How to write business-building emails

You might be shocked at how hard it is to be simple
 
Email isn’t going away. It’s one of those paradigm-shifting developments that everyone predicts will die, but doesn’t. LinkedIn, Slack, instant messaging, blah, blah, blah; fact is, businesspeople still use email all the time, despite its often overwhelming burden. 
 
In this article, we’re going to help you improve two different types of emails that you often must create. First, we’ll cover the topic of basic business correspondence, and how to get what you want from it. Then we’ll touch on the mysterious, often taboo subject of writing emails to cold prospects.
 
The first verse
 
If you learn nothing else from this article, let this be it: Keep it short, and organized. A business email is often, at its heart, a request. You want your client’s blessing to proceed on the next phase of a project. You want a vendor to revise a deliverable. You want to solicit feedback to a piece your team just created. Each of these is an “ask.” 
 
So if you’re going to 1) keep it short, and 2) keep it organized, consider: 

• What “news” do you need to impart, in order to set up the “ask”? 

 

• How can you present that news in its most enticing and favorable light? 

 

• How do you go about asking what you’re about to ask? 

 

• What’s the “call to action” that will best ensure a response—indeed, the response you seek? 

 
And once you’ve done all that... 

• How do you edit that email so it’s as short as possible? 

 
Here’s a hint. It’s often helpful to begin an email like this with a “state of the world” statement, or a “What’s the challenge?” question. Examples: 
 
As you know, our team was tasked with devising a wholly new way to reach prospects in Q2.
 
Or: 
 
If we’ve already maxed out our development budget, how can we possibly increase production?
 
Note the similarities. Each opener suggests “an impossible mission” or “an insurmountable challenge.” 
 
Of course, that’s how you want it to read. The unspoken word is “seemingly”: A seemingly impossible mission. A seemingly insurmountable challenge. You’re crafting a little mystery story here, and you, as the author, already know whodunnit. So you’re well within your bounds to tease it as impossible/insurmountable. Consider your audience: Whoever it is, you can assume that they absolutely hate going through their overloaded in-box every day. 
 
Why? It’s not just quantity. It’s quality—or the lack thereof. Herein, by the way, lies a massive opportunity. It’s very safe for you to assume—indeed, your own in-box is proof—that most business emails that arrive to your audience, well, suck. No one is putting any thought into them, in terms of how they read, how they go over, how they respect the recipient’s time. So they’re, patently, time-wasters.
 
Not yours. You can actually condition your frequent/important recipients to look forward to reading any email from you. Because they know it will be fun, engaging, informative, terse, and worth their time. 
 
Boy are these no-brainer concepts. But 99.9 percent of the email-writers out there fail to heed them. Hence your opportunity. 
 
So. You’ve just posed the insurmountable challenge. Next, of course, you brilliantly “solve the problem,” using the exact info which is the meat of your email. 
 
This segues to “the ask”: 

• “Green-light the next phase.”

 

• “Review the attached PowerPoint deck.” 

 

• “Mark up this shared document.” 

 
Importantly, “the ask” is usually the very last thing you mention in your email. It’s your closer. The last thing you want them to remember. To act on. Thus, it doubles as your call-to-action, or CTA. 
 
We always bake one extra request into that CTA: “Kindly confirm receipt.” This accomplishes many things: 1) It requires them to take action, right then and there. 2) It gives you an audit trail. 3) It compensates for all sorts of technical email flubs out there, from messages that vanish into the ether, to timed-out servers, to misguided spam filters. 
 
A final note: A good business email takes anywhere from ten to 20 times more time to write than it does to read. That’s another reason you don’t receive good emails, generally. People don’t take the time, or make the effort. And, frankly, it shows. Thing is, when people read your well-crafted business emails, they won’t think of all the work you put into it. Because all that work will be invisible. It’s like a good movie that cruises by in 90 minutes. It feels like it happened in just 90 minutes. But if you stop and think about it, of course you realize that it’s the culmination of thousands upon thousands of person-hours of work. 
 
The cold call
 
Sometimes, you need to reach out to someone who doesn’t know you. For our purposes, we’ll call this “prospecting.” 
 
Be advised: If misused, this can veer into the realm of “spam,” thus our “taboo” caveat at the beginning of this article. 
 
We’re not going to delve into the details of the Can Spam Act in this article; you can research them on your own. Suffice to say, you can’t go blasting out tons of stuff to strangers, unsolicited. If you do want to do massive mailings, there are ways to do it: You can use services like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, and adhere to their guidelines and include things like their “Safe Unsubscribe” button in your emails. You can also use LinkedIn paid messaging to reach prospects that you reach via a filtered search.
 
Sometimes, however, you just want to reach out to a specific individual, say, someone who downloaded a PDF from your website, or who made an interesting comment on a board’s thread. 
 
In this case, tread lightly. Your email to them will look like spam. (It may well get trapped by their spam filter.) They’re not expecting it. They don’t look forward to it. Reading it is a burden. Responding is an even bigger burden. 
 
So what do you do? 
 
There are a few tricks you can employ. First, use the time-tested techniques to maximize your odds of getting past their spam filter. Include their first name in the subject line. Be sure to include their name, and perhaps their company, in the body copy. 
 
And above all, keep it incredibly short. We’re talking haiku-scale. Seriously. Two sentences should be sufficient: 
 
Dear Joe, 
 
Thanks for downloading our company’s whitepaper; I hope you enjoyed it. I have some other free information that I think you’ll also find valuable; do you have five minutes to discuss by phone?  
 
Some no-brainer guidelines: 

• Don’t expect a response. If you get one, great. You’ve beaten the odds. 

 

• You may get a nasty response. If you do, write back immediately, and politely: “Sorry for the intrusion. No need to remove you from ‘my list,’ since there wasn’t any list; I’d reached out to you individually. I hope you have a nice day.”  

 

• Practice what you preach. If you’re pitching a five-minute phone call, make sure it clocks in at five minutes. Establish your credibility from the get-go. 

 
Get help
 
You may be surprised to learn that, here at Copel Communications, we actually ghost-write tons of business emails. Yes, the stakes are often that high for our clients, and the ROI of using us is a zillion-to-one. 
 
You can get help, too. Contact us today for a no-obligation initial consultation. 

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