Nowadays, we communicate more and more through email. We use Email communication to write something to friends, relatives, colleagues or clients. Whoever the recipient of your email, it is becoming very important that you write email effectively. As you know, by writing effective email, you can save your time, other person’s time and you can win more trust & confidence from the other end.
Give Reply of Email As soon as Possible
More and more people contact each other through email. Even if they mention directly or not, they expect prompt responses. One of the study by Jupiter Research indicates that 35% of customers expect a reply within six hours, an additional 55% expect a response within 24 hours. Though many people focus on response time, content is just as important. The same study indicated that lack of a thorough response (45%) will cause on-line customers to view a company negatively when considering future purchases.
Learn the art of writing Email
Poorly crafted emails will generate additional emails back & forth, which potentially eating up more of your time. Worse, they can drive unnecessary calls to your most costly channel – your phone. And at that point, customers are bound to be angry and frustrated.
Here are some tips for writing email responses that are both thorough and appropriate:
1. Format your response so that it’s easy to read on a screen. Do not write email using very long sentences, which are lengthy horizontally. Each line must be short. Ideally, write 5-6 words in each line only and not more than that.
2. Make sure the subject line is concise and meaningful to the recipient…not just a generic
“Response from Marketing Team” But also be careful that it doesn’t look like spam.
3. Have one subject per paragraph. Mention this separately by blank lines, so that its easy to read and understand.
4. Be brief. Use as few words as possible to convey your message. More is not better when
it comes to email. An email is not perceived as an electronic letter.
5. Use simple, declarative sentences. Write for a third or fourth grade audience,
particularly if you’re creating templates that are sent automatically. You do not know the
education level of your sender or the sender’s level of comfort with the English language.
6. Be sensitive to the tone of the original email. If the sender is upset because of an error on
your part, acknowledge the error. Clearly state what you are doing to correct the situation.
7. Make sure you answer all the questions posed in the original inquiry. A partial answer
frustrates the sender and results in additional contacts. It also makes the company sending
the response look inept.
8. Make it clear what actions you will be taking next and when the writer can expect the
next contact from you.
9. Don’t ask for an order number/case number or any old information which you remember out of your mind only when one is included in the original email…sounds pretty basic, but sometimes people miss very obvious info in email.
10. Don’t just tell the sender to go to your web site. In many cases, they have already been to
the web site and couldn’t find the answers they were looking for. If you want them to go
back to the web site, provide a direct link to the exact information the reader needs.
Making sure your website has a steady amount of activity is one of the most important aspects to maintaining a successful website. Increasing website activity is one of the easiest ways you can make your site more popular as well as help your business if it is ran over your site. By using specific tools, such as email signatures, you can passively increase your website’s activity with no extra effort required. Even if you have been using email for years, you may not be aware that you can add signatures to your emails. Email signatures consist of a few lines of text that are automatically added to the bottom of each email you send. You can usually create these signatures using a “preferences” tab on the email program you most often use. After you create an email signature, each time you send an email, your email program will automatically add whatever you saved as your signature to the bottom of the email, without you needing to do anything.
Before you can enjoy the increase in website activity through email signatures, you will need to create an appropriate signature. To do this, you should consider two things. First, consider how much space your email program allows you for your signature. This will be important, as you may need to condense your content to fit the program you use. Secondly, and most importantly, you need to think about what you want to say with your signature. If you are running a business it is probably best to use your name, the business name, address, phone number, and website address. This is a very professional and passive way to promote your website. If you have a more casual website, you may want to include your name, the website link, and a nice quote or two that you find inspiring, entertaining, or relevant to your website. Think about the overall feel of your website and try to keep your signature in the same tone of writing.
There are a few “rules” in creating an email signature to help website activity. The first rule is to keep your signature limited to four lines or less. If you create long signatures, it is likely the reader will completely tune out and not remember anything in your signature. There is also that possibility that they will not even read it because it “looks too long”. This can occur frequently. Keep in mind that most people use email because it is easy to use as well as fast. Therefore, they will not be prompted to read areas of email that are long because they will feel they take up too much time. Another rule is to make sure your email signature is appropriate for all ages, genders, and ethnicities. The last thing you want to do is offend someone with your signature because this will not attract website activity, but deter it.
After you successfully create your signature, be sure to save it in your email program so that it is added each time you email someone. You may have to “check” a specific box in your “preferences” to get to this point. You can check to make sure it is working correctly by sending yourself an email. Your signature should show up exactly how others will view it on the email. After everything is working properly, all you need to do is send emails like normal. The more emails you send, the more often your website link will be viewed. When you send emails that are forwarded by the recipient, your signature will be viewed even more than expected. The chain of email is a complicated one with many viewers, so you will likely get viewers that you don’t expect, which is great for your website. The more the link is viewed, the more traffic you will have on your website.
Increasing website traffic through email signatures is one of the most effortless and passive ways of advertising. You will probably even forget that you are advertising because you don’t need to do anything to do so after the initial setup phase. Email signatures are a great tool that cost nothing and can deliver results. Those who don’t use them are often those that have no idea how to use them. By learning to set up your own email signature you can immediately begin seeing an increase in traffic to your website.
As the online world changed in the nineties from informational to commercial and highly competitive, marketers embraced the new technology and the need has arisen to send graphically appealing newsletters and marketing messages. You have only seconds to capture attention, and the right picture will grab quicker than the right copy, as they say, “a picture can be worth a thousand words”. Just ask your clients if they would use plain white paper, rather than letterhead, to send an offline message to prospects and customers.
Today, the vast majority of all email clients can render (that is, display) HTML emails fairly well. Notable exceptions are older versions of Lotus Notes and pre AOL pre version 6.0. So whereas a few years ago the answer to the question was rather complex, today it really comes down to message purpose, subscriber preference and multipart messaging. Studies show that roughly 95 percent of commercial messages sent today are sent as Multi-Part MIME.
Multi-part MIME is an older protocol that allows you to send both text and HTML versions of an e-mail in a single package, kind of like a sandwich. The recipient’s e-mail program then displays the HTML version, if it is capable of reading that, or the text version, if it is not.
MIME stands for Multipurpose Internet Mail Extensions and is an internet standard for the format of e-mail. Virtually all human written Internet e-mail and a fairly large proportion of automated e-mail is transmitted via SMTP MIME format. SMTP stands for Simple Mail Transfer Protocol and if nothing else, you’ll learn a few more acronyms if you stick around. Internet e-mail is so closely associated with the SMTP and MIME standards that it is sometimes called SMTP/MIME e-mail.
Folks, while nobody can really agree on numbers and stats, we all agree on this: HTML Email Doesn’t Work Properly for Millions of Recipients.
HTML email breaks in a wide variety of email inboxes. This isn’t due to your creative abilities or lack of HTML knowledge – it’s due to the fact that the email client your recipient views your email in routinely breaks your message.
I feel like this is worth defining, as I know a lot of people get very scared when we talk about clients and servers, but will not admit it. An email client (some “big picture” folks also call it Mail User Agent) is nothing but a computer program that is used to read and send e-mail, such as Outlook, Lotus Notes, Thunderbird, etc. A mail server (also called a Mail Transfer Agent or MTA, or a mail exchange server) is a computer program that transfers electronic mail messages from one computer to another. Most of the time, since nobody has time to learn all the acronyms and terminology coined by those “big picture” people, we are used to know a mail server as the entire contraption (wires and all) that runs the program.
Depending on the email system, your HTML images may be blocked so recipients see a blank white box and/or your live hotlinks may not work properly. AOL 9.0, Outlook 2003, and Gmail are most infamous for blocking and/or breaking HTML, “for security reasons”.
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