Top Ten Tips - To Email Etiquette When Contacting Someone You’d Like To Collaborate With For The First Time by James Lightbown
First impressions count, they really do! The first time someone sees your work, your website, your portfolio they will make a judgement on you. So sending that first email is very important, get it wrong and you are very unlikely to get a second chance.
So here’s a “Top Ten Tips” guide to writing that first email.
1. Introduce Yourself!
When emailing for the first time be sure to introduce yourself. Your name and what you do, just a brief introduction, it seems obvious but I have received emails that were missing some pretty basic details that rendered the email unanswerable.
2. Personalise your emails – Actually personalise it!
It’s very easy to spot a generic email that you are copying and pasting to send to a lot of people. Non specific text jumps off the page when you receive a lot of emails. Do some research into the person who you are approaching, look at their website, reference images that you like, say what inspired you to contact them and why you would like to work with them.
3. Personalise your emails – Do not copy & paste.
Very, very basic – Even worse than copying and pasting the content of your email is to copy and paste the email and then forget to remove the previous person’s name. Receiving an email that starts with “Dear Barry” when your name is James will get you a reply but it won’t be the one you want!
4. Personalise your emails – Do not bulk mail. (via @keithclouston)
So you’re not going to copy and paste, fine but don’t also write one email and send it to lots of people by putting all their names in the ‘to’ section. It means your recipients will see that you sent the same email to everyone and rather than annoying one person you’re likely to alienate yourself from a lot of people!
5. Use proper punctuation, do not use text speak nor TYPE IN CAPITALS.
You’re approaching professionals, be professional. If you don’t understand why you shouldn’t do the above then to be honest there’s not much hope!
6. Be careful of your attachments.
The following link (http://bit.ly/bkQXMj) to an about.com article on email etiquette recommends you never sending attachments in a first email, due to viruses. So your first option should always be for you to have a simple professional looking portfolio website for you to send people to by including a link in your email (though this does lead onto another article about the quality of websites!)
However I appreciate that not everyone has a website if you’re starting out so there may be occasions when sending attachments may have to be necessary. However if you are going to send attachments only send a few and make sure that the file sizes are small enough. Ideally images should be no bigger than 200k in file size and no longer than 900 pixels on the longest side. The worst example I have received was someone sending me over 30 hi-res images, the smallest file was 1.5 mb the largest was over 7.5 mbs! This, obviously clogged up my email for an eternity and they got instantly deleted without ever being looked at.
7. Use a professional email address. (via @markjobson)
Basically if you’re email address contains anything other than you’re name and possibly your profession then there’s something wrong. If it’s possible for you to register your domain name so that the email is @yourname then brilliant. If you’re not able to then at least have yourname@ one of the email providers.
If you have registered your own domain name then I personally think you should also use your first name as the email address. It is a very, very small percentage of people who are ever successful enough in this industry to be able to hire their own staff. Personally I’m not a fan of info/contact/bookings in the address. I think it’s a more personal touch to have your name in there.
So in order of preferance:
a/ jane(at)janedoe.com - jane(at)jane-doe.com - jane(at)janedoemake-up.com
b/ johndoe(at)hotmail.com - john.doe(at)gmail.com - johndoephotography(at)yahoo.com
never/ hotchick1981(at)hotmail.com - snugglycuddlebunny(at)aol.com - Itakewickedpicturesinnit(at)msn.com
Addition: I’ve also just remembered receiving emails from a female make-up artist who was contacting me using her husband’s email address. This is another big no! It’s very easy to set up an email address and so there is no good reason to basically ask me to get a message to you via your husband!
8. Keep it short and to the point.
Don’t waffle or go on too much about yourself. Introduce yourself, what you do, provide a link to your work, mention why you are emailing the person, what it is you like about them, what prompted you to mail and what you result you would like from the email.
9. Don’t actually type anything in the “to” section until you have finished writing your email.
This removes any chance of you hitting the send button prematurely. Write your email, spell check, proof read, check you’ve added your links right, added any attachments (only if necessary) and then when you’re happy with the email finally fill in the recipients address.
10. When you do type the recipient’s name, actually get their name right!
Check the spelling of the recipients name before you send it and then check it again! My surname is Lightbown, there is no “R” in my surname, my name is not a description for beige yet so many people want to spell it as though I am a colour. This happens so often that I have actually registered the incorrect domain names to make sure that people find my work. This also means that I now actually receive the miss-spelt emails, of which there are a scary amount that come through. One thing is certain, if my first impression of you is that you can’t even get my name right then it’s highly unlikely that I’ll will even email you back let alone want to work with you.
So check the spelling of your recipient’s name and then check it again.
Hope this helps!
For further reading simply google “email etiquette” and look through any of the huge number of guides that have been written.
