Email Etiquette

Many people are not using proper etiquette when they send email messages – to friends or to business prospects. There are issues of etiquette in emailing that we need to think about every time we send a message.

For example, do not write your note in all capital letters or in all lowercase letters. Writing in all capital letters is the equivalent of shouting in email. (My wife’s cousin writes all his messages in lower case letters. Some people not only write in that style, but will not use any punctuation. That can be very frustrating and makes reading messages very difficult and time consuming!)

How often do you get an email with a return receipt request attached? I have some friends who always ask for a return receipt on all their emails, even after I suggest to them that they can turn that function off. If it upsets us, imagine what it would do to a prospect that we are trying to get in to see? We always want to be professional in everything that we do and our email messages is one of the first ways that a prospect begins to determine how prefessional we really are.

Excessive use the high priority setting for messages is like crying wolf! If we continue to use it on all our emails, the first time that we are trying to send a really critical message, we will have lost the effect of the priority setting.

Be sure to reread your message before you hit the SEND button! How many times have we sent an email and gotten a reply back that when we read it, we wished we could dig a hole and climb in? Reading our own screwed up words and sentences that come back to us is way too late a time to think about how we wish we had reread the note and made corrections before it went out!

Often we are writing to prospects who are very busy people, so we need to learn to get to the point in our emails. Make your email messages short and to the point. Don’t send unnecessary files either. Be sure to answer email messages back right away. If you don’t have time to provide needed details, do your prospect a favor and write a short answer back telling them approximately when you can deliver the needed information. People tend to use email because they’re very busy and they assume that you are busy too. However, common courtesy always wins the day!

Next time, we’ll discuss how go from “Hello, my name is Joe” to uncovering customer needs. We will discuss how to begin our sales calls. There are trainers out there giving bad advice to sales people on how to start a sales call and we'll talk about that in detail.

Good selling!

If you have any questions or comments, please email me at john@mccannmotivations.com. (I promise I won't critique them!)