Five New Ways to Tame Your Inbox
Email can be the bane of our existence as wedding and event planners. Between vendor and client communications, a full time planner can easily process 100+ emails in one day. To keep the clutter and chaos down, here are a few tips:
Filter messages – This isn’t a new idea but even if you already do email filtering, consider doing more. You can set up separate email addresses for different things such as a separate email for careers at your business (careers@xyzplanning.com), an email for inquiries (inquire@xyzplanning.com), an email for newsletter subscriptions (general@xyzplanning) and more. Certain email programs allow you to tag messages with keywords to help keep you organized. You can also filter email from certain senders into particular folders instead of landing directly in your inbox.
Create a FAQ page – Create a page on your website with the answers to frequently asked questions about your services. This can alleviate many messages from your inbox. You can have an FAQ page for potential clients, potential employees and vendors who are interested in working with you. If you prefer not to have these on your website, save each FAQ as a separate signature in your email program so that you can click reply, choose the correct signature FAQ and hit send.
Unsubscribe – Unless you look forward to the contents of an email newsletter every time it arrives, unsubscribe from it. These can include email deals from retailers, sales from online stores or association emails you never read. There is usually an “unsubscribe” link on the bottom of those newsletters.
Reply quickly – If you can reply to an email within two minutes, send the reply now and get it out of your inbox. If you don’t have time to reply, either file it or mark it for follow up.
Use Boomerang – Boomerang is a great investment for event planners to manage follow up email reminders for leads, send messages at a later time to current clients and to remind you when you don’t hear back from a bride or vendor professional in time.
What other ways do you use to manage your email?
Boomerang is about the best invention ever! Have used it for a year now and it really does help when you are trying to establish “business hours”. We all know that we work into the wee hours of the night and on weekends, but clients don’t really need to know that. With Boomerang you can respond on your schedule, but have all your replies send out at a specific time within business hours. Great suggestion!
Great to hear Chelle. I just started using it and love it. Thanks for sharing your experience!