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Email Can Be Dangerous!

Ever written an email, clicked send then wished like hell that it would bounce because of what you said in it?

We’ve all done it of course. Email (like Facebook or Twitter) is ultimately a permanent record of a conversation.

Given our passion for communication – and asking direct questions wherever possible to avoid any ambiguity, we are often amazed at how others ‘read’ and more importantly interpret emails they receive. There are some ‘lessons learnt’ at the end of this article for all of us to consider!

Not so long ago while calling potential customers for a new service we run, a client – we’ll call him Jim – sounded very positive and interested in what we were offering and all that good stuff and asked for information which we emailed with the explicit words “Jim, if you don’t mind I’ll follow up with a call to you next week to see what you think of our proposal”.

We do this so the person at least has some kind of ‘warning’ that we will follow up and he or she doesn’t have to think about calling back.

The following week three days running – ‘sorry, Jim’s in a meeting… or Jim’s at lunch… or Jim’s left for the day.’

No problem – Jim was clearly a very busy person so we’ll make a note to follow up the following week.

By the way, if you are following up anyone after a proposal, do it within 3 days of your initial contact or after you have sent your information. The chances of success diminish very quickly after that!!

Anyway the following week no luck getting to speak with ‘Jim’ so we felt an email was in order. No response. Some more calls then another email.

“Dear Jim,

Thanks for you time on the phone last month and great to know you are interested in learning more about our services – we sent you the information you requested and have been trying to contact you since by phone and email to follow up as we discussed but it looks like you have been very busy as we haven’t heard back from you.

Jim – we know from experience that a lot of people who are initially very interested in something will - for whatever reason - find it hard to say ‘no thanks’ down the track.

To be honest we prefer to hear ‘thanks but no thanks’ sooner rather than later as it is a waste of everyone’s time to do otherwise.

If you could please just quickly let me know if you would like to proceed or otherwise I’d be most grateful. BTW we have extended the end date of special offer we spoke about so I hope that is still attractive to you.

Meantime, have a great day… Kind regards etc etc..”

Ok, now maybe that email could have been worded slightly better, but it was important (we felt) to say it like it is. Simply… ‘let us know yes or no!’

Some people CAN’T say ‘thanks but no thanks’ – we’re not sure why (that’s another story elsewhere on this site) – so we thought we were giving ‘Jim’ an easy out to avoid wasting our precious time any more… or get the business which was the preferred option.

WRONG!... so wrong… Clearly the stars were poorly aligned that day for ‘Jim’.

For reasons still unknown to us ‘Jim’ wrote back the nastiest most vitriolic email we have ever received saying that he would use it as an example of poor communication in his internal staff training classes and how not to treat others etc etc…

The email carried implied threats to ‘let others know’ about our email to him.

We were dumbfounded!
We waited a full day before replying and thanking him for his honesty.

Then, feeling a little cheeky, we suggested that if he was going to show our (very tame, not incisive) email to him, that he be fair and also show his reply to us.

After all, what we were after was a simple yes or no about our proposal.

We never heard back from ‘Jim’. Of course our reply contained an apology for any misunderstanding of the original email but to this day we are still in the dark!

So who was right and who was wrong?
In retrospect our ‘cheeky’ suggestion was not the right thing to do. But coming off the back of what really was a very rude ‘semi-threatening’ email we felt ‘vindicated’ in saying what we said.

LESSONS LEARNT?
1 – Stick to the facts. Be business like in every sentence you commit to the page that will be emailed to someone. Whilst your candid ‘matter of fact’ approach may seem reasonable at the time, we don’t know what is happening at the receivers end. Work, family, money problems can affect how someone ‘perceives’ what they read.

2 – NEVER reply in anger or try to be a ‘smarty pants’. If a reply is warranted (and using the example above) we would have been better to simply write a short apology for any misunderstanding and leave it at that.

3 – Email is a great tool. So is the hammer, knife etc. But all have the potential to cause great damage if used incorrectly.

4 – If you feel the need to reply ‘in anger’ – by all means write something, but REMOVE the To: address or better still, open up a word document, write the response – leave it open for a few hours then DELETE it.

Life is too short to be angry – besides, there’s many more important clients or customers waiting for your full attention right now.  And they’re the ones we all need to be looking after.

CHECK OUT: 'Take This Job & Shove It!'

Image Credits: (top) Dreamstime - (bottom) Dreamstime

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