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1. Subject Lines

The single most important way to ensure that your e-mail is effective is to have an accurate and descriptive subject line.  E-mail messages that either do not have a subject line or have a subject line that does not match the body of the e-mail are much less likely to be read. 

E-mail is for many people time consuming and tedious.  It is only now becoming a part of daily life for many but for many others, it has been a part of daily life for many years.  The longer you have an e-mail address, the more likely it becomes that your e-mail will fill up with dozens, perhaps even hundreds or thousands of e-mails every day.  Having a subject line that matches the message is absolutely essential to effective e-mail communication.

Put yourself in your recipient's place.  There you are faced with sorting through many dozens of e-mails every day and large portion of them have subject lines that do not match the body of the message.  The chances are that the recipient will lose the message amid the sea of e-mail or delete it based on the subject line.

Never respond to an automated e-mail directly.  The chances are that it will not be read.  Businesses use e-mail subscription lists to send newsletters, send announcements, and inform customers of product promotions.  Subscriber lists can easily number in the thousands, even the tens of thousands.

Here at BestInspectors.Net, when we send an e-mail to our subscribers, we get dozens of automated responses back from our subscribers.  We may send an e-mail with the subject line "12 Tips for More Effective E-mail" to 3,000 subscribers and we may get dozens or even hundreds of "Thank you for your e-mail" auto-responses.   Nestled among the hundreds of auto-responses, there will always be subscribers asking about the next online class, specials we are running, or even technical support questions.  We try to scan through the e-mails but because we are dealing with thousands of e-mails each week, the chances are very slim that we will see a message if it has a subject line that does not match the message.

2. Autoresponders

There are basically two types of auto-responders.

2.a First, there is the auto-responder that you use to acknowledge the receipt of an e-mail.  Autoresponders can be great tools when used properly.  A common use of this type of auto-responder is to notify senders that you are not available to read their e-mail when you are on vacation or away for the office for a few days. 

Limit the use of an auto-responder on your primary e-mail addresses.  The bad guys (spammers) use automated programs to find legitimate e-mail addresses that they can send junk mail to or that they can sell to other spammers.  Have a disposable temporary e-mail address that you can forward all e-mail to during your absence.  Have the disposable temporary e-mail address send the auto-response.  The bad guys will harvest the temporary e-mail address.  Your primary e-mail address will be protected. 

Don't use auto-responses as an everyday thing.  Autoreponses with messages such as "thank you for writing, I will get back to you as soon as I can" do very little to benefit you but they can do a great deal to cause trouble.  Every time a robot sends spam to you and your autoresponder sends a message back, the bad guys know that they have found a live e-mail.  They can then put you on the hot list to send spam to or sell your address to someone else.

Check your e-mail at least two times every day.  A timely personal response will be much more effective than an impersonal automated response.

2.b The other type of auto-responder is the type that you use to build a subscriber list.  For example, you may have received an e-mail telling you about this article.  We at BestInspectors.Net use an auto-responder service to manage our mailing lists. 

Auto-responders are a great way to maintain your relationship with your customers and real estate agents.  You can have the auto-responder send e-mails with home maintenance tips and notifications of promotions or new services that you offer.  Here at BestInspectors.Net, we use a service called GetResponse.  You can learn more about GetResponse here: http://www.inspectionworld.us/

3. Quotes

E-mail conversations are not in real-time so they should not be treated as though they are real-time conversations.  If your e-mail is part of an ongoing e-mail conversation always quote at least two or three of the most recent e-mails.  The farther apart in time the e-mails are spaced, the farther back you should quote earlier e-mails. 

Imagine that you open your e-mail and find a message such as this: "OK, but what about that other thing?"  You don't have the slightest idea what the person is talking about.  You may have read hundreds of e-mails since the last time you remember getting an e-mail from the sender.  How are you to know what the message is referring to?

Many people have multiple e-mail addresses.  You may use one e-mail address at your office and another at home.  carrying on an e-mail conversation from multiple addresses can cause even more confusion.  The natural first reaction of a of a person who has received what appears to be a non sequitur will be to sort e-mails based on the sender's address to see if the message is part of a forgotten e-mail conversation.  If the earlier e-mails had been sent from a different address, the thread is lost.  Quotes from earlier messages will allow the recipient to continue to follow the conversation. 

4. Spam Scores and Spam Triggers

Whenever you send an e-mail to someone, the chances are it will pass through at least one, possibly many, junk mail filters.  Junk mail is a major problem.  Some experts have estimated that as much as 90% of all Internet traffic is junk mail. 

