Sending emails is a modern staple of work life. We email our bosses, our colleagues, our clients, and more. But a new survey from email marketing firm EmailTooltester reveals there’s a host of things you may be doing in your emails that outright annoy people.
According to the results of the company’s survey, these are the top 10 things in emails that annoy workers the most:
- Misspelling names (24.4% of respondents were annoyed by this)
- Using emojis or smiley faces in emails (21.6%)
- Calling someone by a pet name in an email (20.5%)
- Including a meme image of gif in an email (18%)
- Overusing exclamation points (17.3%)
- CCing or BCCing managers in the email (16.9%)
- Using salutations like “What’s up” and other unpersonalized greetings (15.7%)
- Not saying “Hi” or “Hello” at the beginning of the email (13.1%)
- Using unnecessary puns in the email (13.1%)
- Not ending the email with a sign-off, such as your name, or just using a single letter as your sign-off (9.5%)
While these results are the averages of all people surveyed, EmailTooltester’s survey also found that when you break down the results by generational divide, the rankings vary with different groups of workers. For example, when it comes to emoji use in emails, 26.4% of millennial respondents aged 35 to 44 found them the most annoying, while just 12.2% of Gen Z respondents aged 18 to 24 found emoji use in emails annoying.
You can check out EmailTooltester’s full survey results here, which include more workplace communication faux pas. The survey was conducted from a representative sample of 1,043 American workers aged 18 and older in October 2023, who work or had worked in an office environment in the previous 12 months.
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