Blog posts tagged email

Apparently we need to send even more email

Here’s a good one for you. According to new data from digital marketing agency Alchemy Worx, brands could increase engagement and revenue by simply sending more email.

Before we examine this idea any further, let’s just recap where we are in the world of business email: 

• According to some research, dealing with email takes up more than a quarter of the average worker’s day.
• A while back, Google redesigned its inbox in an effort to tackle the growing problem of email overload.
• In 2012, there were a massive 144 billion emails sent every single day — most of which were probably rubbish.

In short: email is out of control. And they reckon we should be sending more of it?

More emails, more revenue?

The business behind this research, Alchemy Worx, is an email marketing agency. Its conclusions are based on an analysis of its own client data, which consists of 2.2bn emails sent to 40.6m recipients over the last year.

This analysis found that if a brand with five million email subscribers sent one more email to that list every month, it could achieve an extra 1.9m email opens and an extra 175,000 clicks on links in the emails.

Alchemy Worx reckons that could equate to an extra £1.8m in revenue.

Every business is different

So: send more emails and you’ll get more business. Is it really that simple?

Well, no. Even if we disregard the wider issue of inbox overload and the mess that will ensue if every company decides to send emails more often, it’s clear different businesses will see different results.

The best analysis I’ve found comes from MailChimp. If you’re re-evaluating your email marketing strategy then it’s worth reading the whole article, but the key point is that every business has an email sweet spot.

If you increase the frequency with which you email your customers, over time people engage with each individual email less.

This means that if you move from sending an email once a month to sending emails three times a month, you’ll almost certainly find your click through rate drops for each individual email.

As you’re now sending three times as many emails as you were before, the total number of clicks may still be higher. That means more engagement overall, and — potentially — more revenue.

But if you increase email frequency too much — say to five or six times a month — you could see lower engagement than with fewer messages.

You need to be more sophisticated

Email marketing is a long-term effort. You don’t want to undo all your hard work of building a list of loyal customers by sending them so many emails that they start to think of your messages as spam.

But equally, you don’t want to email so infrequently that you drop out of people’s minds altogether.

Quite simply, you need to figure out what works for your company. Again, MailChimp has summarised it well:

“I’d highly recommend ignoring calls to ‘send send send,’ and find a comfortable middle ground that feels balanced between individual campaign engagement and overall periodic engagement.”

So, while using your data to make decisions is important, there might be other considerations too. For instance, it’s increasingly possible to send targeted emails to specific groups of customers, rather than hitting everyone with the same email.

Finally, next time you’re about to press ‘send’ on a marketing email, spare a thought for the state of your recipients’ inboxes. With email, as with many things, less really can be more.

• How to choose a bulk email service provider
• Email newsletter basics
• 11 ways to make email marketing work for your business

How to avoid five big email headaches

A flexible, modern email system can really make your life easier. Advanced email clients combine your email, calendar, address book and file management tools to make it easier to find the messages and files you need.

Here are some of the ways an advanced email system can help you avoid the most time-consuming, headache-inducing aspects of email.

1. Finding and organising related files

We often store messages, documents and files relating to the same subject in different places. This means you need to waste time switching between different apps and windows to access them.

An advanced email system will help you keep all information about a particular subject in a single folder. You can assign categories to files and folders too, making it easier to identify what you need.

2. File loss and corruption

Most email systems store messages, attachments, calendar data and contacts within a single database file (in Microsoft Outlook, for example, data is stored in .pst files).

As the file grows in size, performance suffers. But more seriously, if it gets deleted or corrupted, you can lose everything. An advanced email client avoids this by processing and storing messages and documents as separate files in regular folders.

3. Data security and downtime

Even the very largest, most reputable email services can go down occasionally. This can leave you cut-off from crucial data.

An advanced email client will combine offline and online storage so that data is stored on your computer as well as on the email server. This means you can access it even if the email service goes down.

4. Switching between accounts

One big limitation of web-based email services like Google Mail is that it can be tricky to access more than one email account, address book or calendar without constantly logging in and out.

However, advanced email clients can connect to and work with several accounts at once, so you can use multiple mailboxes, calendars and address books more easily.

5. Getting support when you need it

Modern email applications have become increasingly more sophisticated. That’s a good thing, until you run into a problem. Then it can feel like you’re on your own — especially if you’re using a free service.

Switching to an advanced email client for which you pay a small amount each month should give you access to proper support channels, so you can search for help online or pick up the phone if you get stuck.

• Digging for gold in your inbox
• How to sort your email out once and for all
• Control yourself, and your emails

This is a guest post from Vladimir Spirin, managing director at EverDesk.

Who's been reading your email?

Think your email is safe and private? Think again. Most emails sent over the internet travel in plain, unencrypted form. That means anyone who knows where to look could theoretically intercept and read your most private missives.

So, who could be reading your email?

Google, for a start

Google has revealed that it does scan the emails that pass through its Google Mail service. The tech giant has has stated this in submissions aiming to dismiss a class action lawsuit that accuses it of breaking wiretap laws.

