Respect Your Email: Add Value When You Touch It

This is the third installment in the three-part series “Stop the Madness: Manage Email to Grow Your Business”

Here’s one technique for bolstering yourself against the notion that email is your daily death sentence:

Put a premium on the time you spend with it.

In yesterday’s installment of this series, I suggested that you put tools into your ecosystem that enable you disconnect from the email minutiae. Today, I’m saying that when you do dedicate time to email, make certain that you’re adding value in the following ways:

Your personal brand: In the first post of this series, I talked about the branding that’s inherent in email communication. Now we’re one level up. When I send an email, I’m cognizant of the fact that I’m conveying character traits with each sentence. If I want the reader to know that customer service is of the utmost importance, then I’m going to write with a tone of compassion and invitation — regardless of the topic. Remember that for the most part we’ve given away messages of a conveyor built nature, or those manageable with a template.

Your organization’s brand: What are the most important things to your business? Beyond standard branding, what can you do to separate yourself from the pack? AtPalo Alto Software we brand ourselves with response time. We are in the process of developing a badge you’ll be able to attach to your website that will indicate how long a customer can expect to wait for an email response to their inquiry. Would you be willing to use that?

Your time: Based on the parameters we’ve set for your email engagement, the time you’re going to spend with it from now on will be as valuable as other components of your day.

Your end goal: There are varying goal levels associated with operating a business, from completing a feature update to putting together a marketing presentation. But what’s the goal behind that? And the one behind that? Making money? Helping people? How can email support that effort?

Email can speak to each level of your business. It’s got a voice for administration; one for marketing; one for IT; and so on. When you pour in the appropriate value, it’s nimble enough to make all the difference.