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How To Email Like a Boss (Complete Beginner’s Guide 2024)
Don’t Miss Out On These Key Tips To Send Emails the Right Way
Brandon Storey
April 21st, 2024
There are just over 8 billion people on Earth. Guess how many open up their email inboxes every day? 1 out of every 2 people. Every day, more than 4 billion people dive into their email inboxes.
If you want to be taken seriously, you need to know how to master email. Whether you’re a working professional, business owner, or email newsletter operator, you need to know how to email the right way to grow your career.
In this article, you’ll learn how to email like a boss.
If you want to dominate the email game and outperform the competition, then keep reading.
In this article, we’ll break down two key areas to email like a boss:
1. Sending emails in the workplace as a professional
2. Sending emails to your audience as a business owner or email newsletter operator
Let’s dive in!
Table of Contents
What Does It Mean To Email Like a Boss?
I used to listen to a podcast called Travel Like a Boss. Why? I wanted to learn how to live life on my terms, start a business, and, of course, travel.
So what does it mean to “email like a boss?” Emailing like a boss is all about:
Communicating with confidence
Taking back control of your workday
Leveling up in your career
Most importantly, it’s about achieving all of this with email. Whether you’re:
A busy professional trying to level up your career
A business owner who wants to be taken seriously by employees or clients
An email newsletter operator or email marketer looking to improve the effectiveness of your email strategy…
This guide will break down key tactics that you can start using today to feel like a boss—all by leveraging the power of email.
Why Listen to Me? I’ve generated over $1 million with email and get over 50,000 monthly visits on my niche blog, Hockey Question. I also run Storey Time, a newsletter where I teach people how to become a full-time digital writer.
Part One: 7 Tips To Email Like a Boss in the Workplace
Want to send emails like a boss in the workplace?
Whether you’re an employee looking to move your way up the chain of command or a business owner or manager looking to be taken seriously by your co-workers or clients, it all starts with how you communicate.
Here are nine key tactics that you can use to email like a boss today:
1. Be Professional.
If you want to email like a boss, you need to act like a professional with your emails.
I’m not saying that you need to write like a robot. You still need to be human, but there are a few key steps that you need to take to give off a professional feeling with your emails:
Use a professional email address (not a personal one).
Avoid spelling errors.
Do not use bad grammar.
Include an email signature.
Be friendly.
Do not overuse emojis.
Use each respondent’s name.
By following just these tips, you’ll be ahead of 90% of other professionals in the workplace.
2. Keep Your Cool.
The internet is strange. It’s not face-to-face communication (unless you’re in a video call).
Sometimes tone can be misunderstood in an email. Be careful of how you write your emails so that you’re not perceived as threatening or irrationally angry.
And if someone says something that triggers you emotionally, try to keep your cool. You should never speak rudely or harshly to someone (even if you think they deserve it).
If you didn’t land a client or get that promotion or if one of your employees screwed up big time, take a minute before hitting send. Arguing with colleagues, suppliers, or clients in an email is a bad look, and it’s a quick way to ruin your professionalism in the workplace.
If you’re unsure of an email’s tone, ask yourself, “Does this email come across as harsh or friendly?”
3. Get Right to the Point.
Everyone has dozens of new emails (if not hundreds) when they open up their inbox every day. Don’t waste their time. People are busy. They don’t always have the time to read a 20-minute email.
You need to get straight to the point. Writing emails well often means keeping them short.
Do a quick intro such as “Hey, Bob, hope you’re doing well,” and then get straight to the point.
“I just finished going through your reports and noticed that x, y, z is missing.”
Bob doesn’t need to read eight paragraphs about your weeklong vacation in Cancun, swimming with sea turtles. Keep it short and sweet.
Honor your reader’s time. They’ll be more likely to open your next email.
4. Use the Right Phrases.
There’s a certain language that bosses use. It’s all about confidence. You need to write with confidence, but sometimes it’s hard to figure out the right words that make you sound confident.
Here are a few ideas to get you started.
Feel free to save this graphic for later:
Phrases To Email Like a Boss
5. Be Specific With Your Subject Line.
Your subject line will make or break your email. If you write the wrong thing, the whole email could be a waste.
Make your subject line clear. Ensure that it contains only the most essential information, but don’t include too much. Make it too long, and you’ll lose your email recipient.
If your co-worker needs to send you a completed project, be straight to the point.
Subject Line: “Update on X Project?”
6. Always Proofread.
You need to proofread your emails.
I can’t count how many times I’ve sent an email only to find a spelling or grammar mistake later. It’s not the worst thing in the world if you miss this every now and then. But if you’re consistently making grammar or spelling mistakes, people won’t take you seriously.
Don’t worry. You don’t need to spend hours and hours working on your grammar. Just set up a tool like Grammarly, so it’s active while you write your email.
You can get a browser extension for free. Once you’re done writing your email, use the tool to find errors to fix.
7. Always Reply.
If you want to email like a boss, you need to know how to be a good email recipient.
