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How to Get Your Business Email Read Past the Subject Line

Learning how to structure and write a business email is vital if you want the recipient to read it and respond. You probably want to come across as assertive but polite, comprehensive but to the point, and urgent but not annoying. Finding such a balance in business writing can be tricky, but it’s by no means impossible. We’re here to help.

To help you master business email writing, we’re providing you with a simple structure to follow. Outlines are an immensely helpful tool to use in any kind of writing because all you have to do is fill in the blanks. Using our eight-step process, your email should generally adhere to the following format:

  1. Subject line
  2. Greeting
  3. Introduction
  4. Reason for contacting the recipient
  5. Call to action
  6. Gratitude
  7. Sign-off
  8. Editing

This clear outline will help you write your email quickly and effectively. With our business email writing process, you’ll get your email read past the subject line and your foot in whichever door you choose.

1. Provide enough information in the subject line

To get your email read past the subject line, the first thing you will need is an engaging subject line. Most important, it should be informational. Make sure your subject line correctly summarizes the email’s message. That means no spammy-sounding clickbait. You want your email to be read, but false advertising in the subject line will result in the loss of your recipients’ respect after the initial read-through.

It’s also important that your subject line isn’t too long. Be succinct! I can’t count the number of times I’ve had to log on to a computer because the sender’s subject line was too long to read on my smartphone. Don’t make the same mistake; some people won’t even go out of their way to read your whole subject line, let alone your email.

2. Be friendly and formal in the greeting

Make sure your greeting is friendly yet formal. It’s important that you address the recipient by name whenever possible. You should hunt for the correct name and verify that you’ve spelled it right. If you don’t know the name, a simple “To whom it may concern” or “Dear Committee” will suffice.

Ensure that you know the person’s gender for certain before you ever use gendered language. Avoiding these embarrassing mistakes is important in business email writing; one small mistake can secure your email a spot in the trash bin with a simple click.

3. Make sure they know who you are immediately

Making a good first impression is a two-step process: impress the person on the other end, and flatter him or her. First, you’ll want to introduce yourself as soon as you possibly can in the email. The introduction step should only need one line containing your name and what you do (but only what you do as it is relevant to the email). You’ll also want to mention any mutual friends or experiences here, if applicable.

You may also wish to employ some flattery early on. If they don’t know you and you have nothing in common, perhaps they can know you as an admirer. You should explain what motivated you to contact them specifically, such as an inspiring paper or an impressive accomplishment listed on LinkedIn. However, if it’s obvious why you’re contacting them (like a call for submissions) or the person on the other end is anonymous, feel free to skip this part.

All this might seem excessive, but remember: write one sentence for the introduction and maybe one to butter them up a bit. That’s it! Don’t completely overwhelm the recipient with paragraphs of information outlining your biography and every little accomplishment. You also shouldn’t drone on and on about how great they are, as people can smell insincerity a mile away! If you’re being honest in your compliments, any flattery you employ should blend in quite nicely.

4. Provide a clear and succinct reason for contacting them

Now you can get to the real meat of the email. Why are you writing? Explain, as concisely as possible, what it is you want or how they can help you. If it helps, outline the reasons for contacting them beforehand to ensure a clear and concise email. Email is generally a short format, so there should be no overwhelming blocks of text.

5. Ensure an obvious call to action

What is it that you want the recipient to do by the end of your email? If it’s a simple response, make an easy call to action (e.g., “Please feel free to reply to this email address with your answer”). If it’s a request for them to look at your webpage or portfolio, provide a link (e.g., “Please click here to view more of my work”). If you would like them to open an attachment, direct the recipient’s attention to its existence (e.g., “Please see the attached file for more information”).

It doesn’t matter if it’s more concrete, like meeting somewhere or performing a specific task. Just make sure that what you want them to do is clear and that your request is polite. Think of business relationships in terms of symbiosis: both parties have something to offer, so ask for what you want but be nice about it. On that same note . . .

6. Be polite and thank them for their time

You know that advertising campaign by Dos Equis, The Most Interesting Man in the World? You need to be The Most Polite Person in the World. Generally, this means being a little less direct. If you want something, you probably shouldn’t just say “I want . . .” Instead, try “I was hoping I could have . . .” or “Would you mind if I had . . .” Because the language is a little bit softer, it sounds more polite.

