7 Great Email Habits for the Beginning Internet En

7 Great Email Habits for the Beginning Internet Entrepreneur

by: Michael Turner

If you are just starting out as an Internet entrepreneur then you have a lot to learn about doing business online. One such thing you need to concentrate on is your emailing habits. Email is your way of communicating with people and potential customers, so developing good email habits early on is very important.

Habit #1 Respond Quickly

Always respond as quickly as possible to an email. Don’t respond so quickly that you do not answer the questions or write properly, but respond as fast as you possibly can. One to two days maximum.

Habit #2 Grammar and Spelling

As a beginning Internet entrepreneur you cannot risk losing customers because you can’t write properly or spell. Fortunately, spellchecker and grammar check will help you with this. Be sure to use it with every email.

Habit #3 Appropriate Subject and Format

Make sure the subject heading is filled in and gives the reader some clue as to the content of the email. Then, make sure the format of the email is similar to that of a real business letter. Lastly, don’t forget to keep it short and sweet. When you write a long drawn out email you will lose people’s attention.

Habit #4 Address Recipient

Always address the recipient of the email. You don’t have to start out with Dear Recipient, but their name should definitely be addressed. This gives a more professional look to your email, which is just what you are trying to accomplish as a new Internet entrepreneur.

Habit #5 Provide Contact Information

Always provide your contact information in your email following your signature. This way individuals will be able to visit your website, call you, fax or email you without having to ask you for this information or do any extra research. Make it easy.

Habit #6 Cases

Don’t use all upper case or all lower case. Type correctly, just like you would write. You would never send a business letter in all caps or all lowercase, so don’t send emails this way either. Some people will interpret this as either screaming or whispering, respectively, and some might think it is just unprofessional. Avoid this and type correctly.

Habit #7 Previous Messages

When you respond to someone and are answering their questions be sure to include the previous email so they may see exactly what you are replying to. Frequently, people send emails and when you reply without the previous email attached they have no idea what you are responding to. The best thing is to copy parts of the previous email and paste it in your email with your response. Or be very specific when answering questions, such as restating them, for the convenience of your reader. If not, you will waste your time and theirs and not be perceived as a professional.

About The Author

Michael Turner reveals his foolproof way to increase website traffic in his free 7 part miniseries. Grab it free right now at http://www.powertraffictactics.com/

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 04

by Michael Turner

Writing Effective Emails

Writing Effective Emails

by: Graham Jones

Sometimes email messages can get quite long, especially when you quote much of the material that has been sent in previous emails. Also, emails often get long if you have a lot to say or you need to give a comprehensive overview of a particular business situation.

Most people tend to find that the letters and emails they receive that are short are the ones they responded to most positively and had the best feelings about. Long letters do get a positive response — however, almost invariably, long communications are only given a positive rating if we have a very close and warm relationship with the person who has written to us. We rarely feel positive towards acquaintances and people we do not know, who send us long letters or emails. This has important implications for people using email in business. The vast majority of your emails at work are going to be sent to people you do not know or have only the slimmest of relationships with. Hence anything other than a short email is likely to lead towards a negative feeling in your reader. Play safe; keep it short!

This is all very well in theory, of course, but in practice, particularly at work, you need to include a lot of material. The answer is to treat the email as though it were a covering letter. Then attach the main text as a separate word processor document. All email programs can attach files to them, yet vast numbers of emails are sent without using this facility. The advantage of putting your main material in an attachment is that your recipient immediately views your message in a positive light because it is short and to the point. You should summarise the content of the attachment in a sentence or two — in that way your reader can gain all they need to know, without having to open the attached file. However, if they need more depth you have provided it for them.

One technique you can use for shortening your email is to write the main message in your word processing software, with all the detail you need. Then take a break, do something else and later on, read through your text. Now try to summarise it in a few sentences – that summary should be the main part of your email. Trying to summarise something you have just written is difficult as all the detail will still be in your mind. That’s why taking a break can help you as you leave your mind uncluttered and make summary writing much easier. Your summary email, together with the word processor document as an attachment is much more likely to please your recipient. This means there is considerable value in taking time to construct your email properly, rather than just dashing something off.

