Heather Porter talks about her email “Gurus” to Overcome Email Overwhelm

Laura: Heather, I know we were just talking about this, and you and I were equally kind of intrigued by the fact that when we recently did a survey, one of the number one complaints that we’ve heard was that people are dealing with email overwhelm.

So will you please share a tip or maybe a hack that you use to control the inbox instead of letting it control you?

Heather: I set up folders or mailboxes – what they’re known as in certain email programs, the mailboxes or folders – and rules that sticks emails into these folders, and the folders that I set up is number one, I set up – I actually call it Gurus, but what it is is it’s my marketing research folder. So any of the different email list that I’ve signed up for a research, those could be competitors. That can be actual potential mentors that I want to do work with. Myself actually hire them. I will have all those emails that come in go into that folder so I set up rules to say, “If an email comes in from this particular domain, then pop it into this particular folder.â€

So I’ll have like a good 20 different types of businesses and people emailing that go automatically in that folder. And I might look at it like once a month or whenever I need inspiration for subject lines or things like that.

The second one is I set up my bigger clients. So I will have retainer clients and those that are not just one off quick ala carte items. For the retainer clients, I set up a folder for them as well. So again, same rules. If an email comes in from this particular domain – And I say domain because some of my clients, they’ll have about 10 people emailing me depending on how big they are – and then that one goes into the same folder.

And number three, I have another folder. This might help to get my helpdesk tickets. So those are more for the ala carte. Those are the things from that is a live chat thing that I use on my website. Those are help desk tickets that come in off of my website. Those all go into a folder as well.

So what does that mean I’m left with? Well, I have these little compartmentalized folders, and then the rest that comes through is either spam or junk, or you know, family or friends or things like that, and then I can just sort of sift through that way.

One other little hack for this, as you then develop a team and a VA, you can actually start to then set rules not only to go into folders, but you can then set forwarders. So certain emails that come into a certain folder, you can also auto forward on to a team member of your choice, and I do that as well with some of my bigger clients, which is very helpful because I have all the emails there on the folder. I can definitely revisit them at any time when I do my calls with my team that she could say, “Oh, can you go ahead and check that email because I don’t know how to answer it,†and then I could go and do a sort and find it. But outside of that, I don’t have to go in there unless I need to based on what my team then says I need help with.

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