Transcripts
1. Introduction: Hey there, my name is Kevin. And in this course I'm going to help you write amazing e-mails for your clients. I'm a former quality assurance agent for Google technical support. My job was to ensure the members of the support team communicated with customers in an efficient and friendly manner. Over the years, I've created the foolproof way to write the best emails for your customers no matter what business you're in. We'll learn about creating an email structure, detailing what goes into each section of your structure, what to say and Wat never to say the importance of empathy which your clients and communicating in a clear and concise way. So if you're looking to improve the way you communicate with your clients via e-mail, then this is the course for you.
2. The Good, the Bad & the Ugly of Emails: Hey there and welcome to the first video in this course. Basically, I'm going to give you a quick rundown of the whole course, right? We're going to start off by looking at an example of a poorly written email and an example of a well-written email around the same topic. Now, just to let you know, right? Like this course is going to show you a way that I have been using to write professional e-mails for quite a long time. It's been proven time and time again, just to be quite efficient and just kinda keep things short, clear, concise, but also keeping a quite professional. You might have different opinions on some of the topics we're going to look at. Maybe you might say something in the body should go into closing, et cetera. I guess. Keep this as a guideline. This isn't like a written rule that you need to follow, you know, but it's going to be a very helpful guideline for you to maybe spruce up e-mails that you might be writing every day. Okay, with that in mind, let's jump right in this course, we're going to cover a bad example of an email, a good example, an opening, body and closing structures, some extra tips. And we're going to recap all of it with demons we're going to look at now. So let's brighten. Okay, so here we are. We're going to look at writing professional emails. And the first thing we're going to look at is an example of a poorly written email around a specific topic. Okay, So I know this might not make much sense right now, but let's just have a look at this, okay? This is an email, for example, to a client that you might be helping with some technical issues. Now this could be hotel reservations, this could be a doctor's appointment email. This could be, you know, dog grooming service email that you're sending on to a client. Same principles apply were saying hello to the customer or client. We're introducing our e-mail. We're going to include some information and wrap up the EMA. Now the one we're looking at specifically here, let's have a look at it. Hi John. How's things? I'm emailing you today about your question? Here is what you're looking for. And then we're provided with a URL. Who knows Watson that URL do use them need help by k. Now k For Kevin, just K. Okay, so this, Let's just look at this, let's digest this for a second. Okay? We don't even know from the onset what this is about. Okay, So like the context here is the customers asking for some help regarding some technical issue, e-mail technical issue, and this is how the support has responded to the customer which is quite poor. You know, I mean, what if I if I was working and I was a busy client and looking at different emails all day and this came in, I'd I'd go where am I? This is no sooner didn't this isn't helping me at all. Anyway, let's look at a good example of the same email. Okay, well, might be a lot going on here, but let's have a look. Okay. Hi John. I hope all is well, this is Kevin here from the support team. I'm following up with you in regard sorry, with you regarding your question about how to send an e-mail using Gmail. Okay. So if I got sent this e-mail instead, I would know exactly what is going on here. In order to send the email, there are a couple of steps that you need to, Newton needs to be followed. If you're on a computer, please follow these steps here. If you'd like more information on how to send an e-mail using your phone or tablet. Please visit the support center here. And I hope you found D above helpful. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me if you've any questions, kind regards Kevin. So this is a completely different e-mail than the email we've seen before us. Okay. Now, I know this is don't worry about any of the technicalities of what's going on here. Okay, The most important thing to notice here is this is what an email should look like. It should have, it should be broken up into different sections. It should be very clear about what we're talking about. Have a good structure as opposed to this where we have absolutely no idea what the emails about. Now, the next couple of videos, I'm going to go over in a bit of detail about what's going on here. For example, this is the opening of our email right here. Do you know we have this section right here, very small, but that's technically the opening section of our e-mail. Our body is here. Okay. This is the body of our email. So this is the second section of every email that you would write. And the third section is our closing, which is here. Okay? So when we break an email down like this, it becomes very doable. All of a sudden. Now each of these sections have very specific elements to them. You're not going to introduce yourself at the bottom of the email. In the closing section of the email, you're not going to give steps underneath your email signature. You notice things here that we can just lay out very well and kind of just gave us helpful tips towards each of these. So basically you look in the next video, I'm going to jump in about our opening section and how we should write it, what we should phrase it, how we should go about making sure that we're correctly staging an issue, all of that sorts of stuff. Okay. So I'll see you in the next video. And it's going to get very exciting. Okay? Who news, who knew emails could get so excited with? Let's give it a go and I'll see you in the next video.
