The E-mail Nightmare: How Do You Get All Those E-mails Answered and Still Get the Rest of Your Important Business Tasks Done?

That quote basically states a hard fact about the way you must treat your business tasks on a daily basis. If you don't have a feasible plan that will alleviate a business problem, then you need to take time out from your busy work schedule and write one down. Only after that will you be able to attack your problem and move on to the next one. This brings us to the topic at hand: the huge workload of answering your daily e-mails in a professional and prompt manner, while also making sure that you have answered your customer's questions with the right amount of detail so they are satisfied with your response.

If your customers are not satisfied with your feedback to them, they will either e-mail you yet again with another question regarding the same issue, or they will go elsewhere with their credit card, and you will have just lost another valuable customer. The following 7 steps will make sure that this never happens to your small business.

1. MAKE SURE THAT ALL YOUR MESSAGES ARE FILTERED FOR JUNK MAIL This would appear to be considered a no-brainer for most business people, but you would be surprised by how many business owners still continue to go through their junk e-mails and try to see if their customer's names are on the subject line. If you have a really good e-mail service such as G-Mail, let the software filter out the junk, and just concentrate on the valid e-mails you see coming into your in-box every morning. If your e-mail service can't handle a specific task like being able to filter out all spam e-mail, then you need to change your e-mail service immediately.

2. GROUP ALL INCOMING E-MAILS BY LEVEL OF IMPORTANCE A great way to make sure that the e-mails you answer first are the most important ones of the day, is by grouping the e-mails into folders in order of importance. Your e-mail service software will allow you to set up certain rules for all incoming e-mails that will allow certain words in the subject line to pop into the folder of your choice. You can then set up specific folders to only contain certain e-mail messages. For instance, if you sell customized car parts and your profit margin for selling wheels is much higher than any other item you sell, put "wheels" in the folder that you first want to open every morning.

When a customer's e-mail comes in with the subject line "I am interested in buying some new wheels for my WRX", that e-mail immediately pops into your primary folder which ensures that you will be reading that e-mail before anybody else's. This method enables you to distinguish what e-mails you should respond to the first thing in the morning on a daily basis.

3. COOL DOWN BEFORE SENDING OFF AN ANGRY E-MAIL I know that some people can be very rude and irritating by the way they scream at you through an angry e-mail to your company, but you can't go to their level and respond in kind. The best way to make sure you never reply back in a viscous manner to a client or customer, is to just calm down before you write the reply and really think about why this person is so angry. Deliberate your thoughts and think of ways to explain to him/her how you will fix the issue at hand. All of the e-mails you have sent in the past could still be in someone's in-box, waiting to be unleashed on the internet world, so make sure you don't hand anybody any ammunition that will one day shoot you in the back.

4. NEVER FALL INTO THE TRAP OF SENDING MORE THAN 3 RESPONSES TO ANY ONE E-MAIL Have you ever been in the situation where you have been constantly responding to the same e-mail subject more than 10 times? By the tenth time you probably have lost all comprehension of what the subject was that got you started in this ongoing e-mail nightmare in the first place. A good way to be sure that this does not happen again would be to send that person a new e-mail with a different subject line after you have replied to his first message twice.

The new subject title should say it all and give your recipient a very clear idea of what your message idea is. If the subject is still the same, but only some sections of the chain remain relevant, cut and paste the relevant sections of the original message into a new message. For long messages, type your reply in a different color, in the body of the original message. This is a good way to identify the exact message of the subject that you are replying to.

5. DON'T SEND OUT E-MAILS USING GROUPS Seeing as how you probably hate to receive an e-mail from somebody that was already sent to fifty other people at the same time as yours was sent, why would you think anybody else would want to read a group e-mail sent to them from your company? You would never call in the entire sales department of your business if you just need to talk to Jack and Maggie from the online sales division, so why would you send an e-mail to more people than the one person the message is for? It might take more time to send out individual e-mails to clients and customers, but that personal touch usually can make the difference between retaining a customer or losing them to your competition.

You need to start equating e-mail communication with telephone communication. Most phone calls you make on a daily basis do not include conference calls, so don't turn all of your e-mailings into group mailings. If it is an absolute necessity to send your e-mail to more than five people at any one time, then mark the subject line clearly and with "for your action" or "for your information only" in the heading so that all the recipients of your e-mail can easily determine the priority for them personally and can then go ahead and open it or disregard it depending on the relevancy to their business.

Always make sure that the information in all of your e-mails actually pertain to important matters regarding the recipient of your e-mail. That way, the people who do open your e-mails on a regular basis will never consider your e-mail messages irrelevant or unimportant to them and will always be interested to see what you sent them.

6. MANAGE YOUR E-MAIL RESPONSE TIME EFFECTIVELY The most effective way to manage all of your e-mail responses to customer's requests is to set aside an exact time every day to devote to e-mail responses. Be sure to turn off the "notify me" option on your e-mail service first, then pick an early morning hour like 8AM or 9AM to go through all of your most important e-mail folders first. Then go back around 3PM to finish off the less important e-mails and to see if you have any other important ones to respond to immediately.

Most business people are getting ready to leave for home around 4 PM, so clearing up your head within the hours of 8AM and 3PM to devote an hour or two to e-mails is a perfect time frame to get back with people before they have to leave for home. If you are constantly distracted by answering somebody's e-mails every five minutes, your company will suffer for it. By focusing on responding to your customer's e-mails only twice a day, you are able to concentrate on more serious business concerns like promotion of your website or by quickly processing orders to the biggest clients of your company so they stay your clients.

7. MAKE SURE THAT THE E-MAIL YOU ARE RESPONDING TO DESERVES A RESPONSE AT ALL Unless there is some information or specific instructions you can give to your e-mail recipient, you should never feel you have to respond to every e-mail that is in your in-box. The original sender probably didn't expect a reply, and you have just added to his or her already substantial list of e-mails for that day if you are just going over the same information he already has. If you are more discriminating in determining who deserves your e-mail attention, your entire business will run much better because you will be able to focus on more important and vital company tasks that need to be taken care of first.

Don't disregard any of the steps I've listed here. There are many online business owners who now regret taking too much time in answering their non-important e-mails and not concentrating on vital tasks like paying their invoices and enlarging their customer base which always is never a waste of time. Don't fill your life with regrets: take these steps today.