How to write a Business Email

hi welcome to mad English TV in this lesson I'm going to teach you how to write a business email okay you just need four things a subject greetings body and your closing okay now business emails in our culture are very brief and to the point okay so you're not gonna talk about the weather you're not gonna ask them how their family is and you're not gonna talk about your favorite hobbies you're just gonna keep it very brief and to the point but you still want it to sound friendly so it's good to have one sentence maybe that says it was nice to meet you or I hope you're doing fine or something like that just to give it a little bit more of a friendly feel because if it's to business then you know it can sound a little bit cold you want to be friendly in all situations right so let's take a look at the subject line of the email actually first you need to know who you're sending the email to okay so you need to know their email address so let's say you're sending an email to me okay then you would send it to Matt English TV at gmail.com and let's say you're interested in taking some English lessons with me okay then your subject would be English lessons or something short and to the point okay you don't want to write a full sentence here like let's say you're applying for a job somewhere your subject line should just be job application it shouldn't be I'm applying for a job in your company okay you don't want a huge thing just some maybe two or three words very brief and to the point okay now up here you'll notice we have CC and BCC CC stands for carbon copy and BC C stands for blind carbon copy now let's say you want to send this email to other people as well okay then you can choose one of these options if you choose CC then everyone will be able to see who the email was sent to but if you choose BCC then nobody will be able to see anyone else so if you choose BCC and you send this email to me I'll probably think I'm the only one who you sent the email to okay so usually if I do this I use BCC because I don't like everyone else to know everyone else's email address it's just it's nice for privacy to choose BCC okay let's talk about greetings now there are several different ways to start a business email and I'll be honest this is pretty awkward this is the most awkward part of a business email because you're writing a business email to someone that you might not know very well and so you're not sure how you should call them should you say hi hello should you use their first name or their last name what if you don't even know their name then how do you start the email so this is extremely awkward I get awkward every time I have to write a business email but don't worry about it just do it it's okay so the first and the most common way to do this is just to say hi John so hi and the person's first name now hi is very informal right and using a person's first name is also very informal but in our culture it's okay to use someone's first name and especially in a business context it happens all the time age doesn't really matter in a business context you hear people calling each other by their first name all the time like if you work in a bank let's say and there's someone who's 20 years old and someone who's 50 years old they'll probably call each other by their first names okay so if you're writing a business email to someone I think it's okay to use their first name now if you want to be a little bit more polite then you could say dear like dear Linda personally I like this one I like to be polite in my email so I think this one is also very common and that's probably the one I use the most so if I was writing you an email I would say dear Mary or Dear John I think that's that's nice now if you've been contacting them for quite a while like I send you an email you send me an email and we're emailing back and forth and that's way too official then you could just say hi okay but if it's for the first time I like to use dear now some people also just start with the name like Paul you could do that personally I think that's a little bit cold just to say the person's name without greeting them the whole purpose of a greeting is to say hi or to have some other word before the person's name but maybe that's just me it happens though a lot you'll see people especially in an official like official business email that might they might just say mark I'm contacting you to request information about something okay now if you want to be very respectful you could call someone by their last name you could say dear mrs. Stewart or dear mr. Smith okay that's nice because you're being very polite you're using dear and you're being very respectful you're using their last name okay so this is also a very common way to start a business email now you could also just say dr. Johnson or mrs. Stewart okay that again that's sort of like Paul it's it's very official okay so if you're writing someone for the first time and you're trying to keep your distance then this is a good way to start it but personally I think it's a little bit cold so I never use this one now what if you don't know their name that's a common problem let's say you're writing to a company to apply for a job or something and you don't know who's going to get the email well then it's a really awkward situation okay we don't have any good options in English so you could say dear sir or madam okay so you're you're not sure if it's going to be a man or a woman getting the email so you have to say sir or madam I use this sometimes but I try to get the person's name because if you can know their name then you can avoid any awkwardness that comes from this okay to whom it may concern now that's very very formal and that's really cold to whom it may concern you're not even talking to anyone you're just saying like to whom it may concern that to me is almost rude like if if I got an email that said to whom it may concern I don't know like it's it seems like you're writing a government document or something it's just way too official