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Experience is simply the name we give to our mistakes. Oscar Wilde
Over the last few weeks running email management and email etiquette workshops, many of you have shared some classic faux pas. The spell checker is great for those of us who cannot spell but it can lead to some real howlers if you don’t watch what is happening. Here are a few from recent Brilliant Email management training sessions:
‘Hell’ was the email greeting instead of ‘Hello’.
The Board were asked to line up their ‘dicks’ instead of their ducks’ ahead of a board meeting.
Visitors were asked what size ‘willie’ would they like rather than ‘wellington’ boots.
The IT department apologised in advance of weekend maintenance for the ‘incontinence’ rather than ‘inconvenience’.
The moral of these email faux pas is not only to think before hitting send, but watch carefully as you spell check your email. Paying attention, pays dividends when it comes to email etiquette and preserving your image – both your own and the company’s.
Dare to share email mistakes like these either that have been sent to you or you have sent to others? Copy of ‘Brilliant Email’ for the best one.
Tags: email etiquette, email howlers, email management training, email mistakes, Oops
A couple of weeks or ago I had the pleasure and honour of running a Brilliant Email Management workshop for over one hundred NHS PAs at the NHS PAs for Excellence Wales conference. Here are their top tips for reducing email overload and using excellent email etiquette to save time.
What would you add as your favorite tip?
Tags: Brilliant Email, email etiquette, email overload, email rules, email subject line, NHS PAs for Excellence, Twenty five top tips
Hurray for the Harris Academy who earlier this month decided to ban the use of all slang and text speak in an effort to improve pupil’s English language skills. A person’s lack of command and competence with proper English is rendered naked in an email as many business people have discovered. An email sent on a company address is a business record and as such represents that company’s brand and image. Whilst slang and text speak may be acceptable socially, proper business email etiquette is a pre-requisite to developing good business communications.
How would you feel as a manager and/or business owner if your employees sent emails which do not reflect properly your brand and company values? Yet that is what thousands of people do every day. They write emails in which ‘there way to resolve the challenge is…’. ‘They two will spellcheck their emails…’
Add to that the number of emails which contain text speak which many outside generation X and the Millennials see as a foreign language. Add too those emails which contain smileys and kisses and you start to see the problem. (If you are in the retail sector such emails can be enough to cost you a customer 
especially if they customer if a Baby Boomer or from Generation X who are used to properly written communications). Your email is your digital dress code. Sloppy email – sloppy you and your business. Business email etiquette is different to social email etiquette. Business emails need to be need properly structured, grammatically correct and spell-checked. After all it would not be good to ask fellow board members to get their ‘dicks’ lined up!
The ban on text speak and slang by Harris Academy is welcomed, because if we don’t start to educate today’s school children we might as well wave goodbye to English as you and I know it. This would a be a great shame and could be the start of the slippery slope to lower standards of email etiquette and business communications which will mean time wasted as we try to comprehend what is being said.
Use Mesmo Consultancy’s free ‘Email Etiquette Benchmarking tool‘ to check the quality of your emails. If you find they do not support your values and brand then it’s time to take the bull by the horns and educate your workforce before you lose valuable customers. Call me to discuss how we can help you.
Meanwhile, what’s the worst business email etiquette bungle you have ever seen/made?
Tags: business email etiquette, digital dress code, email etiquette, Generation X, Harris Academy
Alan Coote CEO 5Digital
What is email best practice for including video within your campaign can increase click through rates by 300%. If you want to correspond with a company’s senior executives, you had better include a video link as 60% of them prefer receiving video to text. Yet click through only generates traffic. In order to be successful you really need to convert this into sales. That means generating compelling content. Whilst I could write a book on the subject, let’s break it down into three steps which also make for good email etiquette.
In broadcast media it’s standard practice to have a profile of a typical viewer or listener. We give them a name, we know how old they are, where they live, how many kids they have, what car they drive, the newspaper they read and what other programmes they are watching.This is your starting point; it steers the whole production in a single, clear direction informing not only how the video looks and sounds, but also how it’s filmed, edited and presented.
You may think being too specific could lose you business – it won’t. The more specific you are, the greater the clarity of your production.
It doesn’t take long in business to realise that nearly every marketing message your company puts out must have a clearly defined objective. If the aim is to make a sale then everything you do should point the viewer in that direction. If it’s to raise awareness you’ll need a mechanism for measuring that too.
Now we have to determine how we’re going to achieve the final step – the all-important conversion. This is where a significant number of people are lost. Imagine promoting a holiday destination with an enticing video of the hotel. The pool looks inviting and there are lots of happy people saying what a great time they’ve had. The video ends on a call to action to visit the website to book. That’s another hoop, more typing and more effort. To increase conversions include directions in the video to a simple tracking link included in the email. Autoresponders such as Aweber and GetResponse allow you to manage the success of your campaign.
Even with a compelling video, the maxims of email marketing still hold true – a captivating subject header, personalisation, call to action and click through tracking. To find out more on video statistics, watch this:
Alan Coote’s career spans 35 Years in Creative and Digital Media including the BBC, BAE Systems and numerous Independent broadcasters. He is the CEO of 5 Digital and broadcasts weekly on the national business radio programme Let’s Talk Business. Follow him on Twitter @TheAlanCoote
Tags: email best practice, email etiquette
Reply All emails are the bain of most people’s inboxes. Its been a recurrent themes during discussions this week. Using Reply All shows lack of good email etiquette and drives up the email overload. The question is why do people take this option and how do we help them change their email behavior. A kind view is that the offending recipient accidentally hit Reply All. The less charitable view is to assume the offending recipient is trying to score points.
Banishing Reply All emails depends on good email etiquette from both the sender and recipients.
As a sender, how can you improve your email etiquette to manage and reduce the opportunities for people to hit hit Reply All? There are three easy options:
As recipient, the message is simply, Reply only to the sender. In addition there are two other options:
These are actions you can take as individuals and teams working together. To completely banish the Reply All syndrome, requires good email culture and email etiquette policy across the organisation. What does your corporate email best practice say about using Reply All? What are the penalties for breaking the email best practice code?
Over the years Mesmo Consultancy’s Brilliant Email workshops have been instrumental in helping organisations banish the Reply All syndrome. For more information on how we can help you and your organisation, please contact us now by phone or email.
Meanwhile, what suggestions do you have to banish Reply All emails and improve the email culture?
Tags: email etiquette, email etiquette at work, email etiquette dos and don'ts reply all