How To Improve Your Email Processing System

Business professionals all around the world handle emails on a daily basis. Still, processing all incoming and outgoing emails promptly without getting buried in a sea of unread messages is a bona fide challenge. 

This is why you may need an efficient email processing system that helps you keep on top of the task, and ultimately, saves you a lot of time and money. 

Let’s go over the basics, what is email processing system, and how you can go about improving it.

What is email processing system?

Even though you may not know the actual definition of what is email processing system, you most likely process emails at least once a week. It’s a system of opening different emails in your inbox, organizing them by priority or subject matter in order to reach a decluttered email inbox. 

That way, you’ll have a better time managing your company emails and be more productive.

The power of email extends beyond its original purpose, as numerous people use it as reminders for to-do tasks. Many also use email inboxes as storage for important documents. However, this also makes email processing more challenging than it needs to be. 

Fortunately, with an effective email processing system, you can solve this problem and bring your email inbox down to zero, each week.

How to process email like a pro

Now that you know what is email processing system, it’s time you work on improving it. Here are four key practices you should give a try.

1. Clean your inbox

Check your inbox right now. Our guess is it’s filled to the brim with emails you viewed earlier or marked as read. These don’t need to be a part of your inbox anymore and will only complicate the process of finding information that you do need.

A good start is deleting emails that you won’t serve a purpose in the future. For instance, you can delete anything that contains promotional materials or items on your subscription list. 

Cleaning out the entire inbox may take hours, so you should split it into manageable chunks. Overall, it will be worth it, as you’ll be given an opportunity to start on a “clean surface”, so to speak.

2. Allocate times for email processing

All of us process emails each day, and we’re constantly going back and forth between the email client and the main task that’s in the works. Yet, this only serves as a huge distraction. 

What you should try is to allocate a few minutes to email processing each day where you won’t do anything but process all the new messages in your inbox. We know it’s hard but refrain from opening emails outside these time windows. 

In doing so, you’ll improve your email processing, while also giving yourself an uninterrupted chunk of time handling your main work tasks.

3. Action all emails immediately

No matter how similar some emails look, processing email is not the same as email reading. Without the former, you’ll simply leave messages that don’t require any attention collecting in your inbox. 

So, create a folder for important emails, outgoing payments, personal emails, etc. With this level of categorization, you’ll always know exactly where everything is whenever you need it.

For example, you can create a waiting list folder where you’ll put read emails that require your response and for which you expect a response from the sender. You can name this one something like “waiting list”. 

Some emails may require you to respond but you won’t be expecting a response from the sender, and you don’t need it for future reference. These you should always respond to and delete them straight away - the same goes for emails you only need to read. 

Lastly, you can also benefit from having two folders: one for the emails that you have to respond to and will need to save for future reference, and one for those that don’t require a response but you will need in the future. 

This is just an example, feel free to include any additional categories that are unique to your circumstances. 

Pro tip:

Create a to-do list for each email you process that requires some work before sending a response. That way, you won’t forget to respond to an important message. 

4. Automate your email responses

Generally speaking, when rummaging through emails, a lot of them will only require short boilerplate responses. Many messages you receive will only have an informative purpose, and your response, in most cases, will be a standard response you’ve sent out many times. 

You can probably guess that this is a major time-waster as you’ll need to type out the same old response you've already written a few times that day. 

One productive practice is taking a close look at your recurring responses and making a variety of templates for different purposes you can use in the future. 

But how do you go about using those templates? After all, finding, copying, and pasting responses wouldn’t be that efficient. A good idea is to use a program such as the TextExpander that allows you to save andu can enter all your templates with just a few clicks.

For instance, you can assign one template which pastes inside an email after you type out a phrase like “.greetings”. For long responses, you can use multiple templates to create a full message after entering different variables and combinations of templates.

Once you get the hang of it, you’ll be much more effective in processing emails and save valuable time on typing out the same old message.

Say goodbye to chaos

Now that you know what is email processing system, you can create one that suits your needs and start communicating with team members or clients more efficiently. The tips we provided above will help you get a good starting point you can use to expand on once you learn some other, more business-specific processing workflows.

But what if your business activities rely on email and you can’t realistically handle everything yourself?

Then you can implement automated email systems that use artificial intelligence to sort emails, extract data, and create automated responses. In case you don’t want to see machines take over, you can outsource your email processing to a third-party company, such as Aspen Media, that can support you with trained agents who will take over all your email communication.

Automated or otherwise, anything that helps you stay on top of your email inbox and get rid of the chaos will be worth your time and effort.