Emails: An Easy Way to Building Relationships
Pay Attention to Email Inquiries
Do you have a website?
Do you invite customers / clients or potential customers / clients to contact you by email?
Is building relationships important to you?
A reply to email inquiries seems like such a simple concept to put into practice, but may be challenging to implement consistently. Your relationship may begin, or end here, so reply to email inquiries.
Awhile back, I emailed a local roofer using the email address on the company’s website. I wanted to ask the company to quote on replacing our roof. A few weeks went by with no reply. Knowing that sometimes an email is missed, I re-sent my original email with the message “Perhaps you missed my earlier email.”
After a few more weeks with no reply, I came across someone who works for the roofer and told him my odyssey to connect with the company. He mentioned that the company was very busy and the owner likely hasn’t had time to reply. I’m glad the roofer is busy, but it only takes no more than two minutes to hit [Reply] to let me know they are booked several months out and don’t have time to quote. While this answer wouldn’t have been the reply I hoped for, it would have stopped my follow-ups and perhaps motivated me to look elsewhere or to connect with the roofer next spring.
A reply to my inquiry is also an opportunity to begin building a relationship with me either by stating when they expect to be able to quote my roof and/or advise me on other roofers they recommend.
Not replying to my inquiry tells me the roofer doesn’t care about my business, helping to solution my need or my time.
All websites should have a way for folks to connect with them. I don’t recommend having an email address published on a website as harvesters will collect it and either do their own spamming and/or sell the address to others for spamming. Ideally a visitor to your website will be able to click on a Contact Me link and be taken to a form to fill out and [Send].
