The Importance of Being RESPONSIVE

Let’s be real – generic and broad promotional messages are a waste of my time and yours. Our time is precious, and we’re all more than ready to move past the never-ending clutter of useless and untimely emails. Delete, delete, delete…We’re hungry for relevant and valuable conversations, expressed through mutual interest and a form of genuine personalization – what we’re after is a connection.

But when we interact with someone who is effectively a stranger (regardless of the medium), it’s impossible to accept the unknown sender as a trusted source of caring and noteworthy information. We’re too busy and too tired of what we’ve come to perceive as a marketing gimmick. We’re tired of being sold to.

So how can you personalize the impersonal?

With email as the top method of communication, it’s imperative to perfect and customize your outreach style in order to save yourself from ending up in the dreaded Trash box.

Last week, VentureBeat published an article detailing what Google’s Eric Schmidt explains as the #1 email habit of the most effective people. Most importantly, he believes that “being responsive is one of the only ways in asynchronous messaging to signal that we do care about a person — even if it’s a short message. This helps build a culture of trust.”

Check out the rest of Schmidts’s email tips below:

1. Write short, non-flowery emails. “Every word matters.”
2. Clean out your inbox. “Any time you spend thinking about which items in your inbox you should attack next is a waste of time.”
3. Handle email in a Last In First Out order, since older stuff often gets taken care of by itself.
4. Include other people in the conversation who might be useful.
5. Be sparing with BCC; sometimes it’s better not to hide information from others.
6. Don’t yell.
7. Track requests made to recipients by labeling them [like a gmail tag]. If the message isn’t responded to, you can look at this category and then follow up. [My personal tip: I use the Mailbox app, which sends emails back to your inbox if they are not responded to in a specified time period.]
8. Make email searchable by forwarding notes to yourself with a few key words.