COVID-19 Mass Email Etiquette
Top 5 Tips For Getting Your Email Read
Reading my COVID-19 emails has turned into a full time job. From business trying to assure me that they are still operating, non-profits needing assistance and government organizations trying to give me vital updates and resources my email is a morass. So assume that everyone’s in overload, and that they are predisposed to not want to read your email.
Here’s the Top 5 Best Practices to make sure your information gets read.
- DO ask if your information is really for the READER. Many organization’s COVID information emails have up to 2/3 of the FIRST information that is really internal. Are you wiping down surfaces for employees and letting employees work from home? Aren’t we all? That’s not really newsworthy at this point. The other offender is identifying with the reader for several paragraphs – yes this is a hard time but you are making it harder by contributing to the reading load. Keep the intro short and sweet.
- DO condense your information and restructure the content so that the new, newsworthy or action oriented items that you have come FIRST. You can offer reassurances of your continuity of operations AFTER your newsworthy item.
- DON’T have a long letter format without any headers. Having headers and bolded info lets people skim to see if your information applies.
- DON’T Add Health Resource Links. If you are a government agency, link away – everyone else, please stop. We all know the websites for the CDC, the Health Department(every county) and WHO. And we know how to use Google so there is really no need to add resource health links if you are not the primary authority on this.
- DO assume that you are going to have to send out more mass emails. That means not having a long winded email that’s going to leave a bad taste in readers mouths and make them not open your next email.
