Incredible Email Management Tips For Business Owners: It’s More Important Than You Think!

Email management is unlikely to be at the top of your priorities list as a business owner. It’s one of those things you rarely think about – or something you never even consider. Who has time to worry about emails when you’re running a business? Well, there’s a certain irony to that question as good email management can help you save time – it’s also far more important than you initially think. 

In this guide, we’ll explain why email management is essential for all business owners before launching into a host of simple tips that will make your inbox easier than ever to manage. 

The Benefits Of Strong Email Management For Business Owners

When we talk about “email management”, we’re imagining a world where your inbox isn’t overflowing with thousands of unread emails. You’re living in a vision where your email count is close to zero and nothing ever gets lost or goes missing. You are 100% on top of everything – and this leads to a host of great business benefits: 

• Save time & boost productivity – Did you know you can waste 21 minutes per day due to poor email management? Surveys show people waste time by over-checking emails and scrolling through their inboxes trying to find important messages. This can be eliminated with proper management, which saves valuable time and gives your business a serious productivity boost. 

• Better communication & professionalism – When you fail to manage emails, you end up replying later than expected. Do this to suppliers and you look unprofessional; do it to leads and you potentially miss out on them! It can damage your bottom line and brand image, which is why great email management is necessary. It will ensure you’re responding correctly at the right times and appearing more professional. 

• Save money on email costs – Believe it or not emails can cost money to store. Most email providers give you x amount of free storage before charging for more. If you’re not dealing with your emails and getting rid of unimportant ones, you’re clogging up valuable email server storage. This forces you to buy more storage, wasting money that doesn’t need to be spent. Managing your inboxes helps you remove junk and clutter so you have a thinned-out email client and don’t need to constantly buy more email storage. 
• Maintain compliance with data storage requirements – As you should be aware, businesses must follow specific data privacy rules. This applies to your data storage methods and how you store customer information in emails. Having a proper email management system in place ensures you maintain compliance at all times and aren’t found guilty of breaching data security laws. 
• Reduce stress levels – From a personal perspective, managing your emails reduces stress levels so you have one less thing to worry about at work. As well as making you feel better, being less stressed about emails can free up your mind to focus on other tasks, which may lead to long-term business benefits. 

Top Email Management Tips For Business Owners

Based on what we’ve seen above, managing your emails is clearly advantageous for a host of reasons. The next question is what can be done to improve email management. Business owners should do a few things to tidy their inboxes and these are the best tips: 

Remove certain emails from your inbox

Start by cleaning your inbox of certain emails that don’t need to be there. This refers to a few email types: 

• Spam emails
• Unnecessary emails
• Emails that could be dealt with elsewhere

For the first two, go through your inbox and mark spam emails as “spam” or “junk”. This should prevent these types of messages from getting through to your inbox again. Then, click on any marketing emails you get from companies that you deem unnecessary and unsubscribe from them. 

Already, you’re freeing up valuable space in your inbox and getting rid of a lot of clutter. The third email type refers to important messages that don’t necessarily need to be in your inbox. Ones that spring to mind are emails from multiple suppliers. While essential, you can handle these separately with supplier compliance management solutions. This gives you a separate platform to manage all of your suppliers and get messages to and from them. It’s way easier to stay on top of supplier relationships AND you keep your inbox clean so email management is simpler. 

Categorize emails with labels and filters

Regardless of which email client you use, it will give you the ability to create labels or folders for emails to be stored in. This means your messages are put into separate folders rather than appearing in one inbox. For a business owner, some of the labels you could create include: 

• HR
• Finance/Accounting
• Marketing/Sales
• Clients

The goal is for emails relating to these labels to be sent to the specific folders. You could do this manually whenever a message pops up – or you could set up some filters to do it automatically. We recommend searching for how to create email filters online as it can vary depending on which client you use. The bottom line is that you can automatically categorize emails based on who’s sending the email, specific keywords in the email/subject and so on. Rather than having a mixed-up inbox, you’ve now got most of your emails in folders to understand what they’re about. This also makes searching for specific emails a lot easier and faster. 

Have a dedicated business email

This should be obvious, yet many business owners forget to set up a separate email when starting a company. Especially if you’re running a self-employed business that almost takes shape on its own without much planning. For instance, you start as a freelance writer and gradually get more and more clients to the point where you’re effectively running a business. All the while, you’ve kept the same personal email you’ve used for everything else. 

This is an email management disaster! 

Sifting through business emails is hard enough, let alone when you get personal ones thrown into the mix. Be sure you have a separate email for both aspects of your life – and keep them separate! Don’t put your business email down when buying things online for your personal life as you’ll get all the marketing emails after. 

Use an email management tool

You’ll find lots of email management tools out there, but one like Help Scout is usually a great option. These tools help you take your inboxes and move them to a different platform. From here, you can manage your emails and see conversations with customers all in one place. You also get access to software or other features to send automated emails and ensure you’re replying ASAP. 

As we said, lots of these tools exist – it’s a case of shopping around, trying a few demos and seeing which one is the best for you (and your team, if you have one). It can help you stay on top of incoming emails to improve customer service and look like a more professional brand. 

Set up notifications for your labels

Remember when we spoke about making labels and using filters to put incoming emails in specific folders? Another way to remain organised is by setting up notifications specifically for these labels. In other words, you only receive email notifications if a message is filtered into one of those inboxes. 

Why do this? Because it means you will always know when a fairly relevant or important email comes in. The whole concept of “labels” is to categorize critical emails, meaning the main inbox should be left with stuff that’s not as important. It’s either not sent by someone in your company or doesn’t contain any keywords to be categorised into a folder. Having label notifications means you can stay on top of the pressing messages while also making it easier to look through and organise the rest of your inbox. 

Organise your inbox once a week

Following on from above, get into the habit of organising your inbox at the end of every week. Go through your emails and delete anything that no longer needs to be there. This frees up loads of storage space and ensures your inbox isn’t littered with junk. It also ensures you spot any messages that maybe slipped the net and should’ve been filtered but weren’t. 

Star your important messages

Finally, make sure you “star” your most important messages. This makes them easier to find – for instance, a message containing contract details with a client can now be found by clicking on the “Starred” tab instead of scrolling through an entire inbox. It also means the messages show up as “starred” when you search for them, so it’s easier to identify what you’re after. 

Overall, email management is a skill every business owner needs to learn. Stay on top of your messages and your emails become far easier to handle and deal with. This leads to all of the benefits we mentioned at the start of this guide – money savings, productivity boosts, better customer service and so on.