This is an All Ears English podcast episode 1845.
How to show urgency when you end your business emails.
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How can you request immediate action from a colleague without being overly demanding or disrespectful?
Today we share formal and informal phrases to help you express urgency in business English emails.
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Hey aubrey, how's it going?
What's shaking?
I am great.
How are you?
Oh, i'm awesome.
I love summertime, so i'm feeling good.
I'm feeling good.
Yeah, i'm going to be going to a podcast conference right around this time, so always love those.
Oh, that's fun.
I haven't been to one yet that they sound really cool.
I think that would be awesome to make all of those great connections.
Yeah, conferences are so good.
And it's good to follow up by email with the people you meet after the conference, isn't it?
Are you good at doing that?
Are you good at following up with an email after you meet someone?
I would say not as much.
Actually, you know, cause sometimes I don't I don't quite know what to say, but I'm pretty good at connecting on LinkedIn and there's a little box I can just say Hey, let's connect.
It was great chatting.
You know, let's connect here.
That's a little easier than a whole email where you have to bring up everything you talked about, right?
It's too much.
For sure.
Yeah, that's smart.
Smart to use LinkedIn that way as a tool.
You guys out there listening.
We know a lot of you are working in business English, you know, working in English at work.
And that's a useful tool.
If you're not on LinkedIn, you should be get a good strong profile on there.
Yeah, guys, we talk about business topics so much on Allers English.
That's why you should go ahead and make sure you hit follow on this show, so that you don't miss any of our four episodes a week.
Aubrey, what are we getting into today?
Yes, we are talking about business English today.
We had a great listener question about phrases to use to get people to respond right away.
If you need to express some urgency, you need to hear back from them right away.
So let's hear this question, because I know that everyone out there is going to need this one day, if you haven't already.
Yeah, this is a really good one because, oh, you still need to be polite, right?
You need to be polite.
You need to, so let's see what the listener asks and then let's see what our answer is.
Here we go.
Happy New Year.
Firstly, I want to thank you, Michelle, Jessica and Aubrey for this amazing job at All Ears English.
I really love it.
I used to listen to the podcast when I'm driving from my job to my house.
Awesome.
Once I lived in Sao Paulo, Brazil, I take a lot of time in the traffic.
Yes, there's lots of traffic there.
We know that.
But being able to listen to All Hears English, I'm not wasting my time.
That's great.
I have a question for you.
Sometimes I have to engage people from my company to answer emails and questions to solve some system issues.
And always, I'm not sure which are the best approach to say this.
Please revert back on this.
Please return back.
Please answer this.
Please try to respond.
I hope you have a great day.
Many thanks in advance, Arianne Sosa.
Great questions.
Great question.
And I know this is a common struggle.
I mean, I've also experienced this myself.
Like, what is the best way to let them know I need them to respond right away?
And in helping students with their business English emails, I've also seen this struggle, or I've seen sentences where it's either a little bit unkind, maybe a little too pushy, or not clear enough.
Right, because if it's important they get back.
You need to make sure that message is clear.
That's a good point.
The challenge here for our listeners today is how do we land in the middle where it's direct enough so that people know what they have to do, but it's not rude.
It's not pushy.
That's our challenge today.
The first thing that you need to be aware of is that the tone of your email will be very different depending on who you are writing.
We talk about this in our business course, to really be aware of what's the relationship, what's the context, so that you know how informal your tone will be, because the vocabulary, the phrases are very different depending on that relationship.
So we're going to share today, formal phrases.
If you know the relationship is pretty formal, you either haven't met yet or don't know them well and need to stay quite formal and some informal phrases for people that you work with all the time, that you know well, and you're going to be quite a bit more informal with them.
Yes, I love it.
So let's dive right in, guys.
Take out your pen and paper.
Get ready to write this down.
So let's go into formal first.
Right, Aubrey?
Yes, let's do it.
OK.
All right.
So the first thing you can say is please respond at your earliest convenience.
That does sound really, really formal, but really urgent.
Right.
Quite urgent and quite formal.
Yes, exactly.
Right.
You never going to say this to a coworker that you've known forever.
Right.
It is very formal.
It's perfect for prospective clients, but that you need to hear from right away.
It's very polite and respectful and impressive, really.
And expresses that urgency.
Yes, absolutely guys.
So that's a good one to go for.
And so what about this next one?
This one's interesting.
I look forward to hearing from you soon.
What do you think about this?
Yeah.
So this is also quite formal, right?
You're not going to end a business email with someone you know very well, but it's quite a bit more formal.
But this one, it doesn't express urgency as clearly.
No.
No, it doesn't.
I would definitely follow this.
This would needs to follow something where you're saying like, I need these numbers by Friday.
And then you'll say, I look forward to hearing from you soon.
Right.
So it's great when you've clarified in the email when you need to hear from them by.
You've made that clear.
This is a perfect way to end that.
Yeah, that's exactly what I was thinking too, right?
If you just say I look forward to hearing from you soon, they might not who knows where you're going to go in their order of importance for that day or that month.
That on its own doesn't really let them know, like, I need to hear from you right away.
No, no, no, no, no.
So make sure you add that extra piece guys.
Okay.
So those are, I like that we have just two options for each.
That's really good, because our listeners are definitely going to be able to take these in.
Write these down guys, and use these right.
You don't need a bajillion different options.
Right.
You just need a few.
Okay, good.
Exactly.
So let's dive into informal.
This is one that I emailed to both you and Jessica all the time, right?
Which is let me know ASAP.
So just the ASAP.
And when it's an informal email, you don't need to capitalize it.
Like acronyms, usually we capitalize.
