Ten Ways to Make Your E-mails More Appealing
by Bill Koelzer

Plain old gray, all-text emails get boring fast. That's mostly because many business people just don't know how to liven up their messages by adding varied type faces, colored text and varied font sizes, clickable links, images, divider lines, and so on. The worst offense, however, is to NOT send your emails in the HTML format.

Here are the top ten easiest ways to make your emails zing from now on:

1. SEND IN HTML: Be sure you send your emails in HTML and not plain text mode. To switch from boring plain text to HTML (lets you customize your emails in dozens of ways), open your Outlook email sender/receiver box, and at the top menu, choose: Tools > Options > Mail Format, and then, after the line "Compose in this message format" appears in a window, select HTML from the little drop down menu there.

Now, at last, since you are using HTML format instead of plain text, you can dress up your emails and have some fun as well as make your emails stand out when compared to your competitors. However, let's use common sense---if you are emailing a bereaved family after a funeral don't be including clowns and balloons in your email.

2. INSERT DIVIDER LINE: Open a blank Outlook email box after you have set it for HTML, and then click your cursor once in the empty typing space. Notice that as soon as you do that click, the top EDITING part of your email box comes alive and the formerly shadowed area on the formatting bar now has bright colors.

To insert a horizontal line from margin to margin, click in the box again, exactly where you want to insert the line, then, on the Insert menu above, click Horizontal Line. The line magically appears across the page. Or, click to the extreme right of the formatting bar, on the box with two tiny "As," and a line, and you can insert a line, too.

Including a line is valuable in dividing sections of a long email, so that the reader understands where one part ends and a new one begins. It simply adds ORDER. It is also a nice tight way to set off a series of photos that are one on top of another.

3. INCLUDE YOUR FULL CONTACT INFORMATION: I can't recall the number of times that I've simply referred to a previous e-mail to obtain or confirm the contact information of the person that I was trying to eventually contact. Make it easier for the person if they need to contact you in some other form of medium - be it phone call, mailing address, or even a FAX number. Some e-mails contain a logo, photo, signature, name, title, mailing address, along with e-mail, phone numbers and FAX number. This makes it easier for future contact or reference in the event someone needs to find your complete contact information.

4. INSERT AN IMAGE: Almost every businessperson has to send a photo eventually to a customer or client. In HTML it is so easy to imbed the picture right inside the email window. The advantage of doing this is that the recipient sees the image right away instead of having to find it in the attachment and laboriously open it with his photo manipulating software. Imbedding the photo is faster and he can STILL save the photo if he needs to. Here are the steps to inserting an image:

Open a blank email window and click where you want the image to appear.

On the top menu, click on Insert and choose Picture.

When you do this a small window opens up. Click on Browse and find the image that you want from your computer or camera, etc.

Click on the image you want. Click on open and then click ok, or just double click the image and then click ok.

Bang! There's your inserted image in all its glory inside your email and visible.

5. ATTACH AN IMAGE OR FILE:

1. In either HTML or plain text emails, click on Insert on the top menu of your email window. Click on File. When you do, you can then browse all the files in your computer.
2. Select the file you want to attach, double click it, and it is attached to your email. You can also attach images the same way...an image is considered a file, too.

6. ADD HYPERLINKS: A hyperlink is another name for a link...those blue, underlined things that when you click on them, you go to a different web page or to a pre-addressed email window. Add them to your emails yourself to cut down on the length of your emails and make them far tidier than ones packed with, say, four decks of impossibly long links.

For example, you COULD have a bunch of sentences like this one:

"Sarah, see my discussion about the tall ships festival in Dan Point Harbor: http://blog.debbieferrari.com/2007/08/31/dana-point-harbor-real-estate/."

Or, you could shorten the sentence in this way by adding a hyperlink:

"Sarah see my discussion about the tall ships festival in Dana Point Harbor."

Here's how you do it.

1. Highlight a piece of text or an image in your email message.
2. On the top menu choose Insert and click on Hyperlink.
3. In the little window, type or paste in the URL or email address you want the person to go to when they click on the hyperlinked item.
4. Click OK.