Remember that recipients cannot see your expressions when reading your email. All they have to go on to determine your demeanor is your words. That’s why even direct language that isn’t intended to be rude at all can come across as abrasive in text format. You need to be aware of that while you’re writing.

You should also thank recipients for their time at the end of your email. If they’ve gotten that far, it means they’ve read your email, and that deserves your gratitude, indeed.

7. Sign off (and don’t forget to include your contact information)

Now it’s time to sign off. There’s a lot of debate about the best way to end an email, so we’ll leave it to you to decide which way best suits your email’s tone and purpose. Consider how formal you want to come across and how friendly you want to sound, and find what you need on the spectrum.

Try not to overthink it. Use something you might say in real life, and be respectful. Chances are that the person on the other end won’t think about your sign off as much as you do, unless you completely miss the mark. You’ll also want to include your name, once again, and your contact information. Make sure everything is clear and accurate before you hit Send.

8. Edit and proofread

Your email is fully written. You’ve typed your name and contact information, and you’re scrolling up to the top. Your hand is hovering over the Send button. With a simple click, your email will be flying through the Internet, never to be seen again. After you send it, though, you notice a glaring error.

It is absolutely vital that your business email is completely error-free. That goes for grammar, spelling, clarity, sentence structure, and tone. Read over your email a few times to be absolutely sure it is all correct. Author Chandra Clarke suggests changing the font size and color to get a fresh perspective on your words.

However, if you need an objective pair of eyes, or if you want to save yourself the frustration, you could always hire a professional editor or proofreader. It might seem like overkill, but business emails can greatly affect your professional persona; ensuring clarity and accuracy will demonstrate your commitment to professionalism and attention to detail.

Conclusion

Using our simple business email writing process, you’ve written your email from the subject line to the call to action to the sign-off. You’ve had the whole thing professionally edited and proofread, and you’ve employed all the necessary changes. It’s perfect, just perfect! You almost don’t want to send it, because that would mean saying goodbye.

Well, take a deep breath, because it’s finally time to hit Send! I know it’s hard. But before you know it, you’ll have a shiny new email response in your inbox. So pat yourself on the back because you’ve just sharpened your business writing skills, and who knows how far you’ll go now? There’s no email in the world you can’t handle!

 

23 Practical Resume Tips to Help You Get Hired (Plus a Resume Example)

I’m just going to say this outright: resume tips are not going to get you hired. That is, resume tips won’t get you hired, but they will help get you hired.

The first step to landing a job is having a great resume, and having a great resume requires a lot of thought and effort put into every little detail. Tips are great for nailing down all of the details, and implementing many resume tips can add up to an overall better resume.

To help you put these tips into practice, the resume example below has been designed using the same tips offered in this article. Use this article and the resume example to guide you in creating a document that will land on the hiring manager’s desk instead of in the trash.

The Resume Tips

1. Choose the right format

There are four main types of resumes: chronological, functional, combination, and targeted. If you have a lot of experience in your field, you should use a chronological resume, but if your career path has been irregular or erratic, you should go with a functional resume. A combination resume lists both your experience and your skills, and the targeted resume is geared toward specific job requirements. You’ll want to choose the one that’s best for your background before you even begin writing your resume.

2. Make sure the style suits your background

Similarly, your resume should fit your background. There are a number of styles you can choose from, but three of the most common are classic, creative, and modern. A classic resume is best suited for professional jobs, as it provides a clean and simple format with information that is easy to find. A creative resume will help demonstrate your visual capabilities in an original and expressive way. Finally, a modern resume shows that you are up to date with current trends by providing a neat and refreshing document that avoids the outdated look of traditional resumes.

3. Know your audience

In any kind of writing, the best way to ensure you will write well is to know your audience. You should have a very good idea of what your potential employers do, how you can help them do what they do, and what you can get from doing something with them. Once you know these points, you’ll be able to begin writing your resume.

4. Look over your contact information

Write down your contact information at the top of the resume, where it will be easy for hiring managers to spot. Make sure you look it over several times. It’s a good idea to have somebody else look it over, too, because the last thing you want is to have written down the wrong information or to have left anything out.

