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About the Virtual Assistant industry for VAs and for clients

Category Archives: Email Etiquette

Sign off your emails!

This is a message for anyone in business – Virtual Assistants, their clients and others.  Please sign off your emails properly. Even if you have an existing relationship with someone you’re emailing, it still makes sense to use your signature.

Why? Because not everyone remembers your phone number off by heart, or has it in their database, or knows what your website is (especially if your email address does not reflect your business website address), your fax number or whatever.

Sometimes I just want to pick up the phone straight away to ring someone and their number is not there in front of me and even if I go through several past emails, often I don’t find the phone number.  I have to google them to find their website to get the phone number. What a waste of time.

Sometimes I want to pass on details of someone to someone else – how much easier that would be if it was there in a signature block for me to copy and paste and then forward on.

Think how more often you might get click throughs to your website if that address was included in your signature block. Come to think of it, I had a photography forum email me last week saying I hadn’t been there for awhile and I was missed, please come back.  And yet, they did not include their domain address at the end of the email, and nor did their email reflect the website address.  Lost opportunity.

Be specific

This is probably a post directed more at clients, rather than VAs, but it is important for all to note.

When responding to someone via email, make sure you address which parts of the email you are responding to.

Just to explain.  Someone emailed me asking to change something I was doing for them next Wednesday.  So I emailed back asking did they mean Wednesday 15th or the following Wednesday 22nd? And then I added another question.

The answer I got was ‘yes’.  huh? What part were they answering? So I had to email them back asking for specifics and I got back 22nd. Nothing else.  No answer to the other question.

I know this person is a person of few words but it would be nice if they actually gave me a bit more information so I didn’t have to keep going back and forth asking questions. Of course, I guess I could pick up the phone but I was answering their original email which did have a few more words in it to start with.

Let people know who you are

There seems to be this ‘new’ phenomenon where people email me or respond to an email and then not sign off their name.  They make an assumption I know who it is.  Often I have an email address and sometimes a business name but those things don’t always clue me in as to who wrote the email.  Which means I either have to search my database or do a search online to find out who it is that sent me the email.

Doesn’t matter if you think the person you’re emailing knows who you are, it makes sense to always sign off your email anyway, with your first name and surname, then your business name if you have one.  I believe it’s good email etiquette to do this. After all, if you were writing a letter and posting it by mail, you wouldn’t send an unsigned letter would you?

Get in the habit of signing off – design a signature block and set it up to automatically append to emails you send out.

Identify yourself!

I’ve just published my latest newsletter which has an article about identifying who you are when emailing people, particularly if they’ve been added to a list.  It doesn’t matter if they’ve even self-subscribed.  Your newsletter, auto responders and any other emails should identify who the sender is and should also have some kind of signature at the end, again identifying the sender. Don’t assume that people will know.

Co-incidentally, I was participating in a bloggers forum this morning and one of the members posted about his blog and told people how successful he’d been with it, but neglected to give the URL and didn’t have a signature block either.  He was assuming people would visit his profile and click on a link there.

And then I was looking for the postal address of someone else who recently emailed me (and isn’t as yet on my computer database) and I had to search through several emails before finding his postal address.

I encourage you to make sure you always include your name, a signature block and any other identifier that might be important to the people you contact online, whether it be via email or a forum of some sort. Don’t assume people know and don’t assume they will go to the trouble to find that information out. Make it easy on them. It may surprise you what could take place!

Show them you care

I wonder if you take the time to check the location of a person you are emailing?

Too often I get emails that are directed to me personally, and are not part of a bulk email, where the person says ‘have a great day’, or ‘hope you’re having a great summer’ when the reality is I live on the other side of the world to that person so it’s night not day and winter not summer.

Do you think I’m being pedantic?  I don’t believe so.  When I email someone and if I’m going to make reference to the time of day or season, I actually take the time (a few seconds is all it takes) to visit their website and check their location, if it’s not evident in their email signature block.

Taking the time to consider the person you’re emailing doesn’t require a lot of effort but it does help personalise the contact and demonstrate that you are aware of their personal locality, rather than throwing out a generic or blanket greeting.  It’s just possible it may make the difference between you building a relationship with that person or not having any further contact.

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