The United States government passed the Controlling the Assault of Non-Solicited Pornography and Marketing Act in 2003 (commonly known as the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003).  As with other failed government attempts to control a problem by creating new laws, the CAN-SPAM Act inconveniences the good guys while the bad guys merrily go about their business of flooding e-mail boxes around the world with promises of found money being transferred from the estates of dead Nigerian kings, notices of lottery and sweepstakes winnings, and promises to improve your physical well being in a variety of ways.

The people who try to filter the junk make assumptions about e-mails and attempt to censor your e-mails.  Having words or phrases such as "Urgent", "Free", "Your Assistance is Needed", "Verify Your Identity", and "In the Name of the Lord" are almost certain to redirect an e-mail into the trash.

The junk mail filters are constantly changing.  It can be very difficult to understand why an e-mail you are trying to send is being given a Spam Score of 4.5 on a scale ranging from one to five.  Junk mail isn't the only problem.  The filters can be as much a problem as the junk mail.

Sadly, the only safe and sure thing to do is to turn off the junk filters and not use e-mail services that pre-filter your mail (see Tip #12).  As annoying as junk mail is, it is not as bad as losing an important e-mail from a customer.  

For more information about the CAN-SPAM Act of 2003:

http://www.ftc.gov/bcp/conline/pubs/buspubs/canspam.shtm

Note: See the update at the end of this article.

5.  Spelling

There is just no excuse for spelling errors.  Spelling errors send a powerfully negative message about you to the readers of your e-mail messages.

6. E-mailing Inspection Reports, Images and File Attachments

Home inspectors, real estate agents and homebuyers talk of "e-mailing" reports or photos but that is not what you actually want to do.  to be more accurate, what we mean when we say "e-mail" the report, we really mean "deliver the report electronically". 

E-mail is a very unreliable way to deliver reports.  However, you can e-mail a link to the report and have the actual report on your web server or another server such as RedDomains.com's Online File Folder.

Many e-mail services filter out images and file attachments.  Images and attached files can also use a great deal of the recipient's storage space.  Be mindful of the fact that neither you or the recipient have control over e-mail filters that may prevent your files from being delivered.  Also, be respectful of your recipients when sending files and images, especially large files and images. Even if the recipient can receive file attachments, attachments can quickly fill an e-mail box.

So, rather than attaching a large file to your e-mail, upload it to your web server or use a service such as RedDomains.com's Online File Folder.  Send only a link to the file, not the actual file.  Your recipient will be sure to get the file and you will not clog up your recipient's mailbox. 

Note: The following services are known to have reliability problems delivering file attachments,  and subscription e-mail: EmbarqMail (Embarq), EarthLink, Yahoo, Hotmail, AOL.

If you want to send or receive files, make purchases online, or subscribe to e-mail newsletters, it is highly recommended that you do NOT use any of the services listed above.  Some e-mail service providers often do not deliver e-mail because they filter  legitimate e-mail as junk mail without giving you an opportunity to see it to decide for yourself.

7. Short and to the Point

We have become a short-attention-span bullet-point society.  Keep your e-mail messages short and to the point.  Long e-mail messages are less likely to be read.  Important information could be missed.  The more you write, the less likely you are to be understood.  Most of us have not done enough writing since our school days to be skilled writers.  Long messages can lose the reader's attention and may  lead to confusion.

8. One topic at a time

This tip is closely related to Tips #1 and #7.  Do not cover more than one topic in an e-mail unless the message is very brief and the topics are related to one another.  If you need to write more than a few sentences on two or more unrelated topics, put topics in separate e-mail messages with subject lines that match the topics.

9.  CFD

The next time you see a funny e-mail and feel like sending it to everyone in your address book, DON'T DO IT!

Next to spam, unsolicited mail forwarded from friends and acquaintances is the biggest problem we face as business people who rely on effective use of e-mail.  In the mid 1980's in the FidoNet and UUPC days - long before the birth of the World Wide Web - I began having e-mail problems.  I had several FidoNet friends who could not resist forwarding every joke they heard to everyone on their e-mail lists. 

In an attempt to stem the flow of unwanted e-mails, I coined the term "Compulsive Forwarding Disorder" and began petitioning my fellow FidoNet users to ask permission before forwarding jokes and other frivolous stuff to others.  I tried to deliver a serious message in a light hearted way so that no one would be offended.  It didn't work.  The term CFD caught on almost instantly.  Within weeks it had become a permanent part of the FidoNet vocabulary.  Unfortunately, the problem continued to grow - and it hasn't stopped growing.

In 1985, there were fewer than one million people in the United States had an e-mail account.  By 1993, the year the WWW was born, 1.5 million people had e-mail.  Today, in 2008, a conservative estimate would be that approximately 200 million people in the United States alone have e-mail accounts.  According to an article published on NPR.org (http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=91366853), there are more than 200 BILLION e-mail messages sent every day!

