The ABC of Email Management: 10 Email Tools and Tricks That Will Help You Improve Your Productivity
Email management is a specific field of communications management for managing high volumes of inbound electronic mail received by organizations. Today, email management is an essential component of customer service management.
An email management system consists of various components to handle different phases of the email management process.
- Limit email responses to specific times.
To prevent wasting your whole day reading emails, try add-ons like Leech Block on Firefox or Stay Focused on Chrome to limit access to your mailbox to specific times of day. When you make a timetable and adhere to it, you will discover that you can complete a lot more work in a few hours. You should also remember to turn off all alerts on all of your devices so they don’t distract you.
- Work under time constraints.
Aside from developing a timetable for reading your emails, you should also restrict the amount of time you spend responding to them.
Using a Chrome add-on like Time Warp can help you stay on track with your time constraints. Time Warp is wonderful since it will not enable you to access your mailbox after your defined time restriction for the day has expired, but will always route you to your papers in Google Docs.
A decent amount of time to respond to emails is between 1 hour and 2 hours.
- Unsubscribe from any services that are no longer required.
Nowadays, everyone wants you to sign up for a newsletter service or another type of email subscription. If you discover that you never read any of these subscriptions, unsubscribe because they are only cluttering up your inbox.
When you stop receiving too many subscription emails, you will be able to notice all of your critical emails much more easily. Use Unroll.me to clean up your email subscriptions.
- Send brief responses
Sending long email responses is a waste of time. Take some time to consider one to three paragraphs that will encapsulate all of the crucial information you want to convey. This will save both you and the receiver a significant amount of time.
- Give yourself enough time to answer
Don’t be too hurried with your email responses. When you take the time to respond to emails, you will frequently measure your responses. You will also answer all of the sender’s concerns.
When you react quickly, you are likely to become entangled in a long chain of received and sent emails, which will only waste your time.
- Do not send superfluous emails.
Do not conduct email dialogues, such as talks about upcoming meetings, because they are generally open-ended and will result in long emails.
Walk up to your colleague’s desk and agree on an appropriate meeting time, or use a messaging app; once you’ve both agreed, send a single email to set a meeting.
- Ensure that your inbox is empty on a daily basis.
If you work to deadlines, you may clear all of your emails in your inbox at the end of each day and week.
All you have to do now is prioritize. Respond to all emails that are urgent, and archive or delete the remainder. You will be more productive if you begin your day with yesterday’s backlog.
8. Reuse your replies.
If you see that any of the emails in your inbox are quite similar, react to them with the same replies you provided to the other virtually identical emails.
This might save you a couple of minutes per email.
- Make use of auto-responders
Customize the automated answers that you can send in response to certain sorts of emails. A good auto-responder is one that informs the sender when they may anticipate a response from you. This will relieve any needless stress.
- Track emails that have been opened
If you are sending cold emails and you want to know whether your prospects have read them, you can use software such as bananatag to help you decide which prospects to pursue more aggressively and which ones to de-prioritize.
