site. The members of the site contact the owner for several reasons including:

• Payment issues


• Navigation problems


• Information suggestions

The company has set up three email addresses, one for each of these areas:

• payments@companydomain.com


• website@companydomain.com


• suggestions@companydomain.com

Then for each of those email addresses they have used Marketer's Choice to establish an autoresponder. So, as soon as someone sends a question to 'payments' for instance an email is sent out which says that a detailed response will be provided soon, but in the meantime 'here are the answers to some of the most frequently asked questions we get about payments'. In this way, anyone asking about payment information is provided with a personal response, immediately upon sending an email. If they subsequently respond to that autoresponder email (because their question is not covered in the FAQs) the reply is diverted to another email address which alerts the Internet marketer with an SMS text message. In that way they know they have an urgent email which requires immediate response.

My own example
In my case as a single Internet marketer I have found that most of the emails I get from customers relate to issues at the final stages of the buying process. Things like not getting the download link, or the non delivery of a receipt are the kind of things that most people ask about. Often, the answer is simply that their spam filtering system has blocked the emails. So, I have set up a "support@" email which goes out to anyone requesting support.

Using the Marketer's Choice system means an immediate response goes out. I then get a message telling me who is looking for support. I also build up a mailing list of people who asked for support, which I can then use for further contacts or market research. If I used my ISPs autoresponder system I would not have any of these advantages.

By having this immediate response I have found that people trust me and like my business more than similar businesses. The people who have emailed my "support@" email address tell me they were impressed by the quick response and that they found the FAQs in the email very helpful. Indeed, only a handful of people have needed further help. What this has all meant is that I have provided rapid response to emails from my customers, keeping them happy and enhancing my business reputation. In addition, it has reduced my email workflow, freeing up time to work on the business.

Other options
Your volume of emails, of course, may be greater. Or you may have a kind of business that needs a more individual response. In this case you could delegate much of your email answering to a call centre. Many of the online 24/7 call centres will now also answer emails for you. The basis for each response can be provided by you in the form of templates. But these email centres mean you can respond to customers within an hour, even if they need an individual response and you are asleep.

Whatever you do to arrange rapid response emails, though, you need to ensure your system can respond to customers quickly. Otherwise you will lose their income and they will start telling other people how bad you are.

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