Mastering Reminder Emails and Messages

Key Takeaways

No matter how much effort you put into an email or message, sometimes the receiver will miss it, or perhaps they may forget to reply. We are constantly bombarded with information, and people may need a little push to get back to you or attend your event.

Reminder emails or texts are crucial in the modern workplace, both as a notice or follow up. But writing a good reminder message is no easy task. You need to consider the best channel, timing, and style of the message. This article will help you send great reminders starting with the most suitable platform.

Should I send an email or a text?

In this day and age, reminders don’t necessarily have to be emails; they can also be chat messages. When choosing which one to use, you need to consider who your recipient is. If you are sending a lengthy message, emails may be better than texts, but if you need your message to be seen quickly, texts have higher opening rates than email. Overall, both are great tools to get your point across; you may even consider sending both to check off all the boxes. But at the end of the day, what matters most is to get your recipient to read your message, so use the platform they are more likely to check.

Not too early, not too late

Deciding the best time to send a reminder message is the hardest step of the process. It’s helpful to divide the situations into two distinct categories:

Out of the two, advance messages are easier to figure out. A simple reminder email or text a few days before the event may be enough. You can also choose to attach a confirmation or send a reminder days before the event and a second one a few hours before to ensure your recipient attends.

For follow-up messages, it varies between recipients as well as the gravity of the situation. A good rule of thumb is to send the reply as soon as possible. If you were expecting a payment, project, or message to be sent to you by a given time, you have every right to send a reminder as soon as the deadline passes. Sometimes other situations may require you to wait before sending out the message; let’s say you’re waiting for the results of a job application. You want to strike a balance between giving them time to evaluate you and showing your interest in the position.

Be careful not to forget to send a reminder message. Sometimes waiting for the perfect moment may cause you to miss it. Therefore, if you need to follow up or remind someone, make sure to set a reminder for yourself.

Striking balance

The tone of your message will largely affect the recipient’s actions if they do take action. That’s why you need to be very careful with balancing understanding and urgency. You don’t want to make yourself sound desperate, but you also need to convey the importance of the message. There are two factors you should consider when deciding what tone to use:

Here are some tips for the five main parts of the reminder message:

A better way

Writing a good reminder email or text can be intimidating, especially when dealing with delicate situations or complicated recipients. Overall, we can summarize the critical difficulties into three:

Luckily you don’t need to figure out everything on your own. Closer is a brand new inbox experience that’ll help you follow up and send reminders to people with more confidence than ever before.

Meet them where they are

As stated before, sometimes the best communication channel is not an email. However, as your contact list grows, so will the number of channels you need to track, and when you have different messages sent to the same user on various platforms, things can get complicated. But if you’re using Closer, you’ll never have this concern. Closer groups users’ communication channels and allows you to select the most relevant one to send a message. You’ll also be able to take notes directly under each recipient’s contact name. Combining these features, you’ll know if a longer email or short text reminder will work better with a particular recipient.

Ace your timing

Advance reminders are more accessible to time than follow-ups; the first is generally sent a few days or hours before the event, depending on the preparation needed. Closer lets you bulk schedule messages quickly, even right after sending the meeting invitation. That way, when you need to send many of these reminder emails rapidly, you can simply schedule two reminders, one a few days before and one a few hours before the event.

Let us answer for you

Follow-up messages, on the other hand, can be a bit trickier. But the large majority require you to send an email as soon as the deadline has passed; this can be a bit tricky considering the vast amount of emails we send and receive every day.

Fortunately, Closer can do this work for you using rules. Rules are sets of instructions Closer will follow once a particular condition is met, helping you save time. You can, for example, set up automatic reminders if you haven’t received a reply from a user after a set number of days. That way, Closer helps you ace your timing and relieve some of the pressure from reminder emails.

Write a message only once

After writing a few reminder emails, you’ll realize you often end up writing the same message over and over again. Instead of wasting your time rewriting the text, you can use Closer’s built-in snippets feature. Snippets lets you set up a list of templates you frequently use. You can also organize the templates by category to keep them tidy. That way, writing quality reminder emails will become a fast and easy process.

Conclusion

Sending a reminder message doesn’t need to be challenging, especially when you have the right tools. Closer will help you choose the best channel, ace your timing and improve your style so you’ll never get anxious when writing a reminder message again. You’ll also be able to stay on top of the important conversations you’re having. With our unified inbox, scheduled send, rules, and snippets, Closer will make that next reminder a piece of cake. Join us today to become a beta user!