Email Checklist

Email is the critical application. Everybody on the Internet has and uses email. I wrote about a few email stats in: Email Stats - Part 1 and Email Stats - Part 2.

• 25% of Internet users check their email immediately after waking up.
• 33% of Internet users check their email throughout the day.
• 70% of Internet users check their personal email at work.
• 25% of Internet users check their personal email at work at least 3 times/day .
• 22% of Internet users unsubscribe from email they do not want to receive anymore.
• 60% of people who read an email only read the first half of the message

As a photography business, I receive thousands of email per week, and I send out about a hundred emails per week. I receive about 1,200 to 1,500 emails per day that go directly to the trash, my system is so good, that I don't even see them anymore. There should be rules for sending emails:

1. Would you pay for stamp, instead of sending the email?
2. Would you have called, instead of sending the email?
3. Have you dealt with this person before?
4. Have they replied? If not, all your previous emails went to the trash.
5. If it is a cold-call email, i.e. unsolicited, it's spam and will go to the trash.
6. Does the subject line describe the email content?
7. Can you fit your email in 20 lines or less?
8. Are you forwarding somebody else's email and what will happen when they find out?
9. Are you forwarding something about religion, politics, crude jokes, virus, hoaxes...?
10. Are you attaching files that the recipient will not be able to receive or in a format that they will not understand. Have you considered using PDFs?