Here’s a short video on how to create a Contents Page in Word. The process is the same for earlier versions of Word, the commands and buttons are just in different places.
Feb 112011
I wanted to share with you an email tactic that is used by a fellow business contact (who I hasten to add is NOT a client of mine). This person sells health and beauty products and regularly emails her contacts with snippets of news and reminders about ordering products. I get these emails too.
The content of the emails are absolutely fine. They’re chatty, informative, non-aggressive and actually it’s nice to hear from this person because I don’t regularly meet them anymore.
What does damage her reputation is that these are bulk emails sent to all her contacts in the one same email. It’s so obviously a bulk email because it starts ‘Hi all’. What’s even worse, is that she doesn’t use the bcc facility so all her email recipients get to see each other’s contact details, and the list is huge and grows with each email – a massive faux pas in email etiquette.
The biggest email etiquette error
is not using bcc. When you cc all the recipients, they can all see each other’s email address and ‘reply to all’. That might be acceptable in some cases where you want to let everyone reply to everyone and have everyone read the responses and access to each other. However for a business communication, unless If you’re confident that everyone knows one another and it’s acceptable for them to ‘reply all’ then you need to bcc the recipients. That way they won’t be able to ‘reply all’ and no-one will take offence to having their email details shared with a load of strangers.
What’s wrong with ‘Hi all’ emails?
If you have a small number of emails to send a bulk email and they all know you personally, then ‘hi all’ is a perfectly acceptable way to begin an informal email. This isn’t always the case for a business communication. In fact, this is the best way to let them know this is a bulk email, not necessarily for them and probably doesn’t need to be read at that particular moment, so ends up being buried deep in the depths of ‘unread’ or ‘read later’ never to surface again in the email graveyard.
It is proven that personalised emails are more likely to be opened and read. When I receive an email ‘Hi Vee’, even though I know it was probably sent to me as one on a mailing list, I’m more likely to at least scan read it and take some action if I thought it was required.
How to personalise lots of the same email
Obviously it’s not practical for my networking friend to write individual personalised emails. As a self-confessed time-saving and streamlining geek, that would be a non-productive use of time. It is possible to send a personalised email using MS Word and Outlook (it needs to be the paid version of Outlook and NOT the free Outlook Express). You set up a mailmerge and when it comes to merging, you merge to email. It works like a dream for small lists of up to 50 email addresses.
Anything more than 50 emails, you start to run into problems with sending that many over your mail server and they could freeze you out for an hour or so. You can overcome that by making sure you don’t send more than 30 an hour. But is that an efficient way of using your time? You could end up taking a day to send out an email to your list and that wouldn’t be something I would advocate either!
The efficient way to send bulk emails
I have a number of clients who happen to be in the same health and beauty industry as my networking friend. They also send out bulk emails to huge lists, in one case over 1,000 contacts.
All their emails are personalised, they know how many emails get opened, how many links on their email get clicked and how many times. The emails have a consistent look and feel with contact numbers and web links always displayed and details of forthcoming events. These emails take a few minutes to compose and set up and they can forget about it. They even have ‘forward to’ and ‘subscribe’ links so their list can grow without having to manually add them and, unsubscribe links so they don’t have to manually track down the email to remove them so that they are ICANN/Spam compliant.
What is the name for such such a great email system? There are lots of different Mail Management Systems on the market and my preferred for newsletters is Constant Contact. You can sign up for a free 60 day trial with this link. Constant Contact set up can be a little tricky when you’ve never done it before, so at My Super VA, we’ve made it easy with our Constant Contact set up service from just £97.
The bottom line is the bottom line…. If you want to look professional, save time, be ICANN compliant while you grow your business then you use a newsletter service like Constant Contact to keep in touch with your business contacts. If you cc or bcc a ‘hi all’ bulk email to your business contacts, what does that say about how seriously you treat your business? And how seriously will they treat you?
Dec 102010
It’s not always possible to be at the end of the phone to take calls from prospects, clients or suppliers, but did you know that if a phone isn’t answered by a live human but sent to voicemail instead, no message is likely to be left? Which means you’ve potentially lost a prospect.
If you thought that having a live person answer your calls was expensive, then you haven’t come across Call Partner. Call Partner offer a low cost call answering service that costs just 99p per call. There’s no contract or fixed fees. The calls are answered by a team of dedicated professionals, who take a message and forward it by email and/or text. You can instruct them how you want your calls answered.
We are able to offer a free 2 week trial to try them out. Just go to www.call-message.co.uk/mysuperva.html
Nov 222010
by Margaret Bradley of Bradley Shaw Virtual Assistance
The more time we spend planning our time and activities, the more time we will have for those activities. By setting goals and eliminating time-wasters – and doing this every day – you will find you have extra time in the week to spend on the important things in life. A useful tool is an Activity Log – which helps you to understand how you spend your time and when you perform at your best. Note down the different things you do and note the time when you change activity, eg checking emails, opening post, making coffee, talking with colleagues, working etc. The first time you use an activity log, you may be shocked to see how much time you waste!
