Email Etiquette

Why It Matters?

Outsides of sessions and phone calls, the vast majority of communication with our clients is done by email. Although email has been ubiquitous for the last 10+ years, it's still new our society as a medium. Improper use of email creates unexpected opportunities for misunderstandings, frustrations, bad feelings and other unintended negative results.

Worse yet: due to the asynchronous nature of email, we are not immediately aware of the negative effects our written communications (or lack thereof!) have on the people we are communicating with, which makes it more challenging to be aware of and correct.

The three main issues that create the most room for error are Email Tone, Response Times, and Attention To Detail. Having a good handle on these will cover 90%+ of email problems, so please read this page carefully and take it to heart.

It’s extremely important our email communication are of the highest quality and facilitate easy, clear, and positive interaction with the people we work with.

Email Tone

The most important email challenge is tone.

As most of us know, the majority of person-to-person communication is tone of voice, followed by body language... followed by the actual words we use. When speaking by phone, even if we can't see the other party (and they can't see us), we can very quickly tell if something we've said upset them. More importantly, they can hear the tone in which we are delivering the message. Are we angry or calm? Warm or cold? Accusative or conciliatory?

Email throws all of that information out, and leaves us with only words.

When you write, you have a certain (likely positive) tone that you image yourself speaking with. The person reading emails your will not hear that (positive) tone, and will instead infer your intention from the text and timing of your email.

What will they infer?

Negative By Default

Based on my own personal experience, as well extensive research, the most critical thing about email tone is this:

inferred email tone is negative by default.

That is, unless we explicitly - with words - create a positive tone in the message, our message will be interpreted in a negative matter.

• Emails that are short will be interpreted as rude and disrespectful. "This person doesn't have enough time for me."
• Emails that are not warm/friendly will often be interpreted as cold/unfriendly.
• Emails that are not enthusiastic will be interpreted as apathetic.
• Emails that don't show emotion will be interpreted as having no emotion.
• Emails that don't use soft language will be interpreted as hard or hostile, especially if they contain requests.
• Emails that don't overtly take responsibility for issues will be interpreted as defensive/corporate.
• etc.

Although we may not intend these interpretations, as a personal service professionals, it's up to us to effectively get our intentions across.

What to do?

Although "brevity is the soul of wit", brevity is not the soul of effective email communication.

Show Emotions!

Use words to clearly describe what you would like your email recipients to know about the mood of your communication. Are you excited to work with their child? Curious to learn more about the student in your first phone call? Looking forward to your first session? Grateful for the opportunity? Happy about how much progress the student is making? Let them know!

Use pleasantries

Emails that lack "pleasantries" tend to come off as cold and corporate.

You may not really care about how they are doing today but emails will sound better if they:

• start with a variation of "How are you?"
• end with "I hope you and your family have a great [day/week/vacation/holiday/whatever]!"

Be extra apologetic / empathic

When any issues come up with clients, it's helpful to be extra apologetic/empathic when communicating via email, even though it's not really "your fault" in any meaningful way.

Something like "Dear <Client>, I'm so sorry that I won't be able to make our meeting because …".

If you don't very clearly say "sorry" it will seen as avoiding responsibility - even if that's not what you intend.

This isn't an issue when speaking over the phone since people can hear the tone, but email makes it very easy to misread tone, and people will in general assume a negative interpretation rather than a positive one. This is not in any ways an encouragement for 'fluffy speech', but without the "fluff" and pleasantries, emails can come off a bit cold or corporate...  which is definitely not what any of us intend!

Since we’re not present with our clients all the time,  a lot of communication is done by email. One of the issues with email communication is that it’s very easy to misinterpret each other. You could take things negatively when they’re not intended.

Most of the tutors on our team have no problem with writing itself, but what we find is that a lot of people don’t think of the effect of the time delay of responses.

Email is kind of an unnatural medium - if you imagine you said something to a person and they don’t respond for 5days, it’d feel weird, right? Because of that, we suggest that tutors respond to all emails within 2 business days at most. In general, the sooner you respond the better.

Response Time

If you remember our job post you saw when you applied to work with BMT, you might remember seeing a line saying that we’re strict about email response time.

Email response time makes a big difference in how people will perceive you in professional setting- it’s one of the ways people will evaluate your professionalism because if you don’t hear back from someone it feels bad, it makes you think that you can’t rely on them, and since we’re an agency that offers service at premium rate, this is one of the ‘soft skills’, ‘soft services’, and ‘soft quality’ that we must be very strong on.

If you take a long time to respond to the BMT office, we’d assume that you feel okay to do the same with clients which might result in fewer job offers from us.

If You Don't Have an Answer Right Away

Some emails might not require an immediate response, but confusion occurs often in the type of setting when someone asks you something and you don’t have an answer right away so you  need time to figure it out. A lot of people when being in this kind of situation, they don’t answer until they know their response, and this creates confusion and uncertainty.

What you should do when someone writes to you (this goes for both clients and the BMT office) is that you respond right away with whatever answer you can provide at the moment. For example:

“Thanks for asking, it’ll take me a couple of days to figure this out. I’m going to follow up with you whenever”

The worst thing you can do in email communications is that you ignore emails.