Email Etiquette: Things We All Should Know by Now

Email was invented in the 1970s and ubiquitous by the 1990s. Yet it seems that people still have trouble using it appropriately for professional communications.A few weeks ago, I experienced five breeches of email etiquette within two weeks:

1. someone refuses to answer my emails after a few weeks (no vacation response either)
2. someone replied to an email I sent to my supervisor and not me (nor did they cc me)
3. someone replied to all regarding a matter that only involved two people (causing unnecessary worry and chaos for the others recipients)
4. someone send me a snarky email chastising me for not doing something that I had already emailed them about to indicate I had completed (prompting the "sorry I missed that one" response)
5.  someone c.c. me on an email without explaining why (so I was left to unravel the mystery)

I've committed some email violations before in my day. But in these cases all these emails I wrote were definitively relevant to the person's job duties and were polite and brief.

I actually thought that after many years of email usage people would be committing  email crimes with much less frequency. But email crimes continue to happen far too often.

And, I'm guilty too. The worst email crime I did recently was not checking spell check closely enough and it changed a person (thankfully one with a sense of humour) name to urine.

So since there are still evidently so many criminals here is

Email Law for All Lands

1) Reply to all emails that indicate a reply is needed
With the exception of emails from crazy people, there is no one too great that they can't type even a few words of a reply. I've emailed CEOs, deans, and government officials and received replies - so I refuse to believe that those managing the middle and such are more busy than them.  If you are too busy to reply to your emails then you need to delegate or reassign your responsibilities.

Note some slack can be given to really big, big shots. By this I mean at the level of heads of state and Hollywood superstars. But the same excuse is not acceptable for entry level administrators

2) Read up before sending out
It's easy to quickly send an email to follow up on a topic - but don't channel your responsibilities to someone else by not knowing the current status of an issue.  Before sending an email, it only takes a few moments to check your prior emails on a topic and familiarize yourself with the status of items before sending an email exposing your ignorance.

3) Watch your tone and take sensitive stuff offline
Email is a lean medium unlike talking in person, so tone or humour can be easily mistaken. Better to compose emails with a neutral tone unless one has an established relationship with a person.

4) Be careful of "reply all", CC, and even more careful of BCC 
It's really easy to add that extra person, or two, or three, or ten - but don't! Everyone experiences email overload nowadays so don't compound the problem. Also, never send an email to someone if they don't be to know why they are receiving it.  BCC has the same problem, but is even worse as now you've done something secret and sneaky,

Finally, if you are adding someone to an ongoing email thread state this to the email group. Explain to the group and individual why they are being included.

5)  Check before you send
Taking at least a few quick moments to reread your email before sending it out can help you avoid the above problems and more.  It's a great idea to have spell check set to automatically check emails before sending them, but spell check is not always your friend as my email to "Urine" proved.

There are more email crimes than I have listed here, so feel free to add to the list.

Canada's New Anti-Spam Legislation

If you live in Canada, you probably have been receiving a torrent of emails latel from companies and organizations asking you to confirm your intention to receive email news. Canada's new anti-spam legislation (CASL) goes into effect in a few days (July 1, 2014), hence the flurry of emails.

I have got a bunch of emails from organizations that I'm fairly sure I previously expressly consented to be added to their email list, so I have been surprised to receive so many emails asking me to (re) confirm my intention to stay on their mailing list.

I find email newsletters to be an invaluable source of info for me so I have taken the time to respond to my deluge to confirm. But today a friend posted a note about this topic on Facebook that started a fascinating discussion on the issue.

It turns out that a lot of businesses are confused about the new legislation and are probably being more cautious than they have to be. Nonetheless, I do think the official communication around this issue from the Canadian Radio-television and Telecommunications Commission (CRTC)could have been better.CRTC's website does a good job in communicating the new legislation, through such things as infographics, FAQ page and even spam quizzes. But there's a lot to weed through. 

Thanks to my friend's Facebook thread, I found a couple clear and succinct articles on the topic:

• Canada’s Anti-Spam Legislation: What You Need to Know by Émilie Couture
• Company directors need to care about CASL by Mark Blevis.