As well as recording what you do, note down how you feel – whether alert or tired, energetic or flat. Most people function at different levels of effectiveness in different periods of the day, depending on the amount of sugar in your blood, how long since you took a break, stress, distractions etc.
By analysing your activity log, you will be able to identify and eliminate time-wasting tasks or low-yield jobs and you’ll also know the times of day when you operate most effectively.
Another useful tool is a To-Do List. This is a list of all the tasks you need to carry out, all consolidated into one place. You can then prioritise the tasks in order of importance. With a Prioritised To-Do List you will ensure that you remember to carry out all important tasks, you will tackle the most important jobs first (rather than wasting time on trivial tasks) and you won’t get stressed out by a large number of unimportant jobs.
Nov 122010
Do you make these website mistakes?
Recently, I’ve been carrying out some research for a client which has involved finding and checking out the websites of PR companies. What has really surprised me is how difficult a lot of the big boys make it for people (potential customers) browsing to make contact. In quite a few instances, you had no idea who was behind the company and they had one generic email address for what appeared to be a huge company with many staff. It was as if they had adopted the facade of an anonymous corporate identity, no human touch or personal service and perhaps the front-line person answering the phone or responding to the generic email in the first instance would have no idea how to direct my enquiry appropriately.
So, given that that first impressions count, how does your website rank? How easy is it for potential clients to contact you?
Here are my top 5 must-haves on your brochure website.
- Contact details – make sure they are on every page, including the home page. They should include a phone number and email address at the very minimum.
- About page – it’s true that people buy from people they know, like and trust. An about page gives people a feel for who’s running the business and what their style is.
- Be proud of your size – don’t be guilty of trying to copy the big anonymous corporates to appear big, when your uniqueness is that you are small, accessible and can respond quickly to change.
- Ditch the flashy intro movies on the home page – they may look impressive, but a) search engines can’t read them so they add nothing to your search engine ranking and b) who has time to sit through a 3 minute movie when you’re browsing? Keep movies for YouTube or somewhere else on your website, so at least people have a choice whether to sit through it or not.
- Data Capture – Don’t let visitors to your site leave without giving you their contact details so you can contact them again. However, it’s no longer enough to offer a ‘sign up to my newsletter’. We are inundated with email, so signing up to yet another newsletter that I have no time to read is not going to cut it with many people. Instead have a sign up for a free report that could contain some useful information or tips that gets delivered automatically with an autoresponder like Aweber
Oct 152010
Coz you never know when it might turn around and bite you back.
I believe that nothing is black or white, right or wrong. I like to think there’s a whole load of shades of greys and different ways to solve a problem or go about something. I do like to make sure that I’ve picked the simplest and most time and cost effective way, though.
And I’m also a firm believer that if something doesn’t work, change the way you’re doing it to get a different result.
I am in love with Bluehost for my web hosting. Not only at just $83 per year is it low cost web hosting, but you get so much else with it. CPanel that allows you to create unlimited email addresses and forwards and autoresponders, unlimited web hosting, which means if you have more than one website (particularly if you’re using several squeeze pages) then you pay no more than the domain name which is just $10 per domain name.
The best for me is that WordPress easily installs with just a couple of clicks and WordPress is a great tool for creating fully customisable professional websites.
There are so many tools there that I haven’t yet explored them all.
And, most important, there’s great support to which is 24/7 that you can get via web-chat or telephone.
Oct 062010
Here’s a recommended tool I use to store files so that I can access them from other computers and my iPhone. I can also invite people to share the folder which is useful for files that I share with clients and we both need to update and access.
It’s called DropBox and you can set up an account for free which will allow you up to 2GB of storage.
I’ve also used it to transfer files from my PC to my new iMac, although I found the 2GB rather limiting as there seems to be a huge amount of files I’ve accumulated over the 3 years I’ve had that machine. Which may not be such a bad thing as it’s given me a good opportunity to sift and sort what’s important and ditch what’s not.
A great online time-saving tool that I use for managing events on behalf of clients is Eventbrite.
You can create a web page with all the event information on it, including location maps, link it up with PayPal to collect payments. Ticket issuing is all automated.
It produces attendee reports, as well as the facility to email all the signed up attendees in a group email, reminding them of the event, what to bring etc., print off registration sheets and name badges for the event itself. You can search for attendees in case of queries and re-issue tickets or issue refunds.
And best of all it costs nothing to set up. If your event is a free event for attendees, then it costs absolutely nothing. If it is a paid event, then Eventbrite take a small percentage (and don’t forget PayPal’s charges) from the ticket sales which it invoices you monthly and you can pay by PayPal or credit card. You can also choose to pass on Eventbrite’s fees to the attendees or absorb them in your ticket price.