When working in any industry, especially the fast-paced event marketing industry, few things are a bigger time waster than poor email management. Here at myZone, we have a few tips for managing company email that we know make our lives way easier, and we figured they may help you out too. So here they are, our top tips for managing work-related messages.

Keep It Professional

Make sure you take the time to create an email account (or accounts for your whole team) that’s related to either your company name or the name of the event you’re promoting. For example, everyone who works at myZone has their own email address with the format of firstname.lastname@myzone.com. That way, anyone we correspond with immediately knows where we’re from and will recognize our messages immediately.

We also make sure every team member has an automatic signature set up to go at the end of every message that contains their full name, Skype contact, job title, our company websites, and any other relevant info.

All Emails in One Inbox, and on All Devices

As an event marketing professional, it makes sense that you would have a few different email addresses at different domain names. Perhaps one for a nightclub you run, one for a festival, another for your monthly event; however, there’s no reason you shouldn’t be replying to all of them in a timely fashion. Gmail, Outlook, and a whole host of other services allow you to consolidate all of your emails in one inbox, even if they’re from multiple websites.

Having one spot to login where you can access any email sent to you will make your life much easier, and make it easier for any clients, sponsors, prospective customers, and so on to reach you. Telling people to send certain types of emails to different email addresses is unnecessary, and can result in you missing important messages. Instead, use mail rules and filters to organize your incoming mail from all your separate accounts.

It’s completely understandable that you’re going to have emails coming in that are a lower priority that you don’t want to pop up over your high priority messages. You can always set up mail rules that will let your email server know how to process incoming messages based on the sender or subject, so that they are sorted into the appropriate folders. However, all those folders should still be organized in the same place.

You should also use a service like Gmail or the Cloud to make sure that every email is available on all of your devices. To keep up with time sensitive event marketing emails, you need to have access on the go. Emails should be available on your home computer, work computer, phone, iPad, or whatever other device you have on hand.

The 4D Rule

Learn these rules, and follow them. They are a life saver:

1. Do It: If it takes less than 5 minutes to complete the task sent to you in an email, you should just get it out of the way. That way, it doesn’t build up with other tasks on your to-do list and you’re not apologizing later for failing to complete simple requests.
2. Delete It: If an email isn’t actionable, once you have the info you need feel free to delete it. If you want to hold on to if for reference, you can always file it in an appropriate folder, but there’s no bigger waste of time than reading an email twice.
3. Delegate It: If the email could better be handled by someone else, forward it to them to take care of. If you’re using task management software like Asana, you can also CC x@mail.asana.com to create a task for the person that way.
4. Defer It: If the email regards something that needs to be handled by a specific deadline you can schedule it in your calendar, then delete the email so it isn’t cluttering your inbox. In Asana, you can forward it as a task to yourself and set the deadline and priority that way.

Read Emails in Blocks

Don’t hop back and forth between completing tasks (or taking care of general business) and reading emails. Read your emails in dedicated time blocks. First thing in the morning, go through all of your new emails and practice the 4D rule. After that, everything should either be deleted, deferred, delegated, or taken care of.

At this point, start powering through your tasks. Once you’ve checked a few things off the list, check your email again. Take care of anything else that has popped up.

Continue this sort of system. It’s definitely okay to check your email multiple times a day. It’s actually recommended! However, jumping into a new email just because a notification popped up can distract you from completing a task and slash your productivity. Dedicate blocks of time to checking your email throughout the day, and everything should run much more smoothly.

Use Other Services to Increase Efficiency

Sometimes emails can get left in your inbox for a long time just because you’re waiting for someone to respond to them, or you know you need to follow up again eventually. You don’t need to do that! Use a service that does the work for you, and it will make your life much easier.

Follow Up Then is a great service to use when you need to remember to follow up on certain emails. Our sales team uses it to keep track of leads. Basically, it’s an email address you can BCC emails to that will remind you to follow up at a specific date and time.

There is also Sidekick, a service that can track sent messages. It can tell you when they were opened, how many times they were opened, and other information that is very useful when trying to reach out to prospective clients.

Enjoy Your New Email Management!

If you follow the above tips, your email management should run much more smoothly. Event marketing is too fast-paced for you to spend time reading emails multiple times, having a cluttered inbox, and missing important messages.

If you take a bit of time to better organize your company email management, you will be amazed to see how much easier your life can become. Feel free to contact us for more email management tips, and other ways to improve work flow.