Managing the Mountain of Contract Training Email

Just finished this article for the LERN magazine, but you got it here first!!

OK, let’s confess. We are all drowning in email. I have a love-hate relationship with it. I hate it that I spend two or so hours a day on email. It’s helping my clients (I hope) but it’s ruining my wrists. On the other hand, how much do I love creating an electronic folder and then storing all the emails on a topic or a client in a way that does not require a 5 foot tall grey steel filing cabinet?

If you’ve been in contract training very long, you know that you must have email to communicate with your clients. You really need it on your Blackberry or something-berry in addition to your computer, because your clients need you pretty much 24/7 these days.

Here are some tips to help you keep email from running your life, and at the same time to use this wonderful medium to help you give a level of customer care that no one else can match.

Get yourself a signature. It will automatically appear then at the end of every email you write and it will save your clients the time to find your name, phone number, Facebook page, URL and so on. Go ahead and put your USP (branding statement) there, too.

Be sure that if you send a client a reply, you include the original text that you’re responding to and when possible, keep the entire thread or conversation down in the body of the email. This allows a client to pull up the latest email and refresh their memory or find a key detail, or send the whole thread to someone else. This will encourage them to get more people in the loop.

Remember that the tone of your emails should be cordial, but it is business communication, so watch the tenor. Emails have a way of going places you never intended and meeting people you wish they wouldn’t. They are legal evidence.

Create a meaningful subject line that can be searched on and keep it for the whole conversation or modify part of it, only. For example, one email might say, "Project Management Class with KTOS" and the next might say, "Project Management Class with KTOS - Contract."

Ask someone in your department to let you see an email you’ve sent on their PC AND their Mac. How does it look? Do I need a microscope to read it? Does the text overlap your cool graphics? Does it play music when I open it when I am on the phone? Your email is like your tie, it says something about you. Make sure you’re sending a message congruent with your image.

An email reply must answer all questions, and pre-empt further questions. If you do not answer all the questions in the original email, you will receive further e-mails regarding the unanswered questions, which will not only waste your time and your customer’s time, which will cost you business.

Don’t overuse the High Priority option. If you overuse the high priority option, it will lose its function when you really need it.

Though it might be OK for your rugby team, when sending an email to a group of people, some people place all the email addresses in the TO: field. There are two drawbacks to this practice: (1) the recipient knows that you have sent the same message to a large number of recipients, and (2) you are publicizing someone else's email address without their permission. One way to get round this is to place all addresses in the BCC: field.

Use active instead of passive verb voice. For instance, "We will process your order today', sounds better than 'Your order will be processed today." The first sounds more personal, whereas the latter, especially when used frequently, sounds unnecessarily formal.

Your clients are busy. Avoid long, run-on sentences. Keep your sentences to a maximum of 15-20 words. Email is meant to be a quick medium and requires a different kind of writing than letters. Also take care not to send emails that are too long. If a person receives an email that looks like a dissertation, chances are that they will not read it. This can cause you real problems.

And here’s a tip I got from Seth Godin’s blog, "When you go on vacation, set up an auto-reply that says, "I'm on vacation until x/x/2010. When I get back, I'm going to delete all the email that arrived while I was gone, so if this note is important, please send it to me again after that date."

That was worth reading this whole article for, wasn’t it.

Comments

[Terry]

I don't agree with leaving an auto message that you will delete all emails when you return and for them to send it again later. I seems like putting your work onto someone else and it seems rather rude.

[Julia King Tamang]

That last one was a joke. I think we'd all love to be able to do it, but the truth is, we are picking our email up on our Blackberries or iPhones while we are on vacation, for the most part. But thanks for the comment. Nice to see your posts on FB. Love that kid!

[Casey Fast]

Good advice. As a guy who used to process 200-300 emails/day, I especially like the comments about answering all questions from your inquirer and keeping the sentences short and clear.

[Julia King Tamang]

Yeah, Casey, I get about that many. Phew. I like short. I like clear. I guess if I drank, I'd like vodka.