Surprisingly, many people, when they need to send an email to several people at once, simply list the addresses in the "To" field, this is normal when this email is addressed to your colleagues or friends, but when sending letters to a group of clients, you are thus showing everyone addresses of other recipients, essentially revealing your address base.
All your clients need to do is forward this letter to your competitor and your contacts will immediately leak.
It’s strange, but many far from stupid people are surprised to learn that if you need to send a letter to many recipients so that they do not know about each other, then there is a “Bcc” field for this.
For example, for mail.ru it will look like this:
And so once again briefly:indicated the addresses in “to” - everyone can see to whom you sent the letters, indicated in “blind carbon copy” - everyone thinks that the letter is only for him.
And each recipient will receive a letter where in the “to” field there will be just his address . For other programs, if you can't find where to BCC, ask someone to show you. Another small point, you must specify one address in the “to” field; most programs or mail servers will not allow you to send a letter without this parameter.
And so, when it comes to sending out offers, news to a group of your clients - here the practice of using blind copy is clear, you must hide your address base. An interesting point about sending a letter to your colleagues, here it is recommended to act according to the situation, for example, sending a letter with a request to send suggestions (for example, to improve customer service) and if each colleague sees that other people have received the same letter, then most likely they will not respond - will rely on others, which means you need to use a hidden copy. If this order is carried out, then, for example, indicating your colleague’s boss will simply work wonders, and your order will be carried out.
A separate issue with suppliers. On the one hand, indicating all recipients in the copy should show the supplier that you have a choice and he should offer you good prices. On the other hand, the manager who received your letter, seeing that it was sent not only to him, will most likely treat your request “coolly”. Personally, in my opinion, I think that in the case of suppliers, it is necessary to use a hidden copy, at least to protect trade secrets, but more likely for a good relationship with the supplier’s manager.
You can read a recent case of a specialist’s mistake, when all recipients saw other recipients: Smacks to everyone in this chat, there were really respectable people there - directors, but still many received spam in response.
Well, as always, discussion in the comments is welcome.
We send dozens of emails every day. Sometimes these are very short messages, for example: “Shall we go to lunch?” Sometimes - with the help of which you present your business or website. When there are a lot of letters and little time, we begin to rush and make mistakes. Usually trivial, like a typo, but sometimes things happen that can seriously damage your reputation and spoil your relationship with a client or employee.
This can be avoided, you just need to be collected and know about some pitfalls. Here are the most common mistakes made when sending emails. Read carefully and remember that you first need to take a short pause, check if everything is in order, and only then click on the “Send” button.
The most common and most unpleasant mistake. Imagine you want to send rather personal photos to a friend, but you automatically type the address of your boss or customer. And only after the letter has left do you realize with horror what has just happened. If it's any consolation, each of us has found ourselves in this situation at least once in our lives: lawyers sent confidential documents to the opposite party, designers sent website layouts to the wrong client, etc. But when this happens to us, it seems that the ground disappears from under our feet.
Fortunately, many email services, for example Gmail, have a function. Turn it on and specify a large time interval - it’s quieter, you know.
You wrote that a certain file was attached to the letter, but you forgot to attach it. Another common mistake that often leads to misunderstandings and apologies. On the one hand, it’s okay, no one is perfect, but it’s better to check everything first and only then send the letter. And to avoid questions from the recipient, we recommend listing all attached files directly in the body of the letter. For example, like this:
Hello, Maxim! I am sending you several files, they are attached:
Service Agreement
GIF with a cat
They greet you, as you remember, by their clothes. If you want to prevent your email from making you want to immediately delete it, work on its form. They say you need to devote as much time to it as to the content. Fortunately, today it's easy. To do this, we recommend using the Wix ShoutOut application, selecting a suitable template and adding your text to it. No special knowledge is required, just make sure everything looks neat and beautiful. By the way, a good newsletter has its own secrets and rules, so we recommend reading our email marketing director. Don't thank me.
The subject of the letter performs approximately the same role as the title of the text. It appears next to your name, the recipient sees it and understands what you sent him: an invoice, meeting results, job offer, website layout, etc. Remember that the topic must be clearly formulated so that if necessary, a person will quickly find your letter, and convincing so that he becomes interested, if we are talking about, say, a newsletter. Not long ago we wrote about how, if you have forgotten, it’s worth re-reading.
If you like to write letters in text editors, then save often, otherwise you will end up writing a letter all day, and then suddenly the computer freezes and everything is lost. Or write directly to postal service- then all your sketches will be automatically saved in the “Drafts” folder.