3. Email Opening: Hey there and welcome back to the next video. So on this video we're going to look at the opening of your professional emails. So let's jump right in. Okay, So the opening of every email should consist of a couple of things. So let's just run through it here. Okay? This is where you greet your customer. For example, Hi John. Hi Mary. Hello, Miranda, denote, you could say hi, hello, dear. To whom it may concern if you're not sure of the name, okay. We would never just not introduce ourselves to a customer or not introduce ourselves, I should say not Greece to customer denom you or if you're keeping also professional e-mails, do your best to avoid things like howdy or yo, yo John, howdy, Mary, keep a professional. A good thing to stick to really is the hello. Hi or dear. You can't go wrong. Now again, remember, this is all guidelines. You might have your own relaxed take on dealing with your clients and customers. So keep that in mind. Introduce yourself if needed. So for example, hi John. This is Kevin here from simple sites. So for example, I run a web design agency called simple sites. And if I was emailing a client and they were dealing with many Kevin's or maybe they were just off the phone with me for the first time. It's very important that I introduce myself. So, you know, hi John. This is Kevin here from simple sites as the next line. Okay. Do you know all of a sudden, right. You set the tone, you know who you are. Now, also in this section is where you should, which come to these off right? In this section you should state the issue. Okay. So a lot of places I've worked with before and I did a lot of this with Google support as well. Is the importance of staging the issue statement or the issue identification. Okay. No, no. Not that everything is an issue. I guess that's just a word we attached to this. It's the topic of conversation really you could call this state the topic. This is something where I would say, hi John, This is Kevin here from simple sites. I'm just email and new regarding your questions about the new website or on e-mail and knew about the steps you've asked for for updating your image on the website or, Hey, this is just an email to get some more information off you regarding AB or C. So notice what I'm saying there. I'm kind of stating what we're looking for, what we're needing. And basically that allow that sets the tone for the whole email. We're not guessing what the email is about anymore. Like an email, it should just be a simple, concise letter. To an extent it can be large, sometimes it can be short, but we need to know what the email is about. This is where we stated in a very simplified one-sentence high-level statement. Okay, Now, I'll bring us back to our example in two seconds just to reiterate what we were doing. Again, just like I said, they're the importance of this is to ensure everyone is on the same page. And also it allows your client or customer to correct you in case there was any misunderstanding. So I mean, if I was emailing you saying, hey, hi John, This is Kevin here. Thanks for your questions regarding setting up your toaster. Here are the steps to set up your toaster. Want. If that wasn't what we actually talked about, maybe I misunderstood what you were talking about previously or maybe I misunderstood your last e-mail. This is a point where the customer can say, Hey, that wasn't actually about the toaster, was about setting up my microwave. So I mean, Rotterdam, the customer or client trying to follow steps, perhaps to plug-in their toaster using steps for the microwave, we set the statement here that allows everyone to be on the same page. That's very important when you can deal with like very technical stuff, okay? Also keep introduction to a couple of lines, okay? So that's really honestly, you have a good solid opening when you just follow these steps. If we go back to our opening here, I mean, according to this topic seems to be that John needed to figure out how to send emails using Gmail. Okay. How did we figure that out? It's in the statement. It's right here. So look, we introduced the email just like we said, we would Hi John. We can say hello John. Hey John, you know, or maybe if you have a company or you work with clients or in a, in a place where you see more relaxed, you know, you could do whatever you want. I hope all is well, this is Kevin here from the support team. Okay. So I'm after introducing myself as well, and I added a little, I hope as well too. You can make these personally don't personalize it as well and make it not seem like your robotic. The next sentence here in our opening is, I'm following up with you regarding your question about how to send an e-mail using Gmail. Notice that's an identification statement, that's our topic or purpose. This is so important because one, if they were sending an e-mail using Outlook, you know, this email is completely wrong if that's the case, you know. So this gives me the opportunity to state what the email is about and the customer to correct you or declined to correct you if needed. If not, then the client can look at this email and go, do you don't want Kevin really listened to me. He actually is emailing me exactly what I'm looking for and think about it. This could be, Hey, follow an opportunity regarding your most recent booking at the hotel. Or I understand you would like to change a reservation for your table, you know, on Friday the 5th of whatever genome you're setting the tone. Okay, I think I got that across. If you are still unsure about that, feel free to leave a question in the discussion on this course and I'll happily elaborate a bit further. Okay, but anyway, all in all, that's our opening. We have some more tips later for the whole email. Let's skip straight to the next video now about the body. So I'll see you in the next video.