It’s not just about how you write your emails. It’s also how you reply to them.
Remember, email isn’t a one-way channel. It’s a two-way conversation.
If someone reaches you by email, you should make it a priority to reply promptly. This doesn’t mean that you need to drop everything and immediately respond the moment someone sends you an email. It just means that you need to respond in a timely manner.
At the bare minimum, you should respond to your emails once per day, Monday-Friday.
Ideally, you should batch them. Reply to all emails in one session once (or twice) a day. That way, you show professionalism and respect to the person who emailed you.
Plus, it helps you, so you don’t take too much time away from your other responsibilities.
Part Two: 6 Tips To Email to Your Audience Like a Boss
Now, we’re going to talk about how you can email like a boss with your audience. This means if you’re a business owner, email marketer, or email newsletter operator, you need to know how to email your audience the right way for your emails to be effective.
Here are some key tactics that you should use to craft high-performing emails:
1. Know Your Audience.
Everything starts with your audience.
You’re not writing to one person. You’re likely writing to hundreds or thousands of people, but you should write like you’re writing to one person.
You need to know who your ideal target audience is.
This means understanding your ideal customer profile (ICP) or target persona. You need to know your audience's pain points, wants, needs, desires, and interests.
Knowing who you’re writing to will help you craft emails that resonate with them.
What is the result of doing this? You’ll have an engaged, growing, and revenue-generating email list.
2. Grow Your Audience.
Now that you know who your audience is, it’s time to fuel growth. If you’re not actively working on growing your list, you need to shift your priorities.
Growing your list should be just as important as writing the emails themselves. If you only have 50 people to email, then you cap the impact of each email. Also, use email verification tools to verify and validate your recipient’s email address to avoid landing in their spam folder.
To grow your list faster, you need to work on pulling in your audience from other places such as:
Your website
Social media
Paid ads
SEO
You should also leverage a platform like beehiiv. beehiiv is the newsletter platform for growth, packed full of growth features like:
If you want to leverage email like a boss, then you need to grow your list.
3. Create High-Value Content.
It doesn’t matter how big your list is if you don’t send good emails. You need to offer your readers something valuable if you want them to open your emails. This means writing helpful content that solves a problem in your subscribers’ life.
Remember #1? Your audience? What are their problems? Pain points? Look at the challenges they’re facing right now. Then, use informational content to solve those problems.
The more you help your readers with your emails, the more they’ll come back.
4. Use the Right Sender Name & Address.
Don’t overlook who your emails are coming from.
Remember, if you want to email like a boss, you need to look like a boss. Part of the “look” includes these two things:
Your sender email address
Your sender name
If you’re sending emails from a personal email (Yahoo, Gmail, etc.), you need to get a professional domain email immediately.
When you sign up to beehiiv, you get a professional email automatically, but you can get a professional email that’s connected to your website’s domain.
For instance, if your website is cheeseburgermaster.com, you should be sending emails from [yourname]@cheesburgermaster.com.
Additionally, you can set your “sender name” using beehiiv (or another email platform). This is the actual name that pops up in your inbox.
What is the best name to use? Your own. People want to connect with people, not businesses.
5. A/B Test.
Trying to email like a boss, but aren’t sure what to write? Start testing. An A/B test is a way to analyze one email version against another.
For example, beehiiv lets you test subject lines. If you’re trying to get more people to open your email, create two subject line versions. Then, when you send your email newsletter, you’ll see which one outperformed the other.
This will give you insights into what kind of subject lines resonate the most with your specific audience. Then, moving forward, you can optimize your strategy.
6. Always Include a Call to Action.
Do you want to know what bosses do? They tell people what to do.
If you want to email like a boss, you need to tell people what to do. How? With a call to action (CTA).
You should have a call to action in every single email you send.
Here are a few examples:
Read more (link to blog post)
Follow me on social media
Reply to this email
Buy now
Check out these resources
Sign up for our giveaway here
Read my most popular newsletters
You could even ask your readers to do something offline.
For example, in my newsletter, I teach people how to make a living by writing online. One call to action I used recently was to start writing for 30 minutes straight every day.
Always ask your readers to take action.
Email Like a Boss With beehiiv.
If you want to be taken seriously in the workforce or if you want to take more control of your life and business, you need to know how to email like a boss.
One of the best ways to master the email game is by leveraging the right tools. If you’re not using an email platform to send your emails, you’re one step behind your competition. Without an email platform, it will be difficult to be taken seriously.
Manually organizing, writing, and sending emails in Gmail or Outlook isn’t enough. To start sending emails that make an impact, try beehiiv for free today.
Built by the same team who started and grew Morning Brew to millions of subscribers, beehiiv is the platform built for growth.
beehiiv is equipped with:
A world-class email editor
A full suite of growth levers
Several monetization tools
Analytics that help you optimize your emails
If you want to start emailing like a boss, beehiiv is the best choice available.
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