Undeletable

Sorry to break it to you, Edgar Allan Poe, but nobody purloins letters anymore.

We’ve gone digital. A recent round-up of email statistics assembled by HubSpot offers a harrowing figure—347 billion messages are sent each day—and an array of helpful tips: Emails sent on Tuesday get highest performance. Marketing emails sent between 1 AM and 3 AM have the lowest open rates. If you send me a message with a cat emoji in the subject line, I will open it 100% of the time. (HubSpot didn’t report that last fact; I’m just letting you know.)

Not only is email not going anywhere, but our email now comes with us wherever we go. As of 2023, 55% of emails are being read on mobile devices. In a survey administered by Statista in 2022, 37% of us have two email addresses, and 28% of us have four accounts or more. We use email to conduct work, keep up with family and friends, make travel plans, shop, and read a poem daily (okay, again, maybe that’s unique to me).

Email is our primary mode of communication, and communication is at the heart of sales. So what I’m going to say next might sting a little bit: you’re probably not as good at writing emails as you think you are. In fact, your professional success might not be because of your email skills, but in spite of them. If you want to improve your sales skills, take a long hard look at your email habits. For this next part, a smartphone will come in handy.  

I SEE YOUR 30, AND CALL YOUR BLUF

Here’s a quick experiment: go into your laptop’s email client and into your email’s “Sent” folder. Choose a recent email that you wrote and sent—ideally, a longer email that has some substance—and forward it to yourself. Then, view the email’s arrival to your inbox, using your smartphone. 

First, look at the handling of the subject line. (If you used a “Re:” to someone else’s subject line, you’ll see this play out via their choices.) There’s a limit of display characters on a mobile phone, typically between 30 and 40 characters, and where this display cuts off may seriously impact how you prioritize the enclosed material. Deliver essential information in that space and avoid confusion—or, to borrow my colleague Rachel’s example: “Your Visit to the National Museum of Fun” is very different from “Your Visit to the National Museum of Funeral History.” 

Then consider your opening sentences. Keep the greeting to a short “Hi [[FirstName]],” though be sure to fill in an actual name. Are you allotting precious real estate to “I hope you’re well”? No one ever makes or breaks a connection based on whether the sender wished them well. Follow the Army principle of BLUF, meaning that you provide the Bottom Line Up Front. Let your reader know this email’s potential for ultimate outcome, in terms that are explicitly valuable to them. Don’t confuse this with the call to action, which is the outcome that is valuable to you. 

SIGN IN BLOOD (OR GRATITUDE)

In our training on mastering the craft of emails, we can tailor the discussion to a particular client’s goals. But in this space, I’m going to look ahead to the endgame. How do you sign off from an email? A 2017 Boomerang study was unequivocal: “thanks in advance,” “thank you,” or “thanks” merited stronger responses in situations that were otherwise neutral. “Thanks” received a 32.6% increase in average response rate (from a baseline of all emails, however impersonal) and, in comparison, “Cheers” sparked only a 14.5% increase.

If you have an entrenched favorite that doesn’t fit into this category, I empathize. My mentor handed me the sign-off, “Cheers,” which I used without hesitation for twenty years because of the fond attachments to what inspired using it. But I’m open to the reasons that “Cheers” doesn’t work for everyone, which includes the connotation that someone says it prior to lifting a pint of beer or glass of wine. 

The only caveat that Maestro would add here is that if your sign-off is unusual, and yet authentic to your company, keep it. Can you use “Aloha and “Mahalo” instead of “Hi” and “Thank You”? If you are a Hawai’i-based company, Yes. 

OPTION C: CARRIER PIGEON

In our exploration of time-management strategies, we discussed the Eisenhower Matrix, which helps people sort through their tasks in terms of both urgency and importance. You can apply the Eisenhower Matrix to email habits by thinking about the “four Ds,” namely:

• Do—If your email strikes the recipient as both urgent and important, they’ll reply and engage your call to action. 
• Defer—If your email is overly complex, your reader may agree on the topic’s importance but feel unsure how to proceed effectively, so it sits in their inbox.
• Delegate—If you haven’t foregrounded a value that’s unique to the recipient, but they agree on the general importance, they’ll ask someone else to work with you.
• Delete—Remember in the earliest days of email, when your grandma would send a joke with “FWD: FWD: FWD:” in the subject line? No one took the time to read those emails either.

If your emails inspire “do”? Awesome. 

If your emails inspire “delegate,” ask yourself if you’re properly targeting your asks. 

If your emails seem to inspire “delete” (which you’ll only figure out after time), make sure you’re using an effective subject line, offering BLUF, and making other good choices. Otherwise: I hope to see you at Christmas, Grandma, and thanks for the birthday card. 

If you notice that everyone seems to get back to you eventually…and yet hardly anyone gets back to you quickly…ask yourself why your emails inspire the “defer” response. People often say about meetings, wistfully, “This could have been an email.” The reverse can also be true: perhaps your five-paragraph email should have been a meeting, or a phone call, that would have clarified the necessary course of action much more quickly. 

And if you already know you want a meeting or a phone call, don’t make that request at the end of a five-paragraph email. Get in, BLUF, offer three times, and get out. 

When I titled this post, “Undeletable,” I wasn’t serious. Or was I? 

Whenever I get a substantive email, I drag and drop it into the appropriate digital folder, and my replies are archived automatically in my “Sent” folder. My personal email account at Earthlink.net records my life since I moved into Washington, DC, in 2003. Before that, I experienced eras of Mindspring and Starpower; before that, Erols.com, named for Erol Onarion, a Turkish immigrant who moved to Northern Virginia and opened Erol’s in 1963. His shop started as an electronic sales and repair company, before gradually adding VHS rental and internet services.

I remember stalking the aisles of Erol’s as a preteen, looking for my next movie about murder and mayhem. Not the stuff of an Edgar Allan Poe story, not just yet. But we’re getting there.  

Reach out at mastery@maestrogroup.co for more information on training, coaching, assessments, and more. We promise not to judge your subject line.