From a marketing perspective, most of the emails I have received asking me to confirm my intention to stay on the email list have looked rather like spam themselves - i.e. wordy, generic notices that I quickly scanned and ignored. Many organizations had to send me two such notices before I responded - in the meantime I became more aware of CASL so I made the effort to notice such email. But this email from Shoppers was the most effective, I received so I thought I'd share it.

Visually this is very clear and noticeable. But Shoppers did make a big mistake when they sent this. I don't automatically allow images when I receive emails (except for ones from friends). As almost all the content from the Shoppers email was in an image file, the message was lost until I turned the image on. It's really simple to provide alt text or other text solutions to rectify this.

I'd say it's as important to not look like spam as it is to follow the new rules.

It's Personal with Shoppers Drug Mart

I don't have time to read flyers - print or online. But I do love specials! So I frequently sign up for companies' email newsletters to keep an eye out for good promotions or new products. Most corporate emails, however, are often dull and irrelevant. So I rarely make the time to read them.

Ever since I moved to my prior residence, I relied on Shoppers Drug Mart as the only store available to buy our groceries, health and general supplies (you'd think we lived in the boonies - it was actually mid-town Toronto). I greatly benefited from their Optimum loyalty program (it's kept us happily stocked with electronic goodies: Wii and DS consoles and games, SLR digital camera, HD television, back massager, etc.) So I appreciated their email newsletters to help me save money and maximize my loyalty points.

But since we moved to a new place better serviced by stores, I haven't been closely monitoring my Shoppers' emails. Until recently.

A few weeks ago, I noticed that my Shoppers email newsletter was personalized to me.  It wasn't just my name included in the email (which does not make me feel the email is targetted to me). The email was based on my purchasing history and included promotions for items that I'm actually interested in. Granted, book sellers have for a long time been sending me product recommendations based on my purchase history and others who bought similar items.

Shoppers emails were different as: 1) it included items I had purchased in the past and 2) items were on sale!

I was so impressed by this effort, that I contacted Shoppers and asked if they could tell me more about their email marketing, as well as plans for using mobile media.

Tammy Smitham, Vice President, Communications & Corporate Affairs, answered my questions, as follows:

Glen: Recent email newsletters I received from Shoppers are personalized. Is this a new initiative?

Tammy: In late 2012, we began a pilot of personalizing emails with targetted offers to 150,000 customers in Ontario. These offers were based on their shopping behaviours and preferences. For example, if they were a frequent cosmetic buyer they would get an offer with respect to items within cosmetics as well as an offer on the total category and finally we highlight for them relevant offers from that week's flyer based on products they had purchased in the past.

It is a sophisticated process to pull the data and create the relevant offers. It is proprietary technology. We worked with a company called Sagarmatha who specialize in this. They matched the offers with the customer's purchase behaviour. We are starting the roll out in English Canada over 6 - 8 weeks beginning April 2013.

Glen: What has been the response to these emails?

Tammy: The response was excellent. In fact, we saw open rates increase by 1,000 basis points and 50% of those who opened the email bought something featured in the email offer. We also saw an increase in both basket size and trip frequency from those who received the personalized email.

Glen: What are your future plans for personalizing and other innovative uses of email communications?

Tammy: The customer feedback has been very positive and as a result we embarked on a national roll out of these personalized emails beginning in April 2013. Once we reach critical mass (about 1.2 million active email addresses) we will proactively promote this element of our loyalty program. We have over 10 million Shoppers Optimum members but only have about 2 million email addresses so there is tremendous opportunity to grow the program's reach.

Glen: Any plans to enable coupons received via email to be redeemed by mobile device?

Tammy: We are working on a pilot for mobile for our Optimum loyalty program, which should begin later this summer. This will allow members to have a mobile Optimum card. Alongside with that pilot, we are working on making specific offers targetted to them via their mobile device. We hope to roll that out nationally in 2014.

