I first started using email at home with a Compuserve email account (remember those?) and at work with a Lotus Notes based email account, back in 1994. Not that long ago really, although to put it into perspective; if you were born in ’94, then this year you are 16 and are just about to go to college, the Sixth Form or work!

Either way, you’ll be using email to a very large degree without a second thought and 1994 is ancient history.

Throughout the employers and businesses I’ve worked with over the years, no one has ever formally taught me how to use email. Like most people, I’ve learnt the techniques by trial and error and the observation of others as I’ve gone along.

Yes, I’ve been on numerous Outlook® training courses and in the early days, ones related to Lotus Notes Mail as well. However learning the mechanics of how the email software works is different to learning the etiquette, techniques and protocols of email when it’s used as a communication tool in daily business life.

So whilst I don’t profess to be the world’s best e-mailer by any stretch of the imagination, I have learnt a thing or two along the way. So,given that I see simple etiquette errors and many a faux pas being made everyday by people who email me on a regular basis; then I think it’s worth sharing my top twelve tips for happy and productive emailing.

Email etiquette

Why Use Email Etiquette?

Before I launch into my top twelve tips for becoming a happy e-mailer here’s a few good reasons why you should adopt some good etiquette rules for your daily emailing habits as a business professional;

1. Credibility and Professionalism: Using the correct language and tone within your email conveys a competent and professional image and keeps you from looking like an amateur.
2. Efficiency: Email is a great communication tool for quick and easy messages, so get to the point if you want to capitilise on the time saving benefits of email.
3. A Record: The benefits of email are also its dangers. So whilst email is a less formal method then writing a memo or a letter, liability traps resulting from hastily written emails have been known to land many a business and individual in court. A good email etiquette strategy helps keep those risks at bay. Remember, emails stays around on a some server somewhere, forever.

Top 12 Tips for Happy Emailing

1. Learn how to use your email software. Many people send emails that are either incomplete, contain every man and his dog in the CC field rather than the BCC field, or have key elements missing (Subject line, Signature etc) from them because the sender simply “doesn’t know how to it”. You wouldn’t drive a car without knowing how to drive, so why use software everyday without knowing how to use it? There’s plenty of learning resources around that can help on this matter.
2. Keep to a single point. People like to file away their emails according to subject matter and sender. So if you’re addressing multiple topics in a single email, then it makes it harder for your recipient’s to do this and more importantly, keep track of a conversation thread on a particular subject at a later date. It’s better to send multiple emails to the same person, each on a different subject matter than to try and cram everything into one.
3. Use the subject line. The Subject line in an email tells people what an email is about as it lands in their in-box. Based upon this information, the recipient can then decide what priority to give that email when it comes to reading it. This is an important factor if you’re receiving 50+ emails a day and need to prioritise what’s important and what isn’t. Remember not everyone reads their emails straightway so sending an email without a Subject line can send it to the bottom of the pile.
4. Make the subject line descriptive and relevant. If you’re an accountant and you receive an email from a client that simply reads “Accounts” in its subject line then that’s probably meaningless in a list of other emails from other clients who’ve also chosen to write “Accounts” in their emails’ subject line. Put your feet in the shoes of the recipient. What would be helpful to them? In this case probably a more descriptive subject line similar to “Accounts for [Company Name] 2009–2010″.
5. Use a Signature. An email signature is that little piece of text that is planted automatically at the bottom of every email that is sent out from your email client. It generally contains the sender’s contact information, registered address, website address, perhaps a short marketing message and some sort of polite sign-off such as “Regards”,“Yours” or “All the Best” etc. If you don’t how to do these, look in your email software’s help section or ask someone who does. Many a time I’ve had an email from someone and rather than reply back I’ve wanted to call them, but can’t because they don’t have a signature in their email containing their telephone number. In business you need to capitalise upon every opportunity to give people your contact details.  The lack of an email signature is a missed opportunity.
6. Use a greeting. When writing a letter, you may start off with a greeting such as “Dear [Name]”. Email isn’t that formal but it is good manners to say “Hello” in some form before you start with the content of your email. Sending an email out without a personalised “Hello [Name]” or “Hi [Name]” is simply bad manners and can come across as aggressive.
7. Limit use of the “High Priority” status. In many email client’s it’s possible to assign a status to your email before sending it out. “High Priority” and “Confidential” are the two commonly used ones above and beyond the “Normal” status. A “High Priority” email is seen in the recipients in-box with a red exclamation mark ! next to it. This technique is used to death in my book and as such, has no real value now. I personally take no notice of these priorities at all, based on the principal that if it really is important or urgent, they’ll call me using the more immediate and reactive medium of the telephone to convey their message.  I suspect others are the same.
8. Don’t write in capitals. Writing in capitals comes across as SHOUTING on both emails and websites and should be avoided at all costs and in all circumstances (including attempts to emphasize a particular phrase or sentence). Shouting as we all know is an aggressive gesture so in a medium that lacks the luxury of body language, it should not be used as it’s likely to be misinterpreted.
9. Don’t use read receipts. This will almost always annoy your recipient before they have even read your message. Besides, it usually does not work anyway since the recipient may have blocked that function (as I do), or their email client might not support it, so what is the use of using them? If you want to know whether an email was received it is better to ask the recipient to let you know if it was received.
10. Don’t email in anger. Email is one of those mediums where people will say things to one another, often aggressive and hurtful things, that they wouldn’t otherwise do face-to-face. So if you receive such an email, the temptation is to hit the Reply button and vent your anger in an emailed response. However, before you send it. Place it into your drafts and come back to it later when you’ll have a more objective view. Now’s the time to draft your response. Remember an email sent in anger, once it’s gone it’s gone and can’t be retrieved and as such could prove to be damaging or embarrassing later.
11. Limit use of the CC field. I once worked in a company where one of my colleagues used to CC everyone from the MD down on their email messages even if it didn’t concern them. When challenged about this he told me “they have it now in case they need it” which ‘they’ never did of course. In realty this was simply a CYA tactic from someone who was scared to take any decision above and beyond choosing what beverage he wanted at break time. Whilst an extreme example, this over use of the CC field in emails is a great annoyance to recipients as it does nothing more than clog up their in-box and wastes time. Only CC people you know are genuinely interested in your mail.
12. Don’t attach unexpected large files. Having met someone recently at a business networking meeting, I was a little annoyed to receive an email from them afterwards containing a 6Mb file. The attachment was their brochure in Microsoft Publisher format (which is bad enough in itself). I was annoyed, not because they had emailed me with a follow-up. Fine with that! But annoyed because I picked up the email on my Blackberry which took ages to download the file. When I opened, it was the sheer disappointment of it being a ‘trivial email’ coupled with the lengthy download time, that formed the basis of my annoyance. Learn from this experience and if you must email out large files as attachments, make sure the recipient is either expecting it or is happy to receive it. Don’t send them out unsolicited. Alternatively, why not upload them to your website or your Google Docs account and send the recipient an email containing a link to the file on the web. This gives them the choice of ‘to download or not to download’ rather than forcing it upon them.

