Is it me or is it everyone else?

It seems to me, if you email someone, requesting a quote, a job to be done, asking for information or something that requires a response, then good etiquette states you should reply and acknowledge the email, even if you don’t have an immediate answer.

Over the past year, different people I do business with have not responded to my emails of request for assistance or advice and the end result is I send more email messages and then end up ringing them because I think they are not getting my emails.  Then they think I’m being impatient or a nag!

How do I get across to them that they should actually just hit reply and let me know they’ve seen my email and they’ll get back to me later with the information I’m seeking?  How am I supposed to know they might be researching my answer rather than just ignoring me?

I’ve taken to asking them in my email to please reply and acknowledge they’ve seen my email so I know it hasn’t gone astray.

I posted a new job lead to my team of VAs and one of the responses I got both surprised me but also made me realise that perhaps some VAs (particularly newer ones) probably thought it was ok to do this.  Make the client wait.

The response was:

Could you kindly forward on his details to me and I will contact him within 24 hours.

My reply to her was:

I strongly suggest you reply to him today, sooner rather than later. Clients will rarely wait 24 hours before hearing back from someone – they’ll just go to someone else. Two other members have already responded so important you make initial contact with him too.  Once you have built a relationship with a client then letting them know you’ll be in touch within 24 hours is ok, but not on first contact.

I feel it is really important that the client knows that someone has heard/seen their request and will be acting on it.  If you don’t reply then they’ll think that either you’re not interested or perhaps your email isn’t working. Either way they’ll move on to the very next VA they have contact with.

While I agree that you can’t be at your computer 24/7, that you do have a life and do need to sleep, the reality is if a request comes through during business hours (or perhaps waking hours) then it’s important to give some sort of response.  Let them know you’ve seen their email.  If you are going to be out of the office for a few days, then set up some kind of autoresponder or have someone else monitor your email for you.  Your business is important.

Put it this way. If the phone was ringing would you let it just ring out, thinking you’ll answer it tomorrow? Email is another form of communication but unlike the phone can’t make the urgent sound that demands you answer it immediately. Worth thinking about.

Email, for Virtual Assistants, is often our first point of contact with potential clients. It works like an amabassador for our businesses.

Many experienced VAs, like myself, get a lot of emails from would-be VAs wanting to get work outsourced to them, or wanting to find out if they can work with us as a sub-contractor or similar.  We are, in effect, a potential client for them.

So it concerns me considerably when they don’t take care to read their emails properly before hitting send, correcting any obvious errors.  Nor do many of them sign off their emails properly either.

It doesn’t take a great deal to take a deep breath, read through the email carefully, correct any grammatical or spelling errors, and then make sure the email is signed off before sending it on its way.

Poorly written or constructed emails will be an immediate turn-off for those whom they are contacting.  The same applies for any networking forums they belong to online.  The way they communicate via the forums gives others an idea of whether they could work with them. The written form of communication has become very important in the way business is run online these days. If you are unable to communicate properly via email you stand to lose opportunities for work simply because the recipient won’t have any confidence in your abilities – irrespective of whether word-processing is one of your service offerings or not.

I know that many say they can copy type accurately but I do believe/feel that if that is the case, then they should have learnt something from the copy typing they’ve done in the past.  Take time with your written communications and you’ll find you will be rewarded.

At this time of year (Christmas/New Year) scams will be on the rise and so will phishing emails with promises of all sorts of things through bogus promotions.

One of the VAs from my team posted a warning about a phishing email supposedly from her bank the other day.  A day prior a client forwarded to me an email she got from Paypal (supposedly) but I was soon able to detect that it was not a genuine email.

Here are some ideas to get you looking.

1. Usually not personally addressed. Banks rarely email us but Paypal and other similar groups do and it’s usually addressed to Dear and whatever your user name is.  It’s NEVER addressed to ‘Dear member’, ‘Dear user’ or similar.

2. Check the address it comes from. Often it’s a variation on the real address but not accurate. e.g. I’ve seen no-replay@paypal.com used.

3. Hold your mouse over the hyperlink of the supposed bank web address and you’ll see the reference is very different although if you clicked on it, it might look like the normal website. (I recommend you definitely DON’T click on it though)

4. Check the spelling – it’s usually full of errors and written by those who don’t have a good grasp of the English language.

I wrote a little while ago why I prefer email and this post covers a pet peeve of mine relating to email.

I know that not everyone who uses email is a ‘professional’ online and many don’t understand the use of it.  But it does concern me if a client consistently responds to my emails without including anything of the previous email sent to them.  I find a few people do this and it’s very frustrating.

The reason why it’s frustrating is that often their replies are several days later and their reply email often doesn’t even include what the original subject heading was. So I’m left scratching my head trying to work out what they are talking about and having to delve through past emails I’ve sent to them to put the pieces together.  This wastes such a lot of time – time that I don’t charge them for but perhaps I need to reconsider that.

Perhaps to them it’s fresh in their minds because they’ve just read and replied to an email I’ve sent but for me several days have passed and often several hundred emails I’ve read and many I’ve written since that time.

If you are one of those people who do not include the previous email when you reply, please take some time to consider the person you are responding to.  If the email program you use isn’t set up to automatically include the previous message (and subject heading) then please take the time to find out how to do it.  Find someone who uses the same program you do and ask for advice or research it on the web.  It’s amazing how many ‘how-tos’ are available online.

Make it easier on all of those whose emails you are responding to, especially if there is a continued discussion, and make sure you include the questions you are answering, or the bit that you are adding to, to keep the conversation fluid and not disjointed.

Does anyone else feel frustrated by this or is it just me?

There seems to be an increasing trend of replying to a personal email or forum based email and not include the message being responded to.  I find this rather annoying to say the least, not to mention time wasting.

Email is still not 100% proof as we all know and if I’m interested in seeing what someone is responding to, but they haven’t included a portion of the originating email, it means time is wasted trying to find the original email or be forever in the dark if the original email wasn’t received. And I hate being in the dark!

Yesterday I was trying to follow the thread of a conversation on a forum but had to keep going back to previous emails to try and figure who was responding to who and about what.  Very disjointed.

And today I received an email from someone I don’t know thanking me for my offer of help regarding their website.  And yet they did not identify themselves and did not have the original email included.  I did a search of my sent files for their email address and they aren’t listed there – at least not over this past month. So what were they replying to and what did I say to them in the first place?  And how long ago? I’ve had to ask them.

If you’re new to email or new to participating in email based forums, it makes good sense to include the part of the original email you are responding to, to keep a trail of the conversation that has been begun.  And if you’re emailing someone direct from a forum, copy and paste the bit you are responding to so it keeps them in the picture.  Makes for much smoother lines of communication.