Tips to Help You Be More Effective with Email as a Remote Worker

We spend the equivalent of as much as 9 workdays a month dealing with email.

The amount of emails we receive can increase the higher up we go within an organization. Chief Marketing Officer of Enjoy Life Foods, Joel Warady, told Edoc that he’s actually tracked his email count. Joel receives about 270 emails each day.

In 2014, we moved most of our team conversations to group chat, but email will remain one of the ways we’ll communicate with our partners, for now at least—any many (remote) teams can relate, surely.

Since, for many of us, a great deal of our ability to influence decisions and to communicate today is still dependent on email, we’ve compiled a few tips to help you send more effective emails.

1. Make it frictionless for your recipient to respond.

The emails that are usually the most important to us in terms of getting a response are the ones in which we need something from someone. The first step in communicating more effectively is to do everything in our power to make it easy for people to give us a response in the first place!

It’s true that we usually want someone to take action as quickly as possible once they have read our email. The following would be just a few barriers that would make it harder to respond if this were the case for our recipient:

• They must go and search back for several documents in order to answer us

• They must find us out something you could have searched for and discovered for them online

• They must convert time zones

And these are just a few examples of small ways we can mistakenly add friction to the process!

2. Consider how your recipient reads their emails. 

Even though you want to make the process painless for the other person, this isn’t to say shorter emails are always easiest on your recipient.

If I’m confident my intended recipient is reading my high priority, urgent email on a mobile device, for example, I would adjust how I treated the process of attaching a document for them.

Step back and think about how they would have to access that attachment from a mobile device. It’s actually a bit tricky to download, open, edit, and then re-send a document all on a phone. Instead, if I copy and paste the one or two sentences, let’s say, I need them to approve, I’ve now made that request much more convenient for them.

This may at first look redundant by attaching a document and by writing what looks like a longer email by including a paragraph of copy from that document within the email, but I’m working to make it accessible for them.

3. Reduce barriers to responding.

When an email isn’t urgent in nature, be aware of the time you hit “send.”

If I’m asking for a favor that isn’t time sensitive from one of our remote office managers, I reduce my likelihood of getting a quick response if I decide to send it on Monday morning at 8 a.m.—a time when they’re often the busiest.

And of course there is the other element of time—their time. When writing an email that requires multiple questions, I either need to focus on the one highest priority question I have, or I know it’s time for a different medium for communication.

2. Put yourself in your recipient’s inbox.

It’s easy to forget that every single email we send has one thing in common: the subject line. Making your subject line just that—the subject of your email—can greatly help you better communicate in the long run.

If done right, email subject lines give you the ability to cut through the clutter, something marketer’s recognize.

An email subject line is typically the one part of your email you can almost guarantee will get read! But recognize this: if you’re having a hard time writing that subject line, you’ve given yourself a good indication that it’s a conversation that is not ideal or appropriate for email.

But let’s now imagine you’re sending an email to someone you know will open your email. Even if you have your files and emails organized in a setup that allows for quick retrieval on an ongoing basis, that doesn’t guarantee your recipient will always have that same level of organization over time.

Keep your subject lines descriptive and up-to-date, especially on longer threads.

I learned this seemingly small, but powerful trick while shadowing a senior project manager at an ad agency. You’d be surprised how often, in a threaded conversation, important details are overlooked because the conversation changes, but people gloss over the email because the subject line remains the same.

Now imagine you are working on a website launch being managed primarily over email. With each revision or new document that’s been added to the project over time, I would update each email’s subject to represent exactly what is in each new email message distributed to the team.

This way, if either party needs to look back, or to find a certain request or attachment (we’ve all been there!), it makes the searching process much simpler.

Similarly, in long email threads, and during back-and-forth conversations that are infrequent but are still in a conversational thread setup, I prefer to change the subject line each time there is a meaningful change in the course of the conversation.

Making this minor tweak, and even doing it in forwarded emails, is always going to make staying up-to-date on a project as frictionless as possible, and it cuts down on someone mistakenly using an old, outdated file.