Writing emails is an essential part of doing business nowadays. Most of us do it every single day. Well formulated emails can help you build a reputation and reach your goals faster. Therefore knowing the art of writing messages can be a huge plus for every freelancer.
However, an email faux-pas can have negative impacts on your career as well. Luckily there are already some useful apps that help you to improve your email writing.
We summed up the seven most important ones in this article:
1) Mail Mentor
Mail Mentor is a basic and free tool that tells you if your text is reader-friendly. Just copy-paste your email text into the app and it will let you know the approximate reading time and the reading level. A good reference point is a 6th-grade reading level. You can repeat the process until your message is simple enough. This is a great and easy way to simplify your mails.
2) Hemingway editor
We have mentioned this app in another context before because it´s a great one. And it´s free, too. It highlights very complex sentences and marks passive voice phrases, which are difficult to read. Moreover, it marks adverbs and requests you to replace them with strong verbs. It also gives your text an overall readability score, so you can quickly check your mails before reading it. The app is not only useful for mails but for any other text, you have to write.
3) Just not sorry
The app was developed by Tami Reiss, a business woman who wanted to help other women to appear more confident in their working environment. The app is an extension for Google Chrome. It improves your wording by underlining weak words and phrases in your email like “I think“, “just“ or “sorry“. If you hover over the highlighted passages you will get an explanation of why you shouldn´t use it. Here is an example: “Using ´sorry´ frequently undermines your gravitas and makes you appear unfit for leadership.“
4) Crystal
People like to be addressed differently. Some prefer a formal way of communication, others like it when it´s more personal. This extension for Gmail provides personal profiles for the people you communicate with. This includes suggestions on how to communicate with them like “Write with short and casual language” or “Use data to prove a point”. The basic version is free and includes communication profiles for your contacts. The extended version which costs 19 dollars per month also will give you communication profiles of people who are not in your network yet. So if you frequently have to contact new people you should think about this version.
5) Contactually
When you need to quickly send out common emails you want to use a template that allows you to send slightly customized content. Contactually is a pretty nice tool to do just that. In a first step, you can select your audience and in a second one, you choose the topic of the email. Contactually will generate some nice templates then, which you can adapt. There are some free templates, but if you want a wider range of templates you have to buy the basic version.
6) SubjectLine
The subject line was already one of the main points in our article How to get people to respond to emails. If you want to convince strangers to read your email you have to use a strong subject line. And you have only 40 characters to do just that. To better estimate if the subject of your message is effective there is an app called SubjectLine. It is a free rating tool for evaluating your subject line. It will, for example, tell you when you have forgotten to capitalize or when it is too long.
7) FoxType
This app is available as a free web app and as a chrome extension. Emails are often misinterpreted, because of the lack of body language and facial expressions. According to a study, more than 50% of all emails are understood incorrectly. The FoxType app helps you to find the right tone. You just have to paste your draft and the app will tell you which parts of your email might not sound polite or adequate.
Do you know any other helpful apps for writing better emails? Which are your favourites? Let us know in the comment section below.
