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Thanks for the Email

November 16th, 2021 by Kenneth Abrahams

Email is a fantastic tool and a great way to connect or keep in touch. It is also a colossal waste of time. Periodically, I go through both my emails and my junk folder just to see all the nonsense that people send me. I thought I would share bits and pieces with all of you.

Dear Business Owner of Funent.Com,
 
Sorry for the intrusion into your inbox, but I assume you are the one responsible for figuring out how to get new business at Funent.Com.

I get these all the time. You are selling a hi-tech service that you are trying to get me to buy, and you can’t even do a simple mail merge? Please notice the salutation, it isn’t Dear Ken, it’s Dear Business Owner of Funent.com. How do you know I am the business owner? Is it really possible for all of us to land on the front page of Google? Are you sending this to different types of businesses? Yes, I have a lot of questions. Also, don’t tell me you are sorry for the intrusion into my inbox, if you were truly sorry then you wouldn’t have sent it in the first place. If you are soliciting my business, why apologize? It is your job to try and connect with me. Did I email the person back? Of course I did, pointing out what I have commented on here and more. They said in the email they were looking forward to hearing from me. After my response, I’m not so sure about that.

 I receive several emails like the following 2 daily.

Mr. Mark Sedwill

Bureau of Automated Clearing House -

Department of Treasury's Fiscal Service Agency.

Brussell Belgium

Private email: [email protected]

Good Day

I was going through our last quarter clearing house of the year and found a file containing fund value EURЂ10.5Milllion been held in our escrow vault, hence the need for this correspondence. I would be delighted if you can partner with me to receive the fund for sharing, if you are interested kindly Send your full name and home address and telephone number, a copy of international passport or driver’s license to do the paperwork and I will guide you more.

May the peace of God be with you and your family. I know it will be a great surprise reading from me today but consider this a divine intervention as a pastor explained to my understanding. My name is Mrs. Stephanie Smith, a widow from Oklahoma USA and am writing you from my sick bed because I have been fighting cancer and the doctors says I have only few weeks left. I want to entrust my money ($8.5 million USD) to your care for charity purposes to help the less privileged as my late husband’s relatives want me dead so that they will claim all my late husband and I worked for.

All I need to do to become wealthy beyond my wildest dreams is to provide some information about myself like name, date of birth, social security information, valid address and a bit of banking information and I will be rich. What could possibly go wrong?

Somehow over time, I have gotten onto mailing lists for restaurant properties that are available, capital investment angels, HR Compliance newsletters for the hotel industry, assistance with PPP and small business loans and many others. Even just hitting delete takes time. There are a few tricks that I have developed with email that I am going to share with all of you. Hopefully, they will be more useful than what is above.

First off, don’t check your email first thing in the morning. Many people do this, and it is a big mistake. It means that right off the bat you are working on someone else’s priorities and not your own. Take a few minutes and get yourself set with the tasks for the day ahead. There may be a task or two that you need to accomplish before diving into your email account.

Use Unroll.me. This is a free service that helps you manage your emails. It takes some time to do the initial set up but after that it really helps. This wasn’t my discovery, I got the tip from Jill Konrath, https://www.jillkonrath.com/, well worth checking her information out if you are in sales. How Unroll.me works is that it identifies all the subscription emails that you are getting. During the setup phase it will ask you to do 1 of 3 things with them:

Keep them in your inbox,

Unsubscribe,

Or add them to your Unroll. The Unroll is a once daily email with all the correspondence from the organizations that you have added to your unroll.me.

There are days that I have 20 or more emails in that one document, but it is one document. If you are interested, then you can click on that email, and it will open. It is a huge time saver. To date, it has unsubscribed me from over 500 lists. Every quarter, I go through and look at all the new email lists I am on and either keep, unsubscribe, or put them on the unroll list.

If you are sending out emails, try and make sure that they are well written, provide value to your target audience, and are short. All of us are getting bombarded daily with a ridiculous number of emails and people are not reading them as carefully as they used to. This has gotten far worse during COVID. One other suggestion is to make sure that the subject is accurate, catchy, and short. Email is a great way to communicate. In many cases it is quick and provides a great paper trail that we can look back on if we have questions. Don’t abuse it. Remember that sometimes it is more effective to pick up the phone and have a conversation.

About the Author

Ken Abrahams is a phone guy. He was dragged, kicking and screaming, into the email age but has gotten used to it. Yes, he will always respond to emails, but If you want the most from him, phone is still best. Why the phone? It allows for a better exchange of ideas. Wishing you all beneficial communications.