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Email - To Reply or Not to Reply, That's the Question
In his January 13th, 2010 blog for the Harvard Business Review, Peter Bregman took on the whole topic of email etiquette. He started the piece with an anecdote about a marketing consultant who had what he thought was a great meeting about a branding project with the head of marketing at a pharmaceutical company. A month later, Bregman explained, the consultant's follow-up emails and voicemails remained unanswered. Had he lost the job? Was the head of marketing sick? Busy? What was up?
Email is two things: A remarkably easy way to communicate with people and an equally easy way to ignore them. Personally, I think that if you're going to use email, you should try to answer messages in a timely manner, particularly those that need only a short reply. If you don't want to do that, don't use email to communicate with people. Here are a couple of anecdotes of my own. I once tried to get information from a supplier via their hotmail email address, the one printed on their ad. When I didn't receive any response, I called and was told that they rarely checked the hotmail account. I've also dealt with a supplier with an email firewall that blocked the info@ messages from their own site.
There's no doubt about it. Business email is a chore. But it remains the most effective way for communicating with customers, suppliers and other business consultants. Do you remember faxing? Good email etiquette is good business so soldier through your inbox. To reply or not to reply? I say, reply.
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Lori Smith, , Editor-in-Chief
Lori Smith is the editor of Gifts and Tablewares, Canada's premiere gifts and tablewares magazine. Written for retailers of gifts, tablewares, housewares, stationery and home furnishing accessories, its objective is to help readers increase their sales and run their businesses more profitably by providing information on new products, merchandising, small business management, customer service, consumer behavior and industry news. The magazine is published six times a year by BIG Magazines, LP, a leading Canadian information company.
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This page contains a single entry from the blog posted on January 13, 2010 5:11 PM.
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