4. Email Body: Hey there and welcome back to the next video on this course, we're going to look at the body of an email. Okay, so let's jump right in. Okay, So here are a list of items, action items, topics we need to cover for the body of the e-mail. So the body is where everything happens in the e-mail. We've already said hello. We've already said who we are and also what were emailing about. Now the body would be a whole new paragraph or a whole new set of paragraphs. Okay? And this is where we get down to the nitty gritty stuff of the email. So this is where we get stuck into the details just as discussed here. Okay? So for example, you're looking to change your reservation. I need to say to maybe ask you for specific information about changing your reservation. Maybe you're emailing me about the new reports for this month's statistics on the website. Do you know if this is where I will start providing you with those details and really breaking it down for you to read true in a clear, concise manner. Okay. Exactly. That leads us into what's the purpose, you know, I mean, the email, whether we are replying to a customer or sending a customer and email for the first time. This is where we really talk about the details of what we're offering or what we're giving or what we're requesting from your client or customer, you know. And is this email to gather information about a certain issue. So I mean, if someone was to email you and say, Hey, I I really like the graphic design work you made, but I'm not happy with us. One if you've just got an email like that as a graphic designer, Dino, you'd have to reply and go, hey, thanks for your email. I understand you are unhappy with my graphic design digital. Then you start have to ask them certain questions. You have to start saying, well water, you're not happy about, you know, how can I help you with that? Can you give me more details about that? Specifics? Is that the color is denoted like this is the body. This is where you really get into those bullet points, steps or those kind of that sort of information. You know, maybe we were sending steps to fix an issue. So just like the good example we have there, if we go back in the body here now, we're sending steps. So for example, in this email, they were looking for a resolution to something and we sent them steps, so we could be doing that in this e-mail as well. And that will be Dino. That's where we would go in the body of the email. Perhaps we're emailing a customer asking for a review or a recommendation. So maybe you've done lots of work. You've finished a project with the customer, and you're now sending an email to look for a review or testimonial. Perhaps you sold them a product. And you're looking to say, hey, any chance you could leave a review on my website or are on on Etsy or eBay or whatever, you know, this is in the body is where you would put that you would say, okay, Do you know if you liked it? Could you give me, what would you think out of 10 for its usability? How about its quality? How about the whole experience? This is where you would make that list out. Okay. Cool. Sending it an explanation to a question that was asked. Yeah, absolutely. I think we've kind of covered that already really were explaining in the body what we're getting across the customer's question. Here also I have down the body should link with the issue, attaching useful URLs if needed. So remember when we state that issue in the opening, when we say, Hey, understand you're having an issue with x, y, or z or whatever. We need to be consistent with that, our body can't kind of go on a tangent. You know, if if if you were saying I understand you're having an issue with your hotel reservations. And then in the body of the e-mail, I'm talking about how to book a new reservation on the website. It's not connected. You know, maybe they need to book it, but that should be explained again. So Hey, I understand you have issues which are reservation. Unfortunately, I can make these changes. Can you create a new booking and I'll cancel the other one? Just be concise, you know, be very clear about what you're saying. Make sure it links. Don't ever just put steps in as well. Hey, I understand you're having an issue and then just put the steps in. Introduce your steps with a sentence in order to, in order to fix this, you need to do this and then give the steps. Okay. I know I'm trying lots of crazy information out there. You can feel free to kinda go back and watch this again, Okay? But basically you just need to be clear and concise and imagine you were really explaining it to. Sometimes I notice might be condescending to some, but it's very helpful way to think about it. Think about your explaining this to someone who has no idea about the topic you're talking about like a, like a, like a kid. You know, you're explaining it for the first time. The thing about us is when we write emails, we think everyone. Knows what we know when in reality they really don't or if they do, great, sometimes they don't. So when you eat to explain something by email, really go out of her way to put in that extra finesse that little sentence that says, look, to fix that issue, you need to do this and then leave your steps there. Because that can be really, really helpful. And that's called going the extra mile. Anyway. Perfect. Also, yes, sometimes you might find a useful article online that might help somebody. You know, someone says, Hey, I bought the seeds off of your seed store for growing plants and I don't know what's the best tips for doing. I don't know. Plenty of stuff. Pinhole. What's the best shovel I should buy? Maybe you don't know me, but that's not something you should cover for your clients, but maybe there's a fantastic article out there that might cover that and might say ten great shovels for gardeners. Put that article in and send that to the customer. You know, that's, that's Seoul. Next step above and beyond that, people would really, really appreciate that extra work. And in an e-mail, That's a very great way to do. You can put the fully melon or you can hyperlink it as well if you'd like. And also just to wrap this up, a body can be one or a number of smaller paragraphs. So I mean, sometimes you might have to provide a lot of information to the customer, but you don't want to send them a novel or a book. You want to send them digestible paragraphs. So if we look at the body here, which is the body in this e-mail, we have one-sentence, a list of steps, and that's that's, that's our body. I could have put all of these steps in a paragraph and it would be very hard to follow. It