Continuing on with our Email Etiquette series, I have 3 quick tips. The sandwich method, active voice and the use of sentence case.
First, the sandwich method. It goes a little something like this:
When you sandwich your critique or bad news in good news, it makes people a lot more receptive to what you have to say. It looks less like an attack and more like the helpful-yet-unsavory idea it is meant to be. This isn’t a way to disarm people so that you can sucker punch them; this just a little something you can try to build respect and trust with a person you may not speak to a lot outside of email. Grease the wheels with politeness and things will go a lot smoother.
Another subtle change that can make you more personable is the use of active voice. Oh no. Grammar. Active voice just means that you try to use use the active role of a verb whenever possible.
Example:
Your updates will be processed by the end of the week.
My Response?
Meh. A robot sent me a response. I wonder if my updates will ever go through?
We will process your updates by the end of this week.
My Response?
I look at the calendar. Oh? Really? The end of this week? That’s fast.
An easy way to tell the difference between active and passive voice? Look at who the subject is. In the first example, it’s the ‘updates.’ The updates are processed. In the active example ‘we’ process updates. It’s a lot more personable when there is a person involved.
My last tip should be pretty self explanatory. PLEASE DON’T USE ALL CAPS FOR YOUR ENTIRE EMAIL. EVEN IF YOU ARE NOT SHOUTING, IT SOMETIMES APPEARS THAT YOU ARE.
In the midst of hundreds of emails each week (thousands for some), I think it’s fairly common to disregard the need for personable communication and correct email behavior. There is a laundry list of things to remember, so I thought I would break it up into a series of blog entries. Hopefully working on it one step at a time will improve your email etiquette.
Without the help of facial expressions, body language or tone of voice, emails can easily be misinterpreted and possibly cost you some business in the end. Remember, people you are communicating with are real humans too. I know, crazy. But our emails don’t always reflect this. Here a few things to remember:
- Ask about their life: A simple, “How was your weekend?” will do.
- Personally address your emails: We like to see our names and talk about ourselves.
- Always say please and thank you: This one seems easy, but the email takes on a whole new meaning with polite words. I’ll get into the sandwich method later.
- Don’t always use email: Yes I know this post is about email, but if we’re talking about the more personable approach, it would be the phone. It’s not always necessary, but make sure to use both.
From personal experience, I remember an email from one of our clients, Deidra McCall with Paint-A-Smile. I had briefly mentioned to her that my birthday was coming up in a few weeks and not only did she remember, but she sent me a happy birthday email.
I thought she was wishing me a happy birthday and would immediately follow with business talk, but the email was completely non-work related. I really appreciated her effort and she definitely moved up on my list of favorite clients.
Anyway, this just scratches the surface of email do’s and don’ts. See part two for more tips.
I need your help! For years I’ve been advising people on the professionalism of various internet-related topics. On this one, I’d like some data to back up what has previously just been my opinion.
If you could answer the following question honestly, it would be greatly appreciated.
Which email address seems most professional?
- info@xyzincorporated.com (93.0%, 54 Votes)
- xyzincorporated@aol.com (3.0%, 2 Votes)
- xyzincorporated@yahoo.com (2.0%, 1 Votes)
- xyzincorporated@gmail.com (2.0%, 1 Votes)
- xyzincorporated@cox.net (0.0%, 0 Votes)
Total Voters: 58
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Back when I first started working on websites, I displayed my email address liberally, hiding it from no one. I wanted to make sure that anyone who wanted to contact me would have an easy way to do so.
Then came spam. And more spam, and more spam. I was getting hundreds of spam emails each week, sometimes each day. Before too long, I started making people contact me through contact forms, forums, or just nothing at all.
And it worked! The spam email dropped off greatly. But so did contact from people in general. I had robbed Peter to pay Paul.
Seth Godin wrote the following about email addresses in a recent blog entry:
If you sell something, set up an address like “sales@xyz.com”. Put this on your home page, “contact us if you’re looking for more information or a price quote.” Sure, you’ll get a lot of spam, but deleting spam is a lot easier than finding customers. (Hint, ask your IT people to make it a mailto link, with a subject line built in. That way, you can use the subject line to find the good email).
After my own experiences, I now advise people to have both an email address and a contact form on their website for people to get in touch with them via email.
The email address allows people who are at their own computer to send an email from their email program. And if they’re anything like me, they don’t always remember what they said in a message, so it’s great to have a record in their sent items.
The form allows people who are at another computer to send an email from their own email address without having to remember the contact information.
Often we have clients who have problems sending large files or a lot of files in one email, because of limitations their internet provider (not T&S) has put on how big attachments can be. To those clients we recommend YouSendIt. Although we don’t really use it ourselves, we’ve had clients use it and love it.
