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Email is awfully invasive, no way around it these days, but it’s also awfully effective for all types of communication and response.
One of the ways that I’ve found to get a little bit of control over the beast, while also making sure that my responses are well crafted, is to pre-write email responses to many of the common requests I receive. The idea here is to write emails that contain powerful marketing messages while you have the time and mindset to do so and not in a quick response. These types of marketing messages can allow you to send consistently well-written messages without the temptation to drop in to shorthand. (nbd;) is only acceptable if you are a teenager marketing to another teenager.)
- You can create a list of typical responses to requests for:
- Product or service information
- Guarantee and warranty information
- Sales terms and pricing
- Special offers and bonus offerings
- Glad to meet you at the networking event
- I would like to introduce you to a strategic partner
- Please consider a joint venture
- I’m looking for one more great salesperson
The list could go on and on dependent upon the types of emails you write most often.(I get asked for certain links to resources all the time, so I automate those replies.) There are lots of options for autoresponder types of campaigns that send out emails in response to a question, but in this case, I’m talking about more of the 1-to-1 communication that you do all day long. These emails are not robotic cut and paste marketing messages as much as they are meant to be templates that you can start with knowing that you have a well-written message that only needs a little tweak here and there to personalize and send.
I use a little scripting automation program called Quickeys to program pre-written text into key combination shortcuts - so my “thanks for doing so and so” email is completed in response to ctrl+d or some combination of shortcuts you assign. There is a Mac and PC version available.
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This entry was posted on Wednesday, November 14th, 2007 at Nov 14, 07 | 6:03 am and is filed under email marketing. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
For those of use who use Thunderbird, there’s a great extension for this called Quicktext:
http://extensions.hesslow.se/extension/4/Quicktext/
Hi John,
For Mac users you might take a look at TextExpander by “Smile on my mac”. I have no affiliation with the company other then being a happy customer. Anyhow, instead of being limited by the number of “snippets” of text by ctrl+[key], textexpander “expands” small text phrases into larger ones. So for instance, some people have trouble entering their credit card into Heap CRM (it’s the number one question). So instead of typing out the instructions each time I just type “heapcreditcard” and textexpander puts in a very descriptive three paragraphs.
Anyhow I have about 200 of these little snippets for e-mail and they speed up the process dramatically.
[…] I use a Mac and love TextExpander for this task. Windows users, you might take a look at this solution from Lifehacker. There’s also a program with both PC and Mac versions called QuicKeys. I haven’t tried it but Duct Tape Marketing’s John Jantsch swears by it in an article I recommend for further reading: Pre-written Emails to the Rescue. […]