This week we focus on a simple tip that you can implement in 30 minutes or less that will help your business to be more productive.
As a small business owner you wear lots of hats when it comes to running your business. sales, marketing, technical support, accounting, etc. To get the most out of your time, it’s imperative to automate as much of your business as possible.
Automation is simply the process of using technology to accomplish your repetitive tasks for you, automatically!
This week’s tip focuses on email. If you are like us, you get lots of daily emails, maybe hundreds per day. With 120 emails per day as an example, if you take only 30 seconds to read, respond and file each email, you are looking at spending at least 1 hour per day just handling email.
We have a 3-part strategy for helping you to reduce the time you spend handling email.
Part 1
The first part of our strategy assumes that you own your own domain name (in this example we’ll use anydomain.com as our domain name) and your web hosting provider allows you to set up email aliases (or some web hosts call them email forwards). Email aliases look like regular email addresses, but they actually just forward email.
Here’s an example.
– You have an email box at the address: bob@anydomain.com. This is the address where you receive your email.
– You set up an email alias: questions@anydomain.com This alias points to the email address bob@anydomain.com Any emails sent to questions@anydomain.com automatically forward “behind the scenes” to bob@anydomain.com
– You change your website to direct your customers to send any questions to questions@anydomain.com
To learn more about email aliases, check your Web Hosting provider’s help documentation
Now just repeat this procedure for all job functions you want to separate: sales@anydomain.com, info@anydomain.com, questions@anydomain.com, etc.
Part 2
The second part of our strategy uses built-in features of your email client. Most email clients like Microsoft Outlook Express, Eudora and others have a feature that allows you to set up rules on your inbound mail.
We’ll take advantage of this feature to help us sort our mail. Since each mail client has slightly different procedures, we’ll cover the general procedure in this article. I’ve included links at the bottom of this section that describe specific procedures for Outlook Express and Eudora.
Now that we have set up email addresses for specific functions of our business, we need to set up unique folders in our email client for each function (questions, sales, info, etc.).
Finally we set up a rule in our email client that checks each incoming message, and, based on its email address, moves the mail to the correct folder. Now all messages sent to questions@anydomain.com will automatically move to the “questions” folder in our mailbox.
How does this help us, you ask? Check out Part 3 of this article to learn how to put it all together.
(Instructions for setting up rules in the various email clients) Outlook Express http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;187 298&Product=oex
Eudora http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/tutorials/win_filters.html
Part 3
The final part of our email automation article involves email signatures. Email signatures are small bits of data that can be saved and pasted into emails as necessary.
As the name implies, this feature is primarily used to insert a signature into mail messages, but we can expand this feature to be much more powerful.
Picture this scenario.
– a customer sends you an email with a specific question
– As this is a question that you get periodically, you know how to answer it, but you have to do a little research to get all of the details correct. This takes up your valuable time.
– You reply to the customer with the answer to their question
Instead, what if you took your time and composed a Frequently Asked Questions (FAQ) type of email that answered all of the most common questions you received. Once you had this information typed out, you then save it as a “signature”.
Now anytime you receive a message addressed to questions@anydomain.com you can set your rules (see Part 2) to automatically respond to the note with your FAQ “signature”. Then at the bottom of the note, you can give the customer a different email address if they still have questions after reading your FAQ.
The scenario above can be altered to have pre-saved “signatures” for things like:
– your shipping costs
– your mailing or website address
– your newsletter archives
– etc.
Since there is no limit to the number of signatures you can save, use this feature for anything that you can think of answering ahead of time.
(Instructions for setting up signatures in the various email clients) Outlook Express http://www.microsoft.com/windows/ie/using/howto/oe/personal ize.mspx#EFAA
Eudora http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/tutorials/win_signatures. html
Conclusion
In less than 30 minutes time, you can begin setting up your business automation rules that can help to free up more of your time to focus on things like sales and marketing!
These techniques are quick and easy to implement and enhance your customer service abilities without taking up any more of your valuable time. Most importantly these procedures can be implemented with the software that you already have!
Rules and signatures are very powerful, so experiment to find the combination that works best for you.
Next time we’ll take these methods one step further and talk about autoresponders!
Wayne and Scott Foreman are co-owners of
www.build-passive-income.com
They just published a report on creating and building income
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