Our email inbox never sleeps, email potentially comes in at any hour of the day, it just keeps piling up. Aside from sorting through important messages and spam, we could all use an idea or two more on how to increase efficiency, response time, & productivity.
To make your workday easier and potentially your paycheck bigger, here are some proven ideas:
One: Sign up with a web host that comes with a Spam Filtering service
Keeping spam out of your inbox is the first key to saving you time. We recommend 4GoodHosting web hosting and they use a dedicated spam filtering server, that is what we use; and for us it has been working great. All non-spam emails come in, except most every spam message. They are partnered with SpamExperts, which maintain a global database of known spam messages, and moves them to another folder where you can review them later if you wish.
Two: Filter and sort email automatically with your email client software (Outlook/Live/Gmail)
You can also set filtering on your email client, such as Outlook, to filter all email that is not sent to you directly, for instance. Also, you can have your email software automatically sort email from friends or family into folders – so you can keep the focus of your inbox mostly on new prospects and existing customers.
Three: Create some macros / auto-responses for faster responses
One of the ways real estate prospects and clients, and even former clients, appreciate and bond to you is through how fast you respond to their email inquiries. It doesn’t work against you to try to be an agent that regularly responds quickly or at least consistently in a reasonable amount of time.
So we suggest producing a handful of standard replies or even one-liners that you can easily insert (depending on your email software) or copy and paste; this also cuts down on the chance you would be at a loss for words, or would be otherwise proofreading.
Most of us get the same type of emails rather repetitiously, general inquiries, event invitations, you-name-it, etc. So by writing responses that sound as sincere as possible, create a dozen or so auto-responses. A great place for inspiration for this task is your own sent folder. You’ll be happier armed with the ability to write back instead of perhaps pulling over in parking lots to type messages on your mobile-size screen.
