USING E-MAIL EFFECTIVELY
Be Prepared
Of all the changes that have taken place in our lifetimes, the development and use of e-mail communications is surely one of the most significant. The effects of this technology are so far-reaching as to boggle the mind. Relationships develop and grow that would have never existed before, and our horizons have expanded exponentially.
The speed of electronic communications is a wonderful thing, but it can also cause big problems for businesses. The spontaneous nature of e-mail means that customers who suspect they may have been mistreated in some way may put their fury into an e-mail to you. Think what you might do, for instance, when faced with a personal attack in your inbox. You may become angry too and be very tempted to respond in-kind. Such behavior has been known to cause huge repercussions for businesses. The world can be informed of your poor management of the situation in a much shorter time that you might imagine. It could take a lot of good PR to bring your company back from such a fiasco.
For this reason, it is a great idea to prepare “canned” responses to complaints so that you can answer the e-mail complaints in a timely manner while still allowing yourself adequate time to cool down (if need be) and respond appropriately to any abuse you may have suffered. Having a pre-written response can help to immediately defuse any anger a customer may be directing your way. Meanwhile, you can spend your time finding out what caused the problem and constructing an appropriate response.
E-Mail Marketing
E-mail marketing is so prevalent now that it is seen as the norm. In fact, the use of e-mail by the average person expanded greatly with the advent of AOL in the mid-90s. This user-friendly software helped many people to get online and make use of the technology that had been previously primarily used by scientists and technicians. Marketers soon began to see the appeal of this new avenue of access to the masses, and e-mail marketing began to grow.
According to eMarketer ( http://www.emarketer.com/ ) and reported by email labs ( http://www.emaillabs.com ), e-mail penetration is at an all-time high of 91% among Internet users between the ages of 18 and 64. In the U.S. alone, 88% of adult Internet users have personal e-mail accounts. Further, 46% of them have e-mail access at work. Added together, eMarketer estimates that 147 million people across the country use e-mail almost every day.
The model used for the growth of e-mail marketing has been that of other direct marketing, but e-mail marketing has presented a few exceptions. For instance, SPAM, or unsolicited e-mail, has traditionally been viewed very negatively—much more so than is junk snail mail. Instead, opt-in lists have been the norm for successful e-mail marketing. More recently, html e-mail, those with graphics and layouts that resemble a web page, has become common. These bring with them the increased risk of viruses, but that doesn’t seem to have stopped their popularity.
E-mail marketing is inexpensive and the response to it can be very quick. The success and continued use of it cannot be denied. ZDNet ( http://www.zdnet.com/ ) predicts that spending for e-mail marketing in the U.S. will rise from $2.1 billion in 2003 to $6.1 billion in 2008.
Maximize the Impact of Your E-Mail Messages
Have you ever noticed how easy it is to misspell words in an e-mail? Somehow your brain seems to work faster than your fingers, or slower than them, and you spell words the way they sound rather than correctly. Sometimes you totally forget how to spell a word and have to choose an alternative. Your grammar seems to leave you, punctuation is questionable at best, and sometimes you may even write your e-mails in ALL CAPS so that you don’t have to keep hitting that pesky shift key. One word about all of this: don’t!
The speed and spontaneity of the medium can make you a bit freewheeling in regard to your output, and this can severely diminish your professional appearance and the acceptance by your audience. A wise procedure to follow when sending important e-mails is to have several people to proof them before you send them, run them through the spell checker, and wait a day before you hit that SEND button. Even with your more mundane e-mails, it doesn’t hurt to take extra care so that you present yourself in the appropriate professional light.
————————As always, I’m interested in your feedback, questions, problems, and information. Please forward any of that to me at the following e-mail address: vtolbert@laurel-design.com You can also find archives of this newsletter at this link: http://www.laurel-design.com/pages/archives.html (a few are available now with more being added as time permits) Feel free to share this e-mail with anyone you think may be interested. If you do forward it to others, though, please keep the contact information and web address intact. To unsubscribe or to subscribe, send an e-mail to: vtolbert@laurel-design.com http://www.laurel-design.com Phone: 205-338-6546