Love it or hate it, email is a tool that has completely invaded our daily working and personal lives. It is quickly replacing phones as our main communications tool. It allows us to confirm orders, schedule meetings, send notes and attachments and distribute information to large groups quickly and easily. Because we use email is a simple delivery device for text, many of us are unaware of its powerful ability to deliver messages to customers, prospects and associates

Treat it as a letter

With various office tools such as word processors, photocopiers, fax machines and now email sending correspondence has become much faster. Unfortunately, with this increase in efficiency, the involvement of a secretary has largely disappeared. The secretary played a key role, as s/he was able to correct spelling, grammar and a variety of other errors in a letter so that a polished, formatted document was sent to the recipient.

Email is a powerful tool that can motivate, communicate, propose and deliver detailed information, but it also allows virtually anyone in your company to send electronic letters to anyone …whether they are other employees, customers, vendors or prospects - without any checks and balances on the language, grammar, content or layout of the message.

A message sent out by a well meaning but poorly skilled author may not present the right image of your company when the recipient reads it.

If you use email to follow up on customer orders, confirm appointments, or interact with customers or prospects on a regular basis, create a professional image for your organisation by using email templates. This concept is not new. There are free resources on the web to help you get some templates up and running. Some are free downloads.

Here are two useful links. www.officeupdate.microsoft.com/templategallery/

www.letterslibrary.com has a few sample letters for download but most are available for a fee.

Whatever you use as the source of your templates, download them, take some time to change them for your own use and put them in a letters library on the company server. This way everyone will have access and, as changes are necessary, everyone has access to the new copy right away