We want to introduce the article of Artem Turovets about the official emailing organization system. This is neither a set of super methods for increasing your productivity nor an email marketing lection. Artem has just shared his company’s experience where he had organized emailing in the way to fit everybody.
What is an email?
Nowadays it is:
- Your “face”. You can create positive appearance in partners’ eyes or, vice versa, mess up his first impression.
- Yourwork tool. Communication happens through the emailing in most cases. That’s why if you know how to use this tool correctly, you can ease life.
- Powerful abstractive factor. The outer world is trying to drive you up the wall, drawing you away and inciting to do wrong via emailing.
Let’s look into electronic mailing as described in these three positions. Will start from the simplest thing:
1. Letter appearance
Personally I use the Mozilla Thunderbird client, so all the information in this article will be adjusted to exactly this client. Let’s compose a new letter and go down according to the list of margins.
Whom. Copy (Cc). Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc)
Perhaps, you haven’t known that, but you may change the “Whom” margin in Mozilla to “Copy (Cc)” or “Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc)”.
Whom: write one or several primary addressees with a semi-colon.
Copy (Cc): write to those who should familiarize with your letter without answering it.
Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc): write a person who should familiarize with the letter but has to stay anonymous for the rest of recipients.
It is the wrong way to indicate your mailing list through the “Copy” and “Whom” margins. Several times a year I receive letters which contain 50-90 recipients in the “Copy” margin. Remember: this is privacy infringement. Not all your addressees need to know who else you wrote to.
The right way out is sending emails on your name and put all your recipients in the margin “Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc)”.
2. Letter subject
Some professional email distribution services write about the importance of the letter subject. However, in the most cases selling letters’ subject is the most important part of the emails, since it should make people open the letter and read it to the end.
As we are talking about the daily official mailing, we can say that the subject of the letter allows people to find and identify your letter whenever they need. Your efforts will bring you multiple answer letters in Re: or Fwd form, among which you will be able to find the needed letter according to its subject.
Twenty letters is a bulk of a one-day correspondence of a mid-level manager. Businessmen and company owners may receive more than 200 letters a day. That is why remember: do not send letter without a subject.
Try to formulate your subject in 3-5 meaningful words.
3. Main text
There is a great abundant of guides on how to write an email text for various life situations.
I advice to read some of the articles to master your writing skills. While writing the letter you should be attentive to the following issues:
Politeness
In the very beginning of your letter you can spread across the kindness or even tenderness like:
“My dear Afiba, 2 months have passed since I spoke to you in a written form, so I went down with it and even didn’t sleep a few nights long thinking about you.”
This is too politely and too costly, because you spend much time for writing such a long “composition” and your recipient spends much time on reading it, too. Do you still remember that you we are talking about the official type of letters? Do not compose very long introductions, describe the main issues shortly.
Aim
Official letters are of two types:
- When we just inform the interlocutor (for instance, the month progress report);
- When we ask the addressee to do something (for example, to conform the bill).
Signature
It should be in every letter (you may use the automatic signature pattern in your mail client)! Especially when your letters are connected with selling and buying operations. Signature is needed because every person who has received your letter will easily find you by your signature.
4. Attachments
Letters can be with some attachments:
- CVs,
- commercial offers,
- estimates of costs,
- graphs,
- document scans.
This is a very convenient tool and at the same time a source of popular mistakes.
5. Work with letters
Emailing is a powerful distractive factor which we should fight by working schedule toughening and introduction.
You have at least to turn off all the email signals. If your mail client is set by default, you will be notified by both a horn and a twinkle, as well as you will always see the letter preview. All in all, everything distractive will be done in order to draw you away of laborious work and then plunge into the deep of unread letters and unviewed mailing distributions – it will take at least an hour or two.
To conclude, if you apply the correct approach to the emailing process, it should take 10-60 minutes a day to cope with it, depending on your correspondence bulk.
Yes, and the last thing. You have already turned off the signal on your mail client, haven’t you?
