So, I'm new to the Social Media/Email Blast world of promoting my new business. Yesterday, in the middle of sending out emails, I suddenly questioned two things that I was doing in the emails.
Adding Attachments...
How I was Signing off...
Attachments are important in this Digital age, simply because that is how we send third-party information. Instead of delivering catalogs in person, we now send just the Spec Sheets that are pertinent to the customers' needs. No longer is it necessary to have a bookshelf full of catalogs that are only 10% useful for us!
But with Phishing scams so prevalent nowadays, it suddenly occurred to me that, if I had received my email, I wouldn't open the attachment! So why would anybody else? Especially given the fact that most of these people did not know me, or perhaps we had met on LinkedIn. So instead of attaching information, I wrote "I have not attached any information because I don't want you to be afraid of a phishing scam. Please contact me if you desire more information." Now, the jury is still out on how many people will appreciate mind courtesy and actually follow up with me, but I feel that it was the correct thing to do.
The "Signing Off" portion was simpler, as I've always felt that some form of "Thank You" was an appropriate way to end an email. And to validate that point, I came across an article from Inc. Magazine that had been reposted in a blog by Mark Jewell. It quoted the software company Boomerang, "Emails where we detected a thankful closing saw a response rate of 62 percent. This compared to a response rate of 46 percent for emails without a thankful closing. Closing with an expression of gratitude thus correlated with a whopping 36 percent relative increase in average response rate compared to signing off another way..." which made me feel better about my simple "Thanks!", which is a standard part of my signature.
I think now that I'll tinker with it, and try using "Thank You for Your Time!", or something similar, because it seems to show more genuine appreciation for the time and effort taken to read my unsolicited email.
I only wish I could show that appreciation at the top of the email! Hmmm...I may be on to something here...!
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