Welcome to my August Newsletter Blog!
As the last beautiful days of summer draw to a close, I’d like to share some tips to keep you organized and spare your sanity by managing your Gmail inbox.
Providing administrative help and keeping email organized is one of the many services that I offer to keep your business running smoothly and cost-effectively, so I’m going to share with you my favorite tips for keeping a Gmail inbox clean and organized. These are some of the same features and tricks that the Gmail power users use!
- Use the Archive feature
I recommend you don’t delete any email between you and a client—it’s good business practice to be able to go back and reread any details of a deal you’ve worked out, the deliverables, what you were charging in the past, and the dates that different conversations took place. But, keeping such emails in your inbox as a record is a waste of space and will turn it into a cluttered mess. That’s where the Archive feature comes in. It removes the email from your inbox, but keeps it saved and hidden, fully searchable should you ever need it.
- Try a subscription management system like Unroll.me
I can’t recommend this service enough. It’s free to use, and it searches your inbox for subscriptions that you probably don’t even know you have—many companies these days hold on to your email and enroll you in multiple email campaigns, meaning that you can’t just unsubscribe from one, you have to unsubscribe from them all to stop getting their emails! Unroll.me is good for rooting out little tricks like that. It also has the invaluable “Rollup” feature that will bundle together any emails that you choose into a single once-daily email. This is great if you have to keep on top of certain notifications—for example, if you’re buying a house and have subscribed to see new listings, your Rollup can take dozens of emails and display them for you in one tidy message.
- Canned Responses
This advanced feature is invaluable for anyone who communicates with clients or subcontractors regularly. If you find yourself typing the same things over and over again to different people, you can create a standard message right in your inbox and drop it in any time! For example, you can created a Canned Response that says, “Thank you for our phone call, it was a pleasure chatting with you. Would you like to follow up with a meeting next week?” This streamlines your business practices and saves you enormous amounts of time in the long run. Here is a good guide from Art of Hustle on how to enable the Canned Responses feature.
Enjoy the rest of your summer, and be sure to get in touch if you want to discuss using Virtual Assistant services to free up your valuable time and keep your inbox tidy.
God Bless,
Virtually yours,
Donna
