3 Email Management Tips You Need to Know

Email is the primary method businesses use to communicate, yet the majority of us have never been trained to use it effectively. It’s pretty easy to get stuck in old, ineffective ways of handling your inbox. Here are three tips to manage your email, but first, learn how managing your email can make your business more secure and your team more productive.

Managing Your Email

It is not uncommon for higher-level team members to receive hundreds, if not thousands of emails a day. So, it is not surprising that when email goes unmanaged, even for a short period, it can become unwieldy. As email is the second biggest time-consumer for most office workers, it is critical that the time spent on email is as effective and efficient as possible. Here are some tips to reduce inbox clutter and increase your productivity when it comes to how you manage your email.

Three Tips to Manage Your Email

Don’t Let It Linger

Develop the habit of performing triage on your inbox daily. Immediately delete unwanted messages such as obvious spam or promotional communications that you don’t need. Next, look for messages that don’t require a response and archive or delete them. Doing so should help reduce the amount of emails cluttering your inbox and allow you the space to better organize everything.

Organize Your Inbox

You can’t manage your email if you don’t know what you have in there. Too often, most inboxes are little more than a ‘junk’ drawer of messages with no way to tell which is important. When you don’t know what’s in your inbox it leads to wasted time searching, or worse, missed opportunities when important email gets drowned. While performing triage and paring down your inbox is great, unless you organize it, all you really have is a slightly smaller mess on your hands.

Use the organizational tools within your email client to organize your messages. By using labels or placing them in categories, you are better able to see what’s important. Keep in mind, the better you organize your messages, the easier it will be to find them when you need them. Don’t be afraid to use broad categories and continue to filter down until you have a manageable group of subcategories for even quicker access. Finally, don’t be vague in how you name your categories: name them what they are, so you don’t have to ‘remember’ what’s in there. 

If you aren’t using a modern email client, like Outlook in Office 365, it’s time to do all of your employees a favor and migrate your mail to something that will make their workdays easier and more effective.

Unsubscribe from Unwanted Content

While not all spam is harmful, it can quickly overwhelm your inbox, due to its sheer volume. The side effect of this deluge is that it will push down important emails out of your sight, causing you to miss them. By taking a moment to review your messages, you can sort, unsubscribe from, and delete content that is not of value to you.

A quick tip is to search your inbox for the term “unsubscribe”, which will generate a list of any messages with the ability to unsubscribe from them. Once you have your list, take a moment to decide which information or content you want to keep receiving and unsubscribe from the ones you’re no longer interested in and then delete them. Once again, organize the ones you want into a subcategory to avoid finding your inbox becoming content heavy again. 

Note: Don’t be surprised if you find you had thousands of these types of emails clogging your inbox. Going through this process should better reinforce the concept of how much space and time unmanaged email can cost you.

Choosing the Best Email Option for Your Business

There are a lot of options for storing and hosting email these days, and the best fit will depend on your specific needs. Many businesses these days are moving away from hosting in-house exchange servers and moving to the cloud via Office 365. Of course, this might not work for every business, so we encourage you to sit down with the experts at Datalyst to flesh out the pros and cons.

What’s important is that your email is backed up redundantly, and is secure and accessible from anywhere. Having good spam protection and encryption capabilities is a huge plus, too. If you are planning on changing your email solution, it’s worth noting that the migration can be complicated. You’ll want an experienced engineer handling it for you, because it often involves more than just deploying new inboxes - you’ll want your mail, settings, public folders, calendars, and everything else moved over too.

Finally, don’t forget the importance of securing your email against social engineering attacks.These attacks are designed to compromise user’s passwords to gain access to your network, most notably by using spam, spoofing or phishing attacks. Our content filtering, spam protection and UTM solutions can provide the protection you need to keep intruders out of your network. Regardless, you should always make sure your users are trained to spot and mitigate these threats as a second line of defense. We can help with this, too.

Face it, email never stops. It constantly flows into your inbox and if you’re not careful, you can find yourself overwhelmed by the deluge. If you’re ready to get your head above water, take advantage of the experts at Datalyst. While email is critical, it shouldn’t be a hassle. To schedule an appointment, call (744) 213-9701 today.