Boost Your Email Impact with These Smart Strategies
Most small businesses rely on email as their preferred form of communication. Either internally or externally to clients, customers and suppliers, email is the go-to format we’d be lost without. Our love affair with it is no surprise – it’s quick, simple and provides a paper trail. But its convenience doesn’t always mean relaxed. In fact, poor email communication can hurt your reputation and cost you customers. Here’s how to be smart with your business email:
Manage your inbox: Your inbox is only for items you still need to access. Once you’re finished with an email, you should delete it or archive it. If you were to imagine your inbox as physical letters, you’d never let it grow to a 6-foot high stack of chaos. Instead, you’d either throw them out or do the filing. It’s not hard to identify which ones to keep for reference, so create inbox folders to sort them accordingly. As emails arrive and are actioned, move them to the relevant folder or the delete bin.
Write professional messages: Stepping across the line from casual to careless is easy if you skip the basic elements of good business writing. Grammar will always be important and the sentence structure of your language hasn’t changed. All email programs include a spell-checker, many of which draw attention to errors immediately, so there’s really no excuse. Typing in all CAPS is seen as yelling, and breaking your text into paragraphs makes your message so much more readable. One last thing before you click send, quickly glance over your email to make sure your tone is appropriate and no mistakes have snuck through.
Embrace the subject line: Many emails are missed because the subject line was empty or meant nothing to the receiver. Writing these attention-grabbing nuggets can be tricky, but if you simply summarize the message, you’ll do fine. Just remember to keep them under 5-8 words so they fit on mobile displays.
Be smart with attachments: Keep attachments small – under 2MB – as they can clog up the email server. For larger attachments, share the file location as a link using cloud storage. When you’re sent an attachment you’d like to keep, save the file and then delete the email. And as always, be careful with unexpected attachments, especially from unknown senders. It’s more important than ever to scan all attachments with an antivirus before opening.
Keep your CC/BCC under control: The carbon copy (CC) and blind carbon copy (BCC) let you send the email to additional stakeholders, more as an FYI than anything else. As a rule, use BCC if you’re using an email list or privacy is an issue. But before you add extra people to the email, make sure the email IS relevant to them. There’s nothing worse than being stuck in a pointless email chain!
Call us at 561-693-1978 for help with your business email.
Struggling with Email Overload?
Struggling with Email Overload?
Email has allowed us to send and receive messages more easily than ever before. While this is a good thing, it can lead to problems. You may receive dozens or even hundreds of emails in a day. At this point, it feels like you’re wasting your entire day dealing with those incoming messages. Even worse, it makes it difficult to find important messages in your inbox. You can quickly become overloaded with emails.
So how can we deal with this overload? The first step is to reduce the number of emails you receive overall and there are a few ways to do this.
Restrict who you give you email address to.
It’s important to think carefully about who you give your email to. For example, if you enter a lot of contests, this often automatically subscribes you to several email campaigns. If you type your email into every popup box asking for it, these add up. Reduce who you give your email to.
Unsubscribe
Go through your inbox and unsubscribe to newsletters that you never read. If you haven’t opened one of their emails in months, chances that you’ll start to later are low. Turn off notifications from social networks such as Facebook, Twitter, and Pinterest. If you like emails from these networks, then at least adjust the settings so they email you highlights once a week or month rather than allowing them to spam your inbox several times per day.
Do you need that notification?
If you receive emails that contain information you can find elsewhere, switch those notifications off. For instance, you might run an e-commerce site that sends an email for every sale. If your website already has a record of this, you don’t need it in two places. Make sure not to use your email as a to-do list. When you need to remember to do something, put that on a list elsewhere to clear up your inbox. If this is a hard habit to break, at least make a folder for things you need to do and move emails there and out of your general inbox.
Change your email habits
Change your own email sending habits. If a topic is complex and will require a lot of back and forth conversation, consider discussing it in person or over the phone. Sending fewer emails will reduce how many you receive in return. Remember that you don’t need to respond to every email you receive. A response indicates a willingness to continue to conversation.
Resist the urge to send messages with a single word like “Thanks!” or “Ok” and you’ll notice others will stop sending you similar, unnecessary messages. When sending group emails, you can also remind others not to use “reply all” unless it’s information relevant to the entire group.
Start clearing out
Now you can start emptying out your inbox and getting rid of any old emails you don’t need to keep. Delete old calendar invites, advertisements, or any emails where the problem has already been resolved. Respond to any messages that can be answered within only a few minutes. File everything that is left until you have a completely empty inbox. Archive messages where you don’t need to take an action, but you think might be useful. You can search and find these later if necessary. Put other emails into folders based off of the type of email and the priority level.
From now on, all of this can be automated. You can have receipts automatically go into a receipt folder, calendar invites go into another, etc. A cluttered inbox leads to your mind feeling just as cluttered. Free up your inbox to free up your mind and create more time in your day-to-day life. Let email overload become something of the past.
If you need help with your emails, give us a call on (561) 693.1978.
How Do You Start An Email Marketing Campaign That Works?
Checking your email is no longer has to be on a daily basis. It can now be done on an hourly basis. The first thing you do when you get to your office is to check your email and when you get home after work, you still check your email. This is minus all the times you check in between. As much as this is effective, it can easily lose the fun in it. Email marketing has become an effective strategy in digital marketing. However, it has to be done well if you are to get conversions. This article is targeted at providing information about how you can make the use of email in social media marketing successful.
To begin with, you need to mind how you send your emails. Never forget that your customers have many emails to read. As such, they might not open yours if it is not catchy enough. Your email should be personalized, and the content should be appealing to your customers. Also, consider the timing of your emails to avoid getting your customers irritated.
The strategy you employ in building a healthy email list is important. The method differs from one company to another. Some of the common methods of building an email list in Florida, South Florida and West Palm Beach involve offering gifts, company newsletters and updates on products. The purpose is to get their names and email addresses. Hence, your message should be compelling. Your email should be properly composed, and it should be targeted to answering certain questions that might pop up in the minds of your clients as regards what to expect from you after giving out their email addresses.
It is also important to note that the choice of your email service provider determines, to a large extent, the willingness of your customers to open your emails. They are more likely to open it if it is from a known and reputable email service. Since email marketing, just like social media marketing tools, is built on expectations, the way you manage the follow-up process is important. You must endeavor to keep your promises. If you fail to follow up with your prospective customers, they will forget your, brand and you will automatically lose them. People in Florida, South Florida and West Palm Beach do not like a disappointment. As such, you must keep your promises for a successful digital marketing campaign.
The proper use of newsletters is also necessary for success. Your email newsletters should be as professional and as informative as possible. It should be easy to read, understand and open on smartphones. It should include updates on products, industry and personal messages.
In conclusion, if your email marketing is not giving you the expected result, below are the things to try: Check the rate at which your emails are being opened, check the rate at which your link in the email is clicked and also check the unsubscribing rate. If any of these are found wanting, it might mean that your emails look too spammy and need to be customized or that your prospects do not trust your brand. The emails should also be grouped into different segments to meet the needs of each group.
