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An overview of email management and why it’s vital to every business - timetoreply

Written by Athenkosi Tshiki | Sep 5, 2024 9:53:30 AM

Discover email management, which tools can assist with this and why it’s vital for every business.

Email is an essential part of any business. It is the primary channel for internal communication. It is also used to market to consumers, engage with sales leads, and resolve customer queries. Email can significantly benefit businesses by increasing efficiency and productivity and helping build relationships.

Nowadays, organizations must manage their email communication channels. With the volume of emails being sent daily, employees may quickly feel overwhelmed and struggle to keep track of the tasks associated with each email sent and received.

Email management is necessary to prevent email overload. As the number of email users grows, so does the volume of emails sent, resulting in email overload. Email overload can result in missed emails, emails being responded to late, missed sales opportunities and more.

What is email management?

Email management is essential for any business that receives high volumes of inbound electronic mail. According to recent data, the number of emails sent and received daily is 347.3 billion. Considering the vast volume of emails sent and received daily, email management is essential to any organization’s internal and external communication strategy.

Email management enables a company to maximize efficiency and reduce the impact of emails being under-prioritized, replied to late or forgotten. Considering employees can receive over a hundred emails daily, it is no wonder that up to 28% of an employee’s work week is used managing emails.

Thankfully, email management tools help organizations effectively manage their email. Organizations that use email management software add a new level of certainty and transparency. No more guessing. No more winging it and hoping for the best.

Why is email management critical?

Email management allows better organization of important documents and messages that we receive. It can help employees prioritise emails and any tasks associated with them.

On average, professionals only respond to 25% of the 120 new emails received per day. That leaves 90 ignored emails. Can your business afford to leave so many emails left unanswered?

Email management helps employees mindfully utilize the time they spend on emails. It helps them prioritize and visualize which emails must be responded to and when. This helps them stay focused on ensuring that all the emails receive the time they need to resolve.

 

The benefits of email management

🧑‍💻Improves productivity

Employees can focus on important tasks instead of emails with proper email management. Email management allows better organization of important information, so employees do not waste precious time scrolling through an overflowing inbox.

⚙️Maximises efficiency

Not every email received deserves the same priority and speed. Email management helps employees prioritize emails. When employees know which emails to respond to, they can more efficiently resolve customer queries and inbound sales leads.

📈Increases profits

With increased time efficiency and improved productivity, your organization can boost profits. When you have a well-run team that efficiently responds to customers, sales leads and internal comms, you can rest assured that no cent is wasted on cluttered inboxes.

Best practices for effective email management

1. Understand your email load

Do you know how many emails your employees are receiving and sending? Do you know how much time individuals are spending on emails? According to a 2019 Adobe survey, Americans spend five hours a day just checking on and replying to their email. Using email management software, you can conduct a diagnostic check to reveal the average time each employee spends in their inboxes. Effective email management can redirect these hours towards more valuable tasks.

2. Monitor email response time

How responsive do you expect your employees to be? How responsive do customers expect them to be? Your team must understand what response time they are aiming for. Installing email management software, such as timetoreply, empowers you to measure and track your email response time according to your predefined benchmarks. This way, you are alerted to team members needing more email management support.

3. Set real-time alerts

It is easy for employees to get distracted and not respond within the stipulated time frame or, worse yet, miss an important email entirely. With timetoreply, you set automated alerts to keep employees updated on emails not receiving responses. These real-time alerts offer live tracking of your team’s responsiveness. This kind of alert system prevents emails from being lost or forgotten.

4. Use email management software

You cannot expect complete visibility over every inbox in your organization. Many excellent email management software solutions can help you do this efficiently and effectively.

Email Management software helps you and your team organize your email inboxes. With email management, you can keep on top of incoming messages from your team, customers, and other stakeholders. Email management software adds a layer of functionality not readily available in your default inbox.

Depending on the software you choose, you’ll find features that help with areas such as:

  • Employee productivity
  • Inbound sales leads
  • Customer relationship management and support

Read more about the best email management software solutions

How does timetoreply effectively help you with email management?

☑️ Measure email response times and volumes

If you can measure each email’s response time, you can optimize it profitably!

timetoreply allows you to track the response time of each email, determine periods between email exchanges and reduce the time gap. You can share peer-to-peer feedback with your team based on these insights to help them improve their response times.

☑️ Supervise individual and group mailboxes

With timetoreply, you can monitor the mailboxes of your group or shared inboxes as well as individual team members. This functionality allows you to measure each agent’s reply time performance, email volumes, number of closed queries, and the average time to close a query.

You can also see how each of these agents performs in the context of a group mailbox. This lets you know who’s doing the lion’s share of the work, allowing you to distribute work smartly.

☑️ Access to automated email performance reports

Accessing the data you need to make effective changes can be challenging, especially when you need quick daily insights. However, timetoreply gives you rapid access to detailed email performance reports. The best part is that you can customize the settings to decide how frequently you want to receive these reports. You can choose between receiving detailed analytics daily, weekly, or monthly. With these data-driven insights, managers can more effectively manage individuals within their teams, encouraging them to become masters of email management.

According to SaneBox, more than 60% of emails received by employees are redundant. That means only four in every ten emails a worker receives is worth responding to. The easy availability of performance reports helps separate and identify the valuable emails worthy of attention.

☑️ Send real-time alerts

timetoreply is enabled with a real-time alert system that informs teams and individuals about emails requiring attention. These real-time alerts offer live tracking of the responsiveness of emails and team communication.

Once you have set a time to reply benchmark, you can help individuals reach these targets by enabling this feature. This way, employees are empowered to reach the time to reply target set, ensuring no email is accidentally lost to flounder in a busy inbox.

☑️ Identify star employees

With timetoreply’s reports, you analyze and share comparative leadership reports with your teams. These reports help you identify the most diligent workers and reward them for consistently reaching their email management benchmarks. By monitoring email performance, individuals are encouraged to rise to the challenge, and the organization promotes a culture of effective communication.

 

Summary

Effective email management is the cornerstone of any successful business. As remote and hybrid work environments continue to grow in popularity, digital communication is more critical than ever.

Every business needs effective communication systems and tools to support its operations and functionality. If your business handles large volumes of emails from customers and sales leads, your priority should be implementing the most advanced and versatile email management software. An email management tool like timetoreply helps harness the power of email to produce efficiency and productivity gains that boost profits.

  • With timetoreply you can enjoy features that:
  • boost employee productivity
  • enhance the transparency of individual and team email performance
  • ensure no email is missed with real-time alerts

timetoreply is trusted by high-performing inbound sales teams and customer-facing teams globally.

Book a demo to get started with timetoreply.