I always write ASAP in lowercase when it's an informal you know email among coworkers that I'm emailing often, or friends.
Oh.
But if I've let them know, right, okay, I need your feedback on this.
I need to know something.
Then I'll end it with, let me know ASAP.
I love that.
Let me know ASAP.
It's simple.
It's clear.
It's not rude at all.
It's just casual, right?
And so just make sure that you are on the level that you're all on the same level.
You're understanding each other.
You work well together.
You work closely as a team.
That's when you want to send that.
Exactly right.
Because again, very different depending on who the relationship with is.
It's a formal email to someone that I haven't actually met.
Maybe I'm writing someone to maybe record with them on their podcast.
I would never end an email this way because it's very, it's respectful.
It's great when you know them well.
If not, it does seem sort of disrespectful because you're being too informal, which is awkward.
Yeah.
This is kind of more of an insider outsider thing, right?
You're talking to your team.
You're not talking to people outside your team representing your company.
No, no, no.
Um, what's the last one?
Yeah.
So this one is a little bit of a semi-formal middle of the road.
It's please get back to me as soon as you can.
So I would say that to you or to Jessica, right?
It's just a little bit more formal, but also acceptable.
But I also would potentially say it to a prospective client, to someone I don't know quite as well.
It's not as formal and serious as the please respond at your earliest convenience, but really has that same meaning, right.
Please get back to me as soon as you can.
Yeah, I think the word you might have been looking for was like impersonal.
Please respond at your earliest convenience.
To me sounds pretty impersonal in a way, you know, kind of stoic and distant.
Kind of.
Yes.
It definitely feels more like something you would write at the end of an email to someone you haven't met yet.
You don't even know.
Keeping them at arm's length as you should when you don't have a relationship yet.
Yeah, completely, completely.
I love it.
So guys, those are two options for formal and two for informal.
Have we ever talked about this topic before?
Aubrey, anywhere else?
Yes, there's another great episode you guys need to make sure you don't miss.
All Ears English episode 1737, where we talked about how to end business English emails.
And we were focusing also on the importance of thanking at the end, right?
We know that gratitude goes a long way.
And to end an email with a thank you is so useful.
So make sure to revisit, check out that episode if you missed it.
Yeah, guys, if you're listening in the iOS or Android app, you can just go and type in 1737.
Now that is the best way to get all of the episodes of All Ears English.
Okay, good stuff.
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All right, Aubrey, let's dive into a role play.
All right, here we go.
So...
We are on a phone call, you and I, because the tricky thing about doing a role play here I was thinking about it is when it's an email.
How do you do a role play?
But one thing to note is you can also say these things on phone calls.
So we're going to show you in the role play how you could also use these phrases on a phone call.
All right.
It's a good question.
How do you do an AML as a role play?
But we're going to show you guys how to do it.
You can also use these on phone calls.
So that's how we're doing the role play.
Okay.
Here we are on a business phone call.
Okay.
All right.
Well, I think that's about it.
Thanks for taking the time to chat today.
Oh, no problem.
And just get back to me as soon as you can about those numbers.
Yes, will do.
You need both past stats and future projections.
Let me know the future projections ASAP.
And then we do need documentation on past stats, but it's not as urgent.
We have two of those phrases here, right?
You said, no problem.
Just get back to me as soon as you can about those numbers.
Totally something I would say in both an email and a phone call.
Yes, I love it.
And then I said, let me know the future projections ASAP.
And then we do need documentations on past stats, but it's not as urgent.
I would say the only thing that's easier here about the conversation is you can hear in my voice.
I do need documentations on past stats.
I'm speaking a little louder, right?
I'm showing certain things, certain changes in my voice to show that that thing, the past stats, really matter.
Okay, so yeah, point out, I noticed that you said ASAP instead of ASAP.
Oh, that's listeners recognize that both are totally acceptable.
Neither is right or wrong.
Neither is really more formal or informal.
It's sort of someone's personal style, right?
Yes, and I think we've done a couple episodes in the past, guys, about acronyms.
Go back to allearsenglish.com and just type acronym in the search bar.
I think we've done a couple of them, but maybe we'll have to revisit and come back to them again, Aubrey.
There are a lot where we'll make it into a word like I did and say ASAP.
But then sometimes we will just say each letter ASAP.
Both are accepted.
Both are common.
You know, just sort of depends where you're from, maybe and your personal style.
Yeah, I love it.
What's our takeaway for today?
Yeah.
So this is a very high level business English skill to be able to ask someone to get back to you right away with respect.
But clearly, right, to express that urgency so that there's there's no communication breakdown.
But also no one takes offense, right?
And today's episode is really going to help you with just some phrases you can use to do that.
Yeah, and I think.
One final piece of advice guys, for writing an email for anyone if you're feeling like adrenaline and your boss is bothering you for something, you need that thing.
Things are feeling urgent.
Write the email and then get up and walk around for a minute and then come back and read the email and then send it and proof it again.
Make sure you're not being pushy or rude because it's so easy just to send that email and kind of you can ruin relationships pretty quickly.
Yes, it's true right, there are so many things that you could say like i need this right away, please do this right away, exactly.
It just feels so blunt and harsh and pushy, demanding.
It's really demanding.
Yeah.
So our goal here is to show you how to build a connection and maintain it.
That's the other key.
Once we've built it, now we've done all these things with our English to build that connection.
We don't want to lose it guys.
So take a minute, just breathe.
Yes, for sure.
That's a really good advice, Lindsay.
Yeah, I know.
I need to take my own advice too.
Don't worry.
All right, Aubrey.
Good stuff.
I'll see you in the next one.
Take care.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Bye.
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