Glen: On the topic of mobiles, can you share any future aspirations for reaching customers via their mobile. (For example, are you considering using geo-fencing?)

Tammy: Our major focus at this time is on making the Optimum card and relevant offers available via the mobile device. We know it is something our customers are demanding.

Glen: I also receive postcards in the mail from Shoppers. Can you discuss your use of old and new media in your media mix?

Tammy: We recognize our customers want to interact with us in different ways - whether it be through our weekly flyer, through personalized emails, via Facebook or through direct mail or our website (we have between 250,000 and 500,000 views of our flyer online per month). Our direct mail programs are also very successful. Given the ability for us to target our customers based on the information we have in the Shoppers Optimum database. We also know that Shoppers Drug Mart customers have greater smartphone penetration at 66% vs the Canadian population at 54% so we recognize that is an important medium for us to be engaged with.

At the end of the day we are focusing on the omni-channel to ensure that our presence is consistent across all mediums to keep our customer engaged with our brand and our offering.

***
As a PhD student and father with a young family, both my time and finances are constrained. So I greatly appreciate efforts by companies to save me both time and money. Too many corporate, digital marketing efforts don't really get my constraints (which I'm sure many people share). As far as I'm aware, Shoppers recent personalization efforts are among the first in Canada, but I hope they prove a model for other Canadian businesses.

Elegy for Yahoo

I remember when there was no Google and Yahoo ruled the roost. Google clearly dominates now in functionality and commercial success, but over the years I've maintained a devotion to Yahoo that began even before there was a Google. My experience with Yahoo, however, provides a lesson of how to lose customers and also reflects Yahoo's progressive irrelevance.

When I first signed on to the Internet in 1997 it was via Yahoo (at the public library even). I even signed up for a Yahoo email account before I even knew anyone who could email me. Over the years, I relied and loved Yahoo's calendar, notepad, document storage service, photo albums, toolbar, and of course their search directory service.

My odd email moniker for Yahoo seem destined. Even before my wife and I had Internet access, I told my wife in my sleep one day to email me. When she asked what my email address was I answered appropriately (and without irony as I was asleep): glen @ sleep. When my wife told me of my somnolent discussion, it inspired me to get an email account. Shortly thereafter, I was at the local library and when I went to create my email account, I mistyped my username. The name stuck even when I was later able to open other Yahoo usernames with more indicative usernames.

Even as bigger and better services came along I stuck with my Yahoo account. This was partly due to the time and learning curve to fully switch over to a new service, but also for sentimental and brand loyalty reasons.

As Yahoo shut down services or failed to innovate sufficiently, I was forced to switch to other services. First Yahoo shut down their photo album service and encouraged people to move over to their recently-purchased service Flickr, but with restrictive caps. So I moved to PhotoBucket and Facebook albums. Then Yahoo's document storage service, Briefcase, shut down and I moved to Google Docs. Then, as I started subscribing to more email newsletters, Yahoo did not have enough or sufficiently sophisticated filter mechanisms to prevent regular email avalanches. So I opened a Gmail account for my newsletters even though I don't like a lot of Gmail's interface.

It was just this week, however, that Yahoo dealt their own death blow with their "upgrade" to their calendar feature. As I juggle an endless barrage of events related to my studies, professional career, and my family life I rely daily on my online calendar. When I got my smartphone BlackBerry, I loved how the device's calendar synched (comparatively easily - via firewire) with the Yahoo calendar and email. I don't know how I could manage now my completely chaotic schedule without this functionality.

When Yahoo recently updated their calendar, they decided not to initially support BlackBerry synching anymore or even give an expected date for said functionality. Of course they didn't say this anywhere; I just kept getting cryptic error messages and had to spend way too long figuring out what the problem was through user forums.

Google offered full support for BlackBerry synching of calendar and email - and even does it wirelessly. Wireless synching is such a huge benefit that I can't imagine how I managed to plug in to synch.

As Yahoo compelled me to switch my calendar to Google and as I have already been using so many other Google services (such as for this blog), I figured it was easier to move all my remaining Yahoo account features over to those offered by Google.

