Email, whether cold emailing and outreach or simply just responding to emails you receive, is undoubtedly one of the most time-consuming things most of us do each day. If you can cut out some of the inefficiency related to email., you’re going to find more time to be productive and strategic in other ways.
The following are some tips and tools geared toward improving email efficiency.
Gmass
According to Ajay Goel of Gmass, personalized emails deliver a transaction rate that’s six times higher than non-personalized emails. Also according to research cited by Goel, personalized email messages can improve click-through-rates by 14 percent and conversions by 10 percent.
However, there’s a problem—managing email personalization in outdated ways is incredibly time-consuming.
Gmass offers a solution. This innovative Chrome extension offers the ability to go well beyond basic customization of emails that just include a first and last name, while also providing efficiency and time savings.
Users can integrate Gmass with Google Sheets, which then allows them to create any personalization parameter. It eliminates busy work, but ensure that your emails are being viewed and have strong conversion rates.
Set a Schedule To Check Your Inbox
You have to worry about efficiency not only with the emails you’re sending out, but also what’s coming to you. According to a Forbes article by Pat Brans, if you’re interrupted from a task you’re working on it can take several minutes for you to regain your full sense of concentration.
Every time you’re going back and forth checking your email inbox, you’re losing several minutes that are not only spent on actually looking at the emails but the time it takes you to get back on track.
Brans advises that you avoid this time trap by checking your email inbox on a regular basis, but not frequently. Check it at set times during the day, and get people used to that schedule so they’ll know when they can expect a response from you.
A good way to do this all is to set an actual timer for, let’s say 30 minutes, as advised by an article on Harvard Business Review. Once that’s done, start writing any emails you know you need to send, and replying to anything important. Since you have a 30-minute window, the idea highlighted in the HBR article is that there is then a chance for you to see any immediate replies you receive during that time.
Use An Instant Messaging Platform
When people are writing emails, they tend to use them as a way to carry on ongoing conversations that could be more productively handled in other ways.
Encourage coworkers or team members to start utilizing some form of an instant messaging system like Slack. This allows everyone to quickly message about the things they need to hear back from right away, and you don’t get an inbox that’s clogged up and taking up all of your time.
When choosing a messaging platform, you also want something that provides a pretty high level of visibility for everyone in the team. You want people to be able to quickly see general messages that widely affect them, or the organization, without individual messages having to be sent each time.
Unsubscribe
If there’s one important thing to do to take control of your emails and manage the time you’re spending on them, it’s unsubscribing to everything that’s unnecessary. There’s probably plenty of newsletters you have still in your inbox that you feel like you’re going to read, but you never quite get the chance. There are tools that can help you unsubscribe in bulk, and they’re worth using. You can use an email app like Edison Mail that will let you bulk unsubscribe with just one click in addition to many other things.
Shift
Shift is an excellent tool that simplifies all that moving back and forth to different email accounts that you’re probably doing during the day.
Along with helping users manage multiple accounts, they can also easily navigate their calendar and Drive accounts. It’s a desktop tool, so there’s no need to have multiple tabs opened on your screen, nor do you need to login in various places. You can create your custom notifications, or you can completely mute them if you need to.
The Unified Search feature allows you to search for anything across all of your accounts, and you can easily integrate with everything you’re doing in Google. It also integrates with other popular business apps like Slack and Asana. Shift supports Boomerang and Grammarly, and it’s really a good way to put everything you’re using for productivity together. It works on Windows and Mac, regardless of a browser.
