That advice Reynolds jokily shared in fact goes directly against a recent article in the Harvard Business Review. Short, sure, and sweet, why not? But ruling out the personal and the emotional? Think again, because those are the very ingredients that can help your correspondents feel more connected to you. Colour your OOO with a dash of personal information – how about saying where you’re off to and why – and you’ve a ready-made conversation starter for the next time your paths cross.
Every business is unique. There’s no one single best way to tell your clients that you’re not going to be around for the next few days (weeks or months). But there’s also no denying that whatever out of office message you use right now, you could always improve it.
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So there you have it! While having fun with your auto-responder, try not to get carried away and end up upsetting anyone or get in trouble with HR! 😉
Automatic Emails. Automatic emails can be created whenever an action is performed within a DataPage such as a submission or a modification of a record. The two types of automatic emails are covered, acknowledgment emails and notification emails.
I work in a role where someone else has to cover when I’m out, so most things do get taken care of. I have never been in a position where I could delete all emails without ruffling some serious feathers, so while I appreciate the motivation, it’s a completely foreign option to me.
However, I’ll be checking in whenever I can, and will respond to all emails marked ‘urgent’ as soon as I am able to. For immediate assistance, you can contact me on [mobile number].
If I am out of office for more than one day, I will update my email out of office message “I am out of the office with limited access to email until {X date}. Please direct any questions to {support department email}.”
For non-urgent inquiries, I will return your message as soon as I get back in the office.
Both of these tools are designed to help you go from Email Explorer to Email Extractor – and get you from guessing to going when it comes to dealing with your email inbox.
Examples of a generic thank you message for a wide range of situations: Thank you so much for your thoughtful Christmas gift. I really appreciated it! Hope you have a great new year! Thank you for thinking of me. That was so kind of you. Thank you for the Christmas gift. You helped make my holidays special. Thank you so much for the Christmas gift.
Me too. I don’t say why I’m going to be out when I take time off either, unless it’s a vacation I’m really excited about and just talk about naturally.
My pet peeve is OOOs for the afternoon/an appointment when the person who set it up is NOT good at responding to emails in a timely fashion. If someone usually requires multiple reminders and follow up emails for me to get a reply to an email after 2 weeks, I don’t really need a notification that their responses will be delayed an hour until they get back from the doctor. It makes me think “who are you responding to that quickly, and why can’t you reply to me that fast??”
An out of office email is an automatic response you can set up to be sent when someone tries to get in touch with you whilst you’re away from the office.
Unfortunately, I’m going to have to return your message. As it’s the holiday season, I’m currently away from the office. When I return, I’ll give your email a good solid read and find that your request is exactly what I needed after all! But until then, I’m going to keep it in the inbox so it doesn’t get damaged and revisit it after the holidays are over.
Give yourself some slack when promising people to keep up with their messages. If your vacation ends on January 18, but you know that you won’t be able to check up on old emails for the next couple of days, mention that in your reply.
Usually also right before a deadline, after ignoring warnings about said deadline for 3 weeks.
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