So thus ends a relationship with a company that was so formative to my Internet experience. I'm going to miss my long-time bizarre email address (it felt odd to recreate an error to use it on Gmail). I would love to continue using Yahoo, if only to help the company maintain its David vs.Goliath status against Google and Microsoft. But ultimately user experience is more crucial than brand loyalty.

Rehabilitating a killer app: How Gmail & Outlook help address email’s shortcomings

While email is often called the killer application of the Internet, it is not without flaws, leading a researcher to declare: “E-mail is a serial-killer application! It is seriously overloaded and has been co-opted to manage a variety of tasks that it was not originally meant to support” (Ducheneaut & Bellotti, 2001, p.37). In a seminal study by Whittaker and Sidner, they found email was “overloaded” by three user functions it was not designed for: task management, personal archiving, and conversations (Kiesler, 1997, p.278). This critique of email is applicable today. However, a critical examination of functionality currently available in Microsoft Outlook and Google’s Gmail demonstrates that these applications offer innovative ways to address these critiques.

Task management refers to the ability of reminding a user of outstanding tasks, recalling related details, and tracking progress and deadlines (Kiesler, 1997, p.278). Whittaker and Sidner found that a crowded inbox makes task management difficult, yet users were reluctant to file or delete messages to alleviate this issue. They proposed that email software should allow the flagging of actionable messages (Kiesler, 1997, p.292) and permit users to set reminders. In a comparison between Outlook and Gmail, Outlook surpasses Gmail in this regard. Gmail allows users to flag messages by clicking on a star icon or colour-code incoming messages based on user-specified filters, not only does this help visually prioritize messages, thus allowing users to keep messages in their inbox, but draw attention to those needing follow-up. Outlook takes this functionality further - allowing messages to not only be flagged, but also permitting users to specify a due date and seamlessly integrates with a calendar and specific task management application.

Email’s second problematic area is personal archiving, which Whittaker and Sidner state is “cognitively difficult” (Kiesler, 1997, p.285). While some users studied kept all messages in their inbox or only periodically filed, this resulted in inboxes so full that retrieval became difficult. They recommended full-text search and automatic message threading. While both Gmail and Outlook offer full-text search, only Gmail makes archiving less cognitively challenging. Gmail, by giving a large amount of free storage space and by offering prominent one-touch “Archive” functionality, allows users to park messages that can be retrieved easily by clicking “All Messages”. Additionally, Gmail offers users the choice to “label” and thus group emails by one or more terms. This improves archiving by allowing users to store a message in multiple places. However, if too many labels are applied, message retrieval could be complicated.

The final issue regarding user functionality itemized by Whittaker and Sidner is conversations. Conversations may involve many overlapping multi-person, multi-topic messages that can be difficult to follow. Whittaker and Sidner cite the lack of convention in including message context; this has been addressed by Outlook and Gmail by defaulting to include a message’s history when replying or forwarding. Again, Gmail goes further by offering the ability to “file an entire thread, but leave a representative message from that thread in the inbox” (Kiesler, 1997, p.292). Gmail does this by automatically grouping messages on the same thread into one message in the inbox. Thus not only is inbox clutter reduced, but conversations can be more easily followed.

Despite this retrofitting of email applications to accommodate actual usage, I believe ingrained user behaviour will be hard to change. Users will still likely struggle with overloaded email. Users can look to Gmail and Outlook for assistance – two email programs that finally address the problems identified by Whittaker and Sidner in 1996. While Gmail is free and generally outperforms Outlook in the above functions, Outlook might be more useful to business users for its close integration with calendar and task management applications.

References

Ducheneaut, N., & and Bellotti, V. (2001). E-mail as habitat: An exploration of embedded personal information management. Interactions, 8(5), 30-38. New York, N.Y.: ACM.

Whittaker, S., & Sidner, C. (1997b). Email overload: Exploring personal information management of email. In S. Kiesler (Ed.), Culture of the Internet (pp. 277-295). Mahwah, N.J.: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Publishers.