3 Email Habits You Need To Kick Right Now
The first email was sent in 1971. Since then, it has become a popular tool for communication. But, over the past five decades, it’s safe to say that humans have picked up some pretty bad habits when it comes to sending and receiving emails.
How to master your inbox
By failing to master our inboxes, we waste a lot of precious time. In fact, the average person spends 28% of their work week on email – that’s around 11 hours per week. You can find out exactly how much time you spend on email with this handy calculator. Be warned – it’s scary.
Today, we’ve rounded up the worst email habits, as well as some ways in which you can skyrocket your email productivity.
CC’ing and BC’ing every man, woman and their dog.
Copying in anyone and everyone to an email isn’t helpful. It’s distracting and annoying for the recipients, as well as often resulting in multiple email threads with even more people joining the conversation.
If it requires the insight of more than two people, try creating a group chat on Teams, Slack, or even Yammer, if your company uses it.
The structure of these instant messaging services is a lot easier to follow than a monster email thread.
With Teams, you can share OneDrive files with ease. This allows you to collaborate and co-author documents and remove the need for various versions of files floating around.
Telling people you’ve sent a message from your iPhone.
Being able to send email from our phones and tablets, away from the office, is really handy. However, how unprofessional does it look when your message is punctuated with ‘Sent From My iPhone’?
You can remove this in a few seconds by going into your phone’s mail settings.
On top of this, you can ensure every email looks as though you’ve sent it from your desktop by using a Managed Email Signatures service, such as Exclaimer.
Compatible with Office 365, Exchange, Outlook and G-Suite, a monthly subscription allows you to centrally manage the signatures of your whole team, it then stamps the signature on the end of any email that leaves your business.
Send from your phone to your heart’s content, my friend, no one will ever know.
As well as replacing ‘Sent From My iPhone’, it ensures all of your staff’s email signatures are consistent and include the correct contact details.
Using email for everything.
We get it – email is convenient.
Almost everyone has an email address nowadays, so it’s the tool we naturally gravitate towards when getting in touch with colleagues and clients.
However, there are quite a few instances where email isn’t the best way of communicating.
Again, if it’s something that needs input from several members of your team, consider using a messaging service like Teams or Slack.
Meanwhile, if it’s something that could be sorted with a short conversation, pick up the phone. Do they work in the same building as you? Pop in for a face-to-face chat and – maybe – even a brew. Human interaction is definitely underrated!
Trust us, when you crack this, your days are a lot more productive.
If you would like more information on how you can boost your team’s productivity with email, please get in touch with us right now.