Including your profile photo in your business emails is one of the most underused, but effective ways of personalising your correspondence. It’s such a simple and great function to include in your business emails but in my experience hardly anyone uses it and I think they are seriously missing a trick.  Almost all email providers give the option of adding a profile picture in your email footer, just as you would in social media.  And there are so many advantages to getting your employees to have headshots uploaded to their email address.

Increased trust and rapport

It has become accepted that in life as well as in business, people tend to relate more to faces than anything else.  The problem with email is that it is a completely text-based platform and it’s so easy to forget that there is another person on the other side.

Nowadays, as technology becomes more and more advanced, it is not uncommon for business relationships to be entirely carried out almost entirely through email.  Whilst I am sure it is not impossible, it makes sense that it will be more difficult to build trust and rapport through faceless communication.  If we are being really honest with ourselves we would be more confident knowing who we are speaking to.

The first meeting

One of the main problems with not knowing what someone looks like when we do inevitably meet, is that awkward thing, where you’re standing in a busy restaurant or café not knowing who you’re looking for.  How much easier would it be if everyone had a profile image linked to their email account so that you could recognise them in a crowd before even meeting them?

Speaking from a personal experience perspective, I have been to meet clients in the past where my client walked straight up to me in the crowd and warmly told me how nice it was to finally meet the face in the emails!

Inter-Office relations

In medium and larger companies, it is easy to see how staff members may never meet, but just have a telephone or email relationship. In this faceless type of scenario, it’s easy to see how these type of staff members can be quite enraged/ irritated by a stream of relatively impersonal correspondence.  Having profile photos on your employee’s emails means they relate what is written to a real person with feelings and emotions, and psychologically, that will make it easier for them to be calm and polite to each other over email. It may also be a subtle way of building a stronger rapport, which in turn, will help with general morale.

It looks professional

It is important to point out, however, that the photograph needs to be carefully chosen. So many people these days use their wedding photo, or a jolly image of them cuddling their spouse on a night out, for their social media.  A strong and professional photo looks so much better than the blank default images, and sends the message that this person is passionate about what they do, and keen to project an image that reflects their business ethos. No matter what message you want to send out, if you have a serious brand then it makes sense to have a serious photo. Similarly if your brand is fun, then you might want to have something a little more quirky and creative.