Ever find yourself drowning in a sea of endless emails to read and send? Don’t worry; you are not the only one. According to a report by the McKinsey Global Institute and International Data Corp., emails take up 28 percent of an average workers’ time. That’s more than 2 hours wasted on reading and answering emails every day!
Believe it or not, the way you send emails can affect the number of responses you receive. Utilizing these few tips will prove that emails can be effective and efficient at your eyecare practice.
As you struggle to keep up with your emails, you can also expect the others to be dealing with the same problem. So keep your emails concise. To help with that, we discovered Shortmail, a service that gives you the convenience of emailing limited to 500 characters. There are no attachments, junk mail or folders to manage. Your message has to be short and to the point, making it easier for the reader and writer.
Including several topics on a single email does not necessarily mean that you are being more efficient just because you are sending fewer emails. Your reader might have skimmed the email quickly and left portions of the emails unaddressed. It may just be better sending two separate emails and getting the response you need rather than sending multiple emails back and forth about the same subject and dealing with delayed response time.
Round up emails also make it difficult to track different issues. You might find it harder to reference these emails in the future when the subject title does not match its content, which brings me to my other tip…
2. Be Smart About Subject Lines
Your subject line will determine whether your reader is going to read or toss your email into the trash. Label “Urgent” when necessary and give a clear idea on what the email is about. After going through a database of over five million emails, Boomerang compiled a list of best words to use in your subject line.
Use: Demo, Connect, Payments, Cancellation, Conference
Don’t use: Join, Confirm, Assistance, Invite, Social
Loading your message with words like “press” and “speaker” is not a good idea if you want a response, especially for email marketing campaigns, compared to using “apply” and “opportunity” which received more responses.
3. Make Sure Email Content is Reader-Friendly
Formatting is important to keep in mind when creating your email. While you might want to spice up your email with cool designs, make sure that it will be readable on various browsers and devices. Broken images and page breaks will result in readers unsubscribing to your content or receiving even more emails requesting to re-send the mail.
Flash and JavaScript are not mobile friendly and you should avoid using them. Email opened on mobile devices increased by 34 percent last year, so you can expect a large percentage of your patients viewing your important emails through a mobile device. Stick to using bold text, headers and images.
Use these simple tips for ECPs to change the way you send your emails and improve the efficiency of your practice! Do you have other tips to add to this list?
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Email makes communicating convenient and efficient, right? But do you ever feel like you have so much email, you'll never get through it all? If so, we can definitely relate! After all, there's a lot to deal with in emailing. Lengthy emails, Attachments, CC, BCC, Reply All, Fowards, Spam, Junk, Read Receipts, the list goes on! This is just the price we have to pay for the convenience of email, or is it? We found out about this snazzy new way to email called Shortmail that has the potential to change the email game as we know it. Basically, it gives you the convenience of emailing but cuts through the clutter. Emails on Shortmail are limited to 500 characters, there are no attachments, no junk mail, and no folders to manage. It even works with your SmartPhone. With only 500 characters, messages have to be short and to the point. Amazing! Check out their blog and you will be even more intrigued, we promise.
We love the idea of this cleaned up version of emailing because it's obviously aiming to make email more efficient, but we have to wonder, could we survive? It's like people who have been cancelling cable television in their houses. I mean, we're impressed, but the thought of actually doing it ourselves? It's enough to bring on a panic attack! All jokes aside, we are so incredibly reliant at VisionWeb on email, as we are sure everyone else is, that we don't know if it would work for us. But the allure of all that stripped down messaging is so appealing that we can't help but ponder the notion of a life with more concise email....
So, what about at your eye care practice? Does email play the same role for your office as it does for us? Could you truly make the switch to Shortmail, or have you already? Do you have some sort of policy in place for emailing that keeps it all manageable?
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We recently told you about a new movement in email known as "Shortmail", which is poised to change email as we know it, if we could actually make the switch. Jury is still out on that one... But! We found out about something that we can definitely do and we at VisionWeb couldn't wait to share - it's called "The Email Charter" and we think you will love it! "The Email Charter" is made up of 10 actions we can pledge to take that will help us save our eyecare practice inboxes!
The email charter says, and we agree, "We're drowning in email. And the many hours we spend on it are generating ever more work for our friends and colleagues. We can reverse this spiral only by mutual agreement. Hence this Charter..." It goes on to review the 10 Rules to Reverse the Email Spiral. We've selected a few of our favorites below:
Slash Surplus cc's
cc's are like mating bunnies. For every recipient you add, you are dramatically multiplying total response time. Not to be done lightly! When there are multiple recipients, please don't default to 'Reply All'. Maybe you only need to cc a couple of people on the original thread. Or none.
Tighten the Thread
Some emails depend for their meaning on context. Which means it's usually right to include the thread being responded to. But it's rare that a thread should extend to more than 3 emails. Before sending, cut what's not relevant. Or consider making a phone call instead.
Cut Contentless Responses
You don't need to reply to every email, especially not those that are themselves clear responses. An email saying "Thanks for your note. I'm in." does not need you to reply "Great." That just cost someone another 30 seconds.
You can read the full list and take the pledge here: http://www.emailcharter.org/. We've taken the pledge, will you?
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