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How to Make Your Emails More Professional

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StrategyDriven Business Communications Article | How to Make Your Emails More ProfessionalRegardless of who you’re conversing with and who you’re having an email exchange with, it’s important you conduct yourself in a professional manner when using email. Making your emails professional looking will help you attract clients and keep existing ones and will also help your communication be far clearer and easier to understand when conveying information between team members.

There are many things you can do to keep your emails looking professional. Here are a few ways to do just that.

Use an Email Signature

An email signature is a great way to sign off on an email and make it appear organized, professional, and important. To make a great email signature, you can either create one yourself, or use many of the wonderful templates available on this email signature software for Office 365. A good signature should provide all the information an email recipient will need to contact you and connect and may include a name, job title, office number and business address.

Signatures can also be a good way to display a bit of personality and to display your brand in a better way. You can do this by making use of awesome themes, color schemes and fonts that convey your business or your own personal brand.

Avoid Grammar and Spelling Mistakes

There’s not many more worse email offenses than having spelling and grammar issues within the body of your message. This gives off the impression that you’re not professional and that you haven’t put enough effort into your correspondence to make sure everything is in order. A simple typo can easily be offensive and could make whoever you’re emailing with view you in a worse off light.

With tools such as Grammarly, making sure your emails are spelled correctly and formatted well is simple, as the application will scan through your email as you type it, highlighting potential issues. The premium version can also help you write to fit a certain tone of voice, which can be helpful when you’re dealing with different clients and people of different seniority.

Keep Things Short and Sweet

A professional email is one that gets straight to the details and isn’t overstuffed with pointless sentences and phrases. This is because saying the bare minimum will help to avoid misunderstandings as it keeps the content and the instructions within the email clear.

Of course, you’re allowed and are encouraged to ask how people are and be friendly, and it’s critical that you include all the relevant information, but you shouldn’t be writing essays for your emails. In addition, it’s also a good idea to have a line break between each paragraph, to make it even easier to digest.

Make Sure Your Email Address Is Suitable

If you’re using an email address that you created back in your early teens, then it might be worth evaluating it and making sure that it gives off a professional vibe. Too many working adults are using addresses like ‘[email protected]’ and it’s sending off a bad and childish impression. To ensure that you’re professional, change the email to simply your name.

3 Types Of Listening Skills That You Can Adopt For Your Next Conversation

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StrategyDriven Practices for Professionals Article | 3 Types Of Listening Skills That You Can Adopt For Your Next ConversationHave you ever been a part of a conversation where the other person constantly shuts you out? And they just won’t let you speak! Don’t worry; you’re not the only one. We all have had to go through people dominating conversations through combative listening. It’s not a pretty picture!

But what are your options? What is the best way to react? Should you be competitive too? Probably not. An active listener would be more likely to grasp what the person is saying and defend his point of view. Makes sense, no? Although it is difficult to apply in heated debates, with a little bit of practice, you’ll know what type of listener you need to be and in which situation. Here are a few that you may already be practicing but didn’t know about! Keep reading.

#1 Competitive Listening – The One Who Shuts Someone Down

Don’t you hate how your boss interrupts conversations to emphasize his point of view? Well, it’s a type of listening skill. Instead of listening to the other person, this model involves pushing your opinion onto someone else. Whether arguing with your spouse or friend, you may have realized that you have been doing this as well. Sometimes, we jump in to say what our opinion is and make a point. This type of listening is predominant when someone wants to list the flaws or drawbacks of the other person’s argument.

One can but not necessarily should apply this to have the upper hand during a negotiation. You may have realized that when you are being a competitive listener, you may indulge yourself a little too much and have a closed mind about everything else. Which isn’t ideal – especially during conversations with important people.

#2 Reflective Listening – The One Who Is An Active Participant

The best kind of conversations are those when someone is actively listening and responding to you. This is known as active listening since a huge part of it includes listening to the other person’s side of the story. It’s necessary to be patient and reflective since hearing alone does not do the job.

Remember when your spouse told you that they would be late for dinner tonight? But you were glued to the television! You may have heard it, but did you listen? If you listened, you would have responded and asked questions or given an opinion. So, it’s necessary for both people to be interested and intrigued while this takes place. Interactive conversations can lead to discoveries about oneself and the people around you. Any conversation can become an intense one. Like an adventure ride. So push beyond your comfort zone and activate your ear lobes. This conversation is going to be a thrilling one!

#3 Passive Listening – One-Sided Conversations

Some people simply like to listen. They are attentive listeners and are absorbing all the information they get with every passing minute. However, this can get monotonous for the other person if it’s a long conversation. Although ideal when you want to pay attention to someone, you may use this while someone is giving a lecture, a talk, or narrating their experiences.

Rather than being reflective, you would want to listen with utmost curiosity and be 100 percent engrossed in the smooth-flowing conversation.

Here, unlike when you’re actively listening, even if you agree with the other individual, you’re not doing so vocally. This can be a good practice to understand what someone is saying, instead of trying to put your point across.