Another way in which you can be sure of keeping emails short is to avoid ‘quoting’ vast amounts of previous emails. One of the benefits of the ‘reply’ button on email programs is that you can quote the previous email. In this way the recipient can easily see what you are responding to. However, since many emails go back and forth between various people, the message can quickly become very long indeed — even though most of it is material from previous messages. The answer to solving this is to only quote what you need to send someone in order to make your reply understandable. By all means, press the ‘reply’ button to quote the original email, but then go through the quoted text and delete everything that is irrelevant to what you are going to write about. Doing so is seeing the message from your reader’s viewpoint — they don’t want to wade through the original text (their own!) just to see which point you are commenting on. It is much easier from their viewpoint if your reply is clear. In other words, only use selective quoting — not wholesale quoting of emails as is the most common practice.

An additional reason why some emails are so long is because the author is trying to cover various topics. They are almost ‘brain dumping’ everything they can think of that is important or relevant to the reader. Meanwhile, the poor recipient has to work their way through this mess to try and find out what is important. Good communication, particularly to people we don’t know, is focused communication. That means, in essence, that each email should be about one topic and one topic only. A hint to this is given in the email software itself where you have to type a ‘subject’ for your email.

If your emails are about more than one subject – stop! Each email should only be about one subject. Your recipient will react far more positively if you sent four separate short emails about four subjects than trying to cram all the material into one, inevitably longer message. Also, when these separate messages get replied to, the quoted material is shorter. Hence, think always, one message — one email.

About The Author

Graham Jones is the author of Effective Email an ebook priced at £9.99. For more details or to download a copy now go to: http://www.effectiveemail.biz.

[email protected]

This article was posted on August 23, 2002

by Graham Jones

Chasing New Business?

Chasing New Business?

by: Aaron Snider

As well you should. New business is what makes the world go round. Your business relies on new business to survive. To get new business you must constantly change your marketing efforts. But what about old business? Have you made a business crippling mistake? Have you forgotten your previous customers while looking for new ones?

There are many ways to advertise your business. What kind of response do you get from ezines, safelists, startpages, etc? Email is a great way to advertise your business, you can email so many people its hard to not get a response. Ezines are nice, better response cause you can target your promotion a little more than normal email. Start pages are good for Alexa ratings, but not much more. What kind of response do you really see though? 0.2%, 0.5%, 1%, 2%? If you get even 1% response you are the most fantastic copy writer and have the best product in the world. For the rest of us we are ecstatic when we get a 0.2% response or any at all.

Well what about the people that do buy from you? Do you even email them anymore? After you send your thank you for purchasing whatever they purchased from you, do you ever email them again? Well you should.

Lets take one person as an example. He/she buys an ebook about making minisites from you for $19.95. What can we tell about this person from their purchase? Well if they want to make mini web sites, they must have a webhost. Maybe your an affiliate for a webhosting company. Maybe they need products to sell on their minisite. Maybe they need an ebook about copywriting for their new minisites. Whatever else they need, they will buy it from somebody. They have already bought from you once, why not buy from you again?

When you make sales, make sure you have other products available to make the one they bought perform better or easier to use. If you sell one product to 100 people, then you sold a second product (that made the first product easier to use) to 50 of those people, you just sold 50% more products. You also just made 50% more profit, and didn’t spend any more on advertising as you did before.

The point is, don’t forget your previous customers. You will make more sales on a monthly basis with 12 simple emails to your previous customer base, and will significantly build your current business. Your previous customers trust you, like you, have money, and will buy from you again.

What the heck, letกs all make a million.

About The Author

Aaron Snider

[email protected]

http://www.thecustomermanager.com

Aaron wrote the Customer Manager Program

This article was posted on February 09, 2004

by Aaron Snider