What you do is actually upload your files to a holding page on their website. Once you’ve done that, they send an email to your recipient, telling them where to go to download the files.
Their website talks about paid accounts, but you can use it for free. Check out their plan comparisons for more information.
YouSendIt
We started a new Email List Tips blog late last week. So if you’re looking for advice on marketing through an email newsletter (or enews), check the new blog out.
Here’s a sample entry:
Here’s another quick tip for you. Your newsletter subscribers have to actually get something out of your newsletter. While you may be tempted to send out something that interests you, or perhaps company news, take a minute and make sure you’re writing about something your customers, clients and future customers and clients actually care about.
Not sure? Bounce it off a customer or client you already have. Find someone who knows you well enough to give you their honest opinion. Ask them if they think your subscribers will even care about it. Their honest answer will translate into dollars and cents.
Feel free to chime in over there and let us know what you’d like to hear about.
Oh, and happy Thanksgiving to all you eating turkey and such today!
One of the most difficult and annoying things to set up in a small business is email. There are so many different options that it can be frustrating to even attempt to configure email. What’s the difference between IMAP and POP3 anyways? I’ve seen people just type in their email address and it works. Why doesn’t mine work like that? I will attempt to answer some of those questions in this post.
There are three main email retrieval protocols in use:
- Exchange - This is a proprietary mail protocol used by Microsoft to receive email from an Exchange Server. Support for this protocol is heavily integrated into Outlook. It is the easiest to set up. Simply enter your email address and password and Outlook takes care of almost everything else for you. In addition to easy set up, the Exchange protocol allows an Outlook client to be connected constantly to the Exchange Server, so any email received by the server when almost instantly be sent to the user. This means that you will know you have an email the instant it has been received.
- IMAP - IMAP stands for “Internet Message Access Protocol.” It is very similar to the Exchange protocol, with the exception of the set up. It, like the Exchange protocol, allows messages to be retrieved the instant they are received, but it is harder to set up. In addition to email and password, you will need to know the mail server, your username to connect to the server, and whether or not the server uses SSL.
- POP3 - POP3 stands for “Post Office Protocol version 3.” It is very different from the other two. It requires just as much information to set up as IMAP, but it does not maintain an active connection to the server. Meaning that it only checks every few minutes to see if any new mail has been received. Another limitation of POP3 is that it doesn’t allow messages to be marked as read on the server. Meaning that if you check your email with an email client on one computer, read, and delete some email messages and then you check it using a different computer, you will have to go through the same messages you went through before. This is extremely annoying, even more so the more computers you check the email with. The one advantage to this is that every computer will always have every email you received.
The one problem with IMAP is that it every email that you delete is deleted from the server. Most people want to have one copy of every email they have received for reference. The problem is that many mailboxes limit the size of the mailbox so that once it is full they can no longer receive new messages (POP3 doesn’t have to worry about this, since most email clients are set to remove the message from the server after a few days). To get around this we need to have a way to move old email off the server and into a different folder. This can be done in almost every email client using offline folders. I will show you how to do it in Apple Mail.
The first thing you will need to do is create a folder to store the old messages. Click Mailbox -> New Mailbox… and add the mailbox to On My Mac. Once the mailbox has been added, create a rule (Preferences -> Rules -> Add Rule) that will move old mail into it when it was received or sent a certain number of days ago. Under “Perform the following actions” select that you want to move the message to your new folder.
This archiving method allows you to get all the advantages that come with IMAP (not having to delete every junk email from your work computer, home computer, and iPhone, individually) along with the advantages of POP3 (being able to keep all your email messages in case you need to reference them later). It also keeps the number of emails in your inbox way down, depending on how many days you choose to wait before archiving your messages.
If you own your own domain, you can set up any email address for that domain. If your name is John Doe and you own example.com, you can set up john@example.com, johndoe@example.com, contact@example.com, or anything you want, as long as it ends in your domain name.
If you’re like everyone else, you probably have some email address you’ve already been using for awhile. Two email addresses would just be a hassle. Fortunately, there are options.
- You can take your new email address and just set it up so that all those emails forward to your preexisting address. The downside to this is that you’ll still be replying to emails from your old Yahoo, AOL or other email address, instead of the more professional looking address you just purchased.
- Email everyone in your address book and let them know you’ve changed email addresses. Keep the old one open for a couple months and go through it every week or so to make sure you’re not missing anything. You may even be able to set it up forward to your new email address, though that depends on the company you were using.
- Set up your email client (Outlook or whatever you use) to check both emails. The vast majority of email programs can be set up to check multiple email addresses.
I can’t emphasize how much more professional it is to use your email from your new domain for all business emails. Because of that, I recommend against option one, though I have had clients select that option.