Politeness in correspondence is no less important than in life. Here are the basic rules that must be followed by everyone:
Always thank the sender for the letter, especially if you see that he did a good job. Remember when we were all taught “magic” words as children? Let's not forget them, even though we are adults.
Stay calm, even if the matter is extremely urgent and important. Nervousness and reproaches will definitely not lead to anything good.
Begin and end your letter with common phrases. The degree of formality will depend on who you are corresponding with. If this is your boss or just an official person, do not use “Hello”, “Bye” or “Kisses”. And vice versa, if you are writing to a colleague or friend, you can do without the traditional “Sincerely.”
Typos can ruin the whole impression, so carefully re-read the written letter, preferably several times. If you have any doubts about spelling or syntax, go to Gramota.ru. It’s better to measure seven times, that is, check, than then apologize for typos and prove that you are actually literate.
And by the way: if you are afraid of accidentally sending an unfinished letter, first write the entire text in full, and only then type the recipient’s address.
Let's figure out who might actually receive your letter. The To field is the primary recipient. Field "Ss" - the person who will receive the copy. He is not directly related to the issue being discussed, but wants or needs to be aware. The "Bcc" field is the hidden recipients. You add them, but the primary recipient doesn't see them. And here you need to be careful: you can confuse Cc and Bcc, and then the recipient will think that he is being spied on.
Keep in mind that it is important for some people to be aware of what is happening. You don’t want to listen to reproaches about “How could you not add me to the copy?! I worked on this project for two months!” If in doubt, add everyone who has anything to do with the question. Maybe not everyone will be happy that they are being distracted, but there will be no complaints against you.
What is email? In the modern business world this is:
From this perspective, let’s look at working with email. Let's start with something simple.
I use the Mozilla Thunderbird email client, so I will use it as an example. Let's create a new letter and go from top to bottom through the list of fields.
Some may not know, but "To" in Mozilla can be changed to "Cc" or "Bcc".
Wrong in mass mailings, indicate recipients using the “Copy” or “To” fields. Several times a year I receive letters that list 50–90 recipients in the “Cc” field. There is a violation of privacy. Not all of your recipients need to know who else you are working with on a similar topic. It’s good if these are people who know each other. What if there are competing companies on the list that don’t know about each other? At a minimum, you need to be prepared for unnecessary explanations, and at maximum, to terminate cooperation with one of them. Don't do that.
Professional mailing services often write (sometimes sensibly) about the importance of the email subject line on their corporate blogs. But most often we are talking about sales letters, where the subject of the letter solves the problem “the email should be opened.”
We are discussing daily business correspondence. Here the theme solves the problem “the letter and its author should be easily identified and then found.” Moreover, your diligence will return to you in the form of karma of numerous response letters, only with prefixes Re: or FWD, among which you will have to look for the desired letter on the topic.
Twenty letters is the volume of one-day correspondence for a middle manager. I’m not talking about entrepreneurs and business owners at all; their number of letters sometimes goes off scale at 200 or more per day. Therefore once again: do not send emails with an empty subject.
So, how to formulate the subject line of an email correctly?
Mistake #1 : Only the company name in the subject. For example, “Sky” and that’s it. Firstly, you are probably not the only one from your company communicating with this counterparty. Secondly, such a topic does not bring any meaning, because the name of your company is already visible from the address. Thirdly, guess what your own mailbox will look like with this approach to correspondence? Something like this.
Is it convenient to search on such topics?
Mistake #2 : flashy, selling headline. It's great if you know how to write such headlines. But is it appropriate to use these skills in business correspondence? Remember the purpose of a business email subject line: not to sell, but to provide identification and search.
There are many writing guides for different occasions. For example, Maxim Ilyakhov, Alexander Amzin and other masters of words have a lot of useful information. I advise you to read their articles, at least to improve general literacy and improve the overall style of written speech.
In the process of writing a letter, we must make several decisions sequentially.
A matter of politeness . At the beginning of the letter, you can blur into pleasantries or even tenderness in the spirit of “My dear Rodya, it’s been more than two months since I talked to you in writing, from which I myself suffered and even didn’t sleep some nights, thinking.” Very polite and very costly, both in terms of time to write such an introduction, and in terms of the interlocutor’s time to read it. Correspondence is business, remember? Not an essay in the epistolary genre for a competition or a letter to Raskolnikov’s mother, but business correspondence.
We respect our time and the recipient's!
It only makes sense to introduce yourself and recall the circumstances of your acquaintance in the first letter sent after a fleeting meeting at an exhibition. If this is a continuation of cooperation or ongoing correspondence, in the first letter of the day we write: “Hello, Ivan”, in the second and subsequent ones: “Ivan, ...”.