These top twelve tips for happy emailing should get you going on the right track. If you have any tips yourself, please post them in the comments below

This is one of my favourite quotations that I often drop into conversation when I’m presented with a load of stats which may look great at first glance: particularly if presented in a pie-chart or line graph format, but don’t actually tell me anything!

However, in the world of sales and marketing; the use of meaningful stats is a great way to gain the attention of a potential customer, build credibility about your products or perhaps present proof of a particular concept that you’re trying to get across.

I know this to be true, as a recent survey told me that 8 out of 10 cats said so!

Get Online, Get Measuring!

One of the great things when it comes to sales and marketing on the web, is the vast level of statistics that are available to you as a website owner.

Whether it’s the wealth of data your website stats application churns out, through to the click-through-rates your online advertising campaign generates or the efficiency rating that your email marketing campaign monitor software gives you, there’s one thing for sure; you’re never short of a few stats to show you where you’re going right or wrong with a particular strategy. Much of this data if often accessible immediately after a particular event has occurred thanks to the response rates of web servers and monitoring software.

Email Marketing Stats

For example, if I send an email campaign to my list of subscribers; using our email management software; I can tell within a few seconds of the emails landing in people’s in-boxes; who has opened the email, how many times, at which time, which links they clicked in the mail and even which email client they’ve used to read it etc, etc.

Powerful stuff, particularly when trying to refine and measure the success of a particular email marketing campaign.

You don’t get that level of detail using traditional marketing methods such as mail-shots or print advertising.

Google Internet Stats

Google knows how web marketers value a “good statistic” to quote at people; so to help us out, they’ve launched a website that acts like an aggregator of statistical facts it finds across the web.

The Google Internet Stats website was launched on October the first and is described by Google as a ” …a cool new website that can help your business by giving insights into what’s going on online.”

The site offers statistics on the economic environment, consumer behavior and media trends that are happening in the UK.

Yes, you read correctly; “in the UK”! Not the US. Which makes a refreshing change!

So if you’re looking for some stats to bolster up a point you’re trying make either in a presentation, on your website or in an elevator pitch; then take a look at the Google Internet Stats website for some inspiration.

Statistically speaking, you can’t go wrong!

That’s what happened last week when I spent a couple of hours training a client, a firm of solicitors in York, on their new website’s CMS and email management application.

