I’ll be back on [DAY OF WEEK], [DATE]. No explanations, no apologies, no promises to respond, no redirects to other colleagues. It works.
While you shouldn’t use a vacation message like the first example in this article, it doesn’t mean you can’t have a little bit of fun with your emails.
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Before we leave you to your own devices, we have some sample messages featuring different ways you can automate text replies to serve your business.
But for employees at Daimler things are a little different. Email these people while they are on holiday and you will get a message like this:
There ought to be a word - and perhaps there is, in German - for the mix of feelings that accompanies composing and activating a holiday out-of-office message. There's smugness, of course, and a gratifying sense of laying down one's virtual tools after a horribly long shift. But for many of us, these nice feelings are tempered by the knowledge that in two weeks, refreshed but depressed, we will have to trawl through hundreds of emails, many of which will be conference room notifications for meetings about crises that have passed.
Interesting! I’d be unpleasantly surprised and tempted to scold them for not taking a proper break.
I love this and want to start using it. I am assuming it’s pronounced “hood-a-lay” and that said hodilay has already begun when the OOO message was written!
Incorporating visuals or GIF images to automated reply messages, you have a greater chance of customers reading your emails and completing the desired call-to-action (CTA).Including visuals or GIF images to the automated email messages makes it interesting and appealing to the recipients. Visuals enhance the description of your messages sent to your customers.6. Personalize your automated messages
Yep. I work with people all over the US so I have no idea who is at home or actually in the office.
Visuals always work whether used in messages or elsewhere. In fact, communications that include images produce 650% higher engagement than text-only messages.
You embraced the thrill of Black Friday, shopped local for Small Business Saturday and had…
Get the time and date right for when the automatic emails start - you could choose the the moment that you actually leave the office, or some cheeky people choose an hour or two before they leave, saying that they are busy handing over or wrapping up to deal with customers or other colleagues. They are still able to check the emails they do get anyway, to reply properly to if they want to.
We are closed on [your business' closed days]. Please leave us a message with your name, number, and any other necessary information, and we will return your call when the office reopens. Thank you for calling." As you can see, this professional voicemail greeting is similar to the absent receptionist greeting but more inclusive.
Apparently, people receiving such a notification rarely get angry. "The response is basically 99% positive, because everybody says, 'That's a real nice thing, I would love to have that too,'" Daimler spokesman Oliver Wihofszki told BBC Radio 4's Today programme. Holiday envy has been replaced by corporate email policy envy.
People are naturally impatient, and when they are looking for answers to their questions, they want them as soon as possible. That’s why some recipients of your auto-reply messages won’t be happy if they just get some information that you are gone and have to wait for your return. In such cases, you need to provide an alternative point of contact for urgent matters.
I do this too! Depending on how busy my inbox is that day, I’ll also set it to start around 4:30 pm my last day in the office before going on vacation. I have a lot of people that email me at 4:56 expecting to be #1 on my list the next morning so I try to catch them that way.
At my old job we had a short script for our voice mail messages including whether we were in the office or out of the office. We were specifically told not to say why we were out of the office for personal privacy and protection reasons. However, an exception was soon made–for jury duty. Callers were getting freaked out when they got the message “I’m out of the office and don’t know when I will return.” They would be worried about the person they were calling and worried about whether or not they would be able to get the info they needed. So if on jury duty we would say, “I’m out of the office on jury duty and don’t know when I will return.”