What Do Your Business Emails Reveal About You?

Article by Tim Knox

I am a huge fan of email. In fact, if you do business with me the bulk of our communication will not be through the telephone, but via email. Email is quick. Email is convenient. Email takes less time than long-winded telephone conversations. Most importantly, email gives me an electronic record of my communications with clients, employees, partners, and vendors; which makes it easy for me to refresh my quickly-aging memory by easily referring back to our electronic conversations.

As someone who receives and sends a couple hundred emails a day I have to tell you that I am constantly amazed at how poorly written and unprofessional most business emails are. I receive emails every day from fellow entrepreneurs that don’t even contain full sentences. They are often rife with spelling and grammatical errors or typed in all capital letters, and sometimes, are virtually illiterate.

One email I recently received from someone trying to sell me an expensive piece of equipment actually read, “tom– what you think — ready to buy?” First off, the name is “Tim” and secondly, what I think is: I will take my business elsewhere. Thank you, drive through.

Why should you worry about how your emails are reviewed by their recipients? Because in business, you are constantly being judged by your customers, your employees, your investors, your partners, and your peers. If your emails give the impression that you don’t put much thought into the composing of the message or that you’re too busy to be bothered or that you are a total idiot who can’t even use a spell checker, what do you think that says to the person on the other end?

Email is quickly becoming the business correspondence medium of choice for the reasons I covered above, and if you don’t take the time to learn how to effectively use email in a professional manner, it will come back to haunt you.

There are rules that should be followed when sending business emails. The website Email Replies gives 32 tips for email etiquette. Culling from that list and adding a few of my own, here are Tim’s Top 10 Rules of Email Etiquette that every entrepreneur, executive, and employee should follow.

Make It Short And Sweet

An email isn’t a letter from camp, so don’t drone on any longer than necessary. Keep in mind that reading an email on a computer screen is harder than reading printed communications, so keep it brief and to the point.

Use Proper Spelling, Grammar & Punctuation

This is not only important because improper spelling, grammar and punctuation give a bad impression of you and your company, it is also important to make sure your message is not misconstrued. Emails with improper punctuation (a comma and a period every now and then would be nice) are difficult to read and can sometimes even change the meaning of the message. And, if your email program has a spell checker do everyone a favor and use it.

Include a Signature Block In Every Email

A signature block in an email is the same as the signature block you would use to end a letter. You should include your name, title, company name and address, telephone number, email address and website address.

Reply Quickly

This is my number one pet peeve: people who take forever to answer email. Fast response is especially important if the email is from a customer or contains time-sensitive information. Customers send an email because they wish to receive a quick response. If they did not want a quick response they would send a letter or a fax or talk to your voicemail. Each email should be replied to within at least 24-hours, and preferably within the same working day. If the email can’t be answered in full immediately you should at least send a reply saying that you have received their email and that you will get back to them ASAP.

Read Every Email Before You Send It

There’s no better way to embarrass yourself than through a hastily sent email. A lot of people don’t even bother to read an email before they send it out, as evidenced by the many spelling and grammatical errors most emails contain. Apart from this, reading your email through the eyes of the recipient will help you send a more effective message and avoid misunderstandings and inappropriate comments.

Do Not Discuss Confidential Information

Sending an email is like sending a postcard. Once it leaves your computer, the end user can do whatever they want with it, so if you do not want a documented record of your comments or the information shared with others, don’t send it. Moreover, never make any libelous, sexist or racially discriminating comments in emails, even if they are meant to be a joke. There have been court cases where email correspondence was used as evidence. That’s a road you do not want to go down.

Don’t Use ALL CAPS

In email terms, IF YOU WRITE IN CAPITAL LETTERS IT SEEMS AS IF YOU ARE SHOUTING, so please tone it down. ALL CAPS are hard to read and can trigger an angry reply if the recipient mistakes the intention of your email. Emails should be written in standard sentence style. Turn the Caps Lock off and back away from the keyboard.

