6 Essential Elements of Effective Business Email

What happens when business emails are not well written?

• It creates a gap between the sender and receiver
• Some important deadlines are missed
• Back peddling of emails
• It creates confusion and time is wasted
• It creates hard feeling among co workers

Hence it is absolutely important that we spend we stick to the basic rules of email writing so that flow of information is smooth. We can become email writers if we keep in mind these 6 points while writing our emails on daily basis.

For this purpose we came up with an Acronym called “CISOTA”. It is a short of form 6 qualities that an email should possess.

1. Concise: The emails that we write should be as concise as possible and wordiness should be avoided. We should use shorter sentences and eliminate the things are not relevant to the current topic.
2. Intention: By intent we mean the purpose of writing the email. The intention should be made clear to the reader in the first line itself i.e. why we are writing this email.
3. Scannable: The email that we write should be visually scannable that is it should be well formatted and divided into paragraphs. This ensures that the reader does not have to spend a lot of time in hunting for important information in the email. 
4. Organized: The email should be well organized in terms of the information and flow of thought. It should answer all the questions that you as a reader can have. This will help you put one point after the other.
5. Tone: By tone we mean the attitude with which we write a particular email. It also has features the words, font and formatting that we use.
6. Action: This is the most important part for the reader as it is what action you want the reader to take on this email. Be very clear on this part for prompt replies and do not assume the things that he/she should do. It is best to pen them down in the email. For example: Please send me the updated weekly tracker by 5 pm today.