Seth Godin’s blog has a very simple guide on how to send a personal email. Yes, we know this is all common sense BUT how often today with all that is going on around us do we forget to do the simple things well.

Seth’s starting point is avoiding being seen as a spammer or worse still having your emails deleted before being read or just plain ignored. Something of course we don’t want to happen with our personal emails or with our “business related messages.”

“The thing is” as Seth points out “email reduces friction. Greedy, lazy organizations have embraced this and tried to figure out how to blast as many emails as they can as cheaply as they can, relying on the law of large numbers. The real law of large numbers is, "using large numbers is against the law."

Seth suggests that we “add some fiction back into our communication”.  He also points out that “to be seen as being personal, the best strategy is to be personal, which is slow and expensive.”

After reading his tips (see below), our thought is that although he is discussing email, much of this advice could apply to our communications and messaging to candidates. Whether it is your response to a candidate email application or the messaging on your career site or even how you use email signature file, Seth’s advice is both a good call to action and a good recruiting mantra.

We will be digging out our very sensible list of “things to do to improve your recruitment communications”  as a follow up to this article.  Why? Do help us all remember that doing as many of the basics as possible delivers a real ROI on our investment in candidate communications.

Seth’s 14 tips are:

1.    Don't send the same email to large numbers of people.
2.    If you have more than a few people to contact, you'll be tempted to copy and paste or mail merge. Don't. You'll get caught. It shows. If it's important enough for someone to read, it's important enough for you to rewrite.
3.    Careful with the salutation. Don't write, "Dear Claudia," if you don't usually write "Dear" at the beginning of all your emails.
4.    Don't mush the salutation together with the rest of the note. If I had a dollar for every email that started, "Joe, When experts come together..." That's not personal. That's lazy merging. See rule 1.
5.    Don't send HTML or pictures. Personal email doesn't, why are you?
6.    Don't talk like a press release. Talk like a person. A person is reading this, so why are you talking like that?
7.    Be short. The purpose of an email is not to sell the person on anything other than writing back. If you don't have a personal, interesting way to start a conversation, don't write.
8.    Don't send an email only when you really need something. That's not personal, that's selfish.
9.    Do you have a sig with a phone number in it? Your phone number? If you don't trust me enough to give me your real phone number, I don't trust you enough to read your mail.
10.    Don't mark your email urgent. Urgent to you is not urgent to me.
11.    Don't lie in your subject line, and don't be cute. You're not clever enough to be cute. Just be honest.
12.    Following up on an impersonal spam email is twice as dumb as sending the first one. Invest the time to do it right the first time.
13.    Anticipated, personal and relevant permission mail will always dramatically outperform greedy short-term spam. I promise.
14.    Just because you have someone's email address doesn't mean you have the right to email them.

Last update : 13-01-2009 19:55

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