The website CMS allows non-techies to easily modify the text and images on their site’s web pages in a simple to use “Word™ like” interface. The email management application we’d installed, allows the client to send out sophisticated, branded emails on a regular basis to their clients and other subscribers who may sign-up directly from their website: a vast improvement on their current method which involves sending out hundreds of emails with large PDF attachments though Outlook™.

However, the real light bulb moments started to go off when I showed them the level of reporting or ‘analytics’ that was available to them.

Firstly there was Google Analytics™ which is the sophisticated visitor statistics monitoring package that offers reams of data to a site owner about the activity of visitors on their website, where they’ve com from and the route they take to achieve predetermined ‘goals’ on a site such as the completion of a feedback form or the purchase of a product etc. The client was genuinely surprised at the amount of data available to them from the Google Analytics package we’d installed on their site and they could immediately see how the data could be used in their normal, offline marketing activities as well as determining the typical user profile of their site visitors.

The second light bulb moment came when I showed them the amount of tracking data they could get at within our email and subscriber management application, SendMail. Aspects such as the number of email opens, bounces, deletions and unsubscribe’s for each mail campaign were easy to determine. Digging a bit deeper, more light bulbs started to switch-on in the room as people realised the degree of data, right down to individual subscriber activity and link popularity, that could be accessed for analysis and how such nformation could be used.

“That level of information really helps us determine if our eshots are being sent to the correct people, are being read and which elements are the most popular sections. Really useful”. The firm’s senior partner said to me.

If you’d like your own light bulb moments and want to measure the effectiveness of your website uing Google Analytics or you’d like a free SendMail email broadcast and subscriber management account, please get in touch.

Excuse me, can I just ask you to stop what you’re doing whilst I attempt to sell you something that you may not be interested in, open minded about or receptive to?

If you’re in business for yourself you probably get a fair amount of unsolicited telephone sales calls, emails and mail shots on a daily basis. How you react to these attempts to grab your attention and more importantly for the issuer, your cash; depends largely upon the skill of the marketer who is trying to grab your attention and your desire or need for the product/service they are attempting to sell.

There’s a whole industry out there which is geared towards creating the ultimate sales call, the perfect email or the most innovative mail shot which will grab your attention and motivate you towards a purchase.

These techniques are tried and tested and if appropriately targeted, are very powerful in themselves for generating business. You may use them yourself and if you get business from them, I’ll have no need to explain further.

However the problem with this type of marketing, often called “Interruption Marketing”, is that it’s increasing becoming ineffective for the very nature of its definition. That is to say it “interrupts” which in turn just adds to the unwanted clutter in the already cluttered lives of your average business person. As a result many of us simply switch-off to the message that is being delivered.

Angelo Fernando gives an excellent overview as to why illustrated with a scenario we can all relate to, in his article “So, Interruption Marketing Isn’t Working!” Worth reading!

Now I’m not saying that unsolicited mail-shots, emails or telemarketing doesn’t work and should be canned as a technique. This is not the case so long as such “interruptions” are targeted at named and pre-qualified individuals (by “pre-qualified” I mean that it is known that the recipient has a need or desire for the product being marketed).

However there is another technique.

Into the marketing mix comes a new upstart when it comes to using the web as a marketing tool which is a form of “Push Marketing”, namely; RSS Feeds.

RSS Feeds and Feed Readers

The best way to explain what RSS feeds are is to show you an example on a website that most Brits can relate to.

Take a look at the BBC News site at http://news.bbc.co.uk

In the top right hand corner you’ll see a little orange icon next to the link “News Feeds”

This icon and link indicates that RSS feeds are available on the site. Park this thought as I’ll explain more shortly!

Time to get your imagination working!

If you’ve decided to keep abreast of the news using the BBC News site; to ensure that you get the latest news as it’s reported, you’ll need to make sure that you visit the site every half-hour or so just to make sure you don’t miss anything.

This is fine if you’re only following the updates on one website, in this case the BBC News site; as it’s easy to make a mental note or even put a reminder in your Outlook™ or on your phone to keep re-visiting the site.

However, things start to get complicated when you follow multiple websites that update their content regularly.

For instance, let’s imagine, in addition to the BBC site, you also want to be informed of news articles as they happen on the Times website or on those favourite blogs that you like to read.

If you keep abreast of changes on many different blogs or websites, then it starts to become a chore to visit each different website in turn, read what’s new, and then move on to the next site. If you relied upon email updates then you’re going to get inundated with the things and before long you’re into “Interruption Marketing” territory and you’ll quickly start to ‘blank’ what’s being sent to you.

This is where RSS Feeds are the Killer App!

RSS feeds allow you read updates from numerous websites when it’s convenient to you in a single place i.e. on a webpage or in a piece of software on your desktop, without having to visit multiple websites.

