5 tips to ensure your online communication doesn’t get lost
Clients are receiving on average 126 emails a day – here are 5 tips to ensure your online communication isn’t getting lost in the barrage.
Effective communication is vital. How you communicate can be the difference in winning or losing an opportunity, motivating or demotivating team members or even streamlining or overcomplicating a process. With competing priorities, travel and the increasing prevalence of team members working remotely, technology dominates the way we communicate. In fact, 63% of business people prefer to communicate via email for business.
So how do you ensure communication is being heard and achieving your aims when using electronic mediums in 2020? Here are my top ideas:
1. Avoid the email tennis match – If you need to discuss a complex matter with a team member or group, it will be far more productive to jump on a Zoom video chat. Email ping pong means key points get lost in the barrage and delays action. Get someone to take notes in the video call, write them up and them send to all parties on the call asking for any final thoughts (in case some have incubated ideas after the call and have further contributions to make).
2. Keep it simple – Don’t use 100 words in an email when you can use 20. If I open a short email, I’m more likely to respond to it right away but if I see communication coming it that has a lot of detail, I’ll likely diarise to answer at another time.
3. Authenticity – anyone can use a CRM to add in a custom first name field within a generic email and call it ‘personalized’. You are emailing busy people, spell out clearly in the first line why they are receiving the email – what does it mean for their unique situation? Why is it important for them?
4. Use videos – instead of sending an article to a customer saying ‘I thought you’d like this’ why don’t you send the article link alongside a 2-minute video outlining why you thought the article would be useful summarising the key points. Simple video products like Snagit allow you to make, trim and send a short video in minutes. Clients will appreciate you going the extra mile.
5. Focus on one thing – For Mindshop, online utilization is integral to the success of our business and we have a huge list of actions our coaches can take to lift engagement with their clients. If our team detects a drop in utilization, we used to email a coach some key tips, use dot points, reinforce messages with a bold font, adding links to FAQs. But sadly, our best endeavours would fall on deaf ears, not because our advisors didn’t care, but because it was too much. Our approach has shifted to focus on one single action based on their unique coaching statistics – far more achievable for extremely busy people.
Not only is content important, but so is your delivery medium. Vary how you go about delivering your message to cut through everyday ‘noise’. Mindshop’s learning and development platform Mindshop Online for example is used by Mindshop advisors, their teams and clients to avoid the fog of day-to-day emails. Allowing collaboration and communication between team members, it’s here that strategies, questions, client opportunities, growth of their advisory skills and revenue streams align, linked to tools, online training and resources to drive business advisory success.
There are 4 ways Mindshop advisors can communicate in Mindshop Online:
1. Communicate confidentially with your support coach: use Mindshop Online to plan ‘how’ to get from ‘now’ to ‘where’ you want to be. Posted actions can be as simple as a question to your coach, a growth opportunity, a strategy, the courses you want to work on to build capability or a personal opportunity – essentially anything you need to guide achievement of your goals.
2. Share a coaching post with a team member or colleague: use your coach, team member or peers as a sounding board for issue resolution or the best way to approach opportunities. Mindshop Online is a great way to gather insights and feedback in a central location.
3. Collaborate with up to 10 team members or peers: plug in a project, collaborate on actions and increase accountability for moving forward, without the hassle of searching historical email trails before every meeting.
4. Tap into the power of the community through the discussion forum: collecting insights from thousands of peers around the globe avoids repeating the mistakes of others, giving you access to a host of curated knowledge.
On average, each worker around the globe receives 126 emails every day, a number expected to rise by 5% each year. So remember effective communication is not just about great content but also the most appropriate delivery mechanism for your message.
Best of luck.
For more information about Mindshop or to access the latest advisory best practise, advisor community, tools, coaching and support talk to one of our regional managers.
