Can you make your e-mails more human?

Nathanael Yellis asks an important question: “why not make your organization’s emails more like the emails you send to your friends and colleagues?”

He’s right. There’s really no good reason not to do that.

Here are a few ways you can strengthen your organization’s e-mails to make them livelier, more interesting, and more personal:

• Include a salutation. Open your e-mails with a greeting: “Dear Jim,” or “Rebecca –.” That’s how you open your messages to your friends, right?
• Write your e-mails to one person. Remember, it’s an individual receiving your e-mail. Especially if you’re using a salutation, write to one person, not a group. Avoid at all costs language like “all of you” that’s addressed to a group. If it helps, keep one recipient in mind as you write.
• Be casual. Nobody writes an e-mail like they do a formal letter. So you shouldn’t either. Use short sentences and short paragraphs. When appropriate for clarity, break grammatical rules: start a sentence with a conjunction or end with a proposition.
• Use simple e-mail templates. Avoid the temptation to make e-mail templates pretty. Remember, an over-designed e-mail not only seems impersonal but may distract your readers from your message’s goal, whether it’s clicking or even just reading your content.

What else? What other elements can help make your e-mail marketing more human?