would just be one paragraph of now do this and now do that. If there's ever something with steps, break them out. Look, it's much easier to read a step-by-step thing. And it's also easier for the client to say, hey, Kevin, I had an issue with step four. And then we can communicate about that. Rather than they try to steps, it's all to muddled together and they just gave up. And then they've had a bad experience. And that's not good for anybody, that's not good for your client. It's not good for you because they don't want to ask you to help in the future. Okay? So just keep things nice and clear and broken down. And they talk about when to use steps and bullet points in a later video. So if we look at this body here, I create, I introduced the body but a little email or little a sentence. In order to send an e-mail which I'm linking, look, send an email. In order to send an email, I'm linking these together. There are a couple of steps they need to be followed. If you're on a computer, please follow these. And notice here, I guess I put a URL kind of in the closing. But you could kind of, you could kinda argue that that is in the body too. Again, this is why I'm mentioning this is sort of a guideline. You might find something goes into body and the photo a little bit sometimes role with us, okay, the most important thing here is they have a consistent order. You're introducing your given steps, you're kinda given some more helpful information and you're wrapping up. Okay. So here in this email you've noticed, I've also said, hey, look, if you need more help with this, to help center has some great information. And that might be very, very useful to the customer. Want to send an email on their phone or tablet. And this article will contain all of that. That saves me writing a long page as well. So this is really helpful here. Okay, so that's the body of an email covered. In the next video, we'll go looking at the closing section of an email. So I look forward to seeing you then.
5. Email Closing: Hey there and welcome back to the next section on this course. We're going to look at the closing section of your professional emails. So let's jump right in. Okay. So this is the last section of your e-mails, the closing section. Okay. So we've covered the body, the opening I should say the opening, the body. And now the closing section. This is where you wrap up the email. Okay. So we've said hello, we've identified want it were emailing about. We have included a lot of information in our body, perhaps steps, perhaps we're offering something, perhaps we require something to continue to help them. And this is where we wrap it up. So this is somewhere where we say, okay, what will we do when the email steps had been taken? Okay, so that's something that can go in our closing body. For example, the steps above, I hope to steps above in this e-mail help resolve your issue. If you have any further questions, feel free to get in touch or once you have followed the above steps, please reply and I will assist you further for the next steps you need to take. Or I hope you have no problem accessing the information I need in order to help you or I hope the above solution has been helpful for you. Do you know if you have any step in the issue along the way, please feel free to get in touch or recapping our body. We're saying, Hey, look, all of the above, let me know if there's an issue with that. Or once you follow those steps, I can do a, B, or C. You're basically kind of recapping the next steps you're looking at the future. Now, you're recap in your email and you're looking at what would happen next. Okay. I advised the customer to get in touch if they have any questions regarding your email. So I just mentioned that there this is so important, this one here, okay, so important. Always offer further assistance. Always say look, if there's anything else you'd like me to help you with, please feel free to get back. A lot of people don't like doing this because they feel that clients and customers would always take advantage of it and just continue asking about new things all the time. And in my experience, I've I've reviewed thousands of emails for when I was working in between Google and other places of reviewing emails and customer emails. And I can tell you it's, it's, it's like the less than 1% comeback and even kind of really take advantage of all wellhead me with disdain. And that's silly issue. In this silly issue, like you might find 10 percent of the time someone might come back and say, Oh, well, I had an issue with step 4. Can you help me with step 4 on your on your email? And and this is an opportunity to let the customer know that you are willing to help. So most of the time they might not even get back to you, but they will appreciate that you offered that assistance. And again, all of these little things throughout your e-mail, going the extra mile, a little bit here and there all adds up to this beautiful e-mail, this beautiful customer service that people talk about, this beautiful experience that you offer. Always offer assistance and stick to a consistent email signature. Okay, So we kinda repeated myself there twice. We'll actually look at email signature later in this course. We might want a bonus video. It can be something simple as kind regards Kevin or your sincerity, Kevin or all the best Kevin. And then if you're going to put something underneath it, like your phone number and your email, stay consistent throughout. Okay. Keep it the same. Don't always change your signature. And also keep to a single paragraph where possible. So if we look back at our example of a good email, our closing for example, is, I hope you found the above helpful. Please don't hesitate to reach out to me if you have any further questions. Kind regards Kevin, like that's a very simple, very simple wrap up. But sometimes you might need to wrap up a bit more, put more detail in there. But do here are some very useful steps to cover some things for you. Okay? This wasn't a long video, but the body is usually just a quick wrap-up, quick conclusion. And just to make sure that you knit it all up nice and tidy at the very end. So, okay, on the next video, we're going to be looking into some email tips, right? So we've been looking at the structure now let's look at how to kind of make sure to hold email is consistent and revamped and and just tidy and professional. Okay, so we're going to look at just a couple of steps to review every email before you send that to make sure that it's an A1 100% e-mail. Okay, so I look forward to seeing you in that video and goodbye for now.
