Email Miscommunication is Too Easy!

 

 Email Miscommunicati

 Email Miscommunication is Too Easy!on is Too Easy!

If you've ever tried searching for something in your email inbox,

you know that it's not a simple process. It's time consuming,

expensive and is sometimes downright fruitless. With 2018 behind us and the New Year about to start, it's worth taking another look at what can make email search work better. So let's take a look at some of the best tools out there to help you scale your email search so that when you're on page four of ten pages of results that are turning up zero matches outside the first few lines, you don't have to wonder if maybe it was just beyond your reach.

By: Kelly Thomas Last Updated: January 1, 2018

Did you know that if you haven't replied to an email from someone in two months — or sometimes even more than two months — they will assume you are "gone"… and just don't bother looking for your response? Instead, they'll just add you to their junk email folder. Yes, it seems like a no-brainer. But the fact is that 30% of your emails still get deleted without ever being read because they were undeliverable. This can really add up over time – it's estimated that 60 billion emails are lost every day alone.

(You don't have to be a math genius to realize that's a lot of unread emails.)

If your email inbox is anything like mine, it's overflowing. And yet, for some reason, I've taken to opening it up and reading through all the messages… every day.

Seriously! Every single day for the past few years. You can imagine how time-consuming that is: just ten minutes here or there adds up pretty quickly into an entire work day – if not more! It's time we don't have, especially as brands are under more pressure than ever to reach customers quickly and effectively.

I'm going to make a bold, albeit somewhat controversial, suggestion: the way you receive your email should only change on days that you actually open your inbox.

Some like to send out emails every morning before they start their day. Others might send emails every day at lunch or after work. And some of us are even still following the old-fashioned daily digest pattern of emailing just once a day before bedtime!

So which one of those is right? In my opinion there is no right or wrong – it's all about the best way for you and your email inbox to work together. But if that's the case, what can you do to make your inbox and your daily work routine play nicely together?

(For the purpose of this discussion, I'm going to assume that you keep your email notifications on.)

Automation In Your Email Inbox: How To Take Control Of Your Time And Money

Automation refers to the practice of putting in place a process or system that does something automatically, with little or no input from a human being.

There are lots of great examples of automation in action all around us – think self-driving vehicles and smart homes. And yet, when it comes to our own email inboxes, we tend to be pretty disjointed: we have dedicated inboxes for all kinds of different purposes.

For example, when I receive an email from someone that I know would be a good contact, I'll often respond immediately. But when it's someone I don't know — or who appears to not have my best interests at heart — I will typically read and then delete the message in the trash before responding. And recently, I did something that would be unthinkable to most people I know: I unsubscribed to an email newsletter!

On the flip side, we also have many of us who use our email inbox as a trash can, where messages get lost in the void of time. In fact, one recent study found that 30% of the emails sent every day are never even read – and 60 billion emails are lost each day! And this is all happening while we run from meeting to meeting and desperately try to keep up with everything.

The sad part is that there may be a better way. That's because it doesn't only take time to read and respond to an email (but I do think that's essential, as it's a great way to build relationships), but it takes even more time to get an email out of our inboxes in the first place. Sometimes, if we're lucky, we might only get ten replies or comments in one day – and if not, it could be twenty or thirty. In either case, 30% of our email responses are going on vacation without ever getting read.

This makes for a kind of really inefficient system, because the very thing that makes us humans unique is our ability to process and act upon information quickly. So what do we do? We try to automate things in our lives.

One of my favorite examples is when I was at a conference last year, where I attended a keynote by someone who was recognized as one of the top ten leading email marketers in the world. This guy had written a book and had been featured on Oprah's Super Soul Sunday . Needless to say, he was quite successful – but he also had some interesting ideas about using automation in email marketing.

He explained how there are several ways that you can put automation into place. For example, you could choose to use certain templates. Or you could create automated sequences where your emails get sent at regular intervals throughout the day (i.e., every 10 minutes).

Conclusion: Automation In Your Email Inbox: It All Comes Down To Time

There are many reasons why I think email automation is such a controversial topic. First, of course, is the question of time. Second, is it really fair to pay someone to take 30% of their time away and make it unavailable for other tasks? And thirdly, how do we know that all this automation is actually working?

In terms of time, I say that we all have enough – especially if you're like me and you need almost no more than two hours every single day. If this sounds like you – and I've talked with a lot of my friends who are like this — then all those work emails can really start to add up quickly.