so personally I would rather use this one instead of this one but probably the most common way I tackle this challenge is I just use the word hello hello I'm writing to ask you about blah blah blah okay this one is it's very informal like the word hello and hi that's informal but in a way it's a lot better than this one and in a lot of situations I think it's better than this one so personally I think this is the one I use the most when I'm just not sure what someone's name is but I would say the ones I use the most are like hi John or dear Linda those are really nice if I'm if it's a person like in a very respectful position or they're a lot older than me or something then I might use like dear mr. Smith or something like that but generally I just use those there and if I don't know their name I just say hello so I don't know what do you think which one do you like the best I know everyone has different ideas probably of what the best thing is but now you know my ideas so anyway let's talk about the body okay the body should just be a short paragraph or maybe two paragraphs just saying what you want to say and then you've closed the email okay so let's see what this person says it was great to meet you at the job fair last week we talked about several positions that are available in your company I'm very interested in the customer service position please find attached my resume and cover letter I look forward to your response ok now this is just a really great body it's very brief it's a few sentences it's friendly it was great to meet you at the job fair last weekend so most universities have a job fair once or twice a year where they invite a lot of different companies to come to their campus so there's a lot of different employers who set up like a booth and they talk to students and they try to recruit students and students come and they can apply for jobs there okay so that's called a job fair so this person's being very friendly I'm saying he's saying it was great to meet you last weekend we talked about several positions that are available in your company okay so now he's getting right to the point this is what we talked about so he's reminding the person what they talked about which is also very nice and then I am very interested in the customer service position okay so he's stating his intention why is he writing the email because he's interested in applying for a job right so then he says please find attached my resume and cover letter I look forward to your response perfect okay and it's done now we have our nice body and now we're ready for the closing okay so when you close an email you need to use one or two words before your name okay and that'll be one of these here so sincerely regards best regards warm regards kind regards best wishes thank you and then your name mark okay so sincerely that's quite official personally I never use it because it's it's a little bit too formal like if you wrote me an email and you said sincerely that's fine it just it makes everything very formal and personally I like to not be that formal there's other ways to be sort of medium formal okay like regards best regards warm regards kind regards all of these are really good okay personally I really like warm regards I use that at the end of lots of my emails if I'm writing a business email okay warm regards mark that's just a very friendly way to end the email now you could also say best wishes a lot of people do this but personally I think it sounds more like you're at someone's birthday party or something best wishes on the new year ahead of you okay I don't know but it's okay you could use it thank you now this is a really great way to close an email it's maybe not as as professional or as formal as the rest of them it's a little bit more casual but it's very nice to thank people right especially if someone is helping you with something then just to end off thank you mark okay so I think the best way once personally for me I would use this one thank you and this one pretty much all the time for my emails okay so let's look at a whole example here so hi mark my name is Ziad I'm from Saudi Arabia I'm interested in taking some conversation lessons with you on skype how much do you charge per hour warm regards Ziad okay so this is a really great business email now I want you to notice the spaces we have a space here we have a space here and a space here now spaces are really important because they give the email a certain structure okay they give it a certain look if you write everything in one block of text then it just looks really messy and it doesn't look very professional so when you write business emails you know it's all about trying to appear professional that's why people wear suits and ties they want to look professional and when they go home they take off their suit and they take off their tie because they don't need to impress anyone but in the business world you know it's all about being really presentable and professional so then you should also make your writing professional and presentable okay so that's basically how you do a business email but I want you to do some homework I want you to write a short business email to me down there in the comments about some scenario that is relevant to you I don't know who you are I don't know why you need to learn business English maybe you're training to be a pharmacist or I don't know some other profession like an engineer or something so think about what matters to you and write me an email down there in the comments and I'll give you some tips on how to improve it okay see you over in the next episode of Mad English TV take care

Channel: Mad English TV

Views: 134,431

Keywords: How to write a business email, business email, english business email, how to write email, english email, email, business english, english learning, english lesson, english class, english tutorial, english lecture, english writing, writing email for business, english, esl, lesson, class

Id: dAqkBwruxT8

Length: 14min 33sec (873 seconds)

Published: Sat Sep 16 2017