Let them know your number!

Does anyone else find it annoying that business people just sign off their emails with their name and no contact details whatsoever? Just sometimes, I’d like to pick up the phone and I have to do a search through previous emails or a Google search to find it.  My next pet hate are websites that have no phone numbers on them.

Perhaps they don’t know how to set up an email signature block, but if that’s the case, why not ask someone to help them? An admin assistant or a VA can definitely help.

Let me give you some examples:

• I’ve been receiving emails for some months from someone I’ve been gradually getting to know. Whenever we’ve chatted on the phone it’s always because he’s rung me.  The rest of the time we email back and forth. Yesterday I was at a business event and met a man that would be an ideal referral for this person.  So I began typing up an email with them both included and also to share their phone numbers. One, I had a business card for and that was easy, but the other who’s been emailing me for months, has no phone number listed in any of his emails – and I have a lot of them. He uses a hotmail address so no website address either to look up. I resorted to Googling his name+number and finally found it after about the third site I visited.
• Chatting with some business people on a Facebook group. One was asking for information and if anyone knew someone who did…?  I do, so I messaged them to let them know and then proceeded to write the details down to give to the person I’m seeing tomorrow. But this person asking doesn’t have a phone number on their profile that is viewable. I tracked down 3 different sites they’re listed on but none have a phone number at all however I was able to track down an email address.

I’ve had many more experiences of these types of things over the years.  I wonder why people in business make it so hard for others to contact them?  If you have a website, a contact form is not sufficient. You should have a phone number, mailing details (many business cards I’ve received haven’t had mailing details and that’s another pet peeve) and any other contact information that would make it easy for people to do business with you.  Business cards and websites alike should have more than one form of contact information to make it easy for prospective customers to make contact. Not everyone likes to converse in the same way and we need to make it easy on all – otherwise they may well give up and go off to your competitor’s site.

So, when emailing people make sure you have a signature block that includes your business name (if you have one), your phone number, suburb or postal address and your website.  And on your website you should have similar information.

Make it easy on everyone who would like to contact you and let them know your number.