Now, think about this.  If you send the next e-mail joke you get to only a few people and they each do the same thing the number of e-mails being sent daily grows exponentially.  If only two people forwarded the the e-mail to two other people, in thirty days, more than a Billion copies of the e-mail would sent on the thirtieth day (2^³⁰=1.07E+09). 

10.  Grammar errors

Yes, this is also in my list of report writing mistakes, my books and articles about report writing, and many of my business articles.   Here it is again.  The reason is simple.  The way you speak and write will influence the way others see you. 

Most of us do not think about grammar much in our daily lives.  How can we expect to know good grammar when every day we see serious errors of grammar in newspapers or hear bad grammar on radio and television?  Almost daily we hear or see constructions such as: “I seen”, “He done that”, “I should have went there”, “The house was inspected by John and myself” … 

Use "I" and "me" when referring to yourself.  Us the proper pronoun for the situation.  Do not use a reflexive pronoun such as "Myself" unless it is preceded by the noun or pronoun to which it refers (its antecedent) within the same clause!

"Myself" should not be used in place of the personal object pronoun "Me"  Don't ever use "Myself" in a sentence such as these:

"Please forward a copy of the inspection photos to myself".

"The home-buyer paid the WDI inspector and myself separately"

Sports writer Red Smith had this to say about "Myself":

"The pronoun "myself" is the refuge of idiots taught early in life that the pronoun "me" is a dirty word (Working with Words, 2nd ed., Brian Books and James Pinson, p. 21).

That may seem a harsh thing to say.  I am sorry if I or Red have have offended you but think of it this way.   Would you rather hear the truth from red and me or would you rather continue losing business because you you sound illiterate and pompous?

Make a small investment.  Buy a good book of common mistakes in grammar and usage.  It may very well be one of the best investments you can make.

11.  I, Me, We, Us

Home inspection is a business in which being personable is paramount.  Independent home inspectors who use "we" or "us" when referring to themselves sound silly and they diminish one of their best marketing features.  Big corporations try to look homespun by using phrases such as "homemade" or "hand crafted" to give the appearance that they are mom and pop or family owned and operated businesses. 

I cringe whenever I get an e-mail that says something along the lines of "WE will respond to your e-mail when WE return to the office".  Huh?  Is everyone out of the office at the same time?  Well, when everyone is really only one person, the answer is yes!  Would you expect to call general Motors and hear a a voice mail greeting announcing that WE are out of the office and will return ..."?  No, you would not!

12. E-mail Service Providers

This is your business, your livelihood.  Of all the tools you need to run your business, e-mail is one of the most important yet the least expensive.  This is not a place to cut corners.  There is simply no reason to use services such as Hotmail, AOL, Yahoo, Earthlink, and Gmail.

The free services tend to put severe restrictions on the e-mail.  They limit the size and types of file attachments and images.  They usually have junk mail filters that you cannot tailor to your specific needs.

E-mail accounts provided by ISPs tend to be more reliable and have more features than the free services but they still do not compare favorably with having your own e-mail account associated with your own domain name.

An e-mail account associated with your own domain name will not only provide you with better e-mail service, it will also make you and your business look more professional.  Personalized e-mail accounts that you have complete control over cost less than $1 a month. 

Tip 4 Update: Spam Score

A few weeks after I posted the 12 Tips I got an e-mail from a fellow I have been working with on a CD/DVD project.  One of my e-mails to him was flagged as spam.  The following the actual excerpt from his spam filter:

----------- Content Information -----------
This email was identified as spam because it exceeded the spam score threshold which is a weighted analysis of key words, phrases, and/or attributes of the email as often found in spam emails. Other attributes checked for and scored are the presence of external images (images on external servers), your user ID in the message body, and invisible ink.

Score = 8.4
Score Threshold = 6.5, or 30%
Scoring details:
are you (1 found x 0.70 points = 0.70 total)
benefits (2 found x 0.30 points = 0.60 total)
bigger (1 found x 0.50 points = 0.50 total)
DVD (3 found x 0.50 points = 1.50 total)
free (1 found x 0.20 points = 0.20 total)
help (1 found x 0.30 points = 0.30 total)
less than (1 found x 0.50 points = 0.50 total)
look like (1 found x 0.50 points = 0.50 total)
need to see (1 found x 1.30 points = 1.30 total)
right now (1 found x 0.80 points = 0.80 total)
to be (1 found x 0.30 points = 0.30 total)
you can (4 found x 0.30 points = 1.20 total)
26 of 1255 words found (2 %) are spam-like
 

As annoying as spam is, the cure is worse than the disease.  Governments need to step in and enforce the spam laws.  That is the only way the problem will go away.  The best thing you can do for now is to turn off the spam filters!

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