How Can A Virtual Assistant Help Me With My Inbox?

Managing your email is a necessary evil of working. Recent reports show that the average person receives 121 business emails per day.

That’s a lot of communication coming your way. And if left unaddressed, your inbox will continue to grow, become disorganized, and cause you more stress.

So what do we do about our email? We can’t leave it alone, because we could be missing out on potential clients, opportunities, and ultimately, money for our businesses.

We don’t have to take care of our email alone. That’s where a virtual assistant (VA) can come in. Here’s how a VA can help you organize and optimize your inbox.

A VA Will Understand How You Operate

The first step to having a VA organize your inbox is allowing them to understand your business. They will dive deep into your current workflow, how your business operates, and how you operate. They will also want to know your goals for your inbox so they can understand what you’re hoping to get out of this process.

They will ask questions to understand how you currently manage your inbox and how it impacts the workflow of your business, including how frequently you check your email and how you sort through different types of emails. They will then use this information to find the best solution for you and your business.

The goal of the VA isn’t to rework everything you’re doing in your inbox, the goal of the VA is to optimize the processes you’re currently using to maximize your inbox for your business.

If a VA introduces all new processes, you eventually won’t follow them, so they have to truly understand what you’re currently doing for lasting impact.

A VA Will Organize Your Inbox

Once they’ve gotten a chance to understand how your business operates and how you manage email, they’ll begin using best practices to organize your inbox to your workflow. VAs have a wealth of resources in their pockets to help them organize your inbox how it suits you.

This process happens before they touch a single email of yours. This organization is to set up a structure that you can then adopt moving forward.

If you work in folders or labels, the VA will set that organizational system for you. If you use stars or level of importance, they’ll organize those so you have the organization set up. Because your VA did research to understand your business ahead of time, they can offer the best recommendation for organizing your emails.

A VA Will Create Efficiencies and Processes

After the structure has been put in place, the VA can then offer suggestions for how to make your inbox work more efficiently for you.

Here are a few of the processes and efficiencies a VA can introduce to you:

• Addressing quick, important emails right away and moving all others in a method called Inbox Zero

• Filters that automatically file emails based on criteria you’ve set into folders, labels, or level of importance

• Introducing email management tools, such as Drag, Hiver, or Missive

• Scheduling emails to send at a certain time to maximize your work hours

• Setting up email templates to utilize as a quick reply to common emails you may receive

• The VA taking ownership of the inbox management for you, so you can focus on the most important things

A VA Can Take Over Inbox Management For You

A McKinsey analysis shares that the average worker spends 28% of their work hours on reading and answering their email. In a 40 hour work week, that’s over 11 hours every week, and over 2 hours each work day. And if you’re a business owner, you are probably spending even more than that in your email.

Over time, you may decide that giving over the task of inbox management to your VA is a better approach for your business. VAs are well adept at setting up your inbox (based on the goals and information you provided earlier) to suit the needs of your business. They are also excellent at taking over the reigns of your inbox, saving you time and energy every day.

Many VAs who do inbox management on a long-term basis for their clients have a system in place to share the important and urgent items with the business owner so nothing is ever lost in the shuffle. Some VAs simply organize every email into a certain folder, other VAs really take ownership of the inbox from start-to-finish.

The best part is that you can decide what type of help you want with your inbox and a VA will support you in that.

Contact us today to hear how our VAs can tailor inbox management to suit the needs of your business!