With email campaigns being the most affordable marketing tool, email users face a rising threat of their inboxes being clustered with messages they don’t necessarily desire to see. To top it off, business email users have a difficult time managing the daily inflow of incoming messages, without unnecessary ones being added. Luckily, email clients have done marvels with unwanted emails filtering, but the struggle goes on.
Leaving marketing emails aside for now, efficient email management matters a good deal. Many people spend hours every day checking their inboxes, while more still keep their notifications on a regular basis. Not only is the practice distracting (statistics has it that a single email interruption delays the task being addressed by ca. 23 minutes and 15 seconds), but it is also unnecessary.
Here are some simple tricks how to efficiently manage your everyday life and never miss an important incoming message.
Forget Notifications
As stated above, email notifications are the single greatest disruptor of pretty much anything you might be doing. Think in terms of all those services you have subscribed to, including social media.
The main lesson to take here is that there are incoming emails that matter and those that don’t. More often than not, the latter constitute a larger percentage of incoming messages. The best approach to never missing an important message while successfully maintaining your other tasks is to designate two time slots to address new messages. Meanwhile, an auto-responder will hold the fort.
Designated Time Slots for Checking New Messages
Most people choose to check their inboxes in the morning and in the evening after working hours. Of course, there are no particular tips in this regard, as schedules differ, so you’ll have to figure it out yourself. Make certain to limit the time; one to two hours at most should do the trick. Respond to all messages that need a response and clear your inbox afterwards. In this way, you will always spend time checking only new emails.
Efficient Email Composing
Responding can take up a lot of time, especially in the case of business communication. However, there is a way to optimize the process. Just like you learned writing essays in school, you can learn how to make responses to the point, without doing any unnecessary, time-consuming writing. I.e., include key information at the beginning and limit the message length to up to five sentences.
To further optimize the process, make multiple signatures, using just the right one depending on the correspondent.
When composing emails, getting subject lines right is half of the job. This also holds true for forwarded messages, which are often overlooked because they don’t state their subject clearly. Therefore, make sure to rewrite the subject lines of forwarded emails. Efficient subject lines provide all the necessary info about the contents of the message, but don’t overdo it. The idea is that the subject line gets the message across, making it easy for the recipient to understand what the message is about prior to reading it. The practice increases the visibility of new messages and, hence, provides a way for more efficient email handling.
Dealing With Urgent Emails
When you designate time slots to check new messages, the premise is that urgent emails will be neglected. It doesn’t have to be that way. If auto-responses cannot solve the issue, you can opt for apps that will address them. There is no single solution, so do your research. After all, every email user has different needs.
Email Rules, Auto-Responses and Templates
Email rules are certain to solve a number of issues for just any user. Both webmail and desktop clients offer a fair share of those, with usual options including moving, flagging and responses. You can add a set of your own rules, telling the client how to deal with messages coming from people in your list and unknown senders.
As regards auto-responses, the sky’s the limit. Given that you can type anything that works for you, using auto-responses is one of the best ways to inform the recipient when to expect a reply.
Finally, email templates can be incorporated for the same group of senders, making the entire process of replying to all new messages considerably less time-consuming. Free email templates are as abundant as they are useful, so that everyone can find exactly the type of message they wish to get across.
Instead of a Conclusion
Other methods and hacks may come to mind, and not without a good reason. Once again, every email user looks for different solutions. Exactly because of that, email clients have given it their best to offer a little something for everyone, making email one of the most user-friendly and easily configurable communication solutions out there. Whether you are a business user or just keep in touch with friends and family, you are certain to manage your life more efficiently by following the abovementioned tips.