After choosing the prosperous project leader philosophy to email in part one of this series of articles, let's move on to discuss email success strategies. Email success strategies focus on effectiveness of your email communications. Email effectiveness focuses on the question "What is the best way to do this?", versus email efficiency (discussed in part three of the series ) which focuses on "What is the fastest way to do it?". Email effectiveness applies to the emails that you send and those that you receive. Guard your time and respect the time of people receiving your emails.

Here are winning strategic tips for email mastery

1. Avoid jargon, abbreviations and acronyms. Don't send emails that require the reader to dust off the secret decoder ring. If you insist on using acronyms (especially your home-grown abbreviations), then be professional enough to define them in your email, or add a legend to your email signature so that receivers can interpret your shorthand. Your readers may choose to simply delete your complex email instead of investing time to find out what you meant.

2. Ruthlessly unsubscribe from unwanted email distributions and newsletters. I am usually successful in unsubscribing, however I once tried to unsubscribe from an in-house newsletter distributed in the company I worked for and the manager asked "Why would you want to unsubscribe". Rather than begin dialog about why I choose to manage my time and he doesn't manage his time, I merely setup an email rule to delete his email newsletter when it was distributed.

3. Brevity is not a four letter word. Keep your emails brief and clear. Teach your project team to do the same. Do not write a dissertation in an email - people won't read it. If you need seventeen paragraphs to get your point across then you should look for a different communication channel. I don't read four-page emails and neither should your readers.

4. Send back emails that are unclear. Educate people to make the time to craft clear emails to you. Give them the benefit of your wisdom and help them to realize the value of clear, concise communications.

5. Set the email example. Make sure that your emails set the example for your project team. Are they clearly written? Do they convey the appropriate tone? If in doubt, then solicit feedback from a trusted advisor such as a mentor or professional coach. Email communication is vital for projects and the project team is influenced by the example that you set as the leader.

6. Learn your email application. It is a large part of your role as a project leader. Don't accept the argument that "I am a project leader and only technical people know how to use email". Take a course, buy a book and do what it takes to learn the functions that you need to know in order to use your email application. Learn how to create folders and files to store emails. Learn how to create an email signature. You can't hold the respect of your project team when they are constantly have to send emails on your behalf, because of your email incompetence.

7. Email is not always communication. Email messages can be misunderstood and not understood at all. A email that is clear to you in the context of the meeting you just held is possibly Greek to a reader receiving it. Don't be afraid to supplement your email with voice communication or in-person dialog.

8. What do you want me to do? Tell the recipient if you need him or her to take action based on your email. Also tell the reader if your email is only for informational purposes. Don't make someone read to the bottom of the email and then guess what you expect of them. Clearly state in the subject line and at the top of the email "Action required - please approve xxx for project Acme to move forward". Then elaborate your needs in the body of the email.

9. Do your part to address the "Reply all" (plus a few more) habit. Address email issues head on with a phone call or a meeting. Do not continually add to email overload by hitting "Reply all" and then adding a few more people who do not need to receive the email.

10. Challenge your project team to reduce email traffic. Ask them to find ways to reduce the amount of emails they send - do you need to be copy on all of those emails? Are there are other ways to communicate more effectively with you? Can daily status reports be stored on a central location and easily accessed on demand?

11. Don't hide behind emails. It reduces your credibility. Pick up the phone and discuss important issues in person. Don't delegate work to team members by copying their managers on the email and giving the appearance that you are helping out when in fact you are pulling childish pranks.

12. Continually improve your writing style. Write emails in active voice. Challenge yourself to continually learn more concise phrase.

13. Avoid emoticons. Be wary of using smileys and strange characters. Perhaps your audience doesn't understand your intention. Instead, focus on improving your written language skills to convey your message.

14. Sell your message. Review basic copywriting skills. Craft emails that lead with the benefits to the reader and elicit the positive response you desire.

15. Recover from mistakes gracefully. Inevitably, you will make mistakes in your email communications. You will occasionally send and email to the wrong person. You will sometimes exclude a key stakeholder from an email. You will also send the wrong status out occasionally. Although you will always strive for accuracy, email mistakes are part of the game and not the end of the world. Accept this reality and learn how to gracefully apologize while correcting your email mistakes.

These strategies build on the philosophy established in part one of this series of articles. Now, let's move on to the tactics of email mastery discussed in part three of this series of articles where the focus is purely on efficiency - how fast can you process inbound and outbound emails?