# Using email as an effective tool

DevFeed: [Using email as an effective tool](<https://devfeed.tech/articles/using-email-as-an-effective-tool-41216.md>)

Original publisher: [Read original article](<https://www.craigkerstiens.com/2019/04/16/Using-email-as-an-effective-tool/>)

Author: Map

Published: 2019-04-16T20:55:56Z

Content type: opinion

Language: en

Sources: [Craig Kerstiens](<https://devfeed.tech/sources/craig-kerstiens.md>)

Topics: [email](<https://devfeed.tech/topics/email.md>)

Tags: [effective](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/effective.md>), [email](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/email.md>), [philosophies](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/philosophies.md>), [tips](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tips.md>), [tool](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/tool.md>), [work](<https://devfeed.tech/tags/work.md>)

## AI overview

A product manager shares practical ways to use email for cross-functional communication and engagement. The article recommends including meeting notes and action items directly in emails, recirculating substantially revised documents, using personalized mail merge for feedback requests, and encouraging timely discussion on team emails. It presents the author's reported response-rate experiment while noting that the supplied text is incomplete.

## Source excerpt

I send way too many emails in a day. My inbox is very intermingled with my to do list and often represents some form of it. More relevant though is that email is a primary means of how I accomplish work. Being a PM I work cross functionally with other teams (from marketing, to engineering, to sales, to BD, to other product teams) and of course customers. Having to work so cross functionality I've found a lot of hacks I use to be able to better accomplish your goals with email, here is a collection of some of those. Let me be clear, this is not another post about inbox 0, how I swapped to slack. This instead is how I use email to more effectively communicate and get people to engage. In other words it is about making emails more useful, not just getting through them faster. And onto those tips. Don't leave a document in a document Often times I've found folks will collaborate in a document during a meeting or take notes there. After the meeting folks will email the document around, but few seldom actually open. Reasons may be they're not logged in on their phone or it may be they just don't care that much, I'm not really sure. What I do know is that by taking the notes and action items from the doc and including them in the email you will get more people paying attention to them. If you really want to get good at this when there is significant revisions of a work in progress document, re-circulate the updated version via email. Again not just a link to it, but the document itself. Mail merge isn't just for marketing Years ago I sent a company wide request for feedback (to about 120 people). I got less than 3 responses. I ran an experiment the next time I needed the same thing using a mail merge so my same email seemed personal and was from me to them instead of some large alias. I got a response rate of over 45%. Use this wisely... not every email you send needs a response. A broad update can absolutely be to team@, but when you need to get actual feedback and people d