NathanHJones.comJust thinking outloud

Many online businesses provide generic email addresses on their ‘contact us’ page for their customers to use - sales@, admin@, press@, etc.  While they may be easy to set up they can become difficult to manage which is why including a little business logic may help ease the pain.  If you’re using Google Apps to run your back-end office operations you’re in luck.  We’re profiling how to set up those generic email addresses with a little workflow to make those in to dollar producing assets.

The Setup:

For the purposes of this post, I’ve created a generic ’sales’ address and an address for a fake employee - Johnny.  Johnny is so good, I want my big-dollar product leads going straight to him for quick conversion.  Every sales organization is structured differently, but we’re working under the assumption that our sales reps are product and territory based.  Our high-dollar product lines are the XY9500 and the YZ9900.  Johnny handles sales for MD, DC, VA, TN, NC, SC and GA.

The Approach:

GMail has a very advanced set of search operators built-in that happen to work with filters when included in the ‘Has The Words:’ text box during filter creation.  We’re going to create a set of filters in the ’sales’ inbox that will forward matching emails to the appropriate sales rep, label the message as ‘forwarded’ and then archive it.  Labeling and archiving the email keeps the inbox clean so that the generic address ‘manager’ only has to review and react to those messages that our logic doesn’t recognize.

The Execution:

Here is an email from a potential customer that found us on the web.  They’re interested in setting up a contract to purchase 100 of our XY9500 products.

Dear Sales Team:

My name is Phil and I’m the purchaser for Acme Associates based in Washington, DC.  We are in the market for 100 of your XY9500 products and would like to speak with a sales associate to obtain some additional information.

The best way to get in touch with me is via email or at 123-123-1234.

Thank you,

Phil

Acme Associates

Washington, DC 12345

For the state determination we’re relying on the fact that people use a full signature with the address.  You could also include area/zip code in an ‘or’ condition.  You can create another filter for just products that goes to an individual to distribute accordingly or to a distribution list of all the reps that handle that product.  Google Apps allows you to easily create distribution lists.

Within the ’sales’ email account enter the ’settings’ and create a new filter.  We’re going to leave everything but the ‘Has the words:’ field blank.  If you’re using a web form to capture the data you may be able to use the ’subject’ field but I think it’s a little more robust and easier to maintain if it’s all in one field.  One of the more important aspects of the operators to understand is that parenthesis “( )” equate to ‘AND’ and brackets “{ }” equate to ‘OR’.

The filter rule we’re going to use is: “({XY9500 YZ9900} {MD DC VA TN NC SC GA})”  This means that the email has to contain both a product of XY9500 or YZ9900 and a state of MD, DC, VA, TN, NC, SC or GA.  If it passes our filter, we’ll send it to Johnny, mark it as ‘forwarded’ and archive the email.  You could expand the list of states to include area codes since most people include at least one phone number in their signature.

Step 1

Step 2

Once you come up with a filter you want to use, test it by emailing yourself a few emails and entering the filter in the search field.  You know your customers best and if the email is caught (either included or excluded) as you expected then you should be good to go.  Here are a couple screenshots of the search - one note, the search feature will highlight pieces of the email that fit your criteria.

Search results from Sales inbox

Email with highlighted search results

The Debrief:

While this is in no way an exhaustive list of the advanced search operators, I think it is a good introduction and should get you started.  From a maintenance perspective, it would be best to create one filter per employee (sales person, PR agent, etc) so that in the unlikely event that they leave, you only need to adjust the forwarding email in one label to the interim employee.

If your website uses a contact form that potential customers fill out you have a little more opportunity for drilling into the data.  If you know how the data will be formatted when it hits your inbox that allows you to create more advanced filters and get things to exactly the right employee.  Maybe, your contact form has a ‘budget’ field with preset amounts and anything over a certain dollar figure gets sent to an urgent-response team.  There are so many applications for the search operators that spending some time to familiarize yourself with them will pay off in the long run.

One thing to experiment with is the ‘exclusion’ operator.  If you include the “-” symbol before one of your clauses it excludes items that meet that statement.  For example, if your filter criteria was “({XY9500 YZ9900} -{MD DC VA TN NC SC GA})” and you used the email above, your search results would return 0 results because it contains ‘DC’.

Don’t forget to have the office manager login and check those inboxes and forward those leads to the appropriate person.

If you have some other ideas that you use to make things easier, let me know in the comments.

My addiction to Gmail continues today (official post was last Thursday) as they roll out a ‘new’ feature - group mailing lists. The group feature isn’t exactly new, I’ve had group assignments in my Gmail contact list for about a year now but now I can send an email to everyone in a group without having to remember everyones name…let alone making sure I got email addresses right.

Getting set up is extremely easy, I had a new group with members set up and ready to email (test group for my screenshot) in roughly two minutes. I’ve got a couple different groups but they’re useful for family and friends.  Makes sending out the family news a whole lot easier.

When sending an email all you have to do is start typing the group name and Gmail will populate the email addresses for everyone in the group.

Sorry everyone, this is only available for IE7 and Firefox 2 or newer.

