Auntie Kate The Resale Expert

Today, we begin our latest one-week series on The Internet: It’s free, but do you get FULL VALUE? with the top 3 points to review about simple email.

1- Identify yourself in a professional manner.

When you set up your email, you may have been thinking of yourself as, well, yourself. So your comfortable old email address could be something like lassiesmeemaw@wherever.com or luvthemredsox@somewhereelse.com. That’s fine, but it does nothing to show your professional polish. Start another account that reflects your business. Include your business name in a variation as close to your web site’s URL as possible. Extra points for using the email address which promotes your business, like theboss@myshop.com (Something I need to get more consistent in, myself!) To learn how to redirect several email addresses to one mailbox, google email redirect or ask your web master.

2- Make your message readable and appealing

Don’t make your recipient have to work at reading your message. Use basic fonts and colors, forgo the free email services which place ads in your messages, and create and use a professional signature line, including a clickable link to your web site. BTW: if you’re wanting to send recipients to your Facebook page, use the URL for that. “Find us on Facebook”? Please. That’s like saying “Find us on the North American continent.” Make it easy to “find” you. Read more about signatures.

3- Double-check before sending

We’ve all sent emails too soon, before we proofread them for grammar, spelling, and above all, clear statement of what we wanted to say! Here’s the best tip I found about that:  Do NOT enter the recipient’s email (or simply enter your own) while you are composing it.  That way, you won’t hit that pesky “Send” button until it’s time! Also check whether the CC and BCC recipients are properly used. Read more about CC and BCC.

Read more about email for resale shops.

Bonus tip:

Ditch the weird characters: Ever wonder about those weird ? or other characters in email you’ve received? Like George?s wife? Here’s what happened:  if you used a word-processing program or if you copied-and-pasted text from the web, you possibly picked up some code you can’t see and your email service cannot interpret. To avoid this,  cut-and-paste your message into Notepad (which all computers have; I keep a shortcut to it on my desktop. MAC users’ equivalent is TextEdit) first, then block it again, copy, and paste into your email. Poof, weird characters avoided! Bonus resource about Gmail.

Later in this series, we’ll discuss Marketing through Email, so stay tuned!

Add your 2-cents' worth

This is just the 5-minute fix to getting more out of the way you use email. There’s lots more to learn, and perhaps you think I’ve left out something vital. Comment below to add what you’d include in this list!