Do you often find yourself waiting forever to get responses to important emails? Maybe you’re hashing out the details of a new project with a client or discussing a color scheme for your new home with your significant other. Either way, you aren’t alone.What’s important is that such emails involve some form of planning and decision making, and we often put the onus of both on the email recipient — by sending emails with vague and open-ended sentences like “Let me know what you think”.
Now imagine you’re on the receiving end of an email that ends this way. You’ll most likely relegate it to the category of things you will “deal with later” because you just don’t have the time or energy to think things over, decide what needs to be done, and send out a coherent response. Well, that’s what others do, too.
just found an email from November 25 that i forgot to reply to.. is it too late to reply now???
— Estelle Maskame (@EstelleMaskame) January 11, 2016
So how do you increase the likelihood of getting replies for your emails? It’s simple. You make it easy for the recipient to respond by suggesting a logical course of action. Call it Plan A. Back it up with a viable alternative, Plan B.
The recipient can reply with a “Plan A sounds good” (or Plan B, as the case may be), or even suggest a Plan C. When he has the prospect of pushing at least one decision out of the way with such ease, he’ll most likely be eager to get it over with and send you a quick reply. And you’ll have one less email to follow up on!
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