Organizing your Email is Crucial in Business

Written by Corrie Petersen

If you have an organized email system, you will spend less time searching and more time sending emails and doing other things to grow your business.

One way to organize your email is to organize your contacts. This way you won’t search through emails trying to find the correct email address or you won’t have to call that person to ask for it.

If you use your email for all contact information for a person, that’s ok. It’s a great way to keep it all in one place without building a spreadsheet for it. Depending on the email system you use, you should have room for their full name, title, company name, phone numbers, and address. You can use this as your electronic rolodex if you choose. This is a very good way to organize your contacts and have a clean desk at the same time.

If you use your email for contact information, it’s a good idea to add the information or make changes as soon as you are aware of it. If this is not possible, you should consider calendaring time each week to do these changes or outsource it to a Virtual Assistant if possible.

Another way to organize your email is to use the distribution list feature in your email. If you have groups of people that you continually send items to and it’s always the same people every time, you should consider creating these. Use a name that you will always remember and something that will match what you send. That way you won’t forget. Then you add these people to the list. Then you will only have to type in that list name and all of the people within that group will receive your email.

A great feature of distribution lists is you can have one person in as many distribution lists as you want. So if you have three lists and one person should be in all three, that’s ok because you can do that easily.

Distribution lists are easy to edit and add people to. This makes it easy to create all sorts of lists and save yourself so much time. Probably the hardest thing you will have to do is remind yourself to add people to them if you have someone new come along.

One important way to organize your email is set up folders for your different groups, and set up rules for each one. When you set up rules, your emails from certain people are transferred right to the appropriate file. This keeps your inbox free of clutter. There is one important thing to remember, and that is to check the emails in these files each day. You can also set up files like these for those emails that you receive from companies soliciting your business, that you may want to read later, but are a nuisance in your inbox. When these are moved to their own file, you can read then when you have time. By setting up files and rules, you save yourself the job of cleaning out your inbox.

You can also set up a rule to move mail with certain words in the subject straight to junk mail. Spammers are very sneaky and will do anything they can to get their email to your inbox. If you have a rule for these types of emails you can get ahead of the game concerning junk email.

Now you know how to organize your email and you are ready to get started. Follow these tips and you will be well on your way to an organized inbox and you will save yourself time each day.

Tags: business, distribution lists, Email, email rules, Organization, organized email