Emailing 101 needs to be included in a business start up course of learning.
We are shocked, daily, how “professionals” continue to get by with unprofessionally composed emails, not to mention unprofessional email addresses!
How many times have you tried to find an email from someone and couldn’t because 1) the subject line is not descriptive or 2) their name doesn’t match their “from” field.
While this may seem like glaringly obvious digital organization, you will likely find and continue to find incongrueous information when sorting emails.
How does your email etiquette measure up?
We were re-inspired (or irritated ha, ha) to share this simple, yet essential and business defining and refining tool when we saw this Twitter post regarding “How to Email Teachers”. Timely posting as virtual classes are gearing up!
Ever lose something and you do everything you can to find it? You search high and low, and even pray to St. Anthony to find!
What happens when you lose an email? There is no holy portal to crawl through to find it.
And it’s not like you can call the person who sent it to you to try to find it, right? You are supposed to be on top of your emails or at least creatively try to recover it.
Email entrapment.
Now you have to do a fancy dance with the thousands of entangled emails. If YOU can’t find THEIR emails, ever wonder what is happening when others search for your emails? How do you show up in their inbox? What is display name? Is it by your first and last name? Do you appear as your actual email address? It is your name followed by your company name?
Do you even know?
Run some tests to see how you appear in others inboxes. How is it best for you to appear? Do you want your name impression each time an email is received or brand you company name in everyone’s inbox. tests
Why you need to care.
While how you appear in someone’s else inbox might not be the top priority on your list, it’s one of these little pet peeves that stands out! It’s increasingly frustrating when vendors and other people are trying to find important emails from you and they can’t find you no which way they slice the search box!
What about a high priority email you can’t recall the subject line, but you know who sent it. How on earth could the persons name and might not always be the easiest to align, the senders email address (you) SHOULD include you names.
Greetings and salutations
If we can’t get the subject lines in order or the email addresses to match up we at least need to have a digital signature on every email.
Now there is no excuse for not having one.
Even the lay persons Gmail and the like email services allows for an auto inset at the end of every email.
Just because the email /s you may receive don’t have signatures included doesn’t mean you’re should not. Sometimes looking at your competition is warranted on what NOT to do!
While you can’t control all the incantations of how you show up digitally, at least shoot for a word or phrase that would be identifiable to your or your organization! Remember to say “Please and Thank you” and say “Hello and Goodbye” on each email and ever so often be sure to throw in a “how are you doing” in an email so people know you are human and not a robot!