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In a company environment, it is a common thing to be in contact with your colleagues and customers via email. However, it must have happened to you that you wanted to find a specific email between a huge amount of emails. This is where the email thread comes into play and helps you manage the situation.
Your email marketing projects can also benefit from this feature. In your email campaigns, you have to keep in touch with many customers, which can get messy quickly. Therefore, having a feature to organize and clean things up is a blessing.
In this article, we go through the email thread meaning, its benefits and disadvantages, and give you some practices to use it more easily.
What Is an Email Thread?
Let us assume that you are in contact with your colleagues, customers, or even your friends. All of the exchanged emails about your topic will be grouped in one place.
In other words, e-mails that discuss the same subject matter get linked together in similar email threads. This lets you view every email in chronological order and find them much more easily.
An email thread lets you stay on top of conversations and ensure that you don’t miss anything crucial, whether you are writing an important work-related email or just getting in touch with your friend.
What Are The Benefits of an Email Thread?
According to Statista, around 4,481 million people are using emails. This alone shows that a small optimization can have a hard impact on your and other people’s daily lives.
Now that you know the email thread definition, it is time to go through the benefits of using one in your daily routine.
1. Efficient Communication
Email threads offer a productive means of client communication by grouping all the relevant messages. This grouping makes it simple to refer to a specific matter and guarantees that the client and the company representative are on the same page and there won’t be any misunderstanding.
By using email marketing platforms, businesses can automate these email threads and speed up the process of answering clients.
2. Low Chance of Misunderstanding
All of the data that has been exchanged between the company and the clients is easy to access in a thread email. This makes it possible for customer support agents to respond in a way that is both personalized and knowledgeable by giving them a thorough grasp of the customer’s history, preferences, and current problems.
Because of their detailed history and ability to solve clients’ problems faster, using an email thread can have a huge boost on email conversion rate.
3. Easy Management
Using an email thread for each subject is useful for the customer support team. It helps them save more time and manage their clients much more easily.
They can identify jobs that need to be done, prioritize messages, and guarantee prompt responses. These all help to increase customer delight.
In addition, email workflows can be streamlined with the use of marketing automation systems, enabling teams to manage email threads more effectively.
4. Easy Collaboration
An email thread can help email marketers collaborate in much easier ways. They can add or remove people in a conversation, and multiple coworkers can work on a thread at the same time. Therefore, solving and handling customers’ problems or any other issues would be more efficient.
What Are The Best Practices to Use an Email Thread?
Now is the time to introduce some basic considerations to improve your email marketing and management through email threads:
1. Keep Threads Specific
The key characteristic of an email thread is that they should be specific and cover subjects related to each other. It is important to keep things clean. This way, if you or your other colleagues need to find an email, you know where to look for it.
If you need to discuss a new topic, make sure to create another thread and continue your conversation there.
2. Discuss Important Matters
Usually, an email thread is a place for more than two people. Therefore, it is a good practice to make threads about subjects that are important and need insights from a group of people. This leads to much more organized emails and saves plenty of time in the long run.
3. Keep It Serious
Make sure to avoid one-word responses such as ‘ok’ and ‘thanks’ in your email threads. These responses can irritate the thread’s recipients and provide nothing to the other replies.
The solution to this problem is establishing a guideline. You must specify how frequently replies should be made, and update the thread’s status. This will inform the participants that acknowledging an email does not require a reply.
4. Be Professional in Your Answers
Since many people may see your post, it is best to avoid any irrelevant and non-professional responses in the thread. These kinds of messages will lengthen the thread and make it much harder to keep clean and organized. Hence, consider reviewing the email several times before sending it out rather than responding right away.
Email Chain VS Thread
This might be a confusing subject and we decided to dedicate a part to mentioning the differences between an email chain and a thread for later reference and helping you decide on using an email thread or chain:
1. Structure
An email thread forms a hierarchical structure by grouping similar messages together, whereas in email chains the structure is different. Email Chains’ structure is a linear one. Email chains view each message as a separate entity and put them after each other in the mailbox.
2. Communication Flow
The structure of email chains affects the communication flow as well. In an email chain, each reply generates a new email. Email threads, on the other hand, show responses inside the context of the first message, which makes it possible to have a continuous conversation.
3. Decision Making
Email threads make it possible to have a comprehensive look at your conversation and make decisions faster. They provide you with a focused view of the subject, rather than every individual email. However, an email chain has a much more detailed approach. You can easily track down your process and how you have reached the current point for decision-making. This makes email chains more suitable for tracking the process in general.
FAQs
Let us go through some topics that may be a question in your mind and have not been answered in the body of this article:
1. If You CC Someone In an Email Can They See The Whole Thread?
Yes. When you CC someone in an existing email thread, They can see all the previous messages in that thread. They also can see all the participants in the thread and other CCd people as well.
2. What Is a Gmail Thread?
Email replies and their initial message can be grouped together into a single discussion or thread using the Gmail API. This makes it easy to find a specific email about a subject or a problem issued by your customers.
3. How to Forward an Entire Email Thread?
In your email account, select all the emails you want to forward and choose the forward as attachment option. Now, you can put in the receiver’s email address and write your email’s body.
Conclusion
In the marketing world, a small optimization can turn a failed campaign into a successful one. It is no different in email marketing. By using an email thread for your important subjects, you give yourself an edge compared to your rivals. You can easily organize your emails and give your customers a better experience. Make sure to leverage this advantage and raise your conversion rate.
