What does your email say about you?

Do you ever receive - or send - totally unintelligible emails? Just because someone hasn’t bothered through lack of time or interest to re-read what they’ve written before they hit the “send” button?

Happens all the time with friends and it’s easy to go back and ask they what they really meant. But when it’s business, it’s much more difficult.

It’s when you’re talking to total strangers, or colleagues and customers who aren’t starting from a point of respect for your professionalism, that the problems start.

A survey by GMX found that over half of British respondents said they form opinions about a person’s intelligence, age and social status, simply from the way they write their emails. And one in three adults admit that they do adapt the style of their own emails to deliver a desired impression.

So if your email style is unprofessional, ungrammatical, illogical or just plain tedious, you could be making a negative impression on potential customers and partners.

And that’s particularly true if you’re trying to encourage business with regular email communications. Spending some time, and even some money, ensuring your newsletters are being delivering clearly, accurately and with a tone that suits your business, has to be good marketing sense.

Meanwhile running your eye back over every email you write, just to check for sense and spelling, has to be good for your image inside and outside your company, and even your long-term prospects.

Making your promotions work harder

When you're advertising, leafleting, sending out direct mail - what do you suggest the reader does next? They could just give you a call, or you could give them a web site address for further information. That could be your general web site, or you could put together a special page - a landing page - that relates to your promotional campaign. How helpful would that be to encouraging sales?

Say you are offering special prices for your products or services for a limited time. You could:

• Add a page to your web site called www.xxxx.com/specialoffer or something similar
• Put this URL on your promotional materials as a "call to action" for more information
  

Use this special page to:

• Give extra details about the offer and prices (very important that you expand on you said in your direct mail or advertising - don't just repeat yourself)
• Clearly and obviously explain how to book or buy
• Provide a link to your main web site to explain more about your business
• Include any relevant approved comments from current customers
  
• Provide links to any other relevant sites - perhaps product suppliers, good review sites or anything else that gives your customers a fuller picture about your offer
• Gather together any data sheets, case studies and more that you can provide as downloads in pdf format
• Provide a Frequently Asked Questions section
  

By focusing on a particular offer and giving your potential customers answers to their likely questions you'll raise customer satisfaction and the likelihood of making a sale, as well as doing no harm at all to your professional credibility.