How to write an email to IT professionals: 5 tips

In our blog, we write a lot about creating emails and working with e-mail. We have already discussed the complexity of the fight against spam , the future of email , the protection of postal correspondence , and the creation of email auto-responses from support services.

Today we will continue the topic of optimizing the process of communicating via e-mail and will give some tips on how to properly compose email messages for IT professionals.
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No long letters

Technical specialists on duty often have to study lengthy texts of documentation - and they are quite able to read them and isolate the necessary information. However, this does not mean that they want to turn the process of email-correspondence into the similarity of solving a complex technical problem. It is often easier for them to completely ignore the vague and extremely voluminous message.

A much more effective tactic when communicating via e-mail with developers and other "techies" would be to use the " rule 5 sentences ". The meaning of this approach is to maximize the reduction of the letter - of course, if necessary, you can use more than five sentences, but in a huge number of situations and this number is enough to set a task or to formulate a question.

One letter - one task

A pattern in which several tasks are raised at once in one email or several questions are asked at once can confuse and confuse the interlocutor. In addition, if the letter asks to answer several questions at once, the recipient may decide that it will take too much time, which means that it is not worth spending at all. And even if the letter is not ignored, the risk of not getting what you want is great — few developers will answer three questions at once, most likely the answer will be received no more than one of them.

It is much more effective to follow the rule, in which there can be only one question in one message or one task. This will allow the recipient to immediately understand what they want from him and significantly speed up the process of correspondence.

The purpose of the message should be clear immediately

Clarity and clarity - the best that you can think of when communicating with technical experts. Here even the rules of etiquette cease to play such an important role - when sending a letter to the developer, you can omit all sorts of courtesies and get down to business from the very first words. A person will not be offended at all, but on the contrary will be grateful for saving his time (if he knows the sender, if not, then it is necessary to introduce himself briefly).

The addressee must understand why it is written to him.

Developers in general are not very fond of letters from strangers, but sometimes, for example, recruiters can offer their vacancies only in this way. And here they need to be careful, since the list of things that annoy technical technicians is annoying when communicating with Eychara in the mail is quite long .

One of the main claims of the community at Stack Overflow was this - “recruiters do not understand my real level of expertise and offer inappropriate positions with an offensively low salary.” Technicians are solid people, and most of them do not like it when someone does not do their homework. If the interlocutor does not even understand why he is writing to this addressee, this will not cause anything but negative, and it is clearly not worth waiting for the solution of his question.

The use of designs "if ... it saves time

Since email is not an instant communication tool, and the process of receiving an answer can take a day or even more, so you need to try to reduce the number of possible stages of discussion. Speech constructions of the form “if ... then”, which resemble branching, help.

A simple example - instead of wondering whether the recipient received a letter (and wait for an answer to this message, and then send a new letter based on it), you can do all this at once:

“I wanted to know if you received a response from Ivanov?” If yes, then please finish uploading this data until Tuesday and write to me. If not, write him one more time today, and then tell me if he will answer, ok? ”

Here, possible scenarios are immediately foreseen, in addition, the sender immediately tells what to do in each of the cases. It seriously saves time.

Other materials on email in the Pechkin blog:

• Email, social networks, instant messengers: What does the media influence and how to choose them
• How to create email-auto-answers: Analysis of 100 applications to support services of IT companies
• Working with email: How to reduce the number of incoming messages to zero
• Why spam is so hard to beat
• Email and Security: Is it possible to protect email correspondence?