You'll see that your text or image has now become "hyperlinked" to an outside location or email and has likely turned blue. To test it, click on the hyperlinked item and see if it takes you to what you typed in.

7. CENTER AN ITEM IN AN HTML EMAIL:

1. Highlight the headline, image, text, etc. that you want to center on the page.
2. On the menu, on the formatting bar above, you will see three little boxes---located Left, Center, Right---in a group, with teeny horizontal lines in them. Click on the center box to center stuff that you've highlighted.

Obviously, you would also click on the left box to move something to the left and on the right box to move it to the right. So easy...! This is good for centering subheads in an email and that can make YOUR HTML-formatted emails stand out from everyone else's.

8. INSERT SIGNATURE: All your business-oriented emails should carry your contact information, either in a text signature or in an HTML one. The all-text signatures are most acceptable today because HTML ones can become quite garish if overdone in a business context, or they might be perceived that way by more conservative clients. Still, to the right audience, they have more impact.

Before you can insert a text signature though, you have to create one. Microsoft does a better job of telling you how than I would:

1. From the main Microsoft Outlook window, on the Tools menu, click Options, and then click the Mail Format tab.
2. In the Compose in this message format list, click the message format that you want to use the signature with.
3. Under Signature, click Signatures, and then click New.
4. In the Enter a name for your new signature box, enter a name.
5. Under Choose how to create your signature, select the option you want.
6. Click Next.
7. In the Signature text box, type the text you want to include in the signature. You can also paste text to this box from another document.
8. To change the paragraph or font format, select the text, click Font or Paragraph, and then select the options you want. These options are not available if you use plain text as your message format.
9. To add an electronic business card ("vCard") to the signature, under vCard options, select a vCard from the list, or click New vCard from Contact.
10. Click Finish when you are done editing the new signature.

9. ENLARGE SUBHEADS AND USE DIFFERENT COLORS: What if the next National Geographic Magazine that you picked up was printed solely in the same single size type, and in only black on white paper throughout? Sort of takes away from the storied mystique, huh? Borrrrring! Well, there's no reason that your emails have to be boringly mono-type or monochrome, either.

Make Type Bigger

Increasing the size of your text for adding subheads that stand out is so easy. Just type the line that you want for a subhead and then highlight it. Then, go up above to the formatting tool bar, and change the text size number there---look in the little menu box to the left of the bold letter B---and change the number from say, 10 or 12, to 16 or 18. That size is sure to stand out and signal to the reader that a new subject follows.

Use Different Colors

Want to color that subhead? Highlight the words of text that you want colored. Then, go up to the top of your email blank to the formatting toolbar where you see a little capital A. Click on the tiny down menu triangle to the right of the A, which opens a palette of colors. Click on a color... and, Bingo, your highlighted text is now colored. You can also make ALL your type a certain color, right as you type it.

There are other tactics, too, that make your emails more vibrant and interesting. These include adding bullets, numbers, stationery, colored backgrounds, signatures, and much more. But the ones cited above are among the fastest to learn and easiest to use.

10. USE DIFFERENT FONT TYPES: Most of us fall into a habit of typing emails by using our pre-set defaulted type face, size and colors. But you CAN make impact in your emails by using a different font sometimes either for entire emails or for just parts of them.

Look above on the formatting toolbar just to the left of the little window with a number showing in it. That name (Times New Roman, Arial, etc.) is the name of a specific font (the shape of a typeface) and if you click on the little down triangle there, you open up a long list of typefaces. As you scroll down, you can even see what each typeface looks like.

Try one of the above enhancements today on your next email. Once you do and see the results, you'll want to try several at a time. Soon, you'll find that your friends are improving the look of their emails, too. What if everyone started doing this? Wading through dozens of emails might not be so tedious after all!

 

Bill Koelzer is a lecturer and Web marketing consultant for Internet Realtors and realty-related corporations. He is co-author, with Barbara Cox, Ph.D., of the Prentice-Hall book, "Internet Marketing in Real Estate" and husband of Pioneer Web Broker, Debbie Ferrari at www.DebbieFerrari.com. Contact info: www.koelzer.com or e-mail him at Bill@Koelzer.com.

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