I have to admit, when I taught technical and professional writing, email got short shrift.
It’s not that email isn’t important. We’ve just been hearing that Gen Z prefers higher-synchronicity modes of communication for a while. Young people in the work place prefer a face-to-face chat instead of a phone call, a phone call instead of a text, a text instead of an email.
If we’re being honest, it’s easy to see why email gets a low rank. The gap between sending an email and the recipient seeing can be pretty large. If you need a response, you’ve got to wait for your recipient to get the email and send something back to you.
I don’t want this post to be a “kids these days” complaint about patience or planning or whatever. That’s not the point. The point is that email offers a different set of affordances and constraints than other communication media, and many alternatives in the workplace (chat programs like Slack and Teams, for instance) can help someone meet similar goals with much less overhead.
So, we didn’t talk about email much in class. Because so much of my job includes writing emails, I keep thinking about the way I approached them in the classroom.
A Difference of Purpose: Professional vs. Marketing Emails
Let’s get this out of the way: I taught technical and professional writing. The core principles of writing emails are the same in any professional context (whether I’m writing to my boss or writing to a customer), but the flavor is very different, like cheeseburgers from two competing restaurants.
In technical and professional writing courses, we would talk about the importance of clear, efficient communication to get information to your audience as effectively as possible. We would also talk about the need for clearly identifying what the audience is supposed to do with the email once they read it: is it just for their information, or are they expected to respond or perform some other action?
In marketing emails, we make clear, efficient connections between a problem and a solution, with the goal of getting the audience to click a link to learn more about the solution. The difference between this and click-bait or spam is that the audience is pre-selected, so we write an email about a problem that we’re pretty sure this specific audience has to provide a solution that has value to them.
In the end, the focus is on providing enough data to support the audience taking some action. In a technical and professional context, the email should be all of the information someone needs, while a marketing email should be enough information to let someone know whether they need to learn more.
Why (Not) Email? Affordances and Constraints of Email Communication
While we’re here, let’s really quickly consider why email is a tool for this stuff in the first place.
Email offers some specific affordances similar to chat programs and social media. I can send a message immediately, whether or not the recipient is there to respond, which makes it better than phone or face-to-face communication when the issue isn’t urgent. I can attach other media to my message, which makes it useful in situations when text isn’t an unambiguous descriptor (e.g. photos of an accident) or when my reader needs some specific information (e.g. a receipt). Email is also persistent, so I can refer back to my message or others in the conversation when necessary—even months or years later.
But, email’s constraints often led us to talk about other media in class. Emails tend to be short, focused on single concepts or issues, because email clients are not designed for reading long-form documents. An email inbox is also a giant pile of things that have to be addressed (even if it’s just marking something for “ignore” or “delete”), which pulls focus away from whatever message I’m sending. Emails are asynchronous, so I can’t expect an immediate response. Lastly, email has a lot of baggage that affect the tone a reader assigns to its message, and that might be the thing that’s keeping it on my mind lately.
Make it Marketingy
“Marketing” is a noun, but my co-workers and I will often make it an adjective (“this is too marketing-y”) or a verb (“marketingize this”) when we’re talking about the tone of a document and whether it’s meeting the right needs.
We often talk about tone as being a feature that the speaker/writer applies to a message. The content of two messages could be the same (like “good morning”), but it can be said with a happy tone, a sarcastic tone, an angry tone, or some other inflection to indicate the speaker’s mood.
But, what we rarely talk about is the fact that tone picks up a lot of flavor from everything around the message, not just the speaker’s inflection. Vocal tone is the easiest to control, and that’s why we often hear people say that you “can’t show tone” in text, like emails or social media posts. Tone is there, but it is really hard to control.
When we want to marketingize something, we looks for all of the tools available to fine-tune the tone of a message. How excited should it be? Does it need to be urgent? Are people afraid of this problem, and why can they trust this solution?
Toner
There are so many things that affect the tone of an email. I’m thinking of doing a series over at Rhetorical Stuff on this, so I’ll just make this a preview:
- The subject line gives a reader about 10 words to decide whether or not a message is urgent or valuable enough for them to open. The urgency here is supplied by the writer and the reader.
- The sender amplifies the tone of the subject line—“Updated functionality in [software]” from the IT department will create a different tone than if it was sent from my boss or the company that makes the software. Some of those will feel more urgent or like there is a problem I want to solve (like if my boss tells me that Word has some new tool), while others will feel like general information (like if an email about Word is sent from Microsoft).
- The preview text in an email client (sometimes it’s a preheader, or sometimes it’s just the first dozen words of an email) is a chance to see if there’s a benefit to opening the email now.
- The pacing of an email (words per sentence, sentences per paragraph, length of subjects and placements of verbs) affects how much energy a reader gets to spend parsing specific parts of my message—and it can make them feel like I’m running past concepts or dwelling on them too long.
- The number of links, something I used to talk about like citations or reference points in tech writing classes, can dilute the focus of a message, making my main goal in communication (clicking A Specific Link) harder to identify.
All of these things nudge the reader’s response to my message in different ways. In tech writing classes, we didn’t try to downplay tone, but we wanted to make sure our tone matched the rhetorical situation. If we were sending a statement to customers letting them know of an urgent explosion hazard in a product, then we wanted to be serious, direct, and unambiguous about the next steps. If we were announcing donuts in the break room to our co-workers, we could be a little lighter.
Oversaturation
In marketing communication, the balance is a little finer. Urgency is necessary. I have an inbox full of marketing emails flagged as “read later” because there is no urgency to them. Urgency can be a problem when it’s abused: nearly every email I get from a video game website uses some variation of HURRY! OFFER CODE EXPIRES SOON! in its subject line.
I don’t open them anymore. Even when I’ve got spare time, energy, and cash for a new game, I ignore these emails because the tone has been flattened. The sender always uses the same sense of urgency, so I only have the subject to tell me whether something is important. There’s a discount… but on what?
Know which marketing emails I do open?
I don’t sew. My wife does. I go to a specific website to get sewing and quilting tools when I can’t buy them locally. I open emails to see more about items that solve problems I know she has (and I ignore the ones like “How to Sew a Scrunchie” that tell me they have no information I need). Only the top example about the XL Wool Pressing Mat is really urgent-sounding on its face, but the rest get an urgency boost because I know those subjects are connected to real problems that have to be solved (especially the cluttered sewing room).
Conclusion?
There’s no conclusion here. Just thoughts on the differences between email writing in a tech writing class versus a professional marketing context.
