Optimize Your Business With Organized Email

Email can be the bane of a business owner's existence. It's a vital means of communication and a time waster. Hundreds of SPAM messages flood inboxes on a daily basis. How can a business person cope with the ever rising tide of email?

You should have a personal email address for your business that isn't posted on your website. Use that email for correspondence with potential clients and customers. The email on your website should be filtered through the use of SPAM programs to weed out the garbage before it gets to you.

Organizing your email is one of the first steps towards increasing your productivity. Don't let emails pile up in your email program. Set up folders that cover the major tasks, products, and functions of your business. If you can answer an email immediately, do so, and either delete it or send it to the appropriate folder. If the email requires some thought or research before answering, put it in a to-do-immediately folder. Every morning go through the to-do-immediately folder, send your prepared responses to the emails you've selected, remove them from the to-do file, and put them in the appropriate file.

Sent email should also be organized. Struggling to find an email that was sent three weeks ago can be a monumental task. There are software programs which can not only organize your incoming email into folders but also your sent email as well. One of these programs is E-mail Sorter Wizard. E-mail Sorter Wizard lets you sort through and organize your e-mails. Its comprehensive filing system can help manage inbox folders and sent mail. Users who are on the move, constantly receiving and sending e-mails will find the features in this add-in extremely beneficial.

Another time saver is to have responses to frequently asked questions you receive composed and saved in your word processing program. When one of those emails comes in you can simply copy and paste the answer into your response and send it quickly on its way.

Autoresponders can automatically answer those questions as well. An autoresponder is an email address that has a preset message that is automatically sent back to the sender. Autoresponders also have the benefit of capturing email addresses so you can follow up later. For example you might have a product that gets a number of questions. You can compose your FAQ response and set it up on the autoresponder. The potential customer sees the email address of the autoresponder on your website that says something like "need more information" or "have questions." They send for more information, receive the FAQ and you can follow up to make sure their questions were answered.

Organizing your email can optimize your business.