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Here’s my latest entry in my How to Write an Email series. These posts are meant to help you develop skills in the most common and ubiquitous form of written communication in the world of information work: email.

Today’s post is a bit of a twofer. I’m going to cover what you write at the very beginning and at the very end of an email; the subject line and the signature. I think that both pieces are vitally important to communicating effectively with any email. I also think that these are both areas that could stand some serious improvement for the majority of us.

Starting at the Start: The Subject Line

The subject line of any email should tell the recipient exactly what the email is about. This is important so that your email:

1. Actually gets read,
2. is treated with the right degree of urgency, and
3. is easily filtered and stored for future reference.

These are all super important with respect to your email communicating your ideas and to soliciting real action from the recipient.

So what does an excellent subject line look like? An excellent subject line will be:

• Short,
• Descriptive, and
• Unique

For example, the subject line “Project meeting questions from yesterday afternoon” doesn’t fit the bill at all. It’s better than a blank subject line, but within a week, it will have totally lost its meaning. As an alternative, you might try “Questions for Project XYZ [12/07/2012]”. This will maintain its meaning regardless of when it was sent. It’s also clear what specific project it’s referring to.

Other things to avoid include:

• Blank subject lines
• Greetings (i.e. Subject: “Hey!”)
• Subject lines with email body content (i.e. Subject: “Hey Joe! Are you available to meet tomorrow at 3?”)

Email Signatures

Email signatures are an important part of any email. They’re the digital equivalent of your business card. You need to include email signatures in all of your correspondence so that the recipient knows how they can contact you besides through email.

A good email signature includes the following elements:

• Your name
• Professional designations
• Title/ role
• Phone number
• Fax number
• Email address
• Mailing address
• Company name

You may be surprised to see that I included “email address” in the list of required items. I suggest you include it so that all of your contact information is present should somebody wish to copy and paste your signature for future reference or for sharing your information.

There are a few things I also recommend you pay close attention to:

• Don’t include a salutation like “Respectfully yours” or anything like that. It’s lame. Worse than that, it doesn’t always make much sense, depending on the context of the email. I recommend you conclude your email as though the signature isn’t even there . That means, add a salutation and then your name.
• Keep the formatting simple. Just like you shouldn’t write an email in a loopy handwriting font, you should keep your signature in the same, or a similar font.
• Don’t mess around with colour too much. If you’d like to colour your signature, try a light grey or a blue, but don’t get too creative. You’re an engineer, not a graphic designer. No offence.

Parting Thoughts

I hope these tips help you in your everyday communication at work. What tips do you have? Let the community know in the comment section below.

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