9 Surprisingly Simple Ways To Get People To Respond To Your Email
Here's how to make
your messages stand out and actually get a response.
Emails are so easy to send, but they’re also easy to ignore. With
more than 120 messages landing in the average office worker’s
inbox each day, making sure yours gets read and gets a response can be tricky.
To increase your chances of getting of a reply, here are nine tricks you can
try:
It sounds simple, but sometimes all you need to do is ask for a
response. If an email needs a reply, alert the person in the subject line,
suggests St. Louis-based professional organizer Janine Adams. "The one thing that gets me to reply to an email is when
the person puts ‘—RESPONSE NEEDED’ at the end of the subject line," she
says. "It’s very effective."
The topic can change, especially during a long back and forth
thread, making the original subject line inappropriate. "People tune out
and stop reading when their need to know has been satisfied, thinking the email
replies no longer apply to them," says Dianna Booher, author of What More Can I Say? Why
Communication Fails and What to Do About It. "So they miss important details and
action. By updating the subject line on that thread, you re-engage all
readers."
When the email starts without addressing the recipient by name,
they could easily assume it was sent en masse and doesn't require a response,
says Peggy Duncan, author of The Time Management
Memory Jogger: Create Time for the Life You Want. "Also, your email could easily be
perceived as a demand as opposed to a request," she says. "And adding
a greeting is simply more polite."
Don’t bury the purpose of your email; start it by describing the
response you want and your deadline, says New York-based professional
organizer Lisa Zaslow.
Emails written at a
third-grade reading level with simpler words and fewer words per sentence were
considered optimal.
"For example:
‘Please let me know by the end of the day if you can meet for lunch on the
21st,’" she says.
To boost your response rate by half, keep your email between 50
and 125 words, according to a study by email-marketing platform Boomerang.
Response rates declined slowly from 50% for 125-word messages to about 44% for
500-word messages. After that, it stayed flat until about 2,000 words and
declined dramatically.
The reading grade level of your emails has a dramatic impact on
response rates, finds the Boomerang study. Emails written at a third-grade
reading level with simpler words and fewer words per sentence were considered
optimal, providing a 36% boost in responses over emails written at a college
reading level and a 17% higher response rate than emails written even at a high
school reading level. If you want to check your readability level, you can use
a website such as ReadabilityScore.com.
The Boomerang study
found that using a moderate amount of positive or negative emotion words—such
as great, wonderful, delighted, pleased, bad, hate, furious, and
terrible—increased an email’s response rate by 10% to 15% over emails that were
neutral or strongly emotional.
If you are sending a
complaint, for example, Boomerang CEO Alex Moore says it’s better to say,
"I had an awful experience at your store today. The clerk was very rude.
Please do something to make it right," instead of "Your store
experience sucks. Your clerk is a douchebag. Piss off and I hope you die in
agony."
Use bold and color to
highlight the response you'd like to get, suggests Zaslow. "This may not
show up depending on the compatibility of different email programs, but it's
worth trying," she says.
Duncan agrees, adding
that you can use bullet points to increase readability, and use a different
color text to draw attention to deadlines.
Send it in the morning. According to a study of
500,000 emails by email tracking software provider Yesware, emails sent between
6 a.m. and 7 a.m. get the highest rates, about 45%. Fewer emails are sent
during these time slots, lowering competition.
STEPHANIE VOZZA
http://www.fastcompany.com/3058316/how-to-be-a-success-at-everything/9-surprisingly-simple-ways-to-get-people-to-respond-to-you?utm_source=mailchimp&utm_medium=email&utm_campaign=fast-company-daily-newsletter&position=2&partner=newsletter&campaign_date=03302016
No comments:
Post a Comment