Not everyone has the luxury of 0 unread emails. Australia right now is on the Top 10 list of countries worldwide in terms of open rate according to GetResponse.
One of the main problems that business owners face when it comes to their day-to-day minutia is checking and managing their email. Whether it’s emails from your employees, clients, or from your subscriptions (even those you didn’t know you subscribed to), there’s just never enough time and never enough coming in and out, especially you as a key decision-maker.
There are many ways to manage your email, and it doesn’t have to require you to get out of your comfort zone like Inbox Zero, which may work from some, it may only add more stress than good.
So how do you sort out your email account without spending too much time on it? We found 5 Surprisingly Simple Solutions to do so with less than an hour to do.
5 Email Hacks That Save You Time
Email Hack # 1- Use Automated Tools to Remove Your Unnecessary Subscriptions
One of our favorite tools to use in the office is the online web tool Unroll.me, a software by Rakuten Intelligence, which gathers all your subscriptions when you sign up your account and you can either unsubscribe in one click or create a “rollup” of all your important email subscriptions in one convenient email, Unroll.me does the work for you. It is available on your phone as well so you can instantly go to the content that you want without having to scroll through your entire feed.
Email Hack # 2 – Create Quick Rules / Filters in Your Email
While this may take some time to set up at the start, you’ll thank yourself for it later on: Greenlight’s Operations Manager stands by it. While your Gmail account can only filter to whether an email is a Primary (Important), Social (Social Media Notifications, Emails), Promotions (Mostly Spam Opt-ins and Offers) and Updates (Important but not urgent), this is not the be-all-end-all way to filter your content. From a business standpoint, Microsoft 365 Outlook is one of the tools that can offer better filtering for emails as you can mark them as important, flag them for further action, and create rules on specific emails or users whether to put them in one folder or the other. If done right, Outlook can automatically separate any and all emails that come in through your mailbox depending on how you want it to so you never have to miss any invoices or follow-ups.
Here is a step-by-step article from Microsoft on adding rules using Outlook.
Email Hack # 3 – Place all your email accounts in one easy-to-manage platform
It may sound overwhelming at first, but you don’t have to use 3-4 separate email apps when you can host all the domains you check in one platform. Gmail and Outlook can hold multiple mailboxes so you can see every single thing that is happening with the account. As business owners, you would carry either the domain with your name amongst many others (especially generic ones like ‘info’ or ‘sales’ or ‘admin’), you can easily switch and compose an email from one or the other. Outlook can also support emails from different domains, here’s how to set it up.
Email Hack # 4 – Install a Better Spam Filter
While tools like Gmail and Outlook have their own stock spam filter, it does not always work perfectly the way we want to. Oftentimes, you miss a thing or two when an important email suddenly gets flagged as junk mail by mistake and if you don’t normally check your junk mail it could be left there for days to weeks on end. Choosing a Spam Filter like SpamTitan (Greenlight recommended) that not only learns from your activity but also creates an easy-to-manage notification email where you can review each one based on what the content is without opening them. This is important as some emails are built to phish information out of unsuspecting humans when you open a wrong attachment. Spam filters give you the necessary details before you decide to either delete, deliver or whitelist (take it out of the spam filter)
Email Hack # 5 – Don’t reply or open every email sent to you
As a business owner who has more important things to do, it is understandable to not reply to any and all emails. Following the Pareto Principle wherein 80% of results that move the needle is caused by only 20% of the actions. Reply only to those that will help your business move forward. Otherwise, if it’s not urgent, set it aside for another day or better yet forward the email and delegate the task to someone else who can best address it. You’ll be surprised that some threads can actually move forward without you doing anything and that way you can create more time for you to do the things that matter in scaling your business.
Greenlight ITC is always looking for ways our clients do better business operations by creating efficient systems to Empower You through Technology.
If you have any other suggestions that others can be able to use in their business, comment on the article or contact us now.
