How to Craft Warm Emails: Write Business Emails that get Opened and Read

How to Craft Warm Emails

Write Business Emails that get Opened and Read

Samwel Katambi

Published by Samwel Katambi at Smashwords

Copyright © 2016 Samwel Katambi

Cover and internal design copyright © Samwel Katambi

This book is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you’re reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to your favourite ebook retailer and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting the hard work of this author.

All brand names and product names used in this book are trademarks, registered trademarks, registered trademarks, or trade names of their respective holders. I’m not associated with any product or vendor in this book.

Website: http://www.samwelkatambi.com

Facebook: http://www.facebook.com/samwelkatambi

Twitter: http://www.twitter.com/katambis

Table of Contents

Introduction

Chapter One: Email is the Heart of your Business Communications

Chapter Two: Why Email is Important for the Success of your Business

Chapter Three: Email is a Conversation

Chapter Four: How to Use Email Effectively as a Communication Tool

Chapter Five: How to Send Email to the Right People

Chapter Six: Send Email only at the Right Time

Chapter Seven: Send Email Message with the Right Tone

Chapter Eight: Send Email Message for the Right Purpose

Chapter Nine: Write the Right Content on your Email Message

Chapter Ten: How to Write Effective Email Subject Lines

Chapter Eleven: Your Email Readers and How to write to them

Chapter Twelve: Start your Email Message with a Direct Opening

Chapter Thirteen: How to write a strong Email Message

Chapter Fourteen: How to write the body of your email message

Chapter Fifteen: Make your Message Unique for Each Reader

Chapter Sixteen: Proofread the message before you hit the send button

Chapter Seventeen: Use Email Cautiously

Chapter Eighteen: How and when to follow up an email message

Chapter Nineteen: Use Courtesy Copy and Blind Courtesy Copying Appropriately

Chapter Twenty: When to Forward an Email Message

Chapter Twenty One: When Not to Use Email in Your Business Communications

Chapter Twenty two: Be very careful with Attachments in an Email

Chapter Twenty Three: Understand the Impact of your Email Message to the Recipient

Chapter Twenty Four: How to Handle Email Effectively

Bonus Chapter One: How to do Text messaging in Business

Bonus Chapter Two: How to Conduct Productive Phone Conversations

Bonus Chapter Three: Where, when and what to say During a Phone Call

Bonus Chapter Four: Guidelines when Leaving and Receiving a Voicemail Message

About the author

Thank you

Introduction

In 1996, for the first time, more electronic mail was sent than postal mail in the U.S. Almost from its creation, email has been the most widely used medium of communication, and in that respect can claim to be the most important aspect of our business life. Email, text messaging, and mobile phone communications have been revolutionary in the world of business communication because information passes quickly along with instantaneous efficiency and effectiveness.

This is good news for businesspersons, entrepreneurs, and employers who are able to access business information from a computer, phone or PDA nearly anywhere to communicate with employees, potential customers and prospects. The use of email within a business greatly increase productivity for employees and increase sales from customers.

The success of your business in the information age depends much on how you communicate with clients and visitors. The de facto standard arena that you use to meet with visitors and clients is through written text on the web in the form of emails. But those emails need to be useful, timely, and presented in a way the impress people. They need to help readers achieve their goals.

If you don’t impress clients and prospects with your communication skills then you lose their trust and they will go away and will never come back. You have at most seven seconds to make a good first impression. That is right, 7 seconds only to make a potential customer or client decide if he/she is going to buy something or do business with you. This is because in business, your first impression set the tone for the rest of your relationship with your customers and clients.

This book gives you techniques, standards, rules and procedures of how to write effective emails. It also guide you on how to write business text messages as well as voicemail etiquette guidelines when communicating with customers, clients, work colleagues, and visitors in your business.

Improper or inappropriate writing of communication content for email and text messaging as well as ill preparation for phone call and voice mail channels can set a negative tone for your communications. As a bonus, I also show you how, when, and what to prepare and converse through voice mails and phone call channels in your business communication.

By understanding the standards, best practices, and proper ways of writing business communications, you can make an informed choice on what situation you should write and send email and phone messages; as well as what to say and not to say during phone and voice mail conversations.

I promise you the way you communicate in business will improve after reading this book.

Samwel Katambi

Author

Chapter One: Email is the Heart of your Business Communications

Email is not dead. Nor is it going to be.

There are a lot of experts out there who preaches that email is dead, or at least going to die, soon. But when you look at the numbers from various researches, you will find that email is actually growing in acceptance:

1. Because more and more email accounts are created every day.

2. Because of better technology.

3. Because of reliance of other services upon the medium of email.

4. Because of how people use it in business communications.

In fact, email is a vital link to people, retailers, businesses, freelancers and the information they want to receive. Businesses are using email now as one of the highest profit activity of all marketing channels.

And people’s habits conform to the fact that email is the most important thing in their lives. The first thing in the morning most people do is check their email, more than any other facet of online communications.

Figure 1.1 the first thing people do in the morning is checking emails before sipping coffee

People want to know and see what messages were received. They sit down and do business after they have checked their email. Generally, people check their emails to see what was received and what is important, the first thing in the morning, before they continue doing other things.