Avoid Abbreviations and Emoticons

In business emails, try not to use abbreviations such as BTW (by the way) and LOL (laugh out loud). The recipient might not be aware of the meanings of the abbreviations and in business emails these are generally not appropriate. The same goes for emoticons, such as the smiley and his depressed pal . If you are not sure whether your recipient knows what an acronym means, it is better not to use it.

Don’t Use Backgrounds or Silly Graphics

I actually received an email from a fellow entrepreneur that had an animated smiley face waving a gloved hand in his signature block. If the email had come from Walt Disney I wouldn’t have been shocked. Coming from a small technology company, I had to wince. Not much to smile about there. Remember That Email Is A Formal Business Communication

You wouldn’t send a formal letter to a customer that lacked a salutation, a well-thought out body of text, and a signature. You should use email in the same manner. A proper business email should be structured like a short letter. It should have a salutation, the body of the message, a sign off, and a signature.

Next time we’ll discuss email issues that should be a concern to larger companies. If your company doesn’t have a formal email policy, you should. Tune in next week to find out why.

Here’s to your success,

Short tutorial on how to add photos and files to email. This shows yahoo, hotmail, and gmail.
Video Rating: 4 / 5

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Why Email Marketing – What is E-marketing About

Article by Tom Wilson

Email marketing or e-marketing is one of the most efficient forms of marketing there is, it reaches thousands of targeted customers quickly and easily. Every business should set up an email marketing campaign to make their producs and services more visable on the internet. Take a look at the article below and it will explain what the basics of email marketing is about.

Gone are the days of sending letters by post, gone are the days of worrying whether your mail has been delivered or not. Technology has given us a very effective way of communicating and marketing our business. It is used by all the top businesses in the world to market their products, and you should learn how to market your product as well, by setting up an email marketing campaign.

Email marketing or emarketing is a way of communicating and advertising your product and business using emails. All you need to set up your email marketing program, is a computer and an internet connection.

With Emarketing you can do more than just send emails, you can send marketing information,newsletters,sales letters and product or service information. You can advertise your website and you can set up public relations campaigns. You can Use your emarketing programs as an after sales tool.

Email marketing strategies can be beneficial in attracting potential customers, by informing them of new and existing products. You can keep your customers interest with a follow up sales service. With the technology available you can communicate with your customer, and collect important information about them. This information can be used for offering products in the future.

Communicating with your customers on a regular basis is one of the key strategies to use when marketing a product. The old way of keeping in contact with your customers, by telephone, letters, fax etc was time consuming and at times difficult. This is not so with the introduction of email marketing you can keep in touch with thousands of your customers with just the click of your mouse.

Email marketing allows you to set up customer accounts with all of the relevant information at hand. You can set up delivery times when ever it suits your customer, You can contact your customers at any time no matter what time of day or night, without any inconvenience to your customer.

One of the main reasons why emarketing is so popular with the business community is, because you can contact thousands of customers quickly,easily and also it is cost effective. Emails allows your customers to reply immediately and easily.

You should use your emarketing strategy wisely, send only useful information to your customers, send them information that is relevant to the product or service that you are offering them.

An email address list is an important part of your email marketing strategy, you can build your list simply by inviting your customer to subscribe to your newsletter. As your list grows it will not only bring in more customers, it will also help increase traffic to your website.

This increase in traffic will have two benefits, one more traffic means more customers, and the other it will increase the visibility of your website on the internet this will also bring in more customers

I hope this information on email marketing or emarketing as it is sometimes known, is of use to you and it will help you in building a successful business. Good luck.

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Three Things You Need to Know About Online Email Marketing and Your Internet Business

Online email marketing is not hard to understand but it can get pretty dicey in determining if it is the right fit for your online business. In my opinion no matter what the circumstances online email marketing is a must for any internet business but still there are factors to consider.

