Whether you are a freelancer, consultant, or an agency owner, you probably wear many hats and juggle myriad responsibilities.
Which makes organization essential to staying on top of an ever-changing and increasing workload.
Having a set of tools you can rely on is key.
According to a study by Elance and the Freelancers Union, 69 percent of freelancers say technology helps them find more work and be more efficient.
Freelancing for a living also means sorting through hundreds of emails from current and potential clients every single day.
Email Overload
The issue of email overload has become an increasingly greater problem.
And the total number of consumer and business emails is expected to grow annually by a rate of more than four percent during the next four years.
Clearly, this email problem is pandemic and not isolated to freelancers alone.
Whether you work for yourself, run your own business, or operate on the client side, the trend seems to involve spending way more time managing emails.
And that leaves less time for far more important aspects of our jobs. Such as the actual work.
Increasingly, managing messages and trying to achieve inbox zero seems nearly impossible on a daily basis.
For many users, the reality of email is that it’s become an ever-growing to-do list.
Something which can allay the madness is an inbox management tool.
Introducing…Email Management Software
There are some great email management software tools out there including Shift, Unroll.me, FollowUpThen, Google Inbox, and Sortd.
If you’re just looking to pick off the low-hanging fruit, there are tools to unsubscribe you from emails you signed up for ages ago, never read, and meant to unsubscribe from, but didn’t.
This alone can clean out the clutter fast. These tools adapt to your personal preferences quickly when clearing your inbox, offering various filter options, and more.
But if a string of email newsletters were our only problem, there wouldn’t be a need for this article.
Yes, clearing out unwanted email newsletters can help save time, and ultimately make you more productive. It’s the least you can do to manage the madness that is your inbox.
And that is the magic of SaneBox.
Email can be a powerful tool, rather than a necessary burden. And when used well, email is an incredibly effective way to communicate.
SaneBox can save the average user two-to-four hours every week by supercharging the tool and your process.
Organize Your Inbox, Free Your Mind
An uncluttered inbox equals an uncluttered mind.
Research suggests a clean inbox has positive effects on individual productivity and the opportunity for profitability.
After all, spending time sorting through a disorganized inbox is one of the biggest time wasters at work.
Fortunately, with a comprehensive email management tool, you can automate your email organization with minimal effort.
As with any software which relies on automation, the most important aspect is to find the organizational flow that works for you and stick with it.
This might entail quickly deciding which messages to archive for later, what to delete, what to save for reference, and what to respond to immediately.
The software tailors your inbox to your email habits, and you end up with an organized and personalized email experience.
This can change, just like our habits and priorities change.
You have to train automation software, but the process itself will teach you best practices. And it gives you the flexibility to determine what works best.
In the short time it takes to train your inbox, you’ll be on the path to emailing leads and making clients happy instead of cleaning out your inbox.
Always Respond and Follow-up
Following up on new business isn’t just a concern for marketing consultants and freelancers.
If sales is part of your role, you spend a lot of time searching for and managing new business leads, conversing with potential clients, and sending a copious amount of follow-up emails.
There’s also a good chance you waste a decent amount of time keeping track of said follow-ups.
By integrating email management software into your workflow, you can safely put those days behind you.
Whichever tool you use, follow-up reminders are a must-have.
They let you know when an email you sent to a client didn’t get a response by a certain time.
This helps you to be politely persistent—after all, your email may have gotten buried in their inbox!
Follow-up reminders can also be a great way to send messages to your future self. And this helps you to keep a firm grasp on your follow-up list, as well.
But what about someone who has sent a response?
You may have a potential client who sent a response, but you’re not ready to reply yet.
Don’t let those emails get lost in the shuffle, especially if they’re important, possibly lucrative, leads.
There is often (or should be) an option allowing you to defer an email until you’re ready to answer.
The software places the email in a separate folder and drops into your inbox at the specific time you choose.
Of course, things sometimes have a way of falling through the cracks. However, there’s less chance of letting a potential client slip away with a process in place designed to ensure you don’t forget.
Keep Track of Leads
Let’s say your business is killing it and potential clients are pummeling your inbox daily expressing interest in your services.
How do you keep it all together so you don’t leave a single one hanging?
Any email management software worth its salt allows you to set filters for different email addresses, body texts, and subject titles.
Emails from potential clients are automatically sent to respective folders whenever they land in your inbox.
For example, if an email contains the word “inquiry,” it automatically goes to a folder you label “soft leads,” or “new business.”
This helps minimize the time you spent manually sorting through emails and drops them neatly into their specific place.
Email Management Software Creates More Time
Time is money, and you don’t need to spend a copious amount of it sifting through messages.
Email management software helps you use email more effectively, creating a distraction-free inbox proven to reduce stress and increase productivity at work.
Have you tried using an email management software tool to organize your work inbox?
If not, do your research and see which email management software best fits your needs.
Consider the time it takes to train your inbox, integrations, costs, and ROI when choosing the perfect email tool.
As you train and implement email management software, you’ll find you spend less time in your inbox and more time getting work done, and of course, landing more clients.
Photo by seth schwiet on Unsplash
