All business owners would love to have more time to get tasks done so that it allows them to generate more turnover, which equals more money.
Hiring a virtual assistant for email management is one of the best ways you can save time and money.
A successful business receives countless emails each working day and prioritising important messages is vital.
Hiring a highly skilled email management virtual assistant will allow you to concentrate on generating money for your company.
This article explains eight key elements you need to consider before hiring a VA.
The Time Saving Of Proper Inbox Management
Hiring an email management virtual assistant will save you valuable time when organising your email accounts in a timely manner.
Therefore, hiring someone to handle all your email management tasks can save you heaps of time, so you don’t have to stress about junk mail and spam emails cluttering your inbox.
An excellent email management virtual assistant can create an email management system that works well for your company’s needs. Prioritising emails into separate folders and using a filtering system ensures you get all the emails from an important client.
Unimportant messages will be moved to the appropriate folder by your virtual personal assistant, and all junk and spam mail can be binned when you create filters correctly.
What Does A Clean Inbox Mean For You?
Many business owners want to save money but don’t realise that keeping their email inbox organised will go a long way to saving their company money.
Trying to organise emails is time-consuming when you are busy running your own business.
Several hours are spent sifting through emails when you could get on with other dollar-productive tasks instead of managing emails.
As a business owner having an uncluttered email inbox will ensure that you can focus your efforts on lead-generation tasks, which translate into paying customers.
Hiring email virtual assistants may cost a business in the short term, but all that vital work you can focus on will cover the hourly wage of a remote worker and a whole lot more.
Our Top Tips For Email Management With A VA
Here are the main tips you need a VA to follow when managing email inboxes.
1 – Arrive To Work With An Organised Inbox
Imagine your email inbox is always organised and ready to start the working day. This can be a reality when you hire a virtual assistant, as they will ensure your inbox is uncluttered and that you only deal with important emails.
Your virtual assistant will send emails, deal with follow-ups, and schedule emails correctly so that you only have to deal with the most urgent emails.
Sorting and deleting emails is vital to excellent email organisation and helps save time when responding to incoming emails.
2 – Proper Use Of Smart Folder
Having all emails in the correct smart folder is a good way of keeping on track with email management. Your virtual assistant will create parent categories for each email to ensure you don’t miss out on correspondence from important clients by missing unread emails.
When you create labels for your emails, it allows you to access them easily, which saves you time.
For example, having smart folders set up allows you to put each email from different clients into their folders and creating labels will enable you to mark them as a priority.
Managing a time-consuming task can be made more accessible by efficiently organising the related emails, and you can even flag emails to ensure they go to the top of your inbox.
3 – Automate Certain Responses
Responding to emails can prove time-consuming; therefore, your virtual assistant will set autoresponders to help you stay on track for all daily emails.
Your virtual assistant will create email templates that allow you to respond promptly. You can either copy and paste a certain response, or use email automation tools to identify which auto-response will work best.
An autoresponder email can be just an acknowledgement to say you will respond fully within 24 hours, so ensure you always deal with the replies within the specified timescale.
But there are also tools that allow you to respond to certain queries with a templated response.
4 – Better Use of Email Tools
Knowing how to use email management tools correctly must be part of the virtual assistant’s job description. In addition, using different tools to help manage emails efficiently will save time and stress.
A business will receive countless emails daily, so taking advantage of the best tools available is vital. Some of the leading free tools include Direct Mail, MailerLite and setting up a Gmail account will help with access to Google Workspace.
All these tools will assist you with excellent email inbox management with any email account you are dealing with.
5 – Consistently Follow Up
The virtual assistant you hire must ensure they always follow up to email inquiries from potential customers or alert you when an important email requires your attention.
For example, sending out promotional emails always requires some form of follow-up reply to your emails regarding the promotion.
Failing to follow up on all email marketing campaign correspondence will negatively affect your company and cause you to lose potential customers.
6 – Set Prioritisation Requirements
All email messages your business receives must be graded regarding priority. For example, daily email notifications can fill your inbox from your contact list, but some will be more important than others.
Some emails you receive will be sales pitches from other companies with nothing to do with your industry, so always make sure you manage your emails correctly.
Like auto responders, your virtual assistant must know the right emails to prioritise. nfortunately, many businesses fail to prioritise appropriately and lose customers.
All administrative work takes time and effort, so devising a simple low, medium, high and urgent priority system is vital. This system lets your virtual assistant know which emails need your attention and which can be dealt with when they have extra free time.
7 – Use Smart Folders And Notifications
Your email management virtual assistant must always use smart folders to ensure all the emails you receive are put into their topical folder.
For example, essential customers will always have their own folders. Therefore, when correspondence with the sender’s email address is received, it will automatically be sent to its folder, making it easier to access when needed.
The same applies when your email virtual assistant is working on a promotional campaign; all the relevant emails will be sent to their own designated folder.
You may also have a business account with a specific travel company. All emails relating to this account should be sent to their folder.
8 – Filter Out Newsletters
The company newsletter may include some points of interest but can’t be classed as necessary, so it should always be filtered into the Archive folder within your inbox.
Newsletters are suitable for keeping staff informed of company-related information such as social gatherings, company five-a-side football matches, or when someone has recently married or had a baby.
Now and then, the company may choose to include industry information within the newsletter, but on the whole, newsletters should always only be read during your lunch breaks.
Call Us For A Free Consultation On Hiring A VA
As you will realise from reading this article, hiring an email management virtual assistant makes sense as it helps you save time and money.
When you hire the right virtual assistant, you can let them handle all the unwanted spam emails while focusing on attracting new clients and generating more sales.
Hiring a remote worker can be stressful and time-consuming, so let our team do all the hard yards for you.
We will identify, source, interview, hire and manage your virtual assistant worker for you.
We have several highly skilled virtual assistants on our books and ready to go, so call us for a free consultation.