5. List your experience, achievements, education, and skills

This is obvious, but outlining your resume in major sections will provide a clean document that is easy to follow and understand while providing all of the necessary information. You’ll need to include contact information, key skills, awards and achievements, education, employment, volunteering, and anything else that may be relevant for your prospective employer to know.

6. Only include what’s relevant

On that note, you should include only relevant information in your resume. If it doesn’t apply to the job at hand, that’s okay, but if it also doesn’t share any of the same skill sets, objectives, roles, responsibilities, or environment, you may not wish to include it on your resume. Conversely, if you don’t have a lot to include, be smart about how you use your time so you can include volunteer work or online courses that are relevant where nothing else is.

7. Use action verbs to describe your past roles

Action verbs draw the attention of your reader. However, avoid being too repetitive in your word choices. For creative jobs, you may wish to include verbs like brainstormed or designed. Similarly, if you are applying to a job with a leadership role, you’ll want to include words like established or improved.

8. Take keywords from the job description

If you’re struggling to come up with action verbs, you may want to take a look at the job description. Employers often, consciously or not, include action verbs that best suit the prospective employee’s skill sets. Since they know what they’re looking for, you can use these verbs to your advantage to come across as the perfect candidate.

9. Maintain a consistent tense

It’s important that you maintain a consistent tense in your action statements. You’ll use past tense for any jobs from the past and the present tense for anything you are still in the process of completing. Make sure you don’t switch tenses from bullet point to bullet point; doing so isn’t just wrong, it also gets confusing very quickly!

10. Avoid personal pronouns

Rather than using personal pronouns to describe your experiences, use strong, direct action statements to show potential employers what you have accomplished throughout your career and to give your main accomplishments the most attention.

11. Keep away from buzzwords

Stay away from overused descriptors like hardworking or team player. You can be hardworking and a team player, but instead of using watered-down, blanket terms, describe the accomplishments you’ve achieved through your dedication and ability to work with others.

12. Limit yourself to short and straightforward statements

Keep everything as brief as possible without losing context or necessary information. Include your core responsibilities in a detailed and concrete way. This will help you avoid generic statements (and the aforementioned personal pronouns and buzzwords). You should also try to remove any words that serve as filler, like unnecessary adjectives.

13. Only include what you can prove

For example, only list tangible skills or attributes, and avoid listing personal skills like adaptable or organized. Though these qualities are important, they are less impactful than tangible occupational skills because personal skills are much more difficult to prove.

14. Don’t lie

Never lie, exaggerate, or otherwise stretch the truth on a resume. Even if lying gets you to the interview stage, if employers discover that someone they have hired has lied about his or her academic or professional history, they will very likely terminate the employee immediately.

15. Choose or design a visually appropriate resume

An applicant may have impressive credentials and an extensive professional history, but without proper resume formatting, these credentials may be buried in an impenetrable block of text. You have worked hard to compile your resume’s content, so take care to ensure that you use proper formatting to grab a potential employer’s attention quickly.

16. Let the content speak for itself

Since your achievements and skills are the focus of your resume, you shouldn’t let its format consume the actual content. It is easy to get carried away with visuals, whether they’re colors, objects or fonts. However, your resume should be legible and professional rather than flashy or distracting.

17. Allow white space

Incorporating white space in a resume can be difficult; after all, you have a lot of information to include in a limited area. How can you make sure your resume is balanced? Use the quadrant test. Divide your resume into four equal sections, and make sure the text is evenly distributed in each section.

18. Customize your resume for every job

It’s a good idea to edit and revise your resume for every position you apply to, unless the resume will be submitted to several similar organizations with the same job requirements. This may seem tedious, but the more effort you put into creating your resume, the more you will gain from the entire job-seeking process.

19. Have references ready

You typically don’t have to provide your references on your resume, but you should prepare a list of references and their contact information so that they are available upon request. Ask the appropriate parties, and be sure that you notify your references when you are applying for a position so they can expect to be contacted in the near future.

20. Make sure nothing is missing

Ensure that all of the required sections are present, especially any information that is asked for in the job description or by the employer. In addition, make sure your name and contact information are there so the hiring manager can find you! When applying online, make sure you’ve completed all elements of the online application form, as the failure to do so demonstrates an inability to follow instructions.

