Sunscreen: check. Passport: check. Floral shirt: check. Last step before you take off on your vacation: the OOO (out-of-office) message!
This type of email, sent automatically while you're away from the office, is essential for staying professional and maintaining good communication with your colleagues.
In addition to vacations, it can be used in all kinds of situations, whether it's a business trip, a public holiday, or a training course. The key is to formulate it correctly.
To give you some inspiration, here are 12 examples of out-of-office messages, with a few writing tips to boot!
To ensure that your OOO message is understood and received by the former sender, certain elements of structure and content are essential:
When setting up your out-of-office message in your email software, it's essential to indicate the subject of the email, i.e. your absence.
This step makes it clear to your contacts that you are not available, and therefore unable to reply immediately.
In the body of your out-of-office message, after the customary greetings, you can specify the reason for your unavailability. Your transparency demonstrates your professionalism, which maintains and reinforces the confidence of your recipient.
However, be careful not to go into too much detail! Your recipient has no interest in knowing that you've gone off to herd sheep in the English countryside or basking in Costa Rica (yes, we know, it's a shame not to be able to say it to the whole world like that).
So keep it simple and concise!
What the senders do want to know, however, are the exact dates of your absence. In your out-of-office message, always indicate the exact dates you'll be away, and when you'll be back in the office.
Providing this information shows your commitment to keeping in touch with your correspondent and meeting his or her expectations.
Note: For greater efficiency, you can also provide your dates of absence directly in the subject field of your out-of-office message.
After announcing your dates of absence and return, you can indicate how long your correspondent will have to wait before receiving a reply to his or her request.
It's best not to use vague markers such as “approximately” before giving your response time. Instead, give a definite time, such as “two days”, “three weeks”, or a specific date.
Finally, depending on the profile of the person you're talking to, you may even want to indulge in a little humor to help get the message of the wait across. For example, use a light phrase like “I'll get back to you on [date] as soon as I have my first espresso”.
If you have the possibility of being replaced during your absence, you can also direct your correspondent to a colleague who will be able to respond to his or her request.
In this way, you show your correspondent that his request is important, while offering him an alternative solution that will help him to wait.
Remember to ask for your colleague's agreement before providing his or her contact. You can offer to return the favor when it's his or her turn to leave. Because helping each other in the office is essential!
To conclude your out-of-office message, don't forget to include a thank-you note.
This is the time to thank the sender for his or her patience and understanding, which will soften any disappointment caused by your unavailability.
Finally, give your email a truly professional finishing touch by integrating your professional email signature.
Now you've got the basics for writing a good out-of-office message. To give you some inspiration, here are 12 out-of-office message examples to suit your situation.
For your non-English-speaking recipients, it's always a good idea to set up an out-of-office message in another language as well.
Here's an example (in French):
Fancy an original automatic absence message? If (and only if) the sender's profile allows it, don't hesitate to add a little fantasy and humor to make the message more enjoyable.
With these tips and 12 out-of-office message templates, you're almost ready to go. All that's left is to set up the automatic message!
Setting up an out-of-office message in Outlook couldn't be easier:
And to complete your automatic out-of-office message, don't forget to set up an Outlook email signature!
Are you using Gmail as your email client? No problem. Setting up an out-of-office message in Gmail is just as easy:
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Now you know how to formulate an out-of-office message to suit your particular situation, and how to set it up! Now you can leave with peace of mind.
And don't forget to include a personalized email signature with our email signature creation and management tool!
Yes, with the 'Campaigns' offer, it is possible to track the number of clicks on the email signatures of all your employees in the 'Statistics' area of the platform.
You can then access a detailed or global view of the number of clicks on the email signatures of each employee. You can use the search option to target a specific signature or a given period. Finally, you have the possibility to export all statistics to an Excel document.
If you launch campaigns with banners inserted in your email signatures, you can also access their performance via this same space.
With Letsignit, you can easily add social network icons in your collaborators' email signatures and link to your company pages. Also, our "attributes" feature allows you to manage personalized URLs for each of your collaborators such as their individual LinkedIn profile.
And that's not all: you can add links to an appointment-setting application, allow your customers to leave reviews easily, and integrate our 'Chat on Teams' widget to let anyone start a discussion via Microsoft Teams chat.
It’s up to you! As an administrator of the Letsignit platform, you choose whether or not to grant modification rights to your employees. These permissions are managed on an attribute-by-attribute basis, which means that you can decide to allow the employee to change their phone number, but not the address of your premises, for example.
This feature applies to all attributes in your directory, including custom attributes created on Letsignit. When your employees change one or more attributes, your directory is obviously not affected.
It often happens that employees make their email signature their own: custom format, bad fonts, colors inconsistent with the brand standards... all of this has an impact on your brand!
A consistent visual identity is considered authentic and outperforms a perceived weak one by 20%. And, your customers are 2.4 times more likely to buy your products.
With Letsignit, take back control over your brand identity by standardizing all your email signatures. Our tool has many features that allow you to customize your signatures by department, by audience or by subsidiary. Not to mention the possibility of carrying out campaigns within your email signatures thanks to our Campaign offer.
What is the user experience like for our employees?
In both cases:
In short, they have autonomy in their email signature, but you keep control on the field, signatures, and banners they can edit or use.
With our "multi-signature" feature, your employees can benefit from multiple email signatures. No technical manipulation is required. Thanks to our Add-in for Outlook or the desktop app, they can change their email signatures as they wish with just a few clicks.
Regarding the creation of email signatures, you can make several variations such as:
Everything has been thought of to go further in the personalization process based on the recipient of your emails.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
If sending emails has an impact, non-optimized email signatures also have an impact. An unsuitable format or an image that is too heavy considerably increases the size of your signatures... and therefore, your emails.
As a responsible economic actor, we contribute to reducing our CO2 emissions and those of our customers in several ways:
As we are increasingly involved in sustainability initiatives, our priority in 2023 is to develop even more green IT functionality.
