Email. It’s not rocket science. We’re all pros at it; after all, we send and receive somewhere in the region of 40-80 emails a day, on average.
But sometimes we’re not as effective as we could be. Or, we offend. Or, we cause frustration. And frustration, offence or ineffectiveness are not good ingredients when it comes to making our clients happy. So, here are 6 tips.
1. Be comprehensive
Be sure to answer all questions, and to pre-empt further questions where possible. You know how irritating it is when you send someone a list of points to consider, and they respond to the first and ignore the rest. They ‘didn’t see them’ – so you have to send a further email about the unanswered questions, which wastes your time, and so on. Annoying! Please, don’t be that guy.
2. Use templates
If you’re regularly asked the same things – how to get to your offices, how to subscribe to your newsletter, what your rates are, whether you’re BEE-compliant, etc, use friendly, pre-drafted templates to reply to these emails.
For one thing, it’s a time-saver; for another, it helps you to avoid sounding snotty or impatient – especially if the client or contact is asking a question with which you’re confronted often. Tip: Save your templates in a Word document.
3. Answer swiftly
Clients send an email because they want a quick response. That’s what email is about and unfortunately, that’s what people expect. So try to make a habit of responding within 24 hours, if you can, and on the same working day if at all possible. Tip: If the email is complicated, and needs time or consideration from you, send a quickie to confirm that you’ve received it and you’re on it.
4. Don’t use receipts
The auto request for a ‘delivery’ or ‘read’ receipt almost always irritates readers, even before they’ve read your message. Not a good start… Besides, this function usually doesn’t work anyway, since many recipients block it or say ‘No’ as a rule. Unless there’s a major legal implication, if you want to know whether an email was received, rather ask the recipient to advise you.
5. Retain the context
Even if you’re keen to save email space and recipient reading time, please don’t leave the previous message thread out of your replies. People who receive many emails find it hard to remember each individual email and have to spend time locating the context of the email in order to deal with it properly.
6. Title cleverly
In this tip, I’d like to go beyond my usual advice which is, ‘Use the subject field to indicate specific content and purpose in seven words or less’.
How about being creative and agreeing within your team, division, department or company to use acronyms to identify certain actions? For example, <AR> could mean Action Required or <MSR> could indicate the Monthly Status Report. It’s also good practice to include the word ‘Long’ in the subject, if appropriate, so the recipient knows that the message will take time to read.
7. Always sign off
It drives me scatty when people use a signature in their first email but not in subsequent emails (replies, forwards, etc). Because then, when I want to phone them, fax them, check out their website or whatever, I have to go on a treasure hunt for the first cursed mail in the discussion. Just have it there, on every single mail, every time. Please. It’s a sanity-saver. Thank you.
In conclusion…
Told you it wasn’t rocket science… Bottom line? When you make clients lives easier (or rather, when you don’t make them harder), it’s more likely that they’ll engage with you. And an engaged client says ‘Yes’. Wonderful, right?
