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Avoiding Stupid Email Mistakes #2

May 20, 2009 I recently worked on a client's e-newsletter that made a point that stuck me right in the gut. He was writing about the printing business, but his point applies to all businesses. He writes:

If sales are about relationships, I’ve never understood why I see so many [your industry]'s websites that lack any type of personal feel. They contain no mention of a person’s name, no pictures other than stock art or pictures of their [equipment], and for the contact info, they either have a form they expect you to fill out (big mistake) or generic links such as sales@abcprint.com.
 
Print buying guru Margie Dana of Boston Print Buyers discussed this in one of her newsletters. As a print buyer, Margie says, she wants to know who is in charge. People want to feel some form of personal connection to the company they do business with.

This starts with naming names—preferably those high up in your company. To repeat what I’ve said many times in the past, people are always impressed when they feel some type of connection or access to the CEO, president, or other company executive. Having a message from this person and being able to contact him or her directly is a highly effective way of fostering trust.
 
Your website should also be viewed as a one-to-one conversation with your best client. If you keep that in mind when developing and reviewing your web content, it will further increase your website’s effectiveness at fostering sales relationships.

I read this post and I marveled. How easy it is to overlook such simple things! I have two websites, Digital Printing Reports and Strong Tower Publishing. In both cases, the contact email is info@. I'd selected it because, well, isn't that what everybody else does? Isn't that the "professional" way to do it?

In reality, people purchase reports from Digital Printing Reports, not because of the company name, but because of my own personal brand. They purchase reports from me. My contact email should be heidi@digitalprintingreports.com.

On the Strong Tower Publishing side, people don't want to talk to "info." It implies that the email goes into an inbox somewhere in the bowels of a large publishing company, never to be seen again. Is that really the image I want to project? Wouldn't it be better to have two inboxes — editor@strongtowerpublishing.com for editorial requests and publisher@strongtowerpublishing.com for manuscript submission requests?

What simple changes these would be, and yet, how powerful. I think about my own feelings about sending emails to a company inbox. I hate info@ and contact@ addresses. I figure that, once I send them, the request is lost forever. I may as well put a message in a bottle and toss it into the sea. Yet, I chose those same addresses for my own business out of habit.

Time to change my email addresses.

Thanks to Patrick Whelan of Great Reach Communications for his terrific post.

Have questions? Comments? I'd love to hear from you. You can email me at info@digitalprintingreports.com. For more information on primers for marketers and small businesses on digital, 1:1, Web-to-print, and personalized URL applications, visit Digital Printing Reports. You can also keep up with all of my posts on EBS, The Inspired Economist ("Greening Print Marketing"), and other blog sites by following me on Twitter.

Posted by Heidi Tolliver Nigro on May 20, 2009 | Comments (0)