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.

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.

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.

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!

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.

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?