blog.wsiwebbasedmarketing.co.uk

I often get emails from people who have poor email presentation. I’ve been asked for advice in this area many time so I thought it was about time I put together a check list for business email response and signature setup, so here we go:

1)      Your email signature offers free advertising for your business.  I recommend you ALWAYS have the following in your signature:

• Your name
• Position (optional)
• Main contact number, ideally direct or alternatively switchboard. I use my mobile number.
• Your email address. If the recipient wants to add you to their contacts this makes it easy.
• Your company’s web site address like www.wsiwebbasedmarketing.co.uk  Use hyperlinks but when viewing in plain text or through company firewalls they often get stripped out.
• If you have social media profiles and/or pages add a link to these here. Perhaps add small icons so it breaks up the text a little.
• Company legal information, see point 3.

2)      Make sure your reply name is properly formatted and accurate. For example when you see an email from me it will be from: Alan Tomkins. I regularly get emails that have from: “alan” or something similar because when the account was setup this was added as the reply information.  Although no harm is done how people think of you is influenced by everything you do so getting this right is important. If your correspondence looks sloppy, you look sloppy.

3)      If you’re a limited company in the UK it’s a legal requirement to include your company registered address and registration number in the email, the same way it’s required on your letterhead. There is a fine of £1000 for noncompliance. There is a useful resource on this here http://www.out-law.com/page-5536  Required are:

• Registered name
• Company number
• Address of registration
• Country of registration

4)      Don’t use a legal disclaimer as it just suggests that you’re trying to preempt any incompetence or failure on your part. You don’t have one on your letterhead so why on your email?  No one reads it and it’s unenforceable, it also makes your emails look a mess as part of an email exchange.

5)      Create a shorter version of your signature for email replies with perhaps just your name and number.

6)      Make sure you have a good signature on your mobile devices if you use them for email, such as your smartphone or tablet.

7)      Lastly test your email signature in as many email clients as possible, Outlook, Outlook Express, Windows Mail, Gmail, Hotmail, Yahoo mail, should be the minimum.

Do you think I’ve missed anything or disagree with my thoughts? If so I’d value your comments.

Has anyone else noticed that when people respond to an email on their mobile a couple of things often happen;

• Firstly they don’t read your complete email, screens are small and time is short.
• Secondly the reply often makes no sense as keyboards are poor, auto correct is often random, and grammar and punctuation are totally ignored.
• Thirdly they don’t give you the info you need, refer to point 1.

Email is still the most important medium for business communications and it deserves more of your attention.

Smartphones are getting more prolific so the problem will get worse. Over 30% of all UK mobile phones are smartphones and you just need to walk into any high street phone shop to see they are gaining big ground.

So what can we do about this? As the sender we need to embrace brevity and only email when you need to. To all those who think it’s clever to reply to all or cc everyone please stop. It’s not clever, it does not make you look important, and it does not cover your ass. Being good at your job covers your ass.

We all use our smartphone to answer emails but if your response is ill considered and your point not delivered well then I would suggest you resist the urge to respond immediately and wait until you are back at your desk. Very few emails are that important.

Dell Laptop Exploding

I don’t normally use other peoples material here on my blog but this post on the econsultancy blog was too good not to pass on, I hope you enjoy it.

It contains my all time favourite with Dave’s guitar on United Airlines and a couple I’d not seen before including rats in a KFC and the CEO of GoDaddy posting a picture of himself standing by an elephant he’d shot, DOH!

“There are scenes in this blog you might find disturbing”.

I’ve said this before but common sense and manners are a great place to start with your social media and the minimum you should be doing is monitoring for mentions of yourself or your business so you are aware when there may be a problem.

If you don’t have a social media policy in place drop me an email and I’ll fire you a free template over.

See the full article here http://econsultancy.com/us/blog/7913-14-epic-social-media-fails