If you are on a Christmas mood and want to be really sincere, avoid using horrible Christmas or New Year email or SMS templates to be sent to your contacts.

Here’s an example:

Simply because it looks overly cliché, and it doesn’t prove your thought in sending them. Instead you would want to focus on building lost relationships, or reconnect with friends that you really miss in your life for the past year that you would really want them back to you!

Everytime an email comes to my inbox, I would be like – OMG not again, another automated email from a robot trying to look personal. It will come in some fancy bright email template colours, and it simply look like the guy behind the server wearing broken jeans with a baggy shirt is being paid 3 cents to send this email to every client. Super sad

Your message out to your family, friends, clients, associates and anyone in between should be fully personalised for every single contact. If you don’t do that, I rather you not send at all. Also, forget about all of the contacting systems that Company ABC decide to offer you, they will simply just include Dear (Your Name Here), and everyone will know that it is an automated robot doing its chores.

Imagine a boring email that says Hey Jeremy, Merry Christmas and Happy New Year (insert sad face here) and a banner that says: this is an automated email, do not reply. Or worst, this is an email sponsored by ACME Mail Company, click here for a 30 day free trial. If you are one of them, Go kick yourself in the face.

My definition of personalised, is seriously personalised, like literally type or talk as though you are meeting the person in real life. I mean not be overly creepy like a guy pulling over your door to give you candy at 12 midnight. At least something, someone or an event you can relate to, and reminisce the good moments that was shared. You would want to catch up and find out how they doing, don’t you. The world with good friends is a much better place to be in.

So below is a list of things I couldn’t stand, but I still see that it comes to my inbox every single day.

Avoid flash, videos or content that requires you to click.

I can’t emphasise this enough, NO I DON’T WANT TO SEE SOMETHING THAT TAKE 30 MINUTES TO LOAD. Especially I am viewing your message on my crappy phone, where the speeds are horrible. (Plug: I recently wrote about why I didn’t want to switch to 4G/LTE)

Yes, during this Christmas or New Year season, it is actually faster to send a pigeon mail than to send an SMS or an email due to the horrible network traffic.

So please, senders, keep it in simple text, or an image that is really small (<100kb) so it loads on my phone, computer, tablet, pager, walkie talkie, papaya or anywhere so it is FAST.

Don’t write text, write text that sells.

So, if you happen to write, please don’t write something that we ALREADY KNOW. Like Merry Christmas or Happy New Year or a combination or both. It’s as good as telling me: “I am a male, and typing in front of this computer with nothing to do on my hands, so I decided to be social and send you this email for fun anyway, heh!”.

Write informative texts and make sure that they include some action, or some knowledge they could take away with – which is pretty much concise and to the point.

Use images if you must, but please, customise them. AND DONT USE CLIPART OR ANY OF THOSE NONSENSE.

If you have to include an image to your email, make sure it is personalised  or it will go with personalised text. Do not use clipart – why? It is overly used, too abundant, looks like crap, from the 80s (which might be a good thing anyway), and people will create a perception that you are still using Microsoft Office 1997.

By the way, for the younger generation, MS Office 1997 looks like this:

Yes, that is how crappy it looks like – no kidding. So don’t follow the footsteps from the past and create something original.

With abundance of images editing tools, such as Picasa, Paint.net, MS Paint, Photoshop, Gimp and blah blah. It is always easy to create meaningful content, if you don’t know how to edit an image, there is a million YouTube tutorials created over past second to teach you – step by step on how to do it.

My message for you:

So anyway, as my blog readers are basically everywhere, and I pretty much, have no idea whether you are coming back tomorrow to read again (I hope you do). I created a simple personalised message for you. My warm blessing is out to you, my dear internet friend!

(Images Sources: Toastytech, Ciker)

Still reading? … I have a nugget for you, since you make it this far.

TOO MUCH WORK?

I know a faster way: Call your friends and tell them how much you missed them in the year of 2012, and arrange a meetup on that call. Many would appreciate it, I know I certainly do. Guess what? This method always works.