6. Email Tips & Tricks: Hey there and welcome back to the next video in this course, we're going to look at just a few extra tips and tricks to get you on the right track with your professional emails. Let's jump right in. Okay, so here are some extra tips, okay, to just keep in mind when you're reviewing your email before you send this, okay, and this will apply to all emails. Now, this isn't like a guy named victim as you go. This is going to be practice, okay, so keep these in mind. And the more you practice, these will become second nature. You won't even realize how you think it is stuff. Some of this you're already going to be doing naturally. Some of this you might find helpful even in one or two extra points. Okay? Now, first of all, let's look at the importance of capitalizing your name, places, people, services, and product title is now I know some of you will be using the Z here, okay. But in Ireland is where I'm from and where I am right now, we use the United Kingdom English with the S. So if you do see some S's instead of z's, keep in mind, hasn't been a spelling mistake. Okay. So capitalize your name places. So for example, Hi John. John should be a capital J. I am from Ireland. I for Ireland capital I people again, the same services for example, do you know if I was talking about oh, just send an email on Gmail. I wouldn't say with a small g at Gmail should be a large sheet. It's a service, it's a product. Okay. And also product title. If I was talking about genome, if I was selling a specific product, do you know, always give the product its capital letter, like Coca Cola wouldn't be a small, It would start with a large C. Okay, so just keep that in mind. You'd be surprised how that really adds up on your e-mails. Don't write super long email paragraphs. Keep them short and concise. It's always better to break up larger paragraphs then into smaller ones. So again, I said this about 20 times already in this course. It's always better to have two or three simple small paragraphs. Each of them could have three or four sentences, rather than one huge power graph with 12 to 15 sentences in it. You will never read a huge email that comes in with a block of text on it. Okay. I would always happily read one paragraph for a couple of sentences. Okay. Digested, numb next. Okay, and then next. Okay, cool. Now saying that unless you need to denote, put in ten paragraphs, like sometimes two or three in the body is good. Again, it's all in the context of your e-mail, but keep each section of text nice and snappy and short and create a new paragraph if you need to. There's nothing wrong with two paragraphs to small, concise paragraphs. It's much better than have a super large one anyway, okay? When providing steps, always number your steps. So if, for example, step 1, log into your computer step to open up Microsoft Word, step three, create a new document. You know, I didn't bullet point him. I didn't go bullet point open. Bullet point open. I said one. Do this to do this. Three, do that. You know, we follow numbered steps very logically, okay, without even thinking about it, It's so important, it's such a big deal when you start using numbered steps rather than bullet points. When requesting information though, you listed out in bullet points. So if I was saying if someone who was email and me looking for a pair of shoes and I wanted to get some information, maybe for some recommendations for them. I would reply going, Okay. What are your shoes for our day? Men shoes women choose. Okay. What size are your shoes? Okay. What color are you looking for? Okay. Want detailer you're looking for. They're not steps. I'm not giving someone a step-by-step guide there. I'm just asking for details about what they need. I would bullet point those. So you can create a bullet point, dash, dash, dash, dash all the way down or anything, a dot for each point. And that's absolutely fine because I'm not given steps. The most important thing here is when you're giving someone directions to do something, you give them a step-by-step guide, 1, 2, 3, 4, otherwise, stick to boil, appoints nice and tidy. Okay, So that's a good one to remember. Don't write emails that are too long. Okay, going back to our paragraph section, if you're having issues explaining something and email, it's always a good idea, if possible, to offer a phone call or a Zoom call. So this is something I find quite a lot with my web design clients because I build a lot of websites for clients. And sometimes it's quick and easy for me to put some steps into an e-mail asking them for information and content. Quite often though. I'll start right in my e-mail and I realized my email is getting quite large. Okay, it's getting very big. There's a lot going on here. It's actually just easier if I can schedule a call with them for maybe 30 minutes. I could spend 30 minutes writing a super long email, sending it to the customer or the client. And they might not even read it. They might actually just say, Look, this is way too much. Can we talk about this over the phone? And I've lost 30 minutes writing that email. Well, sometimes five minutes in your right near email, maybe after five minutes you're thinking notice is I have a lot to explain. Let's cut this short. Let's see if I can just schedule a call or an e-mail or Zoom call and do it over that. That I know isn't really an e-mail thing, but it avoids us writing huge, super long unnecessary emails also. So where possible, do your best to offer a phone call or a Zoom call whenever you can. It can save you a lot of headache. Way had to wait for someone to get back to an email that you put a lot of effort in that you didn't even need to 3D, right? Okay. So if you find that you're saying or I, Kevin, I'm putting all the steps in and put in the bullet points in and breaking them into small