Email is crucial to the success of many businesses and provides us with a vital communication link to both our clients and our colleagues.
But how many of us can honestly say that we practice effective email management?
Are you on top of your email inbox or has it become overwhelmingly huge?
Don’t worry if you’re struggling to keep up to date with sorting, deleting and responding to your emails, you’re not alone.
According to Forbes, office workers on average receive at least 200 messages a day and spend about two-and-a-half hours reading and replying to emails.
That’s a huge volume of messages to manage and it may seem easier to just let them accumulate in your inbox, and simply respond to the ones that are important to you.
But this comes with its own set of problems, and complications can arise when your mailbox gets too big.
Here are some of the issues that can arise when your mailbox gets too big:
- Emails are harder to search for
- Load times are longer
- Increased risk of outlook running slow, crashing and being unresponsive
- Increased system instability
- Unnecessary extra costs from having to upgrade email storage capacity
But how can you keep on top of your mailbox and prevent it becoming a big problem?
It’s actually a lot easier than you think and might just save you a lot of time and money.
Here are our tips for effective email management:
- Create an email schedule of time to read and respond to emails
- Dedicate time within your busy work day to read, respond and process emails.
- Schedule blocks of time within your diary throughout the day for dealing with your emails.
- Some people like to only check their emails once or twice a day, whereas others prefer to dedicate time every hour. It’s all down to personal preference.
- Having a dedicated schedule can help you not only keep on top of managing your email inbox but also increase your productivity.
- Organise your inbox
- Organise your email inbox with folders and labels.
- This will help you not only group, sort, file and prioritise emails but also make it easier for you to locate emails when you need to find them.
- Use filters
- Filters can automatically sort your incoming emails into folders, labels, etc.
- For example, you could set it up to recognise certain customers email addresses and have them filed into a specific folder with their company name on it every time they email.
- Respond promptly to emails that take 1 minute or less to reply to
- Responding to these emails quickly instead of putting them off will help significantly reduce your inbox.
- It will also ensure that your dedicated time for answering your important emails is not filled with responding to ones that could have been dealt with quickly earlier, helping you keep on top of your busy workload.
- Develop template responses
- If you’re constantly sending emails with the same kind of responses it might be worth creating template responses that can be copied and then customised to suit the situation.
- This will not only increase your productivity but save you lots of time.
- Unsubscribe from unwanted email chains
- Newsletters and promotional emails can soon fill up your inbox and prevent you from being able to easily see your important emails.
- It’s well worth going through your inbox and unsubscribing from any emails that you no longer want to receive, or simply don’t have time to read.
- This will not only reduce your inbox size but ensure that you’re not having to deal with the deluge of emails inundating your mailbox every day.
Effective email management can not only make you more productive, but can also save you a lot of time and money.
Plus, who doesn’t like having a de-cluttered and organised inbox.
Contact us today if you need any help or advice with regards to effective email management.
