Despite the rapid advancements of business technology in the past decade, enterprises the world over are still heavily dependent upon email. Therefore, every modern worker needs to be trained on how to send a professional email. If not, classic email mistakes will be made that could bruise your company’s reputation, like these four common email blunders.
Proper Grammar and Spelling Are a Must
Email applications are equipped with spell check, and it’s super easy to use a word processor to check one’s grammar. Too often than not, though, these tools are taken for granted and an email is sent without being checked for spelling and grammar errors. The consequences of sending a poorly-written email can cause dire consequences for your company. Your professional reputation and even your intelligence will be questioned, especially if this is a consistent problem.
Solution: Taking time to check for spelling and grammar errors will go a long way toward safeguarding your company’s reputation. Don’t rush your emails; instead, set aside time to check for errors. In fact, it may even be worth it to rope in another set of eyes to look for errors that you might have missed. Think about it, at the end of the day, would you want to do business with a company that can’t spell?
Don’t CC the Wrong People
Group emails are useful for getting important information out to your entire team. However, things can get messy when team members go to reply, especially if they only want some people to see their response and not the entire group. And then there’s the classic email scenario where a person will accidentally select “reply all” instead of “reply,” or vice versa. CCing the wrong person on an email can even be downright embarrassing if it causes them to see information they shouldn’t.
An email blunder like this can easily be avoided by simply taking the time to review who exactly is going to see your message after hitting send. Do this by looking at the email’s “To” form. It’s also a good idea to never say anything negative about someone in an email that you wouldn’t want them to see. Remember, it’s easy to accidently CC them on a message, or for someone to forward them something negative that you’ve said. For workplace emails, it’s in your best interest to keep all of your messages professional and by the book.
Complete Your Message Before Sending It
As obvious as this sounds, it’s fairly easy to rush yourself and click “Send” before you’re even finished with writing your message. After this, you then have to write an embarrassing follow-up message, explaining your mistake and finishing what you were trying to say in the original message. The best way to prevent this major email blunder is to slow down and think twice before hitting send. Another preventive measure is to not multitask while working on an email. Writing an error-free email is an important enough task that it should get your full attention.
Know Exactly Who You’re Emailing
It’s easier to email the wrong person than you may realize. For example, this can happen if you let the “To” form autofill an email address from your contacts, and you happen to have hundreds (or even thousands) of contacts, many of whom have similar names and addresses. If the wrong address populates the "To" form, it can lead to some embarrassing consequences--or even dangerous consequences if it causes a leak of sensitive corporate information to an outside party.
Notice a theme here? All of these classic email blunders can easily be prevented by simply taking the time to review the content and the forms of your message before hitting send. No big technological solution needed, just think twice about what you’re doing. What about you? Are you guilty of falling for any one of these classic email blunders? Share your negative email experiences in the comments with us in the comments.
