When it comes to brands, and well, life, trust is one of the most difficult things to earn and one of the easiest things to loose. If a business doesn’t have the trust of it’s clients and potential clients, growing becomes all the more difficult. 

However I’ve found that communicating well through email is one of the easiest (and most affordable,) ways to let others know that your brand is trustworthy. 

1. Respond Quickly (and use Boomerang)

Timing is everything – especially when it comes to email. Make sure you’re replying to all messages within 48 hours. If you’re going to be out of the office, set up a vacation auto-responder and make sure it indicates when you’ll be replying to messages. 

While replying quickly is important, be careful not to reply too quickly. Make sure you allow yourself time to think through emails and be careful not to give correspondents the impression that you’re available at all times of the day. If you need to answer emails to clean out your inbox and they’ve come in a little too recently, use an app like Boomerang to schedule them for the next morning. 

2. Don’t Respond “from your iPhone” 

With the pressure to reply to messages quickly, it’s easy to be tempted to send a quick message from your phone. While replying from phones is fine for personal messages, I recommend sitting down at an actual computer to send business emails. Not only are typos and grammatical errors are much more common in iPhone email messages, it’s easier to slip into a more casual mindset of replying when you’re using a phone. 

If you do need to send email from a phone, remove the “sent from my iPhone” message on business mail. It comes across as an apology for typos and brevity and in a world where nearly 50% of email is sent from phones, it’s not necessary. 

3. Be Polite, even when someone doesn’t book you 

 My friend Amanda Hedgepeth recently posted the most amazing video about dealing with rejection. You should watch the video because Amanda and her girls are adorable, but I especially love what she says about being thankful when a potential client tells you no. Take the time to thank them for even considering you and be gracious for every single email you receive. Let them know that you believe their wedding is going to be beautiful and based on their interaction with you, they may refer you to someone else. 

Every email you send represents you and your brand so make sure every interaction others have with you is a positive one. 

4. Send Thank You’s 

I remember the first time Kat of Dear Sweetheart Events sent an email to Bayside Bride thanking us for featuring a wedding she sent us. We were completely blown away by her thoughtfulness and it made us want to feature everything she sent our way. So if you’re a photographer, thank blogs for featuring you, thank friends and other photographers who refer to you and thank the vendors you work with. It may seem so simple to send a little thank you email, but I promise it goes a long way towards  making your brand more trustworthy. 

I’m sure that there are many, many other ways to use email to communicate a trustworthy brand and I would love for you to share your tips!