How Not To Use Email For Business
There are certain things which people do which really piss me off. One of them is having poor email skills. But, to be fair, my whole life is writing and emailing so maybe I'm a little too focused on it.
Always make sure that someone can quickly and easily read your email and figure out what you want from them. If you want a meeting ask for it. Give them your action step concisely.
Here's a example of how not to use email to reach out to someone:
- Today you email me with a 1000 word beautifully crafted five paragraphs about your product. At the end you say, if you are interested, please reply to this email. It could be even better if you attach 4MB of marketing material as PDFs.
- Three days from now you e-mail me to follow up and again ask me to reply if I'm interested.
- Next week you call and leave me a voice mail asking me why I haven't responded to your emails and asking me to call you back if I'm interested.
- Three days later you call and now you want to know why I haven't returned your voice mails or emails.
Firstly, if I were interested I would've responded. That's what you asked for. You didn't ask for a meeting. If you don't ask me for what you want, then you get what I want which is that I'm not interested and please leave me alone.
Secondly, who told you that the prospect is responsible for calling you back? Come on, people. Does this ever happen? If you want to make the sale, then you need to drive the communication.
And you sure as heck aren't going to make a sale if you rebuke me for not driving your communication process forward.
There it is, the secret to a good email. Concise, to the point, asking a specific action related question, and polite.
In the above example, I usually email back at this point and say, "OK, I got your email and voice mail. Thank you for contacting me. I am not interested in your product or service at this time." And then I'm done with it.
