What - are you trying to say?

How many e-mail messages do you get in one day? Twenty? Fifty? One hundred? Chances are, you do not read each one. Chances are, you do not read any one of them to the end!

How, then, do you make your message heard, whether on e-mail, on a Web site, in a verbal pitch? You need to grab the attention of your target audience. And while you have that attention, you need to tell them right away what you want from them.

In public relations, there are different reasons for communicating:

• To inform. Were officers just elected? Who won the recent speech contest? Is there an upcoming event? Give your audience the details.
  
• To persuade, to motivate. Reaching a goal means asking your audience for something, such as joining your club, or soliciting volunteers to take a committee chair position. Let your audience know exactly what you want them to do, and by when.
  
• To create awareness, goodwill. Even without a specific action item for your audience, keeping the Toastmasters name in the public eye helps solidify its reputation as a go-to organization for speaking and leadership skills.
  
• To build on-going, two-way relationships. Similar to networking, before inundating your audience with one-way requests, it is important to build trust, a two-way street of communication. In its simplest terms, that means providing useful, even entertaining, information that is relevant to the audience. Taken further, it means actively soliciting feedback.
  

Make sure that you know the point of your communication, and express it clearly – and in the right format for the medium. E-mail, the Web and social media are the current communication methods of choice, and are conducive to short, to-the-point messages. Longer stories are more appropriate for print media.

The following strategies can help ensure that your online communications are noticed, and not ignored or even deleted:

• Be creative! Use a unique or humorous hook. For example, if you are looking for help for an end-of-year event, but need to solicit volunteers in August, acknowledge it as a “Christmas in July” request!
  
• Keep it short! Your target audience is likely reading on a mobile device, and will not get past the first two micro-screens. If you find yourself typing the words, “Please excuse the length of this e-mail …..” you’ve already lost your audience.
• Place any call to action at the beginning. Many readers miss the actual “ask” because it only comes after all the details. Summarize up-front, and include – limited – details later.
  
• If more detail is required, use links and attachments. One co-worker placed a document into an e-mail message, making the text 20 pages; after printing, said co-worker even stated that it was not “that long, only” 16 pages. Your audience does not expect a manual in an e-mail text. If it is truly needed, make it an attachment, or provide a web-based link to download it.
  
• One message – one point. If too many calls to action are in the same message, only the first one – or the second, at most – will be noticed.
  
• Highlight important points with bullets or bold text. But do not overuse the bold or italics, or the effect will be lost – similar to the solid block of yellow highlights in my college textbooks after an all-night study session.
  

So make your point – keep it creative, keep it relevant, keep it interactive – and keep it short!