By Katherine Andes
If you are under 30, you might not remember what a treat it used to be to get your daily mail. We actually got letters from people. A long distance phone call was expensive, so people still wrote to one another. And when you got a letter from someone special, you sat down, studied the return address, and carefully opened it.
You looked forward to what was going to be inside. Then you read it and reread it. When it was time to respond, you read it again and carefully wrote to the points in the letter.
It was a human interaction.
How many of us look forward to our mail today? If you’re like me, the recycling bin is your first stop on your way back into your house. I don’t even expect to find an interesting bit of correspondence from someone I care about.
But I do look forward to email. I do get email from people I care about. So I’m eager when I log onto the Internet.
That’s something to keep in mind when you prepare to write a business email solicitation. Sure people throw email solicitations into their trash bins, too, but they are more predisposed to open even a business solicitation for a couple of reasons.
First, it’s against the law to send solicitations to people unless they’ve signed up for it or have some sort of business relationship with you.
Second, they are in an eager state of mind when they sit down to the computer.
For these two reasons, you can be confident that your email solicitation has a chance of being opened and read.
TIP OF THE WEEK: Build on the predisposition of your prospects by making the voice of your email warm, friendly, and human. Cut out the corporate-speak and sales hype. It will make a world of difference in making your business emails successful.
Katherine Andes is a consultant who specializes in online SEO writing and landing pages — especially in the home improvement market. You can contact her at kathy@andesandassociates.com or visit her website AndesAndAssociates.com.