Boost Your SME Productivity with Emails

As e-mail continues to be the preferred means of business communication, small business owners can find themselves inundated with the sheer volume of e-mails they get everyday. As a result, efficiently managing your e-mails has become necessity for business professionals, does not matter whether you supply furniture and fixtures or deal in laptops/desktop computers, consider the following tips to efficiently manage your e-mails.

Begin with easy to handle e-mails – Pick out the e-mail messages that can be answered quickly, requiring you to just write a line or two. Don't try to compose a poem, or an essay just be laser focused and to the point. The sooner you get over with these e-mails, more time will you be spared with to spend on messages requiring well-thought out responses.

Make use of e-mail templates – E-mail templates will allow you to respond to the same or similar queries in a fraction of the time it will take you to compose identical answers time and time again.

Make folders and use filters – Sorting your e-mails by creating folders will make it a lot easier for you to prioritize and respond to messages effectively. In addition, creating filters and rules within your e-mail client will automatically transfer the e-mails in different folders, making things even faster.

Use labels for e-mail messages – Find out how you can color-code e-mail messages with you e-mail client. Color labels will make it easy to find and shuffle through the messages later on. You might, for instance, code the most important e-mails in red and the rest in other colors, based on your personal scheme of color-codes.

Be careful with auto-check – The auto check feature in e-mail clients can be very distracting by prompting alerts every time you get a mail. Consider turning off the

feature altogether, or change the frequency to whatever is convenient to you viz every hour.

Save time by using an address book – If you're not using an address book you've probably felt frustrated over typing the same e-mail addresses every time you compose mail, or would have found yourself rummaging through messages for an e-mail address. Using an address book will lay to rest these problems and you'd be able to easily retrieve stored e-mail addresses in a jiffy.