Because the progress of those things may depend on the information sent via email.

Some statistics to help you understand that email is a very big player in your business life:

1. 58% of people check their emails the first thing in the morning (source digital marketing platform Exact Target).

2. Email is a regular activity for 94% Americans according to The Pew Research Center's Internet & American Life Project. For the majority of Americans, email is a dominant activity when compared to everything else people do online.

3. People rely on email as one of the primary activities for their online behaviour and their needs for going about their day.

4. The direct marketing association says that email marketing has 2 times the return on investment as other online and offline marketing channels. It is estimated that for every dollar that is spent in email marketing there is at least $40 return on that investment.

This makes email one of the most profitable means of online and offline marketing, such as search engine marketing, social media marketing, display advertising, direct response advertising and offline advertising.

5. 77% of consumers prefers to receive permission-based marketing through their emails. The majority of people prefers to receive sales based emails, then getting sales messages through their social channels or other means.

Why?

Because people can control email easily – they can keep it, refer back to, print it off, it is much more involved and it is accessible. People tend to prefer that they receive marketing based emails rather than through social channels and other means (Exact Target).

The effect of mobile devices and smartphones

One thing that helps with the resurgence of email as a vital role in business communications is the explosion of mobile devices and smartphones.

One of two of your emails are probably opened on a mobile device. Just think of the ways that you use a mobile device. Such as staying in touch, finding out what is happening, etc. using a mobile device to do that has increased the amount of time that people check, use and access to their email.

So email, resurgence is certainly dependent upon the explosion of smartphones and mobile access.

Where does email fits in a large scheme of things of your business?

Let us compare emails and social media channels. Many social media gurus and experts says that email is dying. But when you look at the numbers you get a very different story.

When we look at email subscribers, every one online who uses email, 93% of email users are subscribed to at least one permission based email list. This is a list of people’s contacts managed by a company, which it can use to sell, promote, and educate their fans and customers. When you compare this to Facebook users, only 38% are fans or friends of a brand. And all of the Twitter users, only 5% are following a brand.

So you can see that just on the sheer amount of people, email by far has more people willing to receive marketing messages from brands and businesses than other media of communications. If you break down these statistics by age group you will discover that, email is still the preferred method of receiving marketing based messages.

Furthermore, if you forget your password or you need to access your facebook, twitter, or LinkedIn account, all of them still rely on email as the way to verify your account, sign up for an account and notify you on updates or information that is happening on your account. So even social media rely on email to communicate vital important information.

Email is multidimensional and multi-functional. You can do so many things through email. Everything from sending a marketing message, to a receipt, notification, to an invitation; email provide a number of functions that people expect to receive through that channel.

Because of email multi-functionality, it allow multiple ways of giving people the right message at the right time for the right purpose. It can be many things to many people. If you compare this to social media channels, people expect to receive messages in a certain format or certain way that has only specific information.

Email allows you to be much more creative and to touch people at different areas and different points within a sales cycle, lead cycle, and royalty cycle of your product or service. It is suffice to say email is everything a person needs in this digital life.

In the next chapter, you will learn how why email is important for the success of your business.

Chapter Two: Why Email is Important for the Success of your Business

Email, voice mails, phone calls and text messages are efficient communication tools that help you send quick business messages. Though you’re are used to sending and receiving messages via email or mobile phone text messaging, you have to know how to properly use these communication channels while communicating with clients or customers.

Writing business correspondence through email and text messages can be frustrating if you don’t know exactly what to say, what not to say and how to say it. You see, email and phone text messages have both advantages and disadvantages for the success of your business.

First, we need to analyses email and text messages separately from other business channels simply because they are the most used in today’s fast paced business world. What comes to your mind when you hear the word email? Is it something informal? Too many emails on your inbox? Easy way to send and receive messages? Intrusive and addictive? Too many advertisements? Annoying? Privacy breach?

Email communication channel is very crucial for your business and there are some statistics to prove that assertion:

 About 300 billion email messages are sent per day and the majority of email traffic comes from business email, which accounts for over 100 billion emails sent and received per day. 80% of those messages are spam.

 The average worker in business place spend about 30% of her/his workday managing email, which is about 2.5 hours a day for an 8 hours’ work time. 64% of people say they open an email based on the subject line.

 45% of email opens occurs on mobile, 36% on desktop and 19% in a webmail client.

 Daily people spend 9 minutes on email via a mobile device, which is 7.6% of the total 119 minutes we use our phone per day.

 71% of purchasing decisions are most influenced by mobile emails from companies.

 Radicati, a technology market research firm, estimates that by 2016, the number of email accounts in the universe will reach 4.3 billion.

 According to Experian, a global leader in consumer and business credit reporting and marketing services, for every $1 spent, $44.25 is the average return on email marketing investment.

All these statistics prove that there are opportunities for you to explore. So you need to know how to use email channel in your everyday business communications.

When email was new, it was taken for granted as a leisure activity of communicating with friends and colleagues due its informality and quickness. And many