You likely already know the situation too well; you’re focused at work, poised for a productive day. Then, every few minutes, the chime of incoming email notifications disrupts your concentration.
(...thanks Linkedin...)
Harvard suggests that the average worker spends 28% of their time checking and responding to emails. That’s roughly two hours spent on emails alone. Sometimes, it gets so bad that people have to hire virtual assistants to handle emails for them.
The good news is that handling emails doesn’t have to be this difficult. Several email management solutions can save you hours of headaches and stress.
11 Practical Email Management Best Practices
It doesn’t take long to read and respond to emails. The issue is when emails stack up on top of each other. Which do you prioritize? Without a system for handling emails, things get messy.
Important emails are left by the wayside, you fail to respond to potential clients, and you end up spending hours sifting through the fluff. To avoid these issues, follow these best practices:
Clean Up Your Inbox— Often!
The average email is 75KB. Google gives 15GB. That’s a scary amount of emails! Be honest, how many of these are unread, forgotten, and left for dead? In the hundreds? thousands? If that’s the case, it’s time to start deleting emails.
But before you go crazy bulk deleting emails, make sure you sort out ones that might be important in the future, like documents, transactional emails, or anything business-related.
Emails that are weeks old probably won’t be worth replying to. The sender has likely forgotten about it, especially if there are no follow-ups. Nobody is going to miss these emails.
Try and sort out emails from newsletters or promotions. Email service providers like Gmail already do a good job with that. Look at newsletters you don’t read and start unsubscribing.
Unsubscribe from Newsletters
You get a ton of value from newsletters. But, many fall victim to over-subscribing, signing up for free trials, or using our main email account on forms to get free content. It can be addicting.
Hoarding newsletters isn’t a good. There’s only so much you can learn. It’s time to let go—it’s time to unsubscribe. The good news is you don’t have to do it manually.
Tools like Clean.email or Unroll.me come in. They help sift through the fluff and show what you don’t need and lets you mass unsubscribe with just a few clicks.
However, what email providers like Gmail lack in mass unsubscribe tools is what they make up for in filtering. You just need to know how to set it up properly to fit your needs.
Setting Up Custom Email Filters
Tools like Gmail already have pre-built filters like the Promotions, Social, Updates, and Forums tabs. These do an excellent job. But, you can take it a step further and create your filters.
For example, you can create filters for work-related emails, newsletters, job applications, emails from specific senders, keywords, or even chat history. Here’s a quick rundown of how it’s done:
- Click on the search bar. On the far left, click on the filter icon.
- Enter your criteria. You can base it on subject, keywords, dates, chats, and attachments.
- Click on “Create filter with this search.”
You’ll be prompted to decide what to do with the emails. You can archive them, mark them as read, tag them as important, send them to a specific category, or delete them.
To view the filtered messages, go to Settings. Then, go to the Filters and Blocked Addresses tab. Here you’ll see the emails that match your filter criteria and the action you set.
Use Labels, Categories, Tags, and Folders
Categories, tags, labels, and folders are Gmail’s bread and butter regarding email management. There’s a lot you can do, whether it’s for personal use or work-related.
Let’s say you work as a salesperson. You probably want to create multiple meeting folders for each prospect. Somebody working in operations might just need one meeting folder.
You can create parent categories and subcategories if you expect multiple emails daily. For example, you can create a parent category for company emails. Subcategories could be announcements, updates, or team meetings.
To do this in Gmail, go to your inbox and look at the sidebar menu. Under Categories, there’s an option to “Create a new label.” Think of every label as a folder that you can name.
Try naming folders based on the email content. Each label can have their subcategories. The more advanced version of this is having multiple inboxes for specific types of email.
Use Multiple Inboxes
Multiple inboxes are essential when you’re doing things like cold email outreach. If you want to scale cold outreach, three inboxes per domain are recommended. You need to track each one.
That’s where Instantly’s Unibox comes in. It’s a centralized master inbox where you can manage all replies from leads in your outbound campaigns, whether it’s a Gmail, Outlook, or from another email provider. No need to log into separate email accounts.
For email management, Unibox lets you filter replies based on interested leads, meetings booked, meetings completed, closed, out-of-office, not interested, and wrong person.
Sales reps also get AI-generated suggestions for replies. Instantly AI analyzes your previous conversations or recent emails to provide contextually relevant suggestions.
Leverage Templates & Automated Replies
Are you writing the same type of email daily? If the answer is yes, you’d benefit from email templates or setting up automated replies. Tools like Instantly can do this for you in a few clicks.
