What I am about to say will make some people stand up and shout hooray! It will make others blush with embarrassment. Either way, take this advice and make your life a little bit easier.

This is about email etiquette. When you are exchanging emails with friends and family, do whatever you want. But when you are conducting business, either as the customer or as the merchant, you need to observe some common rules.

First, I am constantly amazed, on a daily basis, how many people will send me an email without signing their name! C'mon! If you send me an email without signing your name, my first impression of you is "LAZY BUM." Right or wrong, that's what you project if you don't bother to sign your name. It's a common courtesy to sign your full name.

Here is the rule: If it's worth sending, it's worth signing.

This is just like writing a paper letter to a company. You should tell them who you are. Always sign your first and last name.

I got an email the other day from a customer that had NO name at all, and all it said was...

"i lost my psswrd"

That's it! How lazy is that? That's all it said. No name, no contact information. After spending a few minutes checking my database (grrrrr), the email was not on file. In other words, they were contacting me now with a different email address then they signed up with and they were too lazy to tell me who they were. How can I help this person?

So I had to email the person back and start trying to extract basic information out of them so I could help them. It was like pulling teeth. This is really irritating. And get 10 or 20 of these a day and it becomes a gigantic pain in the you-know-what. You will soon understand this when you get an email from one of your own customers who needs the download link for your ebook again because they lost the link. Hey, we all lose links and info from time to time. However, an email that says "pls send link" with no name or contact details doesn't cut it. You've got to know who they are first in order to help them. So make sure when you contact people in a business setting that you do so properly. You will save them and YOU some valuable time.

Second, do not leave the subject line of your emails blank. Not only does it look like SPAM, and some people won't even bother to read it, but it makes you look LAZY! Put a subject line in your emails.

Third, get rid of that silly background color, flowers, smiley faces, pictures and all that other junk. Many email services block those pictures now anyway, mine does. Oh, and that beautiful email you think you are sending shows up as bunch of ugly boxes with red X's in them. I even get emails where people have brown writing on a black background. What were they thinking? I can't even read the darn things and have to copy and paste it into Microsoft Word to even figure out what their email is saying. Just a white background and black letters is fine, thank you.

In a world where common courtesies seem to be going down the drain, take some pride and be one of the people who project a smart, professional image. Not only will it make you look better, but it will save you time and energy.

Copyright 2006 Jeff Yancey