Is email working for you or are you working for your email? Love it or hate it, email is not going anywhere anytime soon. For business, you have to use email. A few years ago we didn’t even have it.
In our personal lives it’s very invasive but only if you let it. It doesn’t have to be like that.
Let me explain, email comes in 24/7. People interrupt you, good old fashioned marketing, interruption marketing, interrupting your day to get your attention.
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So, do you give it your attention, do you give in or do you block it out? Do you look at your emails all day long and answer them as they come in?
Do you think life can’t go on without answering? What would happen if that person does not get an instant reply? How much time does spam take up of your day?
Spam is a nightmare. Spam is huge.
I don’t think we realize how many millions and millions of dollars the organizations in distant countries spend on generating spam and the reason they do it is because it works. But, don’t let them run your life.
What I suggest is first of all get a decent email provider. I have used virtually every type of email system you can imagine and I choose to use Gmail.
I don’t understand why would anyone use Outlook? Even the online version, as I recall, just does not deal with spam.
Yes, you can have extra spam filters but Gmail just does it, just gets rid of spam, it just works.
It just does, did I express that enough? Use it.
Gmail also organizes everything if you have multiple companies and multiple email addresses. You can pull them all into one Gmail account and send from that account under the various original email addresses. Or you can choose which one you return the message from. Again, it just works.
But use your time wisely. Decide when in the day you are going to look at your email. Do you remember the old days before it was invented when, if people wanted to get hold of you, they had to write to you?
They could wait for your answer, you had to write back, you had to telephone them or maybe you fax them or that kind of stuff but it wasn’t so urgent. There was no text, no emails.
Remember those days?
I suggest you spend an amount of time in the morning, first thing, say twenty minutes, another set amount of time in the middle of the day, and another set time at the end of the day.
Some people I know have successfully actually set up canned responses so, when anyone emails in, they automatically respond with a message saying something like,
“Thanks for getting in touch. Those of you that know me realize I only deal with emails at xxx time of the day. But, if its very, very urgent and you can’t wait for a reply please phone me.”
They know that if the emailer does have the phone number then they are not going to be important enough to need an immediate answer.
Implemented carefully and in tune with your personality, this sets expectations and gives you time.
So consider your day, do not let email run it. Do not let it be a time suck.
Tuesday Toolbox Tip
Our Tuesday Toolbox Tip, unsurprisingly, is going to be for Gmail. Gmail is free or, as a business, you want to use Google Apps (we use Google Apps). The cost of Google Apps is $5 a month $50 a year per user and you actually get quite a few inboxes.
So, along with the Jon @ FireProtectionOnline.co.uk we have info@, sales@ those will come with it for free as many as you want, media@; whatever you want.
Just look at Google’s Gmail. When you sign up for either version you get Google Docs. It’s documents, it’s storage, you get Drive with 25 gigs of storage.
With Google Apps you will get a lot more. It just works.
Click here to instantly download our FREE Book
“The 71 Ultimate Marketing Tools”
We don’t have any spam problems and loads and loads of other apps and programs integrate with it. It’s wonderful, please go and have a look. It’s my tip of the day for Tuesday.
As usual the show is sponsored by the wonderful people at Rainmaker, without Rainmaker we wouldn’t be running our website so smoothly. Please go and have a look.
