Reminders About Email Etiquette 2004 by Keith P. Stieneke
webm...@opportunityassistance.com
Opportunity Assistance Business Resource Center -
Your resource center for work at home and business
opportunity assistance.
Before I precede any further on relating how to use email to
market I must suggest that you read through this short
course on email etiquette. The ideas presented here are
basics that all people involved in using email for marketing
purposes should adhere to.
NO SHOUTING!!!
When sending either personal or business related email you
should follow at the very least this primary rule of email
etiquette. Never use all capital letters especially in the
subject line of the message. This is also a good rule of
thumb to follow in the body of the message. The reason for
this is that the use of all capital letters in a word when
used in an email almost always denotes to the reader that
the sender is shouting at them. Do you get the same reaction
when reading READ THIS NOW as Read this now? The
capitalized version appears demanding while the second
version appears more as a plea.
Limit Emoticons
Another rule of thumb in following email etiquette is to
limit the use of emoticons, which are symbols such as a
colon and parentheses to denote a smiley face J or a sad
face L. Some programs such as Microsoft word actually turn
these characters into actual smiley faces or sad faces. Also
limit the use of such abbreviations as LOL, which stands
for laughing on line. Do not use these at all in first time
business or professional communications. After you have
established a regular communication with a person such as a
member of your network marketing organization it is okay to
use them sparingly.
Carbon Copy Versus Blind Carbon Copy
Almost all email programs allow for the use of carbon copy
and blind carbon copy formats. Both are for sending your
email message to more than one person. Using Carbon Copy
(Cc) allows the person's receiving the message to
view the other email addresses receiving the message. Blind
Carbon Copy or Bcc allows only one recipient name to be
seen. In business correspondence never place the additional
email addresses within the Carbon Copy Section. You do want
all of the recipient's to see the list of email
addresses that are being emailed. Place the addresses in the
Blind Carbon Copy (Bcc) section. Doing this will make the
addresses invisible to the recipients who receive your
message. Use your own email address in the basic To: section
of the email. The recipient will then see the message as
from you and to you.
The best reason for doing this in addition to the email
looking better is that no recipient can retrieve
another's email address. I've had many
instances where someone failed to follow this advice and the
results were disastrous because of the sheer volume of
email that resulted. Recipients hit reply all and sent their
offer to everyone and those receiving would do the same,
and this would keep happening. Then people would turn around
and hit reply all and ask "Please remove me from
this list" not realizing that "the
list" was nonexistent but rather someone not
following proper email etiquette. Not following this advice
results can lead to spam accusations if the originator of
the email can be traced!!!
Format Please
Another matter of email etiquette has to do with formatting
and will be covered again later in an article entitled
formatting phobias. That matter is that of keeping the
length of lines in your email to no more than 60 to 65
characters. If you do not do this then you run the risk of
the recipient receiving an unprofessional and messy email in
which a sentence extends all the way across the email
program's message box. This creates a situation in
which the recipient must not only scroll down to read the
message but must also scroll across in order to read each
sentence of the message. It creates additional time spent
for the recipient to read the email and therefore the
recipient may decide not to take the time to read it. In
addition if they try to print it for later reading the
sentences will be cut off on the right hand side of the
page. You should consider formatting long emails as a matter
of being polite so you don't waste the reader'
s time. One easy way to do this is to create your message
in a program like notepad and only hitting enter to create
paragraph breaks. Then copy the message and paste it in the
formatting box at
http://www.jbmckee.com/formatit/formatit.html, which is a
free email formatting utility
Don't Spam
The last matter of email etiquette that I will mention in
this article is that you should not ever spam. Do not by
lists of people's email addresses and blindly email
them. Spam is best known as junk email or by its other
moniker UCE that stands for Unsolicited Commercial Email.
There are several new rules covering email. The first of
these is that at the beginning of every email that is
commercial in nature the sender must state that the email is
of a commercial nature. They also must give an option to
opt out of future mailings. Also complete contact
information for the sender needs to be presented at the
bottom of the email. This means name, address, email address
and also the option of your phone number.
In summary I have covered four facets of email etiquette for
business, those being not to use all capital letters
because this denotes shouting, limiting the use of
emoticons, the importance of using the Bcc (Blind Carbon
Copy) when sending emails to more than one person, the
importance of formatting and steps to take so that your
email message is not breaking the rules set forth by
anti-spam laws.
-------------------------------------------------------------
Resource Box:
Keith P. Stieneke is a professional network marketer and
Internet marketing consultant with experience in psychology,
professional writing and network marketing. His Internet
endeavors can be witnessed at
http://www.opportunityassistance.com. You can subscribe to
his newsletter at
http://www.opportunityassistance.com/oaonline.html
************************************************************
This article can be republished as long as the title,
content of the message and resource box are included with
the article.