That means you don’t miss out on important replies, even during dead hours. Remember, businesses that reply first to prospect queries often land the deal.
Let’s say you’re running a cold email campaign with a CTA that asks prospects if they want more info about your service. Instantly AI can reply and send the info for you.
Instantly AI also analyzes the context of prospect replies. If the reply has a negative sentiment, it won’t send an email. But, you can disable this feature if you want to use templates instead.
Only Handle It Once (OHIO)
The OHIO method means only opening an email once. When you open an email, you have to take action. Either reply to it, send it to spam, or delete it. You can’t waste time going back to it.
Seems easy enough at first. However, you might get the urge to skim through emails and go back to them at a later time. But, you’d have to set up reminders, notes, or alarms.
That’s a lot of extra steps. We want things to be as simple as possible when we handle emails. Once the email is opened, take action. This helps us deal with large volumes of emails daily.
No more distractions from the thoughts of unopened emails. The question now is, when is the perfect time to open emails and respond to emails?
Schedule When To Deal With Emails
Having a specific time block to open emails helps you get rid of them as fast as possible. You don’t want to multi-task during this time. The specific time block should be dedicated to emails.
For example, you can have two time blocks dedicated to emails. Let’s say 11:00 AM and 4:00 PM. This way you get to handle all emails that come in the morning and the afternoon.
If your job needs you to handle time-sensitive emails, you can set priorities using labels, tags, and categories. Or, tell high-priority clients that they can reach out through the phone.
But if you’re not dealing with too many time-sensitive emails, it’s best to turn off notifications on your phone and stay away from social media channels to focus your time on responding.
Disable Social Media and Other Distractions
Doom scrolling diminishes productivity. You start with a cute video of a baby hippo and end up scrolling non-stop for 45 minutes because of the content the algorithms throw at you.
Everything on social media is designed to capture your attention and keep your eyes glued to the screen. Before you know it, several important emails are left unread.
Your inbox gets flooded with notifications from social media. Gmail can only do so much to filter out these emails. You don’t want these emails to overshadow the important ones.
For example, you can get notifications from Reddit, Quora, YouTube, or Twitter (X). Log into your account and disable these notifications.
Utilize CRMs and Lead Data
Email management and sales go hand-in-hand, especially outbound. If your business does cold email outreach, your sales team probably handles hundreds of leads in your pipelines.
That's dozens of emails daily. Sales reps must keep track of each email thread, what prospects value most, and every sales follow-up.
To do this, you need a CRM for email management—exactly what Instantly CRM is built for.
Instantly CRM lets you have a Master Inbox for every sales correspondence including SMS, Calls, and Emails. All tasks are centralized. You get to focus on the hottest leads.
You get to automate replies, set conditions that filter emails based on lead activity, and manage emails in the way that makes the most sense to you, making it vital in any B2B sales process.
The best part is that you only need one subscription for your entire team. That means you don’t have to scale expenses as you scale sales operations. Try Instantly CRM for free today.
Integrate Email With Your Tech Stack
Integrating email management with your company’s tech stack makes daily tasks seamless. No more manual data transfers to and from your email. Everything is consolidated.
For example, integrating your email software into a CRM lets you access lead data to help with personalization. If you’re doing cold outreach, one of the best integrations is a lead finder tool.
No tool does this better than Instantly B2B Lead Finder. You can find your ideal customers, buyer personas, or companies similar to your clients.
All leads are pre-verified. The only thing left is for you to reach out. Since B2B Lead Finder is native to Instantly, you don’t have to switch between apps.
After building an email marketing list, you can immediately run a cold email campaign. With Lead Finder, you don’t have to worry about running out of leads for your pipelines.
You can enable the evergreen feature that automatically adds leads that fit within your search criteria to any running campaign. Try out Instantly B2B Lead Finder today.
Key Takeaways
The greatest challenge in email management is a cluttered inbox. We’ve given you the tools and strategies to tidy up and handle high volumes of emails, but managing your inbox will still prove difficult if you don’t address the underlying issues.
Here are three key factors to consider:
- Procrastination: Don’t delay emails—they stack up fast. Use strategies like OHIO and having a time block specified for responding to emails.
- Manual Email Organization: Tasks that need repeating should be automated. Email is the prime example. If you’re writing the same emails daily, use templates or automation.
- Hoarding Newsletter Subscriptions: Newsletters have a ton of value. However, don’t let newsletters overstay their welcome in your inbox.
Email management is key to avoiding the stress of handling high volumes of emails daily. Need a tool to help you stay on top of it all? Try Instantly today.