Appeal . I have always been concerned about the question of who to address in a letter if there are several recipients. Recently I wrote a letter addressed to three girls named Anna. Without any doubt, I wrote “Hello, Anna” and didn’t worry. But such luck is not always the case.
What if there are three or even seven recipients and they do not have the same name? You can list them by name: “Good afternoon, Rodion, Pulcheria, Avdotya and Pyotr Petrovich.” But it's long and takes time. You can write: “Hello, colleagues!”
For myself, I use the rule of addressing by name the person in the “To” field. And don’t contact those in the copy at all. This rule also allows you to more accurately determine (one!) the addressee of the letter and the purpose of this letter.
Citation . Often correspondence is a chain of letters with questions and answers - in a word, a dialogue. It is considered good form not to delete the correspondence history and to write your response at the top of the quoted text, so that when you return to this correspondence a week later, you can easily read the dialogue from top to bottom, descending by date.
For some reason, the default setting in Mozilla is “Place cursor after quoted text.” I recommend changing it in the “Tools” → “Account Options” → “Composing and Addressing” menu. It must be so.
Purpose of the letter . There are two types of business letters:
As a rule, there are many times more encouraging letters than reporting letters. If we want to achieve something from the interlocutor, it is very important to say this in a letter in plain text. The call to action should be accompanied by a name and be the last sentence in the letter.
Wrong : “Porfiry Petrovich, I know who hacked the old woman to death.”
Right : “Porfiry Petrovich, it was I who hacked the old woman to death, please take measures to arrest me, I’m tired of suffering!”
Why should the correspondent think for you what to do with this letter? After all, he may make the wrong decision.
Signature in the text . She must be. Moreover, all email clients allow you to configure automatic signature substitution, for example the classic “Sincerely, …”. In Mozilla, this is done in the “Tools” → “Account Options” menu.
Whether or not to write contacts in the signature is a personal matter for everyone. But if you are in any way connected with sales, be sure to write. Even if the deal does not take place as a result of communication, in the future you will be easily found using the contacts from the signature.
Finally, one more feature of the letter body for those interlocutors who don’t like (can’t, don’t want, don’t have time) to answer your letters. Please indicate the default in the body of the letter. For example, “Porfiry Petrovich, if you don’t come to arrest me before 12:00 Friday, then I consider myself amnestied.” Of course, the deadline must be realistic (you should not send the text from the example on Friday at 11:50). The recipient must be physically able to read and act on your letter. Such “silence” relieves you of responsibility for the interlocutor’s failure to respond. As always, you need to approach the use of this feature wisely. If a person responds to your letters on time and regularly, such an ultimatum may, if not offend him, then stress him out a little or lead to a decision not to answer the letter right now, but make you wait until Friday.
Letters often come with attachments: resumes, commercial proposals, estimates, schedules, scans of documents - a very convenient tool and at the same time a source of popular errors.
Error : huge investment size. I often receive emails with attachments up to 20 MB in size. As a rule, these are scans of some documents in TIFF format, with a resolution of 600dpi. The correspondent's email program will almost certainly freeze for several minutes in a futile attempt to load a preview of the attachment. And God forbid the recipient tries to read this letter on a smartphone...
Personally, I immediately delete such letters. Don't want your email to end up in the trash before it's read? Check the size of the investment. It is recommended that it be no more than 3 MB.
What to do if it exceeds?
And one more not entirely obvious recommendation about investments - their Name . It must be understandable and acceptable to the recipient. Once upon a time we were cooking in company commercial offer in the name... let it be Fyodor Mikhailovich Dostoevsky. I received a letter from the manager with a draft CP for approval, and the attachment included a file named “ForFedi.docx”. The manager who sent me this had a dialogue that went something like this:
Dear manager, are you personally ready to approach this respected man and call him Fedya to his face?
Somehow, no, he’s a respected man, everyone calls him by his first name and patronymic.
Why did you name the attachment “For Fedi”? If I send it to him right now, do you think he will buy axes from us using this CP?
I was going to rename it later...
Why prepare a time bomb - refusal potential client- or create extra work for yourself by renaming the file? Why not immediately name the attachment correctly: “For Fyodor Mikhailovich.docx” or even better - “KP_Sky_Axes.docx”.
So, we have more or less sorted out email as a “person”. Let's move on to looking at email as a tool for effective work and talk about its distraction component.
Email is a powerful distraction. As with any distraction, email needs to be dealt with by tightening rules and introducing work schedules.
