How To Write The Perfect Reply Email - Part I

How To Write The Perfect Reply Email - Part I

A NAMB reader wrote us and said, "I am responding to all my online inquiries but not receiving many sales via email. What can I do?" Assuming it is not the interest rate you are offering; let's focus on how to reply to a business email inquiry.

An Email Is Worth A Thousand Dollars

A picture may be worth a thousand words; but an email can be worth a thousand dollars because any given email to a customer can result in a loan closing for your mortgage company. Due to the high value potential, it is worth the time and effort to create a perfect reply email.

Email is Easy - If Done Right

You do it maybe hundreds of times a day - to friends, to co-workers, to customers. You respond to email requests. You think it is simple, and it is, if it is performed correctly.

There is a famous example of legendary UCLA basketball coach John Wooden sitting down with his players on the first day of practice and saying, "Today we are going to learn how to put our socks on correctly." The players all laugh and find it hard to believe, but he explains, by doing this simple task properly, they won't get blisters from their socks, and thus won't miss practice.

An Ounce of Prevention...

In this article we are going to discuss how to reply to a customer request by email. We will discuss what to say and what not to say or do. Of course there are a few famous examples of "what not to say" in emails:

Michael Brown (FEMA): right after Hurricane Katrina, when he should have been doing everything he could for the Gulf states, he emailed his staff asking if anyone knew a "good dog-sitter" for his dog.

Enron: Former Enron executives Kenneth Lay and Andrew Fastow claimed not to know about the company's illegal accounting practices. During the trial it was shown that not only was Enron aware of the practices, but that Enron used its email system to send Social Security numbers, wage packages, performance evaluations and also sent revealing messages about office romances, affairs and other personal content.

Martha Stewart: In 2004, the Martha Stewart trial reveals how even a single email message can influence a verdict. In an email from Stewart's investment broker, he informed Stewart that he had sold some of Stewart's stocks to offset capital gains taxes. Three days later, Bacanvoic sold Stewart's disputed ImClone stock, refuting his own testimony that the ImClone stocks, which were actually sold at a gain, had also been sold for tax purposes. This single email message resulted in a six month prison sentence for Stewart.

It Starts With a Subject

In five seconds or less, you have to have your informative and powerful subject line persuade your prospect to open your email and to keep reading. Your subject should be informative, personal and brief. I will discuss a few do's and do not's.

Here are a few examples of bad email subjects:

* The information you requested. (A common ploy by Spammers to get you to open their email)
* URGENT!!! THE INFORMATION YOU REQUESTED!!! (Using urgent or ALL CAPS usually means a Spammer)
* Your new home loan. (Not personalized at all, could be a Spammer)
* Re: Online submission form. (Often a potential customer uses a form submission and the mortgage company representative just hits reply - even if it is a bad subject line)
* "Hi!" or "Wazzup?" or worse, a blank subject line will kill your email. People love mysteries, just not in their in-box.

Remember, you only have a few words to grab your prospects attention, so choose them wisely. Here are a few examples of good email subjects:

* Robert Smith: your home loan inquiry from Texas Loan Company.
* Robert Smith: your 125 Apple Lane home loan inquiry.
* San Diego Mortgage proposal for Robert Smith of 125 Apple Lane.

Subject - Updating & Deadlines

As you progress through a series of emails with a client, the focus often changes and the subject that originally was "Robert Smith: your 125 Apple Lane home loan inquiry," may now need to be updated to read, "Robert, you sign your loan documents Monday at 4 pm." By staying current on the subject it makes it easier to search emails.

Also, when having multiple emails back and forth with you and a customer, be sure to trim the "Re: Re: Re: Re: Re:" out.

Email Address Poor "From" Email Settings

Often replies from mortgage companies to their clients have the "From" address constructed in a manner that appears Spammish. That is, the return address might read "Sales" or "Info" at your company name. Because many Spammers use "Sales" or "Info", you should avoid this. My sister recently sent me an email and my filters put it in the Spam folder. She had recently "updated" her email to read from, "Info" Info@HerCompany.com. The use of the word "Info" triggered a possible Spam alert.

Here is what we suggest as your return address: Full name, URL and case corrected email address, i.e., "Rob Smith - HisMortgageCompany.com" Rob@HisMortgageCompany.com

By showing his full name, and adding his web site address (URL), coupled with the easy to read case of his email address (i.e. not the hard to read, all lower case rob@hismortgagecompany.com), this makes it more probable that his email will not get pick off by a filter and will be easy to decipher by the recipient.

Unmatched Return Email Address

Some mortgage companies allow their staff to use whatever email address the representative wants. In example someone at our company should be using Kenzie@YourMortgageCompany.com, but she might use her personal email such as FishingIsMuchBetterThanWork@hotmail.com.

Any business correspondence from your company to a customer should always match the URL of your company. Two major problems occur when you fail to monitor return email addresses. The first problem is that your email may get filtered out as Spam, or it may not get read by the recipient as they were expecting an email from YourMortgageCompany.com, but not from FishingIsMuchBetterThanWork@hotmail.com.

The second problem is that you lose control of your customers. If Kenzie ever leaves the company, her leads will follow her as they have the email FishingIsMuchBetterThanWork@hotmail.com, not Kenzie@YourMortgageCompany.com. You can easily redirect her old company email address to her replacement. If you don't, the result is you lose business.

Email Address - To

If other recipients (escrow, loan officer, administrative assistant) need to be included in an email response, use the CC (carbon copy) feature in an email. This allows the customer to know everyone that is involved in their loan.

The Reply - Timeliness

The more prompt your reply, the more likely you are to get business. This is especially true when you are buying mortgage leads. Conversely, if you take more than 48 hours to reply, you can probably anticipate losing that person as a customer.

Attachments

Try not to include attachments. Many people won't open them fearing they are a virus. Others can't open them if you send a PDF file and they don't have Adobe reader installed. One work-around for this is to have the document they need online so they can click to the document and if it is a PDF file, there can be a link to download the Adobe program.

Other considerations include that your recipient may use a dial-up connection which makes large attachments painfully slow or they have email accounts that either 1) limit the amount of storage space or 2) refuse attachments over a certain size.

Next month we will discuss in Part II what to include in your content, whether to use HTML or plain text, which layout to use and how to structure your content for business reply emails.