Your portfolio looks spiffy. There isn’t a word out of place, and your punctuation is just right. Your bid proposal looks great too, and the grammar is perfect. You’ve got everything set up to impress, wow, and show off what you can do. A project you’re interested in gets posted, and you slap your bid up, full of confidence.
Then you get an email from the buyer. Things are looking good, you got noticed, and the buyer is interested. You whip off a reply, thinking you may have just landed the contract.
Was your email just as perfect as the rest of your work? Probably not. You probably wrote fast – fast replies are important – and you didn’t pay attention to small details. Emails don’t count, after all… or do they?
If I was a buyer thinking of hiring a writer, I would look at every aspect of that person’s work, including emails. If I receive an email littered with spelling mistakes, missing capitalization, full of netspeak, and with poor punctuation, my first thought is that the person isn’t up to the job. They can’t write. Not only that, they aren’t professional.
Since when do emails come in second for quality? Never, as far as I’m concerned. I check my spelling, and I make sure my sentences make sense before I hit send. I read my email to be sure it flows well and gets my message across properly. I use proper paragraphing to separate my thoughts. Pro writers pay attention to everything they write.
First impressions matter. So do second, third, fourth, and fifth ones. Maintaining an image of quality and professionalism with a client counts, even if you work together for years. Let down your guard, get sloppy, take the person’s business for granted, and when someone else comes along – someone fresh, new, and looking to make an impression – you may find yourself out of a job.
