Gone are the days when businesses could thrive within their target markets without following modern technological trends and tailoring their strategies accordingly. With the advent of cloud platforms and all the latest developments within the cloud-based technologies, there’s no room for excuses against using cloud solutions. 

This is especially true for the companies that operate within business-focused markets and have a hefty client-base. These companies deal with a fairly high number of daily emails, many of which carry crucial and/or compromising data, which is why email security and management should be among your top priorities. 

In fact, around 125 billion business-related emails are being sent on a daily basis, while a recent Osterman Research report shows that an average of 75% of intellectual property belonging to a company is being stored within its email and/or messaging systems. 

This is why using smart email management solutions and best practices is important for your business, in terms of both data security and workflow streamlining. 

Here are 4 easy-to-implement email management tips that should help you improve security, scalability and the overall organization of your emails and email-related data.  

Turn Reading/Responding to Emails into a Regular Task

Being constantly involved in your inbox and receiving email alerts in real-time can be quite bad for your daily productivity as the pings can disrupt your workflow and decrease the overall effectiveness of your tasks. This is why we recommend, unless you are expecting crucial emails that simply need to be read and responded to in real time, creating separate tasks for this purpose only. 

You can schedule 2 slots in your work day just for reading and responding to emails, so you can stay well-focused throughout the rest of your work hours and maintain high productivity. 

If you get tons of emails daily and can afford to read them in separate time slots, you can even set your availability to busy and then tackle your emails when it is due time. If you choose this strategy, we recommend setting up an automatic email response that informs the sender about your email reading/responding windows, for example: 

"I’m currently unable to check and respond to your email due to high workload. I will get back to you later today. If, however, this is an urgent issue, you can require my assistance via one of the following channels:” 

As for how long your email-checking time window will be, this of course depends on various factors and you should scale it according to the number of received emails and the amount of work you have that day.

Utilize Email Archiving

Email storage management can be quite a handful for IT managers, in terms of security, coordination, as well as structuring. The storage needs to be tailored according to your company’s needs, so you don’t end up paying more than you need to. 

This is where the utilization of smart and scalable email archiving comes into play.

Moving to this type of archiving can help your IT department optimize its inbox and increase the overall team’s efficiency. Here are some tangible reasons for switching your company to smart email archiving:

Compliance Automation 

Taking care of compliance regulations is a time-consuming process that takes up a lot of your resources, can decrease your IT department’s productivity and slow their workflow down. The companies that switch to efficient email archiving solutions report boosts in overall productivity and carefree work atmosphere as they don’t have to worry about retrieving the necessary data should their business ever go under investigation or get sued by a third party. 

Reduced Storage Costs

Email archiving is proven to optimize your use of servers and storage space which decreases the resources your company uses on a monthly basis and minimizes any potential overheads. 

Easier Data Recovery

Disaster events that cause data loss are rare but very much possible. Using email archiving provides an added layer of security and peace of mind as all of your necessary data is safely archived and can easily be restored when needed. 

Streamlined Email Management

Not only will your emails and valuable data be safe and your storage costs optimized, your email ecosystem will be much better organized and managed as well. Email archiving and indexing allows for much faster searches and fetching of desired emails. 

Email Triage 

If you get a lot of emails on a daily basis, both spam-based and important ones, we suggest practicing the art of email triage. This process should help you separate the wheat from the chaff in terms of importance and remove all the unnecessary messages that tend to cluster up on a weekly, and not to mention monthly basis. 

When it is time to check your email messages, be sure to browse through your unreads and immediately delete any promotional and spammy emails that typically don’t require your response. As soon as you finish up this process, the number of relevant messages in your inbox will be reduced and you can more easily tackle those that require instant response, action and/or further management on your part. Once you’ve cleaned your email storage by deleting all the junk, it is time to:

Manage Your Inbox Using Folders, Labels, Categories  

Another way to keep your business inbox clean and tidy is to come up with a management strategy that will encompass all the incoming messages and help you store them in an organized and intuitive way. The important emails that pertain any key aspects of your business should be stored and kept safely in a logical manner using:

• Labels
• Folders
• Categories

This way it will be much easier for you to track down important data and access the messages that convey crucial correspondence between colleagues, third-party employees, and your respective clients should there be any need for ironing out potential miscommunications.  

You can organize your email inbox through prioritizing, sorting, grouping, creating parent categories and subcategories (like Clients, Projects, Financing, etc), as well as filing your messages so it is easier for you and your colleagues to locate and access specific emails whenever necessary.

When it comes to categorization and email nomenclatures, be sure to use search-friendly names and subjects (especially if you use email marketing) right from the get-go so you don’t have trouble tracking down certain data and messages when you need them. 

Wrapping Up

The main idea behind email storage systems is to provide your business with a secure, easily navigable, fast and efficient way of keeping messages and your valuable data. Manually performing all the tasks that are involved in this process can be quite tedious, time-consuming and ultimately inefficient in terms of both costs and employees’ productivity.