15 Tips on Writing Email for Business Communication [INFOGRAPHIC]

Your business communication style has just as much impact as your personal appearance. Here's why it's important to know how to write a professional email.

Imagine this scenario. You finally got the interview for your dream job. Prior to arriving at the office, you prepare by doing one of the following:

1. Making sure you look as professional as possible by selecting clean, tasteful, business-appropriate attire.
2. Creating a unique outfit from old Halloween costumes to hopefully lighten the tension between you and the interviewer. Everybody likes a good laugh, right?
3. Rolling out of bed and showing up in your pajamas.

Which option did you pick?

Unless you like gambling with your professional life, I’m guessing you chose the first option. And it’s kind of a no-brainer because we all know that first impressions matter.

But face-to-face meetings are not the only situations where first impressions matter. How you come across to others, your communication "style," is just as important when you write an email.

In fact, the way you write is even more crucial than meeting in person because with email you don’t have the added advantage of your facial expressions and tone of voice to get your point across. All you have is printed words.

Just like your personal appearance, if your writing style is sloppy and unprofessional, your credibility diminishes. And so, to prevent negative impressions about your communication style, practice these fifteen tips on how to write a professional email (infographic by One Lily Creative Agency).

Adding a few improvements

All of these tips are excellent, but I just want to point out a couple of improvements you can make in two areas: getting automatic notifications and sending large files.

Getting automatic notifications

Pointed out in the infographic, the “read receipt” feature annoys recipients and gives you no insight about whether or not they actually read your message. Fortunately, there are smarter email messaging tools that automatically track and present data to show you how people interact with your message.

For example, when you send attachments (pictures, videos, etc.) through regular email, it’s impossible to know if your recipients interacted with these components. But smarter messaging tools automatically track this information for you. A dashboard lets you know those parts of your message that successfully engaged people and those that failed. (And then you can use this data to make your next messages better.)

Sending big files

The infographic emphasized two ways that make it easier for your recipients to digest a lot of data through email: either compress everything into a zip file or send several small emails one at a time.

Neither of these options is ideal. To make it easier on both yourself and your recipients, use a smarter messaging tool that sends files of any size and any type and doesn’t require downloads or installations of apps. (Ving is one of these convenient smarter messaging tools).

Practicing good “email etiquette”

No matter which messaging tool you use, put these fifteen tips in your communication arsenal to avoid negative impressions about the way you communicate.