Conclusion

There you go, those were the three different types of listening skills that you probably didn’t know about. We all use these at different points in our conversations throughout the day. Sometimes you can be an active listener with your friend but a passive listener with your boss and a competitive listener with your partner!

How Transparency Can Benefit Your Organization

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StrategyDriven Business Communications Article | How Transparency Can Benefit Your OrganizationTransparency in communication has become more common in all sorts of enterprises. In the nonprofit and responsible profit sector, candor and authenticity are considered high value. Customer loyalty tends to increase when there’s an emphasis on transparency. Leveraging the power of a good story, transparency is a positive alternative to a competitive, secretive attitude; it’s a more compassionate way to function. For stakeholders, trust is a major issue; transparency helps facilitate it. Consider several ways that transparency can benefit your organization.

Relationships With Investors

If you’re building a relationship with a possible investor, increasing the trust level can be facilitated with the wise use of transparency. There’s a good bit of competition for funding, and investors want to recoup their money as soon as possible. It may be daunting to decide how you want to present your brand story; the assistance of professionals such as PR firms in Portland Oregon can get you started in the right direction. Judicious transparency indicates that you’ll be honest and thorough with your business plan and consistently keep investors in the loop.

Community Trust

In this case, your “community” is everyone you come into contact with — it’s not only a geographical designation. Transparency is all about awareness of the social norms of your customers and stakeholders while having sincere communication content and style. While it’s important to have a reputation for honesty and integrity as sort of a baseline, portraying an image of absolute perfection is unsustainable, unrealistic, and may backfire. Keep it real by being straightforward about the bumps along the way, and describing how you’re overcoming them.

Employee Morale

As you build your organization, transparency with employees is a valuable investment, especially in the early stages. Higher productivity, more confidence and creativity, and less turnover are associated with greater transparency. You’ll also build your word-of-mouth reputation in the professional community.

Customer Relations

Customer confidence starts from a foundation of trust, and transparency helps build it — particularly if you’re a human service provider. Firms like a healthcare PR company Portland can help you craft your message so it resonates with customers. Your organization gains credibility if customers see moments of vulnerability within a framework of integrity and commitment.

Depending on your type of organization, there are many ways to be transparent and professional. Take a look at similar businesses and see how they’re effectively weaving transparency into their stories, and mine your own experiences to craft a compelling message.

Reasons to Have a Newsletter

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Although social media marketing is having its moment in the spotlight right now, email marketing is still very much a relevant and a powerful tool for your business to utilise. One way you can really take advantage of email marketing is via a newsletter, something which appears to be a dying trend.

When you consider just how many of us use email and have access to it around-the-clock through our smartphones, you start to see the raw potential of properly using email marketing to reach your customers and subscribers. Although you may be sitting on the fence, unsure whether or not to create a newsletter, we recommend that you just go ahead and do it – you have nothing to lose and it is really something that can pay off.

If you are unsure how to create a newsletter, there are plenty of guides available online which can help you from beginning to end, regardless of your skill level or experience. Creating a newsletter is very simple and you can have one ready to go in virtually no time. If you are still unsure, read on to learn just how beneficial a newsletter can be for your business or brand.

#1: Newsletters Drive Conversions & Sales

It’s very easy to understand just how email marketing and newsletters are effective when it comes to driving up sales. When a subscriber opens one of your emails, you have a golden opportunity to make the sale right there and then — you already have the recipient’s attention and you need to take advantage of this moment to describe the product or service, explain its benefits, and entice them to make a purchase.

As we all know too well, human beings are impulsive creatures and by including incentives such as a coupon, promotion or special offer in a newsletter, you can easily convince somebody to make a purchase. If statistics are anything to go by – where 7 in 10 adults make use of a coupon or discount from a marketing email or where over 40% of email recipients make at least one purchase per year based on an email – there is no doubt that newsletters can have a dramatic impact on your sales.

#2: Newsletters Create Connections

Although you may not believe so, consumers actually want to receive promotional emails from their favourite brands; many consumers go out of their way to sign up for promotional emails. By creating a newsletter which is interesting and engaging, you enable your subscribers to connect with your brand or business on a personal level.

Email marketing and newsletters are about more than just making sales, they are about providing value and utility beyond sales and profits by sending customers interesting, well-thought-out email newsletters with which they can resonate. By building bridges and connections with your customers, you establish brand loyalty, something which, in the long-term, can spur growth.

At the end of the day, your customers buy from you because they are loyal to your brand and can trust you, a trust which is established through building connections with customers.

#3: Newsletters Boost Website Traffic & Social Media Followings

In your email newsletter, you can add social sharing buttons for sites such as Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and Pinterest. As you are likely aware, these social media channels are vital to your overall marketing strategy yet growing them can be something of a challenge. Email newsletters are very effective at helping you build up your social media following. For the most part, merely having these social buttons there can be enticing enough to encourage people to follow your social media pages, however, drawing your newsletter to a close with a discussion involving your social media channels can be another way to entice your subscribers to like and follow your pages.

Not only this, but your email newsletter can play a major role in boosting overall traffic to your website or online store. If you want people to come and visit your website, peruse through your catalogue and, ultimately, make a purchase, you need to invite and encourage people to do just that. There are multiple ways you can go about this, including promotional incentives, calls to action and targeted emails.

