Email: Reply or Start a New Thread?

Here's a simple guide to help you choose

As I wrote in an early Tutor Scale post, I prefer text to email when communicating with students and parents. Texts get both a better open rate and a faster response time than emails. So you might be wondering: why am I writing an entire post about email?

Well, some people, especially parents, still prefer to communicate via email. So you need to master the art of the email. And time and time again I see tutors, students, and parents break proper email protocol.

The example you’re probably most familiar with is the Reply All fiend. The rule is you only choose Reply All if the information is relevant to every person on the email chain. So if you have a chain going with a student and a parent, but only the parent handles payments, then you don’t want to Reply All to that chain to ask a question about the parent’s payment method. But all too often, people ignore that advice and Reply All to every email they get.

However, there have already been plenty of diatribes written against Reply All fiends. I want to focus today on a more subtle, but still very important, question: when should you reply to an existing email chain and when should you start a new chain?

Think of each email thread as a task with a defined outcome

For example, you might have a contact form on your website that sends you an email when a lead clicks submit. Let’s say you know that you’re most successful at closing leads when you get them on the phone. Then the goal of that first email thread should be to schedule a free phone consultation:

Now, until you get that call scheduled, you should reply to the same email chain instead of starting new chains. That gives your lead a visual reminder that they’ve been interacting with you (the small 4 in the image below):

If you instead start a new chain, you’re making your lead do more work than they need to. Keep in mind, they might be in talks with other tutors at the moment. They don’t necessarily remember your name. So when you reach out with a new thread, they might glance at it and think that you’re spamming them, even if you use the exact same copy in the body of your email:

Even if you have new information to share with them, stick with the existing thread if they still haven’t booked the phone call yet. For example, let’s say you were offering a temporary discount of 20% off. I would still put that in the existing thread instead of reaching out, because again, this person isn’t yet very familiar with who you are:

As soon as a task is finished, start a new thread to move to the next task

This is one of the biggest mistakes I see people make: they do the call with the lead, but then reply to the same chain to recap the call and lay out next steps:

When you keep the same chain going, your message could get lost. It just doesn’t stick out to your lead because they see the subject ‘Quick Phone Call’ and think to themselves: I’ve already done the phone call. They’ve checked that task off, so it’s easy for them to overlook your email.

Instead, start a new thread with the most important next step as the subject line:

You can also recap the phone call and lay out other next steps as well. But by putting the most important next step as the subject line, you’re clearly stating the task at hand for this next email chain. As soon as that session is scheduled, you move to a new chain and repeat.