1. Your target audience

Before you spend time, currency and effort into email marketing, you have to figure out how often your target audience will be online. An email marketing campaign is not worthwhile if people are not even online to check out your information. Find out if a market exists for your product or service. You can open your browser, type in any keyword search terms you wish and hit enter. Is there an audience? Next, use a keyword research tool to check out how often (per month) people are searching for information utilizing a general keyword and all the variations. This is powerful stuff. Knowing what and how your audience is searching for information can greatly help you determine whether you should start an email marketing campaign.

2. You’re Selling What?

Since we live in an advertising world that is 24/7, it is easy to get caught up in the hype. This goes for many email marketers who choose a product because it promises a big affiliate commission but they never have a clear understanding of what they are selling. This translates into not being able to explain in your emails why people need your product or service. It’s also important to remember sending people a sales letter in the disguise of an email will usually not work. Promote by providing quality information that people can utilize. Put together a small report consisting of five articles you write and give it away free to your email list. Integrate the product links into your report but use sparingly. Avoid trying to hard sell your readers. Let the report stand on its own merit while enticing people to find out more. Leave the sales pitch to the product sales page.

3. The Dreaded S-word

It is not hard to get accused of spamming these days. In the early years of email marketing you could send out unsolicited email as long as you didn’t overdo it. Guess what? Some people overdid it.

According to Anti-Spam Spam-Unit, “some researchers estimate that just under 100 billion spam messages are sent worldwide every twenty-four hours as of June 2007″. You cannot blame people for not wanting to open an email box full of spam but it’s gotten to the point that a straight forward email can now come under the heading of spam if the recipient wishes to complain. I have seen customers sign up to an email list then forget about it. When an email arrived promoting a product, they quickly yelled spam and wanted to know how the marketer had gotten their email address.

Even if people do remember signing up to your list, they have gotten so use to deleting emails without reading that getting them to open it is a science all to itself. This is why you want to give real thought to your subject line. Stay away from extravagant promises that will only trigger the spam filters. Keep in mind that certain topics (like money) in your subject line can also trigger the spam filters. Ask a question or create a top five list on the problems and or solutions to your topic. Think of your subject line as a strong push that gets your list to open your email so they can get more useful information

If you are having any doubts about incorporating it into your online marketing system just focus on your target audience by doing some keyword research, provide useful information that helps you to state the benefits of your product or service clearly and craft an email (particularly the subject line) that won’t raise a red flag with the spam filters. Email marketing is a powerful tool. Do not let any obstacles stand in your way to using it effectively.

Visit BusinessEnglishPod.com to view and download more videos on Business English for writing emails. In this episode of Email Tune-up we’re going to look at an email request to an external supplier asking them to speed up the delivery of a shipment.

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All That You Wanted to Know About Email Marketing

The rising popularity of email marketing is not something surprising. Email campaign is, by far, one of the most powerful forms of online marketing. When used strategically, it can prove itself better than any other kinds of online marketing tools. Email marketing primarily requires sending of emails to a number of people who are part of the target market for whom the email campaign is developed.

But before we go on to the benefits, let us first define what email marketing is and in what situations we can do this and also benefit from it. Basically email marketing is nothing but sending of emails to prospective clients and customers. There can be two purposes of email campaigning – one, you can send emails to convert a prospect customer into an actual customer, or two, you can send emails to gather necessary information about a customer (which in other words is also known as leads generation). However there is a difference in sending an email and an email campaign. Email campaign is when you send the same mail to a large base of target customers to promote something or provoke them to some action.

But how is email marketing beneficial? Email Campaigns are beneficial in many different ways. First of all, it is very cost effective. There is little investment required and you can contact a large number of people through your mail. You send mails to each of the potential customers and the mails arrive in each of their inboxes which is a very personal domain – so you touch their lives personally and individually. Emails can be customized according to the likes and dislikes of your target audience so that you can have the right impact on them emails can be tracked and their performance can be reported and analyzed.

