10 Practical Strategies To Help You Fall in Love With Email

This sums up my affection for emails. 

During the summer round of Finding Flow, a business owner asked me how I deal with email. 

I think you can tell where this is going based on how she asked the question….

"How do you deal with email?"

My feelings on email might be controversial. 

I LOVE email. 

Like really love email. 

I love writing emails. 

I love sending emails.

I love getting emails.

Always have. There may have been a time when I was in my corporate life when emails would overflow my inbox, but it never overwhelmed me. 

I see people procrastinate on responding to emails and letting them pile up. My husband probably has over 4,000 unread emails in his inbox. I sometimes need to send him things multiple times to get his attention. Obviously, email isn't our go-to communication medium. 🤨

I joke that for people like him, email is "read-only" — they might read it. But definitely don't expect a reply. It also doesn’t stress him out. His strategy to get rid of the unread messages? Delete them all and start fresh. That’s one strategy, but I’m guessing if you’re reading this, you WANT to enjoy email more. There are important things in your email that you want to do. Exciting invitations that you want to say yes to.

📧 Loving email makes you good at business.

I can't tell you how many times I've reached out to people who I wanted to hire or buy stuff from, and they take weeks to respond to the email — if they respond at all.

💙 Here are 10 shifts to help you fall in love with email, too.

Or, even just like it a tiny bit more than you do today.

1) Look at every email as an invitation.

Potential clients asking questions, clients asking questions, people sharing interesting articles. Sure, I get plenty of cold pitches and weird requests. I mark them as spam and delete them. If you’ve ever missed an opportunity because you didn’t make the time to go through your inbox or had it get lost in the pile of unreads, you might have something deeper to look at. Could you be avoiding email out of self-sabotage?

2) Unsubscribe from emails you don't read or enjoy. 

If your email isn't a place you like to be, it might need some cleaning out. You can apply some of these same strategies to social media, too. That one-page PDF you just had to have that got you on an endless drip of boring emails from a digital creator — unsubscribe. That candle company you signed up for only to get 10% off your purchase — unsubscribe. The coach who writes almost no helpful content and only sends emails to sell yet another new group course — unsubscribe. When you get emails from only the people and businesses you love to hear from, you'll like hanging out there so much more. 

3) Touch each email only once. 

I follow this same strategy with snail mail, too. I only touch it when I plan to do something with it. Occasionally, I'll open an email and realize it's going to need to wait — for my time, more information, or I need to do something first — in that case, I'll boomerang (a Chrome extension) it for the date that I will deal with it. Then, it's out of sight and out of mind until it's time to touch it. 

I keep strong boundaries with much of my communication, and I usually send emails during typical business hours. It used to drive me nuts in corporate when people would send emails at 5 am saying," Just getting this out now, no need to reply right away." If I check my email at 6 am, I might feel pressured to respond.

Sometimes, I work early mornings, late nights, and on weekends. If I don't want someone to reply right away — this is also a way to manage your workflow, then I schedule the send to go out later that day. Sometimes, I'll schedule emails to go out at the END of my business day, so I don't plan on seeing any replies until the next day. 

4) Automation & templates.

Save yourself time with templates. I suggest creating an email template as you need it. Welcoming a new client? Write your email and save it in a document. Grow your list of templates as you write and send similar emails over time. Editing from your template makes life so much easier.

Newsletters and recurring emails that don’t need your attention right away — automatically send them to a folder where you’ll check on a schedule.

5) Write faster. 

I wrote a whole book about this — Intuitive Writing is really about writing faster. When you like what you’re writing, you write faster. One reason people hate email so much is they overthink every reply — spend hours carefully crafting the perfect response, writing paragraphs, and treating each email as a precious, delicate thing. 

6) Write emails you want to read. 

Clear instructions, to the point, a little nicety, and no fluff. Sign me up!

Send the occasional nice email…

"Only popping in to say HI! I love your new logo! No reply needed. Byeeee!!!" 

Scan the email before you send it and ask yourself, "Is this an email I'd like to read?" You’ll know what the email needs when you approach it with this filter.

7) Keep emails as brief as possible. 

With most people reading (and responding) to emails on their phones, many emails can read like text messages. Quick sentences, to the point, and no fluff. When you've drafted your email — write first, write fast, and edit after — see what you can remove. 

Did you use three sentences when three words would have done just fine?

Can you use bullets instead of lengthy paragraphs?

8) Format your emails to get the reply you need. 

Put your ask in the subject line. List your questions or reply with numbers. If someone emails you asking you three questions, reply and tell them, "I pasted your questions below to make sure I respond to each of them." Make your email easy to follow with plenty of white space, which tells our brain — this is easy, relax! Use bolding, italics, and whatever formatting you like to make the key pieces of your message clear. 

If you're sending an important email, draft it in a document outside of your inbox to prevent accidental sending. And even then, fill in the recipient emails last just to make sure you've said everything you need to.

If an email is going to be long, make a phone call and save everyone's time. 

9) Make your sender feel good. 

Notice the greeting they use before your name. If they say "Hi," then use "Hi" in your reply. If they say, "Hey," then you say, "Hey." Use some of the actual words your sender used in their email. This is an easy, unconscious way to help your reader feel heard. And when people feel heard, they trust you.

When you write nice emails, you can expect more nice emails back.

10) Create a “thank bank” of feel-good emails.

Daily gratitude might be trendy, but I suggest embracing gratitude because it feels good. And when you feel good, you’ll want to do more of those things. To feel good about email, create a folder in your email called “Thank Bank,” “Gratitude,” or even “I love email,” and file every nice email you get filled with compliments, thanks, or praise there. After you reply and thank the sender, of course.

Words are powerful. I love looking for every opportunity for my words to connect or make someone’s day.

Want more email love? Join The Intuitive Writing School Membership, where we have templates, swipe copy, and resources for everything you need to write as a business owner.

We also recently held an in-depth workshop all about Finding Your Flow in email. We reviewed best practices and tips to write more effective emails and save time, PLUS the one line you should never close an email with.