paragraphs. But I'm Still writing a super long email. It probably means it's more than an email. You might need to meet this person or have a phone call or a Zoom call. Okay, so that's very important for customer experience. Personalized for you Americans out there. I'm just going to say here, personalize your emails. Opening and closing sections can get repetitive. So this is handy. Let's say if you are e-mailing a client back and forth all the time, what a lot of people tend to do is they consistently use the same opening and the same clothes in section, and that you can see a mile off. It's a dangerous line to trade. Okay. It's good to have an opening and closing section. Okay. Personalize them on every e-mail. And if that means you just change one or two words or changed a phrasing. Denote want email could be, hey, I hope you're well, the next one could be a hope you're having a great day. Just changed the wording because they might be personalized the first time. But when you reply to someone and if you keep your clothes in section the same every time, they'll know you're just copying and pasting. And that can come across quite lazy, and that can come across quite robotic. We say that it might be very robotic, like you're talking to a machine, that you're talking to a chat bot. We don't want that. You want to be personalized. And sometimes it's as simple as changing the sentence, just changing the freezing every time. And just you'll get so quick and used to it the more you do it. Okay? So I mean, if we go back to our email example once again, and I've cluttered this e-mail now at this stage, but all of this pen, sorry. Let's look at it. Hi John. I hope you're all well. This is Kevin capital letter from the support team. I'm following up with you regarding your question about how to send an e-mail using Gmail. Product is capital G, Name. Capital G. Capital G, okay. In order to send an email, there are a couple of steps. Look, I listed the steps want to seven. Okay. I gave a URL. Again. Gmail support is actually a technical team. So I gave support an S as well. I hope you found the above are helpful. The next time I could say, I hope these steps help you. It's again, it's very similar, but I'm just changing the sentence. You know, please don't hesitate to reach out if you have any further questions. Kind regards my my I'll keep a consistent signature signature true amount. Okay. So I mean, if we go back to our bad email, look at all of the things that are wrong here. Hi John small, j, right? How's things we'll want? I mean, that's so slang, especially for Irish people. Like you would just say how apostrophe. But we should say how are you or how are things which you, I'm apostrophe, okay, this grammar emailing you today about your question. What question? This is the issue identification. We should be just putting a few words that describe what their question was about. Do you know what were they asking about a booking then say it. I'm emailing you today about your booking question. Okay? You know, it makes a big, big difference. Here is what you're looking for, what, what is what here, like What is this? I don't know what this URL is. I don't trust this. I don't want to click on this. Put some more details in your body. Do you still need help? I mean, we should have a question mark here. Okay. And also, do you still need help? It's like we should really kinda just say, Hey, look, I hope these tips help you. If you happen to have issues, get in touch with me when we say do you still need help but kinda lazy, it's kinda do you still need help? Like, I don't want to hurt you, but do you need us because I'll do my best. I guess it's it's it's not it's not professional. Okay. Put it in a couple of more things here. By on a signature is just so blunt. You know, you have to be a bit more nicer than this. You're sincerely or kind regards or something like that. And k, spell your name. Do you know unless your name is Kay or unless you go by k. I know some people maybe go by K, Y, or K, that's fine. But username. And look, this is a very, let's look at this isn't that it has an opening, technically, it has a body, it has a closing, but there are so poor, they don't contain half steps. And the professional information we are keeping in mind of. We do transform an email like this to this, oh, sorry, this kind of email to this e-mail. It takes a bit more time, but you'll get so fast at us. And this will transform the experience you have with your clients. They will love your emails. I've been following this for so long and I have clines reached out to be going. You are so helpful Kevin. You always line up things in a way that I can understand and if I ever have an issue, I can always get back to you and you're very you're always provide me with the right steps in the right angle to take rather than confusing customer with this, this is not a good way to go. This will confuse your customers and agitate them and they might never want to deal with you again. And we are services. Okay. So just keep that in mind. Don't want to scare anything, but it's just, you know, it's important to keep in mind. Okay, cool. So we've covered opening, body closing, and some extra tips. In the next video, I hope to look at some bonus tips for you. I use Gmail quite a lot and I have a course here on this platform with Gmail as well. If you want to check my profile, if you want to get into using Gmail more often. But there are some things such as canned responses or e-mail templates that are very helpful. And in the next video I'm going to look at creating some email templates which you, and maybe even putting them into Gmail, for example, if you want to use them time and time again. So stick around. The next one's going to be really helpful. It's going to streamline your process. And I look forward to seeing you there.
