Marketing

Get Time Stressed Clients to Read Your Emails

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By Jennelle McGrath

3 min read

There aren't enough hours in the day to read our overflowing inboxes. If you need clients to read your emails, keep your messages knowledgeable, helpful, and personal.

We’ve all been there: you wake up and check your email, only to find that your monitor starts to bulge outward a bit from the built-up pressure of hundreds of emails that somehow found their way into your inbox. How are you going to read all of these? Easy - you probably won’t. Not right away, at least.

Time to do a little message triage. You skim through the subject line of each piece, choosing the seemingly most important or interesting ones to read first. Then, perhaps days later, you almost get to the last message - but then, another wave of urgent messages crashes on the shores of your inbox. Once again, the less interesting ones are pushed out to sea.

So how do you get time stressed clients to read your emails?

Your clients go through the same process. Generally speaking, the only way to get time stressed clients to read your emails is if you use the right combination of professionalism, personality, and intrigue in both the subject line and the body of your work.

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Here’s the secret:

Keep it Classy

Your client is a knowledgeable professional in their field, so present yourself in the same way. Information is your greatest ally, so observe your target from a distance - troll their website and other digital content to learn a bit more about them before you shoot them a message. Then, once you’ve taken care of the “so what” factor, you’ll have a winning . Relevance wins readers.

Keep your subject line short enough to read, but specific enough to make your client interested. Which of the following email subject lines evokes more interest:

“Quick Heads-Up on Your Post”

or:

“Broken Links on Your Dog Food Post”

The second title obviously conveys much more meaning by only using 1 extra word. Giving specifics makes you appear more knowledgeable and insightful. Follow through with this same technique in your message body. Don’t meander - stay on target and give specifics.

Make it Personal

Are you more likely to talk to a friend, or a stranger? Odds are, you’d pick the person you’re familiar with. Your client’s no different. To up your chances, connect with the recipient on a personal level. Do a little bit of social media observation to find out how they write and what they respond well to. Then, identify your similarities.

“From a Fellow Gardener: Easier Composting”

will carry more weight with a green-thumbed blogger than, say,

“Composting Tips.”

Invite Some Intrigue

Would you bother to read Romeo and Juliet if the title was changed to Two Teenagers Die Due to Poor Planning & Communication? Giving your prospective reader just enough information to whet their appetite is a surefire way to make them really dive into what you have to say. If you want to offer financial consulting to a tech firm,

“I Want to Be Your Tech Firm’s Financial Consultant”

probably won’t connect well.

“Financial Solutions as High-Tech as Your Business”

or something else tailor-fit to the company will yield better results.