To give more impact through your email marketing campaign, you can set the time and date of your emails. This way you can send the mails right when you think, they will have the right effect on your target audience. Besides this, you can use rich graphics and intelligent designing to have the maximum effect on your readers and target market.

www.pushbuttonemailer.com Dennis Bayne shows how to review all your contact list data inside the Push Button Emailer bulk email software.

Email Marketing is About ROI

The news regarding investment in marketing is not good, with many firms cutting their marketing budgets left and right. Instead of taking an axe to your marketing budget, consider first how your budget is allocated and move some resources to marketing activities that yield a higher ROI.

One such low cost, high ROI marketing activity is email marketing. In fact, a 2008 Direct Marketing Association (DMA) study showed that, “E-mail’s ROI in 2008 was .06 for every dollar spent on it.”

In addition, a February 2008, retailer survey by shop.org, showing that email marketing has the second lowest Cost Per Order (CPO) of any online marketing method. The email marketing CPO of .85 beat paid Web search, which yielded .33 CPO.

Despite its low cost and high ROI, email marketing still accounts for a very small fraction of most marketing budgets or not used at all as a marketing medium. According to a 2008 Forester study, “only 48% of small and medium-size businesses (SMBs) have been using email for four years or longer. But now they’re beginning to embrace it with gusto.”

For those already doing email marketing for a relatively low cost you could increase the amount of time and energy you put into your email marketing to increase your ROI. This means striving to improve your content, offers, and make use of some features of your ESP that you may not currently be using. For example, most ESPs enable you to segment your email lists by demographic or other criteria (e.g., city). In addition, many ESPs enable you to send out triggered emails based on a number of criteria, including sending emails at set intervals from the day the user subscribes to your list (sometimes called “drip marketing”) and date-based triggers, such as a special offer email on someone’s birthday.

If you have not yet started using email marketing, this is a great time to start. You will want to evaluate Email Service Providers (ESPs), which hosts email marketing services on their servers. While you control your email marketing account and send out emails using a Web browser interface, the ESP’s servers and Internet connections do the heavy lifting.

Look for an ESP that provides delivery reports, open rates, click-through rates (CTR), bounce handling (both hard and soft bounces), an automatically placed unsubscribe link in each email, feedback loops with the major ISPs (complaint management), and Google Analytics integration.

It is important to clarify the different ways that someone can, intentionally or unintentionally, unsubscribe from your list with a good ESP. They can click on the unsubscribe link, click on the complaint button (if they are using a service like AOL) and be automatically unsubscribed through the feedback loop, or the email can hard bounce (the email address does not exist any more). It is very important for these features to all be in place because if these subscribers are not unsubscribed immediately and you send to them repeatedly you run a much higher risk of being blocked by one or more ISPs.

It is also important to choose an ESP that either gives you a private IP address or has you share an IP address with a relatively small number of other customers. The IP address, whether it is shared or private, is the caller ID of your emails. If too many ESP customers share an IP address, you can easily run into problems with being blocked by ISPs for mistakes made by other customers of the ESP. Most reputable ESPs do their best to keep out the spammers but even legitimate email marketers sometimes get their IP address blocked by an ISP and it can take some time to get the IP address unblocked.

Finally, if you are in the process of choosing an ESP, it is a good idea to choose one that does not require a contract term beyond one-month. That way, if you are not happy with the service you can cancel and switch to a more suitable ESP. Not every ESP is going to be a good match for your needs and a good value for you.

An excellent way to start evaluation process is to research a number of ESPs and narrow your choices down to a few that seem to offer a good service at a good price. Then do a free trial of each and upgrade the service you like the best to a full account.. Since you are restricting your choices to month-to-month services you are not locked into a bad choice. You can switch ESPs, move your lists, and move your HTML and text emails over to the new service. Having used one ESP will have given you some valuable experience that you can now apply to the new ESP you have chosen.

Email marketing is a bright spot in marketing that has high ROI and has excellent metrics. High ROI marketing efforts are always a good idea but are especially valuable when the economy is soft. Of course, it is best to engage in a mix of marketing activities, with email marketing as just one component of a larger strategy.