As I’m sure many of you do, I use email constantly at work. There are some days at work that I probably spend 50+ % of my time reading and writing emails. No, I don’t type really slow! Managing a team of off-shore developers just has it’s pro’s and con’s and one of the con’s is that 75% or more of your communication is done via email. Since the majority of my day-to-day communication is done via email and the company I work for is stingy when it comes to email storage (a measly 150MB of storage space…really? I get 6.25 GB in my free Gmail account…but that’s a post for another day), minimizing email size is important to me.

That being said, here are a few email signature etiquette tips that I think everyone can take something away from…myself included. Yes, I’ve broken these rules before but over the past couple years I’ve refined my approach.

Signature Format the Nathan Jones Approach:

• Name: I think this goes without saying but I included it for good measure. If you want to make this bold or slightly (and I mean slightly, don’t make me regret putting this in here) larger than the rest of the signature that is definitely understandable.
• Company/Office: Many people would make this two separate lines within the signature but I don’t see the need for it. I think it should be combined into a single line with a separator such as a dash (-) or vertical line (|). It looks classy and it keeps the number of lines down.
• Contact Information:
  • Email Address: My thoughts on this are pretty to the point - it’s ok to have your email address listed on your ‘new email’ signature but it should not be present on your ‘replies’ signature. In Outlook you can create multiple signatures and assign different ones to different types of emails. If you are replying to an email it’s a given that the person already has your email address. If you use a mobile phone to send/receive that only allows one signature - including your email address is acceptable.
  • Phone Numbers: Where do I begin…I got an email the other day that had five different phone numbers in the signature. My first thought is that this person has way too much time, not doing work presumably, to create this signature let alone manage five different phone numbers. I think a signature should have at most - three. A desk/office phone number, a mobile phone number and a fax machine number. If you don’t have a fax then leave it off the signature and make the max two!
  • Instant Messaging Names: In today’s technology driven world I think it’s perfectly legitimate to place a single instant messaging address in your signature. I do a lot of communicating through instant messaging and it’s a quick way for people to get in touch with me. I’d leave it at one though - it makes sense that it be the name to the instant messaging client you use the most…but that’s obviously up to you.
  • Office Address: Unless you work in a job where clients visit your office on a regular occasion or you get a lot of mail sent to that address, I think it’s best to leave this address off your signature. If people need it they can always ask for it. More than likely the number of people that don’t need that address far outweigh the number of those that do.
  • Personal Websites: I think personal websites should be left off of your work email signature no matter what kind of personal website you run. Maybe you just run a blog (similar to this one) but of course there are/will be views expressed that could ultimately upset one of your clients or co-workers and that’s a situation that no one wants to be involved in. I think it’s fine to advertise your personal website on your personal email signature though - I do it!
• Color: I’m pretty open to colors in email signatures - they make them unique and can call attention to certain pieces of information. Mostly because most email editors these days will format your signature in HTML whether it needs to or not so whether you make your color bright pink (please spare me the pain) or a classic gray I don’t care either way (geek information: HTML color formats require the same amount of bytes for almost all colors). As for how it looks - I vote you stick with a classic color such as black, dark blue, green, gray or some company color if there is one. Personally, I would never look at your signature if it were bright pink, but that’s just me.
• Images: I don’t know how many times I have received an email with the company logo embedded in the signature but it drives me absolutely nuts. First of all, it takes up space. Normally it uses just a bit more space than formatted text but if you receive as many emails as me those extra bytes start to add up…quickly! My personal thought is that an image should never be embedded in a signature unless your company mandates it. By the way, if they do mandate an image I’d like to hear about it and whether they limit your email storage space.
• Mobile Note: If you send email from your mobile phone and have a signature set-up I think it’s a good idea to add a small note at the bottom of the signature that indicates that the email is being sent from your mobile phone. It will take up a little space but your signature should be smaller on your phone anyways and a note like this can go a long way in explaining why sentences may be more direct or the occasional misspelled word appears. Personally, I use “Note: This message was sent from my mobile phone.”.

Well, those are just some of my thoughts on email signature etiquette. In summary, keep it short and simple. If you’re a sales person or someone who relies on getting your contact information seen acted upon you can still keep it short and classy and just use a different color or bolded word to get your phone number looked at.

A couple weeks ago Gmail added some real slick functionality to their web-based version (Sorry, Firefox and IE7 only I believe). I’m a huge Gmail supporter (I’ve been a user since they first opened up shop) and love the flexibility it offers - especially now that they support IMAP which I can get on my mobile phone. And sticking with standard Google practice - that’s free too!

Gmail ‘labels’ already beat the standard folder approach to email simply because it allows you to organize/archive emails in several buckets rather than just a single folder. As many of you have probably experienced, emails tend to involve multiple topics and it can be difficult to remember which folder you may have saved individual emails in. However, with labels you can tag an email with as many topics as you wish which makes organizing much cleaner. I know you could copy the email and place it into several folders but that would cause your email account size to grow at rates that often out pace storage space growth.

The color-coding of labels now lets me organize my inbox even further and provides a way for me to visually determine what requires my attention. I’ve got everything from to-do lists (depicted below) to family members designated with specific colors. To automate the process even further I’ve created a few rules - mostly for reoccurring topics of conversation - to tag emails as they are received.

Here is a shot of the color-coded labels in action.

Just another reason why Gmail wins my email business.