Due to the casual approach most people take when writing emails, the message conveyed often gets lost amidst the garble of typos and grammatical errors. How often do you take the time to proof your email before hitting the Send button? Do you really know if your message is getting through? If not, try going back to the basics. This is the first step in creating effective emails.

Identify Your Audience

As with any form of writing, in order to be effective, you must first identify your target audience. The same is true when writing emails. One of the easiest ways to do this is by asking yourself, “To whom am I writing?” Is it a friend or family member? Are you writing to a familiar business colleague or known customer? Do you even know the person who will receive your email? Once you can answer this question, you are ready to decide what voice to use in your email correspondence.

Choose Your Voice

As a writer, when we talk about voice, we refer to the style or manner that is used when writing. Of course, every person has his or her own writing voice. This is what keeps life interesting. Yet, it is also this diversity that can be the crux of miscommunication in emails. Why? Well, if you are like most people, you just want to write your email as quickly as possible and send it out just as fast. You probably don’t make a conscious effort to ensure that the style of writing you are using is appropriate for the email. This can be a big mistake, but one that can be easily remedied.

Choosing the correct voice when writing an email is vital to the success of conveying a clear message. This cannot be stressed enough. So, we know our target audience, but now how do we decide what voice is appropriate? For emails, we can keep the choices simple by concentrating on three general styles that work well in most scenarios: casual, semi-formal, or formal voice.