Automate your Business in 30 Minutes or Less using Email

This week we focus on a simple tip that you can implement in 30 minutes or less that will help your business to be more productive. As a small business owner you wear lots of hats when it comes to running your business. sales, marketing, technical support, accounting, etc. To get the most out of your time, it's imperative to automate as much of your business as possible. Automation is simply the process of using technology to accomplish your repetitive tasks for you, automatically! This week's tip focuses on email. If you are like us, you get lots of daily emails, maybe hundreds per day. With 120 emails per day as an example, if you take only 30 seconds to read, respond and file each email, you are looking at spending at least 1 hour per day just handling email. We have a 3-part strategy for helping you to reduce the time you spend handling email. Part 1 The first part of our strategy assumes that you own your own domain name (in this example we'll use anydomain.com as our domain name) and your web hosting provider allows you to set up email aliases (or some web hosts call them email forwards). Email aliases look like regular email addresses, but they actually just forward email. Here's an example. - You have an email box at the address: bob@anydomain.com. This is the address where you receive your email. - You set up an email alias: questions@anydomain.com This alias points to the email address bob@anydomain.com Any emails sent to questions@anydomain.com automatically forward "behind the scenes" to bob@anydomain.com - You change your website to direct your customers to send any questions to questions@anydomain.com To learn more about email aliases, check your Web Hosting provider's help documentation Now just repeat this procedure for all job functions you want to separate: sales@anydomain.com, info@anydomain.com, questions@anydomain.com, etc. Part 2 The second part of our strategy uses built-in features of your email client. Most email clients like Microsoft Outlook Express, Eudora and others have a feature that allows you to set up rules on your inbound mail. We'll take advantage of this feature to help us sort our mail. Since each mail client has slightly different procedures, we'll cover the general procedure in this article. I've included links at the bottom of this section that describe specific procedures for Outlook Express and Eudora. Now that we have set up email addresses for specific functions of our business, we need to set up unique folders in our email client for each function (questions, sales, info, etc.). Finally we set up a rule in our email client that checks each incoming message, and, based on its email address, moves the mail to the correct folder. Now all messages sent to questions@anydomain.com will automatically move to the "questions" folder in our mailbox. How does this help us, you ask? Check out Part 3 of this article to learn how to put it all together. (Instructions for setting up rules in the various email clients) Outlook Express http://support.microsoft.com/default.aspx?scid=kb;en-us;187 298&Product=oex Eudora http://www.eudora.com/techsupport/tutorials/win_signatures. html Conclusion In less than 30 minutes time, you can begin setting up your business automation rules that can help to free up more of your time to focus on things like sales and marketing! These techniques are quick and easy to implement and enhance your customer service abilities without taking up any more of your valuable time. Most importantly these procedures can be implemented with the software that you already have! Rules and signatures are very powerful, so experiment to find the combination that works best for you. Next time we'll take these methods one step further and talk about autoresponders! Wayne and Scott Foreman are co-owners of www.build-passive-income.com/report