Checking and responding to email
If you are going to have a
website, it is almost certain that you will need to use email.
Even if your phone number is available on the site, not
everyone will use call you. People
often find your information at work and not every employer allows
people to make personal call.
If the reader is not in your
telephone district, they may not be able to call.
If they get to your website in the middle of the night,
email allows them to contact you right then and there on the spot
and not have to wait until the next day.
The biggest mistake that people
in the home care profession make regarding email is that they do
not check it often. Many
of your potential clients will make multiple contacts and they
don’t look very far into the future to start making these
contacts. If you only
check your email once a week, you risk losing clients to the
competition because they got there first.
The second email mistake is not
using a website domain email address.
It may not bother you to receive an email from someone on a
Hotmail, Yahoo, Charter, AOL, or Earthlink account, but it will be
a sign to many that regardless of your abilities, you are not very
professional. This
may not be important to some people, but it will be important to
others.
A domain email address is
different from your AOL or Earthlink account email in that your
domain address belongs to you alone.
As important as it is to be
personal in your responses, it is equally important to be
professional. Many
professionals in the home care and home healthcare markets have
only been in this profession and so therefore, do not understand
that many potential customers will consider a non-domain email
address to be unprofessional.
For most people, it’s not a deal-breaker.
But getting an email from an AOL address might be something
that makes a question stand out in the mind of your customer.
