Technology is continuing to evolve – and the days of communicating with clients via a letter, or even a face-to-face meeting, are becoming more uncommon. Email has been around for decades, although with the pandemic it has cemented itself as a prime form of communication.
But with so many emails coming and going, maintaining your inbox can be a difficult task.
Here are five of our top tips on how to keep on top of your work emails:
It is important to check previous emails you have received and decide whether you really need to keep receiving them.
Every email should have an “unsubscribe” button at the bottom of the text. Getting rid of subscriptions you don’t need won’t only save you stress, but also prolong the life of your system and save you money.
Keeping on top of a constant flow of emails throughout the day can be a daunting task. If you receive lots of emails every day, it might be more beneficial for you to allocate certain times of your day to read them.
This could be half an hour in the morning and another in the afternoon, for example.
It can be easy to lose track of the important emails in your inbox when you receive a lot of emails. A good way to stop this is to mark key emails as unread, or to flag them. Flagging them has the added bonus of giving you a reminder when you check your inbox.
You can flag an email in Office 365/Microsoft Exchange by pressing the flag icon in the right-hand side of your email preview. It is also available at the top of the screen in “Tags” by pressing the “follow up” button.
Flagged emails will turn red and remain so until you turn it off. To set a reminder, press the follow up button and set a time to be reminded.
To unread your emails, simply press the button next to the follow up button that says “unread/read”.
There is much more to your email software than just an inbox and a sent items folder.
It is possible to create additional folders to help organise your emails on a day-to-day basis. You could also delegate your clients into different folders so you can access their emails more quickly.
Organising your emails through a good filing system stops your inbox from getting clogged – and can prevent important emails from being lost.
To make a folder in Outlook, right click on your “Inbox” on the left-hand side and click “New folder”.
This is a must if you send out a lot of the same emails – especially for those working in the recruitment or sales industries. Email templates will make targets much easier to reach.
You can create new templates using the “Signature” button.
To do so, write your email template in a new message, copy it and press the “Signature” button. From there, press “Signatures” and in the “Signatures and stationary window”, press new.
Now whenever you write a new message, you can just press the “Signature” button and select your email template.
Type in the name for your email template and paste your template into the dialogue box. You can only have one signature per email, so make sure to use the correct one for each email you send.
Find more tips and advice on our news page.
The service that we receive is of the highest standard and we are completely happy that we have made the right decision to move our business to SMT IT Services.
- Chris Addis -