Out of office messages are usually handed to managers, employees, or coworkers as a means of notifying them about your short.
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1. "Hi, you've reached [your name] at [your company]. I'm unavailable right now — probably helping [type of company] get [X results, e.g. ‘double their leads in 60 days,' ‘hire the best and brightest engineers,' ‘convert 40% more customers.'] Leave your name and number, and we'll discuss how your company can see similar results."
I have literally never seen an OOO that wasn’t “I will be out of the office until DATE/further notice. Please contact X or Y at EMAIL/PHONE if you need assistance.” This is fascinating stuff.
My pet peeve is when people put a contact in there but then don’t include their contact info, assuming anyone would have it. I don’t always and that’s super annoying.
Over Twitter DMs, one woman sent me her OOO messages from when she was diagnosed with breast cancer. The messages — composed while she was undergoing chemotherapy treatments and recovering from surgery — were detailed and unique. They offered touches of humor, honesty, details about her treatment schedules and set expectations for others trying to reach her. She offered alternative contact options for potential emailers to make sure urgent requests didn’t fall through the cracks but offered a dose or reality as well. I particularly appreciated this line:
For those new to the business world, your out-of-office message is the most common form of automation related to email. Once activated, it sends out a predetermined email message to anyone who emails you while you’re out, telling recipients exactly what they need to know.
Option 1: Wait it out. Ask yourself, “Is this urgent and important?” If it isn’t, take a beat and give me a chance to respond after I dig myself out of my inbox later this week. You and I will be better off with this expectation set now.
My OOO messages are always pretty casual, and the last line in the list of “for X, contact Y” is always something like “for chili recipes, contact Z”.
Setting a proper out-of-office email also puts pressure off you when you have limited time to respond to emails outside the office. We will look at a few examples together here:
If they think you’ll be checking in, they might still attempt to get in touch with you. In the event that you take vacation time or personal time, they’ll try to contact you less often.
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.
Being gone doesn’t mean you can’t still be doing good for the company. With a lead generation email, you can inspire action in the receiver. Consider using the end of your message to call for action. You can ask your customers to check out your products, read your blog, or maybe become a part of your affiliate program.
This. I’m surprised more people dont havent mentioned this, but this has always been my back to work routine – and sometimes if vacations overlapped, I’d find a summary email of “While you were away, X,Y,Z happened, I covered A, but you might want to check on B and C” which was always very helpful.
3. Suggest Reading the Documentation. This is the office closed for holiday template that our support team uses. If you have an extensive documentation published on your site, you can recommend users to read the documentation while you get back to your users.
Our auto-replies to outside people are two or three paragraphs long though, which feels ridiculous but is actually necessary.