7. Email Templates & Signatures: Hey there and welcome back. So in this video we're going to look at email signatures and canned responses, okay? A candid response is a template that you can use again and again when you're writing emails, it's very handy and you will find it very useful. So let's jump right in. Okay, So in this video, look, we're going to look at two things really that are going to super charge the process. Okay, So it's all about the guidelines. We've covered our grace, but let's, let's make the process easier for us. We're going to create an e-mail signature in Gmail. And we're going to create templates as well that I'm going to show you how to do this in a couple of different ways. And we're going to start backwards actually, I'm going to show you about the templates first and then we will look at email signature. So how about that? Okay, So we'll start by getting out of this mode here anyway. And what we will do is I'm going to take the good email. And I'm going to use this as our template. Now watch what I'll do here a second. Okay? So for example, I want to copy this. And what I have here open is a Google doc. Okay, So you might use Microsoft Word. This is essentially the Google version of Microsoft Word. Okay, so it's very useful. It's accessible from anywhere. I have a whole course on this again and my profile. Feel free to have a look at it. I'm sorry if I keep plugging my carcasses. But if you are interested in looking at Google Docs, check on, my profile is on. Okay, So anyway, I'm going to paste the e-mail here, right? And maybe I'll just increase the font a little bit. Maybe it's a little small on Zoom in a little bit for us too. Okay, So this is the e-mail we have. Now let's make this into a template ish, okay, and you'll see it'll come very quickly. So for example, Hi John. John could be different every time. So let's just put client name here. Okay. I'm normally did was put square brackets with client name written in next to die. I can maybe put it in bold if I wanted to. I hope all is well, this is Kevin you from the support team. Perhaps this will never change. Okay. For my first females, I'll leave that alone. I'm following up with you regarding your question about maybe I could take the rest of this and go clients issue or question. Okay. So let's just make that bold. Okay, so look, my opening now has almost become universal. Okay, so let's say this is the e-mail I want to use for the first time I'm contacting every customer. Again, remember we talked about personalization. So sometimes you might need to change some of the wording on this as you go. But if I want to use this email time and time again, this is a good way to set it up. Okay. So in order to, I'll tell you want Look, what I'm just gonna do here is I'm going to go dot, dot, dot and e-mail body. I'm going to put in here because this can change the body we can't really do much with, okay? It could be different every single time. If you'd like more information on how to and I'll tell you what I put in the client's question. And again, how to so this is a handy sentence here. Please visit. And then we can put in here maybe helpful URL. So I hope this is something that you might be finding a bit useful. Okay, I get it. We're after stripping this email down completely, but it would make a lot of sense. Okay. I hope the above information or hoped above a hope you found the above helpful, please. This is okay. Kind regards Kevin. Okay, look, we're after making a C or a canned response. Now this is a very dynamic and the response, this one I'm after creating a can be chopped and changed. You can make this whatever way you want. Good thing to keep in mind though, is if you were helping customers or clients with the same issue every time, denote let's say John needed the same issue. Mary knew the same issue. You know, I'm going blank on name's John needed the same issue. I think I said John Dewey. You could actually just create an e-mail with the same body and leave the body here and just reuse that every time as a template. So currently, I could leave this in my Google Docs and I could call this my e-mail templates, or what we tend to call them is canned responses in the support world. Okay? And I could maybe, you know, maybe if I want to create a different version, I could just put in a line here. I think I can insert a line. Can I get a horizontal line? And then under that, create another one? And I could change it. Okay, So there's lots of things here you can do. This could be a very useful way to have lots of helpful emails rather than writing out emails for the same issue every time you might find this very helpful. I love doing this. This is fantastic. Like you might say, Oh well it's not personal, it is personally know you're always going to change the issue in question the body. You can always rephrase this every once and awhile as well, break it up. But these, these are going to save you so much time when you think about every time you write an email and every time you have to write all of this out, you could save ten minutes every time. And if you send a 100 emails a day or a 100 e-mails a week, maybe not today, maybe a week. This could be very, very useful for you. Now, you can actually import this into Gmail. Okay, so I'm going to copy this. And over here I have Gmail open, just a blank account. There's nothing in this account. So if you use Gmail, you might find this particular section useful. If you don't use Gmail and you're thinking about using us, keep watching because this might be very useful for you on your Gmail account. Okay, feel free to pause this video for now. Get your Gmail, open up another tab and come back and click resume if you'd like to. Okay. When you have your GMAT open, hover over to the gear icon on the top right, and go to Settings. Now when you're in settings, There's a very useful tool here under Add-ons, on here on the top bar. Or, sorry, it's not add-ons. It's an advanced My bad. This is the pressure I'm under