6 Best Practices for Sending More Professional Emails with Outlook

Every business communication needs to come across as professional and stylish. They should engage prospects and drive customers to take the next step via clear calls to action. Therefore, they need to look good and read well, while being exciting and direct. Follow these tips to make the best-looking emails that deliver results for your business and customers. 

1. Build Effective Email Templates

Templates help build the brand of a business, so should be treated as seriously as any other design aspect. Email templates should be stylish, provide clear areas for text, broken up with branding, products, or imagery, and ensure that all legal corporate and other messages are in place at the bottom. 

Templates ensure consistent branding and a strong look, but should still be quick to load and ensure that calls to action are near the top, as people will rapidly lose interest in a lengthy or text-dense email. 

Time-limited events should be clearly sign-posted with strong visuals to get customers engaged. Remember to update the templates regularly to stop customers from thinking that the brand is unchanging and boring and that years or copyright dates are always correct on the template. 

Also, pay attention to the signature as a professional-looking one can make you appear credible. Here’s a great guide on how to add signature in Outlook. 

An email signature generator for business can be a valuable tool for building and maintaining a strong brand identity. By using consistent branding elements and including relevant information, such as contact details and social media links, in the signature, businesses can reinforce their image and promote their products or services.

Newoldstamp makes it easy for businesses to drastically improve their brand identity.

2. Double Check Titles, Body Spelling, and Sending Times

Email titles and subheads need to grab the attention of readers, with strong verbs and calls to action. Brainstorm several titles and test them with a few people on your team to find the strongest possible message. 

Also, check that the email makes sense from a consumer perspective and ensure it is grammatically correct. Double-check any text within images, as that often bypasses spellchecks.

Finally, ensure that the emails are sent out at the appropriate time or date. Many emails are commonly sent at 9 AM, 2 PM, or 5PM, and you do not want to get lost in the stampede in someone’s inbox. 

3. Personalize and Customize With Plug-Ins

Just like WordPress and Shopify, you can customize or automate emails with a range of plug-ins to add features to Outlook. These can help create automated newsletters to your subscriber email list, or schedule emails with smart tools. 

There are even payment tools for email, to add PayPal or other services directly to messages, encouraging shopping with fewer steps for customers. Additionally, you can also create custom signatures for different types of messages from various personas or teams within a business. 

From time-saving to making emails look better, there’s usually a plug-in for that. 

4. Make Emails Part of the Marketing Campaign

Marketing emails remain a key part of most business consumer outreach efforts. By ensuring that your emails are integrated with key marketing messages, you can create a consistent tone of voice and ensure they are in harmony with advertising, promotions, and other efforts. 

If you’re seeking help with email management to implement best practices for sending more professional emails consider using effective tools for organizing and managing your inbox, allowing you to craft and send emails more efficiently.

As part of the marketing plan, consider how email can offer a different way to express key messages, along with SMS, on-site messages, and other communications. Use the power of email to deliver regular and interesting messages with more depth than shorter communications. 

5. Vary Your Emails to Deliver Active, Timely Messages

Emails from a company can get very boring, very quickly. This leads to them being ignored, deleted, or unsubscribed from. So vary the look and type of messages you put at the top of emails – while remaining on brand and in tune with other marketing efforts. 

Use email outside of your usual sending times to share fun or interesting information about products or events to encourage customers to look forward to receiving and opening those messages. You can also have a range of personas talking to consumers to help build more of a rapport, and use different tones of voice with them. 

6. Link Emails to Activities, and Always Remember the Unsubscribe Button

Emails should always link to a new or upcoming activity to give it a sense of urgency or timeliness. Natural seasonal events like summer holidays, festivals, industry gatherings, or social occasions are tracked and used by most brands, but you should also look for different or new events that help make your business appear more progressive or in touch. 

Finally, even though every business and marketer hates the unsubscribe button. Make sure it is there and clear at the bottom of each email. Firstly for compliance reasons, but also should customers wish to move on, it is a sign of good grace to let them go without any fuss or shenanigans. 

7. Control your Inbox

Managing your email inbox well is key to keep productive and pay attention to important messages. An important method is to often unsubscribe from newsletters or ads mail that you do not need anymore. Online tools can help with email management. Most of these emails let you unsubscribe easily. When you check and cancel these subscriptions regularly, you cut down a lot of unneeded emails. This makes room for more important emails.

Decide on particular times to look at your emails to greatly better your focus and work. Getting many email alerts can take your attention away, so having set times to read and reply to emails can improve how you use your time. At these times, get rid of or archive emails that are not important. This keeps your inbox tidy and easy to handle. It gives you more time to focus on emails that need your reply.

Conclusion

It is very easy for a company to think that an email campaign is just a string of regular messages, sent out with an expectation of a small response rate. Instead, focus effort on making those emails beyond the norm, with unique information or offers to make consumers more likely to react and feel positive about the messages coming from your business.