Email Management Software
Guide to Effective Email List & Marketing Management
The role of email in modern day business
Email is a critical means of communication in business institutions. Every day emails are sent from employers to employees, customers to suppliers and more—helping all these groups of people to be in touch.
The immediacy with which emails get delivered from one place to another makes it the best means of communication. With emails, employees save time and can have immediate communication and collaboration with employees in and out of the office. With emails, disseminating and transmitting of important information becomes possible, allowing immediate responses to any arising matter.
Emails also serve as a to do list and are a great means of record-keeping without actually record-keeping and having a physical to do list. On receiving emails in your inbox, they remain there for the future response unless you deliberately end up deleting them.
Through the efficient spread of information from one locality to another, emails are important in the marketing of your business products. Email lists allow any interested individual to subscribe through which the company will be sending emails.
The fact that emails are one of the cheapest means of sending information both internally and externally helps businesses cut costs incurred.
Dangers of ineffective email management
Poor use of your email as a means of communication could lead to an unproductive trend among people. When using email to try to resolve a critical issue affecting the company performance, emails are not the best means of communication. Email doesn’t express the emotional intelligence of the sender. It is easy to misread the tone and context of the sender when trying to solve issues in a business organisation.
Ineffective email use can also lead to reactive responses. During an argument or debate over a certain issue, people don't pause and think before responding. This provision leads to a reactive response instead of a well-thought solution to a problem.
With ineffective email management, prolonged debates could also arise. This could lead to a waste of time and resources, ending up affecting the production of the company in a negative manner.
- Spend less time in your inbox
You need to be able to account for every minute you spend in your inbox. Every time you visit your email, time yourself. Check how much time you take to read, process, reply, and sort through emails. This information can help you determine how big of an issue email is to your work productivity. As you see the data, work to limit visits to your inbox each week. Make a rule to only login to your email account when necessary. - Learn to prioritise your emails
Not all emails you receive are important. Try to apply the 80/20 rule to manage your emails more effectively. The rule states that 20 percent of the inputs are responsible for 80 percent of the outputs in any situation. Learn to focus on the 20 percent of highly important emails that increase the productivity of your business. The 20 percent emails could include: a business interview, networking opportunities, media requests among others. - Organise your email
Setting up a simple filing system could help you manage your email effectively. Categories such as “Reference”, “Action Items”, and “Waiting” could be used to help manage your filing system. You could also decide to create different folders for every project you are working on in your business organisation. Organising your email in such a way that every supplier and client have different folders could also help keep your mailing system organised. - Mark as unread
This is a good strategy to apply when trying to save time spent in your inbox. It gives the chance to have a quick glance in your inbox and reply emails that are time pressing and delete those that are not relevant. Mark as unread those items you feel like you should revisit later. - Send fewer emails in order to receive fewer emails
Try to minimise the number of emails you send in one day. By observing this simple rule, you will have fewer emails to work on in your inbox. - Be precise in your responses
The words you choose for your responses should be precise and straight to the point. A good choice of words helps avoid ambiguity and possible misinterpretation by the recipient. By being more precise, you will be able to avoid follow-up questions asking for clarity and interpretation of your emails. - Use email filters
These are tools that automatically sort out your emails when they get into your inbox. You could setup your filters for different emails addresses, subject titles and body texts. The emails get automatically sorted into the respective folders whenever they are delivered. This helps you minimise the administrative duties you need to carry out. - Leverage spam filters
Email users tend to waste much of their time trying to get rid of spam messages from their email accounts. Spam filter software as well as email management software gets rid of these spam messages, helping you save time.
A good spam filter includes the ability to block and filter out those spam messages. Good spam filters must be able to protect multiple accounts using a single installation, and they should be compatible with your email client or webmail service provider.
In addition to these tips, organisations should consider using email management software for work emails. Most email software is equipped with spam filters, folders and filters to help keep organisation data and email safe.
As an organisation, do research to see which email management software best fits your organisational needs. Consider the integration, training, costs and ROI with the email software.
When you take the time to train and implement this new software, you can help the overall work productivity of your organisation.
All and all, when organisations integrate effective email management and email management software, employees are more engaged, less distracted and better work gets produced.