Although email newsletters have become something of a dying trend with the onset of social media marketing, it is important to recognise the important role they still play for online businesses, especially small-to-medium sized ones which do not yet have much of a substantive following.

Newsletters are a simple way to engage the customers and subscribers you currently have and encourage them to share your business or brand and, ultimately, come back for more. It’s very easy to create an emotive and engaging newsletter which encourages a response from its recipient, and every business should be sending email newsletters often.

Effective Communication For Your Small Business

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Being able to communicate effectively is one of the most important skills you need to have as a business owner. Every element of what you do is based on some form of communication, whether it’s with suppliers, staff or customers. Communication takes many different forms as well, including face to face, letter, email, phone call, video link, text messaging and collaborative online groups. Mastering the skills to be effective in all these formats and with a diverse range of people can be a challenge, as they all require a different approach to work well. Examining the communications generated by your business is well worth your time, and improving both your own and your team’s communication skills will have a significant impact on your success.

Being able to say what you mean

One of the problems with effective communication is the common situation where you think you’ve said one thing, but the recipient understands what you’ve said as something entirely different. Ensuring absolute clarity in terms of what you provide, and the message you are trying to send is paramount for any business. Understanding what you can offer so, you can present this to your customers in a concise manner is always worth establishing early on. Clear communication and an obvious understanding can be misconstrued if you stray too far in terms of your creative energies. This will especially be the case if you, understandably, have in-depth knowledge of what you’re offering, and may forget that some people aren’t familiar with what you are offering and are finding out about your business for the first time. The first rule of communication is to make sure that what you think you’re saying, is what the person you’re communicating with thinks you’re saying too!

Civil discourse can be defined as respectful conversation, wherein each participant is felt to be heard and respected. In the context of a small business setting, civil discourse is an essential tool for effective communication. By fostering civil discourse definition in conversation, small businesses ensure that their employees feel like their voice is being heard. This not only creates a positive work environment but encourages problem-solving and collaboration. Civil discourse also allows small businesses to express what they mean clearly and concisely, so there is less chance for misunderstandings or disagreements.

Clarity and conciseness

The simpler your message, the more easily it will be understood. Adding lots of unnecessary text to a marketing campaign or an email will just put people off reading it because with so many emails being received every day, it’s only the important ones and the ones that catch your eye that you’ll bother to read. Make it crystal clear what your message is in the plainest language you can, without leaving anything important out.

Construct your message around the key facts, dates, times, prices, product details, whatever the essential information might be in your case, then add your call to action. Leading with a lengthy paragraph about how excited you are to be launching a new product will leave readers cold, but if you have a headline at the top of your message that is short and snappy. This way you’ve hooked them straight away, and then you can follow up with the essential details. Linking through to in-depth information is fine because readers can choose whether to read more or not, but you don’t want to have pages of writing obscuring the vital initial message.


Quality

Seeing poorly written posts, emails and web content is very off-putting. It speaks of a lack of care, of there not being attention to detail, and comes across as being unprofessional. When buyers are looking for products and services, they want to feel they can trust the supplier, which means they need to be demonstrating their care and attention, and the overall quality of the work they do.

Having well-written content on your site is also important for boosting your search engine rankings, as the quality of articles is one of the factors used by search engine algorithms to determine how far up the list of results your site will appear. The odd typo won’t be a deal breaker, but frequent mistakes, badly written sentences and content that is more filler than helpful article will all lead people to believe your business is of equally poor quality. Writing well is not a skill that comes naturally to everyone, and if you struggle with writing articles for your website or posts for your blog, you need to either improve your own writing or find someone who can do a better job. You might have someone on your team who would be better suited to the role of writer, or you could outsource your content writing. There is an army of highly skilled freelancers available that you can hire, and it’s worth finding out more info on how to engage them and what rates you’ll be paying.

Consistency

Communication needs to be consistent to be effective. Don’t start a blog and then forget to post for months on end; you need to communicate regularly, and the most effective frequency can differ according to the mode of communication used. Tweets, for example, are best posted daily, but you might want to do Facebook posts every other day, or three days a week. You don’t want there to be a bombardment of information, or you will be seen as a nuisance; but if you don’t communicate regularly, people will either forget about you or think you aren’t reliable. If you’re looking at maintaining a valuable online presence you need to be using a scheduling tool that will send posts out for you to all or some of your accounts, and have the ability to send posts out at allotted times, so you are never late and don’t miss days because you haven’t had time.

Communication skills can be learned, and indeed training should be considered as mandatory for your team. So much depends upon your ability to communicate effectively, and very often the lack of clear, positive communication results in missed opportunities and lost sales. If you can’t make clear what you’re selling or promoting, or if your message is delivered using poorly constructed sentences with misspellings and grammatical errors, your communication efforts will have been largely wasted. No matter how brilliant your company, your product or your service, unless you can tell people what you do in a way that they understand and that appeals to them, you will fail to get the message across. Look at the effectiveness of your own communications and see how you could improve them going forward.