If a website “Pushes” its content to you via an RSS feed and you may “Subscribe” to that feed, after which you can then read that content from each website in a single place using an RSS Reader when it’s convenient to you and without being interrupted by emails.

That’s what those orange feed icons are on the BBC, Times Online and Google Blog sites that I mentioned earlier, namely their RSS Feeds. By subscribing to each RSS feed in an RSS Reader (sometimes called an RSS Aggregator or RSS Newsreader) such as Google Reader, you can choose to read each favourite websites’ updates quickly and easily from one single web page which can be set as one of your browser’s Home Pages.

This is all fine and dandy as far as informational sites go; but where do RSS Feeds make an impact when it comes to marketing a product or service?

Again using your now practiced imagination, think of your own website.

Could you write content that is of value to your potential customers? Perhaps it could be reviews of your products with case studies of how they can be practically used, or perhaps you could offer tips and techniques that people in your industry would value. If you can, then start posting articles to your website. If people value your content enough they’ll start subscribing to your RSS Feed (assuming it’s set-up to produce one) which means you’ll start to get a subscriber list of people you know are interested in what you have to say. Worth its weight in marketing gold!

All this and without having to interrupt people to tell them about your company, services, products or expertise!

This week I went to see a prospective client who was looking for someone to take over the management of their website, suggest ways of improving it and to undertake future development and maintenance work. This is right up our street so I was happy to meet up with them for an initial chat to see where we could help.

During our conversations we got on to the subject of e-mail marketing and how it can be used as a tool for keeping in contact with customers in an effective and low-cost way. Whilst regaling you with this story, it’s useful to note that the company runs its own internal Local Area Network (LAN) which is based around a single file server. Their email is handled through this server using its own SMTP gateway to the Internet on a static IP address. So in other words they handle all their incoming and outgoing email through their own network server without having to rely on their ISP. This is a common set-up in many medium to large sized companies that have a number of Users on a network. The strategy has a number of benefits but also some draw backs, one of which I am about to describe.

I learned that the client is already sending out regular emails to their customers of which several hundred were on their subscribers list. After digging a bit deeper it came to light that these emails were being sent out from one of the PCs on their network using Microsoft Outlook, with all the subscribers being placed into the BCC field of the email before the “Send” button was pressed.

“How is that working for you?” I asked, whereupon I learned that not only many of their emails failed to reach their recipients, they were also having difficulties sending out their normal day-to-day business emails which, like their e-shots; were not reaching their recipients. This as you can imagine, was causing them big problems in the running of their business.

What had happened is that their method of sending out e-shots had managed to get their network’s IP address, the unique number that identifies their mail-server on the Internet, “blacklisted” as a source of Spam. In this case the most probable cause was the sending of large volumes of emails with the recipients email addresses listed in the BCC field of the email. A classic identifying feature of Spam emails.

Other e-mail servers on the web routinely use Spam blacklists as a first line of defence against the relentless onslaught of spam that plagues the Internet. Blacklists work by keeping track of the Internet Protocol (IP) numbers of servers that have sent Spam. Once an e-mail server’s IP address is on a list, any spam filter using that list as a means of reference will automatically block messages sent from the server. That’s what had happened in this company’s situation.

If this has happened to you, what can you do about it?

The first thing to do is to check to see which blacklist your server is listed on. The easiest way to do this is use some of the available online tools:

• MXToolbox checks your IP address against 147 blacklists, and offers the option of sending a ping e-mail to its server — a super-easy way to lean whether you’re on a blacklist or not.
• Blacklistedip not only lets people know when they’re blacklisted, but helps track the issue that caused the blacklisting and assists with getting off the blacklist.
• Repcheck constantly monitors some 200 blacklists and alerts you if you get blacklisted.

So, what do you do if you find out you’re already on one or more blacklists? It’s not an easy problem to solve as each blacklist has a different procedure for requesting removal, so you’ll have to follow a different set of instructions for each list you’re on. A labourious task.

In addition you need to make sure you identify and solve the problem that causes you to be blacklisted in the first place before you ask to be taken off any list. In the case of the above company’s example; ceasing to use Outlook for sending out bulk email from their on mail server, will solve the issue.

Need to get off the blacklists?

Here are three of the most popular lists, but there are plenty of others:

• MAPS, now part of Trend Micro, offers both information on whether you’re blacklisted, and also threat analysis.
• SpamCop provides anti-spam software as well as its blacklist of spamming server IP addresses.
• The Spamhaus Project is an international, non-profit effort to combat spam.

If you want to benefit from e-mail marketing for your own business, then talk to us about using a dedicated, web based application like our SendMail product. It’ll keep you off the Spam lists and offers excellent subscriber management, tracking and reporting features.