Recently my mailbox is overloaded and I find it hard to follow the conversation unless there is a precise email thread. So I decided to share my tips on using email threads for smooth communication – to help you and everybody with whom you are exchanging emails, for work or play π
Why you should care about the email thread
Imagine you opened your email this morning and there were 53 emails in it. You clean up all the spam, LI group notifications, newsletters, etc. and still – 23 legit emails waiting for your review and reply.
You get started one by one. Those are all happy clients, colleagues eager to work with you, fans sending you questions and blog posts ideas. You are feeling happy – yeah, it will be a great day! Until you see an email saying “Re: inquiry about your writing services”β¦
You open that email thinking “oh, well, I can take up a new client, of course”, feeling happy an all. You start reading:
Dear, [your name],
I am happy to tell you that my CMO finally agreed to the idea of outsourcing our blog content creation and we are ready to move forward. Are you still available for the job? Is your offer still valid? I am eager to start working with you.
Looking forward to hearing back from you.
[name, title, company name, everything a company representative would include in their signature]
You scroll down – no history of communication between you two.
Darn, you donβt even remember who this person is, let alone the offer you made them.
Now what?
You start searching you email – in the past month, the past 3 months, the past 6 months, nothing. Googled the name, yata yata yata – 2 hours later, you have finally found the original email that was sent to you 1 year ago (?!).
You now see what they have written to you initially, what you responded, and you can now start thinking if you are still interested in working with these peopleβ¦ (I guess not – even if they were real! :D)
So, back to the email thread issue – if that person had followed up earlier or at least, by replying to your last email – the email thread would be intact and you wouldn’t have lost two hours searching what on earth is this person talking about!
And that my friend is why you need the email thread.
Use the reply button to keep the email thread intact
To add to the above rant – all it takes to keep the email thread in tact is using the reply button.
You get an email but you donβt have the time to reply now? That’s ok. Star it (that’s what I do) – and return to it later. Hit the reply button when you are ready to reply, type up your message, attach your files, if any, and click send.
Then the other party will get your message as part of a conversation – nice and easy to follow. So even if you have not 53 but 153 emails per day, you will still be able to easily follow a conversation between 2 people – if you have the email thread at hand, with all the history of communication.
Keep the email subject intact to continue the email thread
Right, I said all it takes to keep the email thread in tact is using the reply button but that’s not quite true, sorry – my bad!
If you hit the reply button and then manually go and change the subject of the email, that becomes a new email right away – it is no longer a part of the email thread that the other party has.
So, if you change the email thread every time you reply to an email, you will end up having not 1 but let’s say 4 email threads, despite the fact they are all about the same thing.
So, under no circumstances change the subject of the email when replying to a message – unless, of course, you do want purposefully to start a new email thread rather than continue the old one.
I can’t stand it when someone doesn’t leave the conversation in tact when replying. Even my sister does this. I sometimes can’t even remember what I last said to her that brought about her response, lol. I have to go to my sent items to see what I last wrote. An extra step I have to take amongst the millions of things I have to do everyday.
I definitely wouldn’t have spent 2 hours trying to figure that out. I would have spent maybe 5 minutes max. And then if I still didn’t have the information I needed to respond, I would simply email them back and say, “I’m sorry, I get a lot of inquiries. Can you please remind me what you needed help with again? I’ll be sure to get back to you asap. Thanks!”
Thanks for your comment, Lisha! I hear you about your sister – mine doesn’t do that, but my mom does LOL
As to the second part of the comment – right, 2 hours is too much – but if you send the reply asking for the details, how can you be sure they send you back the price you initially quoted? Maybe on the other side of the email thread there is a person ready to take advantage of you and the lack of original email.
Maybe, maybe not – but in any case, even if you send a quick note asking for details, before taking up the contract (if you decide to) – i would always recommend finding the original thread for reassurance. π
I would be lost without my email threads. I love them – and find them very useful when interviewing an author for my blog, since I ask only a few questions at a time and then put together my interview post at a later date.
Rappaport is supposed to be helpful, too. I have it installed in my gmail account, but I am not sure who does what – Rappaport or gmail. All I know is that I love hitting reply and continuing the conversation!
π
Thanks for your comment, Lorraine! Interesting tactic – to ask only a few questions at a time when doing an interview. I either do it live (i mean, in real time – not necessarily face to face :-D) – or, send a word doc with all the questions…
s for Rappaport – maybe you mean Rappaportive? If yes, it isn’t about email threads, i think. It is to show in your gmail all info about your contacts (email, FB, twitter and tweets, G+, etc,. – to your right hand-side in your gmail… π
Oops, yes that is what I meant. I thought it was there to show email threads. Oh well, I guess I am wrong. π Forgive me!
Nothing to forgive, Lorraine – thanks for stopping by π
Hi Diana
I quite often change the subject line of an email. But this for the reason you said right at the very end β to purposefully to start a new thread rather than continue with the old one.
Often people reply to an email relating to a previous discussion to talk about something completely new.
An email conversation might start out with the subject line ‘Keyword research for product pages’ but by the time 2 or 3 weeks have passed you’re talking about something such as payment details for your invoice β yet still under the same thread and subject line ‘Re: Keyword research for product pages’.
This drives me nuts. So I just go ahead and change the thread.
I also find the best way to track down those elusive old emails is to temporarily reorganise emails by ‘From’ rather ‘Date received’.
But, as you say, if people continue the same conversation within the same thread, I shouldn’t have to do this.
right, keeping the email subject in tact and talking about something else is equally annoying, frustrating and confusing – spot on addition, Kevin! Thanks for stopping by and for adding to the conversation π
I have spent far too many hours in fruitless searches trying to track down an email exchange to question the value of keeping the subject line going. In fact, most of my searches start with the subject line. If that fails then I do the name search, but that can get really hairy if it’s someone you correspondence with on a regular basis.
how can you remember the subject line so you can search by it? I never can do that LOL Thanks for stopping by, Debra – let’s hope email communication will get smoother and smoother with time as people work more closely with each other…