147: How to Manage Incoming Email [Tips, Tools and Techniques]

Tips on How to Manage Incoming Email Is email sucking away all of your time, and taking away from your blogging? Today’s topic comes from one of our readers. Phil says, “I’ve been blogging a couple of years now and in the last 6 months have seen quite a bit of growth in traffic to my blog. This is great but I’m noticing with it is coming a significant rise in the incoming emails I get. I feel like I’m drowning in it and that it’s taking me away from my blogging. "Do you have any systems or tools to help you manage incoming email?” Email is a challenge for most of us - whether we're bloggers or not. But for those of us who have blogs with growing traffic it can quickly get out of hand. Today, I’m going to share how I deal with email. Listen to my thoughts in the player above or here on iTunes. In Today’s Episode Tips, Tools and Techniques for Managing Incoming Email I use gmail for my email I use canned responses in gmail - there is a setting under the labs link - canned responses save you time when you are asked the same question over and over again Have a FAQ frequently asked question page - Anyone who sends an email has access to the link to the FAQ page - this answers many common questions Contact Form - Have a contact form, where people can contact you with a link to the FAQ page - ProBlogger uses Gravity Forms Have a dropdown menu that directs where or who the email should go to. On dPS we have a dropdown menu with 5 options that the user can select after filling out the other fields. Have folders in gmail setup for each incoming email area - use filtering You can also put the answer to the frequently asked question on your contact form Link to social sites on contact form - or even push readers to your facebook page - be clear and set expectations Have help to respond to email - hire someone to help - customer support - We use a paid tool called zendesk, which also has canned responses - ticketed system Use filters on gmail - I have hundreds of filters on gmail - bulk for emails on products sales - keep records to serve customers - quick gmail search of transactions to see if customer purchases a product or not - emails you want to keep, but don’t want to read Tell gmail to skip inbox and mark it as read and put it in the ebooks folder - very powerful Filter emails for reading later - receipts for monthly subscriptions - only want to read these at tax time Unroll.me scans inbox and shows you subscriptions - give you choice to unsubscribe in bulk - or continue to receive them - or roll them into a digest Boomerang Chrome extension - set emails to appear in your ebox later or in the morning so that they don’t get lost - you can tell it when to send your emails - I don’t want to send email at night - tell boomerang to send email in the morning Further Resources on Tips, Tools and Techniques for Managing Incoming Email Tell me in 200 words or less your bravest story Canned responses in gmail ProBlogger FAQ page ProBlogger contact form page Gravity Forms dPS contact form with dropdown menu Zendesk Unroll.Me Boomerang for Gmail   I would love to hear what you use to manage your incoming emails. What are the tools and techniques you use? How many unread emails are in your inbox? Full Transcript Expand to view full transcript Compress to smaller transcript view Is email sucking all your time and taking you away from your blogging and other important aspects of your life? Today, prompted by a reader question, I want to share some tools, techniques, and tips for handling the overwhelming amounts of email that you will start to get once your blog begins to grow. My name is Darren Rowse and welcome to Episode 147 of the ProBlogger podcast. The topic I wanna tackle today comes from a question from Phil, one of our readers, who says,