Email Tips and Tricks

Excerpted from upcoming book The Busy Person's Guide to a Profitable Website and PlanetLink's Enews - an email newsletter delivered for FREE to your computer. To subscribe, go to www.planetlink.com.

We'll explore use and abuse of email and discuss how you can use it more effectively in your business.

Email has become most used service on Internet. According to a Gallup Poll survey, 52%, of email users says that sending and receiving email is their most common online activity.

Consider these statistics:

• By year-end 2002, there will be 135 million email users, representing 59% of overall U.S. population of adults and teens.

• There were 409 million email boxes worldwide in 1999, up from 234 million a year earlier.

• When asked their opinion on spam, 42% of email users say they "hate it," 45% say they find it "an annoyance, but do not hate it," while rest have no strong feelings either way .

Here's some tips you can use to make most effective use of email:

Keep business emails specific and to point.

1. Write less: Try to use at least 50% of words you would use in print. Once you finish writing, go back and try to further reduce your word count.

2. Use headlines to break discussion into several paragraphs. Breaking discussion into small, manageable chunks, each dealing with a sub-topic of your discussion, makes things much easier for readers.

3. Online users don't read, they scan. Use elements that facilitate scannability: bolding key words and phrases, and using bullet points are two examples of this technique.

4. Try to convey one idea per paragraph, instead of bundling them in long, cumbersome paragraphs.