Do poorly written email messages cost companies money? Much of the research and stories we hear point to “yes,” yet most companies do not know the hidden cost of ineffective email. Originally designed as a tool of convenience, email has now become an overused and often abused communication choice that carries a hefty cost in terms of inefficiencies, misunderstandings, and potential litigation.
Email offenses range from vague subject lines that leave readers clueless to ineffective writing that is laden with mistakes. One of the biggest email wrongdoings is inappropriate tone—messages that are hastily written with a dispassionate, demanding, or sarcastic tone.
So how does poorly written email affect profits?
Consider this analogy: I send you a product. The product is defective, so you return it. I fix it and send it back to you in the hopes it is now acceptable. This cycle of “rework” is how email continues to morph into a counter-productive tool. Up to 60% or more of all email messages are so unclear that they fail—they are returned to their sender—resulting in a chain reaction of needless follow-up emails and corresponding responses. Much of the way email impacts productivity and profits is through this rework—rewriting to clarify a message, obtain more information, correct a misstatement, and so on. One study reveals that a company with 100 employees can expect to lose more than $450,000 a year because of email blunders and rework, and with larger firms, this number increases exponentially.
The tangible cost of mistakes, misjudgments, suboptimal decisions, as well as the cost of solutions to repair these avoidable calamities result in a significant waste of an organization’s resources. Add to that dilemma a reader who is angered by an insidious tone and the casualties keep coming: impaired working relationships, breakdown of trust, and the need for damage control. With regard to customers and clients, ties to customers can be severed completely. One survey found that 45% of respondents reported that they could name at least one company they stopped doing business with because of its poor email content.
How is ineffective email affecting your organization’s bottom line?
