Remote workers, entrepreneurs, performance markets – nearly anyone in the world of digital marketing uses emails in some way, shape or form. Whether it’s email marketing and sending out a newsletter, or sharing a funny image between teams, email plays an important role.
But it’s time-consuming. Whether you’re writing and sending an email, or managing your own inbox, it’s time that could be better spent doing something else.
To help you stay on top of your email-game, we’ve teamed up with Remote-How Academy and thrown together 6 email hacks that will keep email as a powerful tool in your digital marketing arsenal.
One click
Once you’ve open and read an email, give yourself 3 options – reply, delete or forward.
This saves you spending too much time on something, or marking it as unread and having to come back to it later.
Open it once and decide what to do with it then and there. If you do need to reply but need to spend some time crafting your reply, dedicate time to it later in the day.
This goes a long way in saving you time and keeping your inbox clean!
Just unsubscribe!
If you regularly delete emails without even opening them, just unsubscribe.
It may be time-consuming to go into each and every email that you don’t want and manually unsubscribe, but it will go a long way in helping you clean out your inbox.
There are tools out there like unroll.me that can automatically unsubscribe you from anything you don’t want to be subscribed to. A good investment if you’re the kind of person who wakes up to a few hundred new emails every day!
With Gmail’s latest update, Google is automatically asking users if they’d like to unsubscribe from marketing related emails. If you’re regularly flooded with emails, use this feature.
Set a time budget
Chances are the first thing you do when you get to work in the morning is to check your emails. In the blink of an eye, few hours have passed and you haven’t achieved anything.
Solve this problem by setting a time budget. Every 2-3 hours, allocate a 15-minute block of time to attend to emails. Set a timer, and when your 15 minute period is up, get back to work.
This means that you still tend to your emails, but you’re not distracted from what’s more important.
This is an important skill to have if you’re the kind of person that wear a lot of hats!
Keep your signature up to date
Are you regularly traveling or a remote worker?
Put it in your email signature!
Consider updating your signature to reflect your current location. If you’re in the business of outreach and networking, this can be a great talking point.
What else can you put in your signature?
- Your current location if you’re a working nomad
- Links to social profiles
- Info about any events you’ll be attending
- An easy way to schedule a call with you
Be creative – your email signatures get in front of everyone that reads your email. Use it as a marketing channel!
Write a better subject line
“Our best deal ever”, “Check this out”, “Meeting”
Terrible subject lines. If you’re in the world of email marketing or sending cold emails, it’s the subject line that determines the success of your email.
One great idea when writing your subject line is to imagine that you’re sending it to one person, not a huge email list. What would you like to see or read? What would get you opening an email?
“Blatant clickbait”, “Remember me?”, “I can’t think of a witty subject line”
A little bit of charm, originality and maybe even humor can help increase your open rates!
Use templates
Do you find yourself writing the same email over and over again, but just sending it to a different person and only changing the name?
Use a template.
Create a collection of your most commonly used emails that you can copy/paste into an email. Then, update the relevant information (such as the name, when you met or plan to meet) and then send away.
This cuts down on the time that you need to spend crafting the same email. Plus, you’re able to respond to emails quicker. What’s more, you can send an articulate email while the first coffee of the day gets your creative juices flowing!
Practice, practice, practice
With these 6 tips, go on and apply them to your inbox. Keep it clean and spend as little time as you can working through your emails. You’ll not only save time, but you’ll also be more productive!
For more tips of working remote or managing a remote team, be sure to check out the resources at the Remote How Academy!
