Despite what everyone is saying about the death of email because of social networking, email is still a critical component when it comes to marketing your work online. So are you putting your best foot forward in your emails? Or are you projecting yourself as unprofessional, amateurish, or even worse…rude in your email communications? Here are some tips to make your email communications as professional as possible.
1. Always email from your own domain- Be sure to get your own domain name, set up an email account, and send all of your emails from that domain. It looks a lot more professional than an Gmail or a Yahoo! account.
2. Be careful with humor and other hard to convey emotions in emails- Humor doesn’t translate well over email. People aren’t there to translate emotions from your face. So don’t attempt to be humorous or sarcastic in your business emails.
3. Get to the point- Businesses get a lot of email. Whoever you’re sending email to…make their job easier by getting right to the point. No long and rambling emails!
4. Ask before sending images- Sending a bunch of email slowing images of your work is one sure way to annoy whoever is receiving them. Before you send images of your work through email, ask if it’s okay and ask what format they should be in.
5. Optimize your images for email- Make sure the images you send through email are formatted (size, file size, file format) so they don’t clog up the recipient’s inbox. Here is a good article on how to properly format your images for your website and email.
6. Include a signature in your outgoing email- Make sure your signature has your name, company name, email, web address, and other important information and goes out with all of your outgoing email.
7. Spell check and grammar check…and leave the acronyms alone- Nothing screams unprofessional than an email filled with misspellings, grammar errors and acronyms like OMG and TTY.
8. Regularly check and answer your email- This should go without saying. Don’t give out an email address that you don’t check and answer on a regular basis.
9. Don’t email when a phone call or face to face contact would be better- You don’t have to conduct ALL of your business through email. If the situation is too complex for an email, pick up the phone…or if your contact is local, set up a meeting. Sometimes a phone call or a face-to-face meeting will do better than a long confusing email.
