Do you have Email Overload??

What does your email inbox look like? Do you have more than 25 emails in it? More than 50? More than 100? More than 1000? Having a congested email inbox can cause the important emails from prospects and clients to get buried in the stack, potentially costing you business.

Has this happened to you? How can you keep your inbox clean? In short, it is called Email Management. It means taking control of your inbox, so it doesn’t control you. Here are some suggestions.

Step 1: Create sub-folders in your inbox and label them by topic, month, year, sender, or in whatever other way that will make it easy for you to find the emails when you need them.

Step 2: Open an email from a sender that you don’t want to receive messages from, and scroll to the bottom to find the “Unsubscribe” link or one that says, “Update your email subscriptions/notifications.” Then, either unsubscribe or change the frequency with which they send you their email marketing to a greater time span between emails, if they give you that option.

Step 3: Copy and paste the email address that has sent you the email marketing you don’t want into the search bar of your email account, and press “Search,” or enter. Either delete all of the emails from that sender you don’t want or move them all into one of the sub-folders you have created.

Step 4: Repeat steps 2 and 3 for all email senders that you want to keep out of your main inbox.

Step 5: Your email account should have a feature that will automatically move emails from certain senders into one of the folders or sub-folders in your email account, other than your primary inbox. If you don’t want to manually move emails from your inbox to your sub-folders, set up this feature to help keep your inbox clear.

To stay organized, respond to emails in a timely manner, and not lose any important emails under the mass of email marketing you receive, I recommend keeping no more than 30 emails in your primary inbox at any one time.

There are also professionals who provide email management services. If you don’t want to maintain the organization of your email account yourself, it may be worth the investment to pay someone else to do it.