If you’re like most of us you receive a tremendous amount of e-mail each day. It can grow like a wildfire and you can spend a lot of time each day just weeding through it. E-mail marketing is big business and many companies are vying for our attention. As a result you can receive numerous newsletters, some that you don’t even remember signing up to receive. Wading through all of this each day can really eat into your time and take valuable time away that you can spend working on your business. However, you can save a lot of time by delegating this task. If you haven’t thought of this before you may be wondering how someone could help you manage your e-mail inbox. Below I will explain how you can go about delegating your e-mail management.
First, determine how you will work with your virtual assistant to help you manage your e-mail inbox. Decide if your assistant will “own” your e-mail inbox or if she will just handle your e-mail while you’re traveling. I don’t recommend that you both handle the e-mail as this can cause something to slip through the cracks.
If you decide that your virtual assistant will “own” your e-mail inbox, she can do this by highlighting all messages that you should read (both of you can determine the process for this). She can filter out all other messages by creating folders, more about this below. She can delete all SPAM related messages. This same process can be followed even if you decide that she should only handle your e-mail while you’re traveling.
If you have sensitive or confidential e-mails, that you might not want your assistant to handle or view, you should develop a process to filter these e-mails to another private e-mail account that only you have access to view. Your assistant can create a rule that forwards e-mails that have the word “confidential” in the subject line to the other e-mail account or have it to go another e-mail folder.
If your virtual assistant also manages your calendar my suggestion is that all meeting invites go directly to her. You can inform your colleagues or anyone in your company to not send you meeting invites. This also cuts down on the amount of e-mail that you receive.
I mentioned above that I would further explain how your virtual assistant can organize your e-mail inbox. Here’s how she can do so:
Create folders. Your virtual assistant can create folders in your e-mail account. You will need to provide your assistant with access and permission to be able to access your e-mail and the way to do this depends upon your e-mail client.
Type of folders to create. The type of folders that you have your virtual assistant create depends upon your individual needs, but below are some examples of the folders that you can create:
- Newsletters – any newsletters that you receive can be put into this folder for review at your leisure. You can even create subfolders for this one for each company that you receive newsletters from.
- Boards – if you’re on any boards any e-mail relating to them can be put into this folder and create subfolders if you’re on more than one board.
- Volunteer or Philanthropy – if you’re on any volunteer committees or do philanthropy work any e-mails related to this can be put into this folder.
- Receipts – anything that you place an order for and want to keep up with electronic receipts.
- Reference – any e-mails that you receive that you may need to reference in the future
- To Do – all e-mails that require you to do something should go into this folder
- Completed – you can move all e-mails that you’re done with to this folder and your virtual assistant can archive them for you.
Delegating your e-mail management can save you loads of time and stress. Just imagine going to your e-mail box and finding it organized, doesn’t that sound wonderful? Allowing your virtual assistant to manage this process for you puts you on the road to delegating success and more time to focus on growing your business.