At a minimum, you need to turn off ALL notifications about mail arrivals. If the email client is configured by default, you will be notified with a sound signal, an icon next to the clock will blink, and a preview of the letter will be shown. In a word, they will do everything to first tear you away from painstaking work, and then plunge you into the abyss of unread letters and unviewed mailings - minus an hour or two from your life.
Some people have strong willpower that allows them not to be distracted by notifications, but ordinary people It’s better not to tempt fate and turn them off. In Mozilla Thunderbird, this is done through the menu "Tools" → "Settings" → "General" → "When new messages appear."
If there are no notifications, how can you understand that a letter has arrived?
Very simple. You yourself, consciously, set aside time to sort through your mail, open your email client and see all the unread messages. This can be done twice a day, for example, at lunch and in the evening, or during forced downtime, for example, in traffic jams.
People often ask, what about response times and urgent letters? I answer: you do not have urgent letters in your mail. Unless you work in the customer support department (this department has its own rules for working with mail).
If there are urgent letters, the sender will notify you about this through other channels - telephone, SMS, Skype. Then you will consciously go into your email client and process urgent mail. All time management gurus (for example, Gleb Arkhangelsky with his “Time Drive”) declare a standard response to email within 24 hours. This is a normal rule of good manners - do not expect instant replies via email from your interlocutor. If there is an urgent letter, notify about it through faster communication channels.
So, we turned off notifications and now turn on the email client according to our schedule.
What to do when we go to the mail and engage in an activity called “sorting out email”? Where is the beginning and end of this work?
I've heard a lot about the zero inbox system, but, unfortunately, I haven't met a single person using it. I had to reinvent my wheel. There are articles on this topic on Lifehacker. For example, " ". Below I will talk about the zero inbox system in my interpretation. I would be grateful if GTD gurus would comment and add or improve the described system.
It is important to understand and accept that email is not a task scheduler or archive for your activities. Therefore, the Inbox folder should always be empty. Once you start sorting through your inbox, don't stop or be distracted by anything until you've emptied this folder.
What to do with emails in your inbox? You need to go through each letter sequentially and delete it. Yes, just highlight and press Delete on your keyboard. If you can’t bring yourself to delete the letter, you’ll have to decide what to do with it.
Here are the long-term storage folders I have.
There are other email client settings that are important for the operation of this system. First, by default in Thunderbird there is a “Mark messages as read” checkbox. I prefer to do this consciously, so down with the flag! To do this, go to the menu “Tools” → “Settings” → “Advanced” → “Reading and Display”.
Secondly, we use filters . Previously, I actively used filters that automatically forwarded letters to the appropriate folders based on the sender's address. For example, letters from a lawyer were moved to the “Lawyer” folder. I abandoned this approach for several reasons. First: letters from a lawyer in 99% of cases relate to some project or partner, which means they must be moved to the folder of this partner or project. Second: I decided to add awareness. You yourself must decide where a specific letter should be stored, and it is more convenient to look for unprocessed messages in only one place - in the inbox. Now I use filters only for organizing automatic regular letters from various systems into folders, that is, letters that do not require me to make decisions. Filters in Mozilla Thunderbird are configured in the menu “Tools” → “Message Filters”.
So, with the right approach, email should take from 10 to 60 minutes a day, depending on the volume of correspondence.
Yes, and one more thing. Have you already turned off notifications about the arrival of new letters? ;)
Most email clients, including Gmail, Yahoo, Mail.ru, Microsoft Outlook, Mozilla Thunderbird, provide the ability to send one email to a large number of recipients. Usually you can do this using the function Copy(on English the abbreviation used to denote it SS), or Bcc (CCB). When sending a message to Copies Recipients can see the email addresses of other people who also received the email. In the second case, the identity of additional recipients is hidden.
Some email clients allow you to simply enter your username into a field, which is then automatically filled in by the program.
If you use this field to send an email to multiple people, each of them will be able to see full list other recipients.
You can list email recipients by simply entering a list of addresses in the field Copy, which is usually located immediately below the field To whom. Everyone in this chain of recipients will be able to see the names and email addresses of all other recipients:
You can use this feature for both individual and group emails. This is especially useful if you want to keep your contacts private, protect them from spam and unwanted emails, or simply if you don't want your recipients to know who received the same message.
Field Bcc not always available by default for all email clients. For example, in Outlook You will need to go to Options to access settings; V Thunderbird you will need to select this function from the drop-down menu; V Gmail need to press a button Copy And Bcc; V Windows Live Mail You will need to press the keys simultaneously Alt + B.
Image: © Ruslan Nesterenko - 123RF.com
