Back in its heyday (a few years ago) email was a spectacular tool to effectively reach prospects and potential business contacts with your message. And then the spammers came along and ruined it for everyone. Now most of us routinely receive HUNDREDS of emails every day, and use filters and spambots to weed out the junk. In addition, with the number of virus and phishing threats out there, we also tend to DELETE any emails from people we don’t know personally, or which look suspect.
So how can you assure that your communication to a prospect isn’t deleted before it’s even read?
We are all more aggressively approaching our business development efforts in these tough times. You want your message to get through and have a chance for impact, however slim. Back in the “direct mail” days, I used to try to stand out from the junk mail by making my letters look more personal. Email communications can be tweaked the same way. Seth Godin’s blog the other day outlined some clever tips that can help you avoid being seen as a “spammer,” and having your emails ignored. If you want to be seen as being personal, the best strategy is to be personal, which is too slow and expensive for spammers:
- Avoid sending exactly the same email to large numbers of people.
- If you have more than a few people to contact, you'll be tempted to copy and paste, or mail-merge. Don't. You'll get caught. If it's important enough for someone to read, it's important enough for you to customize for the recipient.
- Careful with the salutation. Don't write, "Dear Claudia," if you don't usually write "Dear" at the beginning of all your emails.
- Don't mush the salutation together with the rest of the note. If I had a dollar for every email that started, "Joe, When experts come together..." That's not personal. That's lazy merging. See rule 1.
- Don't send HTML graphics or pictures. Personal email doesn't, why are you? (The exception might be your signature block…as long as it’s clean and well designed.)
- Don't write like a press release. Talk like a person. A person is reading this, so why are you talking like that? (If you aren’t sure, read it aloud and see how it sounds. If it sounds like a conversation, it’s good to go.)
- Be short. The purpose of an email is not to sell the person on anything other than writing back. If you don't have a personal and interesting way to start the conversation, don't write.
- Don't send an email only when you really need something. That's not personal, that's selfish.
- Do you have a signature block with a phone number in it? Your phone number? If you don't trust me enough to give me your real phone number, I don't trust you enough to read your mail.
- Don't mark your email urgent. Urgent to you is not urgent to me.
- Don't lie in your subject line, and don't be cute. You're not clever enough to be cute. Just be honest. And short.
- Just because you have someone's email address doesn't mean you have the right to email them. Think about that before sending.
Every improvement in communication makes the bore more terrible."
--Frank Moore Colby