21. Optimize your resume for applicant tracking systems

Applicant tracking systems automatically scan hundreds of applications for information related to job postings, including keywords, employment history, past employers, and educational background. So embed your resume with terms or phrases that represent the qualifications that are required for a position.

22. Think clean and simple

Look over your resume once it’s filled out. Are your name and contact information easy to find? Do the headings stand out from the body of the text? Is everything uniform? Is the formatting consistent? Have you used your white space efficiently? Are your statements short? Is everything legible? Are all of the fonts and visuals appropriate? Revise and make sure everything is clean and simple, from formatting to the actual content.

23. Have your resume professionally edited and proofread

It’s one thing to look over your resume for typos and errors; it’s another entirely to have a professional editor edit your resume. An editor doesn’t just catch spelling and grammar problems. He or she will also ensure that your biggest strengths are highlighted, everything is relevant, your resume is tailored specifically for the job at hand, the formatting is consistent, etc.

Conclusion

A resume on the hiring manager’s desk means your foot is in the door. After looking at the resume example and implementing these practical resume tips, you have a document that’s ready to land you a job!

 

14 Ways to Make a Bad Impression on Your First Day of Work

When you’re a kid, you have the first day of school to contend with. When it comes time to trying your hand at “adulting,” you have to meander your way through the first day of work. Your first day at a new job can be almost as anxiety-provoking as a blind date set up by your mom. It can be especially daunting if you’re obsessed with making a good impression. That’s why you should do what I do on all of my dates with my mom’s best friend’s daughter’s boyfriend’s brother: go in as if you have nothing to lose.

Striving for success is a recipe for certain failure. Making failure your goal in the first place is not only a big time-saver but also a great way to alleviate your first-day-of-work jitters. So, without further ado, here are 14 ways to make a bad impression on your first day of work. You’re welcome.

  1. Start by forgetting to set your alarm the night before. There’s no start quite like a late start.
  2. Dress inappropriately. Everyone knows that personal style is more important than social conformity, and this rings especially true when you’re trying to make a bad impression on your first day of work. Yoga pants, anyone?
  3. Don’t just show up a bit late; commit to your tardiness. After all, you’ve already had a slow start—why stress yourself out by rushing now?
  4. Once you finally arrive at work, make an unfavorable impression on your coworkers by neglecting to introduce yourself to any of them. Ignore everyone who tries to make your acquaintance, or at most, brush them off awkwardly.
  5. Don’t ask any questions. Instead, when faced with an unknown, take your best guess and hope for the best.
  6. To continue your antisocial behavior, you should really consider eating lunch in the bathroom. Sure, Sally from the next cubicle invited you to join her in the break room, but you certainly don’t want her to think that you’re capable of normal social interaction.
  7. Demonstrate almost immediately how you may have slightly fudged the details of your resume to get the job. (Sure, you can type 70 words per minute, but only if “70 words per minute” is actually code for “40 words on a good day,” and only then after two or three lattes.)
  8. Show off your impressive multitasking abilities in the best way you know how: by texting throughout the entire day, of course. Your coworkers will be totally impressed with how you’ve managed to brush off their attempts at friendliness while clearly communicating with someone else throughout your entire first day of work.
  9. Take lots of breaks. There’s no need to be too much of a keener when you’re trying to make a bad impression. A work-to-break ratio of 1:4 should suffice.
  10. If you get bored with being antisocial and want to take a different route to making a terrible impression, mix things up by making off-color jokes by the watercooler.
  11. Don’t just swear like a sailor—swear like a drunken sailor who’s forgotten his manners.
  12. When your efforts (or lack thereof) start making you sleepy, go ahead and put your head down on your desk for a while. No one will begrudge you a short nap on your first day of work. Well, they will, but that’s the whole point, right?
  13. Ask your co-worker when payday is. Then ask your HR representative, just to be sure. Then, for good measure, ask your boss. Everyone knows that important information should be verified at least three times by three separate (but equally knowledgeable) parties.
  14. Leave early for an appointment or some other previous engagement, but be sure to reassure your boss that this kind of thing doesn’t happen often.

There you have it. Just follow these 14 tips and you’ll be sure to make a terrible impression on your first day of work, maybe even before break time. Once you’ve accomplished your goal and have subsequently lost your new job, you’ll be ready to return to the drawing board and revamp that old resume.

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