Email has become the primary method of business communication—72% of people prefer email as their main source of business communication. But are we truly communicating? Sixty-four percent of businesspeople report having either sent or received an email that resulted in unintended anger or confusion. Research shows it’s because we’re not communicating effectively: Email senders overestimate their clarity and persuasiveness and email receivers only determine tone correctly 56% of the time.
If we’re going to continue conducting business via email, then we must get better at communicating using that medium. That means, as email senders, we must improve the quality, clarity, and brevity of the emails we send – with our busy, distracted readers in mind. Our recipients decide if we email well, not us.
Our rush to respond to email discourages us from treating email with due deliberation. Don’t let pressure to reply quickly cause you to send an ill-considered email that you’ll later regret. Plus, expectations and reality don’t line up: Though most people expect a response within an hour, the median response time for a business email is 1.78 hours. Professionals further delay replying to email and only respond to 25% of the emails they receive. So why rush? Give yourself time to treat an email with the same level of care you would give a letter.
Taking more time to craft an email that is short, easily understood, and meets the reader’s needs may help you reduce the back-and-forth. One study showed that intentionally decreasing email by 20% (by sending better emails and being more discerning about whether email was appropriate) led to a 7% increase in productivity.
And let’s be honest. Do we really need to send or respond to as many emails as we think we do? The average businessperson receives 121 emails per day and spends the equivalent of 111 workdays per year dealing with email. Yet, of the e-mails that make it into our inboxes, only 42% are essential or critical. Let’s commit to sending better emails and fewer of them.
With our “always on” digital world, interruptions abound. Assuming the default set-up for business email to be batched and delivered every five minutes, businesspeople will receive nearly 100 email-notification interruptions over an eight-hour day. Even when you ignore the tiny, silent on-screen notification, it still interrupts your thought process and makes it harder for you to focus. That tiny notification typically averages 2.8 seconds, and according to researchers at Michigan State University and the U.S. Naval Research Laboratory, that interruption can double the risk of error. That means that email senders are prone to mistakes and email receivers will be distracted while reading, which makes them highly likely to miss details and misinterpret meaning.
Because your reader will be distracted, interrupted, and impatient, it’s even more important that emails are short and easy to read. To convey the intended message, email senders must be vigilant editors working to make emails as clear and concise as possible.