pressure. Under the Advanced tab, you're going to look at templates. So this is very, very cool. Click Enable and click Save Changes. Now the whole tab we'll refresh. When that's finished. You now have a templates feature on Gmail. And this is going to blow your mind if you don't already use it, it's very useful. Maybe I'm over-excited. If we click compose and we put our email here, I'm just pasted it. I pasted the same command V, or we can click, right-click paste here as well. I can save this as a template by going to the three dots here. And look at this, we have templates. I'll try and zoom in here a little bit. So when we have templates, you can go, there's no current templates age, but I can save this draft I just made as a template. And then it will say, okay, do you want to overwrite an existing one? Well, there's nothing there or do you want to save it as a new one? I'm going to say save as new. I'm going to zoom back out and give it a name. First email to customers. And click Save. Okay, cool. Now I'm going to throw away this draft. I have no draft saved. Oh, I do have one there from a long time ago to me delete that and I'm going to click compose. Oh my God. I'm going to compose window. I'm going to hover down to the three dots. I'm going to click on Templates and look first e-mailed to customers. Is there. I'm going to click on it and it's going to fill it in for me. Amazing, amazing. I know this seems very simple and this is very straightforward, but there was a long time ago where this wasn't the default. This wasn't available in Gmail and it is now. And you might find this very useful. And you can create a lot of templates here. You can create loads of different templates that you might use time and time again to send to customers. Now you might say, why is this part of the writing for beautiful, right, and lovely e-mails are beautiful emails to customers. Why is this in the course? I wanted to put a bonus thing in here. Again, it's about just the process as well. And I mean, if you can find this useful, then you can find this useful too. This is just very handy. So feel free to use this if you use Gmail. Now, one final thing, we must look at these signatures. So if you hover on the gear icon at Gmail and click on Settings, you can also alter a signature down here. Just on the General tab. Here under signature, you basically click Create New. And I can call it my main signature. And save. And you can say here, kind regards Kevin. That's it. And I click Save Changes. When I click compose, I can insert my template. Now my template already includes my signature, which is I can remove. And then what you can do is hover down here to the bottom on this pen, insert the main signature you just created. And here it is. Now you might notice these are different fonts because I paste it in something that was a different font so that you can, if you're writing it from scratch, you're better off just pasting them in the font of the browser. But again, this is something to play with. I have a whole other course on Gmail on this platform to feel free to check that out. If you want to dive into all of Gmail, have a look at that. Let me know if you've any questions. Okay. So I think that's enough. In this video, what's going on a bit longer? Deny expected. We covered creating a canned response or a template that you can fill in with details later. So what you do is you'd remove the little square brackets we put in and put the details you need. We also learnt how to put those into Gmail for quicker access and how to put an e-mail signature on Gmail. So I hope that's helpful. And I'll probably just put up one last video as a quick recap. So thank you very much.
8. Conclusion: Thank you so much for taking this course. I hope you found that very helpful. Just as a quick recap, we've learned about the email structure, which is the opening, body and closing. We looked at some bad examples, a good example of an email. Then we looked at some tips to make sure that you follow things like keeping paragraphs, tidy, capitalizing words, how to list items, how to offer more information. All of this, again, keep this course as a guideline, okay, there's no one correct way to write amazing e-mails. There's lots of different ways. This is a way that I know has worked for me with my clients and has worked in many support jobs that I've worked in, as well as the when I worked for Google, technical support, reviewing emails and customer interactions, I found this very useful. Does the style of writing was very, very useful and I've taken all the best bits from different places and put it together in one, I hope you found it handy as well, using the signature and the template function in Gmail. And I guess I just wanted to say, thank you for taking the course one more time. And if you have any questions about anything on this course, please drop a note into the discussions panel below, and I'll happily reach out and help you. And if you really enjoyed this course, feel free to leave a review if you only enjoyed it, or you really hated this course, I guess you could leave a review too. But feel free to give me feedback. I'll always love to update these courses as much as possible and to take any helpful feedback to help, you know, new learners that might take this course later down the line. If I can make this course a bit better for them, then that's great too. Okay, That's all really I have to say. If you've liked this and you'd like to style, you like to do recordings, then I would really recommend checking out other courses on my profile. I cover courses such as topics such as Gmail, Calendar, Drive, Docs, classroom meet, Zoom. I have a lot of courses around Google products, as I've a lot of experience with them. And I really hope to bring out a lot of courses in the future also with some of my web design topics. So again, thank you very much. I wish you all the best and I hope to see you again and goodbye for now.
Kevin O'Brien, Over 8000+ students on Skillshare
