Friday, October 8, 2010

How To Mind Your Email Manners

You have set up a business enterprise and realise that the important facet of business development is extreme professionalism. Minding your e-mail manners are so important for the future of your business because emails constitute a major part of your communication with clients. Most of the business have actually given up the age old way of communicating through postal letters and faxes and have embraced e-mailing for fast results and saving money in the process. Emails have become the byword for communicating important business deals and contracts. This article deals with how you can improve writing your emails and thus paving the way for better customer relationship. The etiquette that was used in writing letters has undergone a sea change and new formats have been developed that most people are actually not aware of.

Language

It is understood that you should be extremely courteous and polite in your mails. Using language that is not universally unaccepted will cause serious repercussions. Know your language rules when you are making the first communication with your client because the impression that you are going to create with the first mail is going to last really long. Use the correct mix of caps lock and lower case if you want to get your message across. Using all caps if you want to stress on something, is going to create adverse effects with your client. It is deemed as rude and it may have a negative repercussion. Polish your grammar and use the punctuations accordingly. The rules that you apply for formal postal letters are almost the same for emails too. However friendly you become with your client, don’t use abbreviations, like gr8, urs, wrd, txt, asap and so on. They might be good for chatting, but a big NO for official e-mails.

Manners and Tone

Always keep a visual image of the person or client you are writing to. Actually typing a mail is much more complicated than talking in person. True, that mailing somebody will let you off the ‘inhibition’ hook, but it has other dangers too. Since you cant see the person, the tone you use with the mail should exude politeness, understanding and a positive feeling. Don’t use rude words, even inadvertently. People, unfortunately, believe that since email is an intangible tool, rude words written will never come back to them. But that’s not true, anytime these mails could be turned against you.

Its not an easy thing, to start writing effective mails the first time, sometimes it requires training by a professional. Think productive is a company in UK, that provides email training with effective training manuals and technology.

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