Let your prospects know that you are on leave
During your leave, you may drive the attention of some of your prospects away unless they are told about the reason for not promptly taking care of their needs ahead of time. Even if you plan to answer your emails during your leave, program a leave message to let your clients know they might expect some delay in your answers.
Set up your leave message before your time off business
On Outlook you can program your leave notice ahead of time and send your out-of-office replies automatically to your customers and audience.
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If you use Outlook 2007, the first step is to choose Tools and then go to Out of Office Assistant. Next, click on the Automatic Replies box and select Send automatic replies. You will see a calendar where you can input the date when the automatic vacation responder will be activated.
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After that, you should edit the starting date and the end date when you wish the leave replies to be sent automatically to your email recipients. If you do not mention the end time of your out-of-office message, then, it is necessary to turn off the automatic responder manually.
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The next step is to edit the leave message for your clients. You can restrict the automatic out-of-office responses to your contacts only. This could be done by clicking on the menu. When everything is set, save the changes you have made by clicking on OK.
Use rules to create an out of office message
In some Outlook versions, you may not see Automatic Replies. In this case, it is recommended to use Rules and Alerts to set up your leave notice. This means that all Outlook email accounts may not be equipped with the Automatic Out-of-Office Replies. If the Automatic Replies button is missing, it means that the feature won’t be supported by your email account. In this case, it is essential to leave Outlook running while you're away, but you need to set up some rules to send out automatic leave messages to reply to your customers and contacts. One option is to forward your Outlook emails to another account which can be used while you are away. This helps you to mark the messages as read, or to move the older messages spontaneously into another folder.
Create a leave message template on Outlook
This step is not necessary if your Outlook account supports the automatic out-of-office replies. To reply to the customers’ messages when you are away, it is advisable to create a leave notice template. First, sign in to your Outlook account and create a new email message, with a subject line and a short message. Then, save the file under a specific name. You should use the template as your out-of-office response to your contacts. The template format can be saved on your computer among the users' templates. The saved template can be used again and again to respond to your customers’ email messages. Yet, you can also create other templates and save them on your computer to reply to some of your customers.
To conclude, many steps need to be followed to create a leave message on Outlook. And if you use an Outlook app, you can update your out-of-office reply from the Menu. Click on the menu icon and then go to the Settings. Select your Outlook account and click on Automatic replies to send an automatic leave message to some of your contacts. Edit the leave message that you want to send to your email recipient and save the changes. These steps can be less challenging if you use an email signature tool like Scribe-Mail to create more interesting replies to your clients when you are away.