Its position regarding the reading of our emails goes like this:

"Just as a sender of a letter to a business colleague cannot be surprised that the recipient's assistant opens the letter, people who use web-based email today cannot be surprised if their communications are processed by the recipient's ECS (electronic communications service) provider in the course of delivery."

This analogy fails to acknowledge the fact that when an assistant opens their boss’s mail they do so with agreed or implicit prior consent and they are subject to confidentiality agreements.

I have always maintained that writing to someone via email is akin to sending a postcard. The content of the email, just like a postcard, can be read en-route.

Securing your email

Securing your email is easy: you just need to encrypt it. This scrambles every message you send so it can't be understood by people other than the intended recipient.

These days you don't need detailed technical knowledge to use email encryption. Many companies offer email encryption products that handle the technical side of things for you. However, the key is to find one that doesn’t require your recipient to have installed software to decrypt your message and then send you an encrypted reply.

You might also want to find a service run by a UK company and hosted on servers in the EU. This means that UK and EU privacy law will apply — you don't risk getting caught up in the US Patriot Act, which many argue is a good reason to avoid US-based services.

My company offers an email encryption service called Egress Switch.

How to get started

You'll need to decide whether you want a pay as you go encryption service, or something more substantial.

It's also worth looking for a scalable service. You might start out as someone who will use encryption infrequently, for the odd highly-sensitive email. But over time you may decide you want to use encrypted email for all of your business communications.

In the end, though, it’s up to you: if you don’t mind risking Big Brother reading your email then you can do nothing. But if you'd prefer your private messages to stay that way, it's a good idea to adopt email encryption.

• Why you need to archive your email
• Send sensitive information in a self-destructing message
• How to prevent data breaches

Blog provided by Paul Simms of Reflect Digital on behalf of Egress Software Technologies.

Google, please stop messing with things that work fine

I'm a long-time user of Google Mail. By and large, I think it's brilliant.

The enormous amount of storage space means my email archive contains thousands of messages going back over half a decade. I can log in from anywhere and find exactly what I need in moments.

Making Gmail worse

But last October the search giant started testing a new interface for writing messages. Now it's decided to roll it out to all users. And, unfortunately, it's a backward step.

The old interface might look rather traditional, but it does the job well:

The line of icons across the top ensures you're never more than one click away from inserting bullets or links, indenting text, changing formatting or running the spell check.

Contrast that with this new, cleaner interface. When you start writing an email, this pops up over your inbox:

With icons stripped from the interface, it takes more clicks to find functions that were previously obvious:

• To add bullets or change text formatting, you must click the underlined A to show formatting options. A second click picks the option you want. That's twice the clicks it took before.
• It works differently when you want to add a link or emoticon. There's no extra click, but you have to run the mouse over the + symbol to reveal the option you need.
• The process for finding the spellcheck is different again. First, you have to click the non-descriptive down arrow at the bottom right. Then choose Check spelling from the list. Once again, what previously took one click now requires two.

Google says the new interface is faster and more focused. I contend that having to think harder about how to insert a bulleted list or embolden text is almost certainly going to break your focus more effectively than the old icon toolbar did,

Besides, the new interface keeps your inbox visible behind it, so you can see new emails as they arrive. That won't be distracting in the slightest, will it?

Your email matters

The way email works is important because we spend so much time using it (more than a quarter of the average day, according to some research).

When companies alter services like these that we're comfortable with and rely on, it can make us less efficient, change our working practices and make us feel uneasy.

That's the way I'm feeling at the moment. And that's why I'm irritated by Google's unneccessary tinkering and arbitrary changes. Maybe it's time I switched to Microsoft Outlook instead.

• How to streamline your email and save time
• Ten ways to use email effectively
• Find the right business email system

How to sort your email out once and for all

Your inbox is probably as overloaded as this. (Image: Flickr user Mr Thinktank.)

Is the end of email in sight? Er, no, not if current research from Mesmo is anything to go by. It has found that 46% of business users receive a new email every nine minutes. No wonder it's hard to keep on top of your incoming email.

To try and tackle this scourge of modern business life, Mesmo is running its annual Clean Out Your Inbox week. Starting today, you can join forces with Dr Monica Seeley of Mesmo and Marsha Egan of InboxDetox to get on top of your email for 2013.

Daily email tactics

Every day this week, you can view tips and hints to help you and your business take control of your bulging, time-wasting inbox.

Each day covers a different tactic to conquer your email, and there are prizes for the people who manage to downsize their inboxes the most.

To learn more, hop on over to the Mesmo blog where you'll find an outline of the week's activities and instructions explaining how to get involved.

Tools can help too

If you're grappling with an inbox full of email newsletters, you might also want to check out Unroll.me, a clever tool that can combines all your email subscriptions into a single 'rollup'. We covered it a couple of weeks back.

However, if you decide to use this - or other tools - to sort out your inbox, do take note of Monica's advice: "Using software is an option but it is rather like prescribing a drug when you know only the symptoms of the illness and not what is the real illness."

In other words, it's no good applying the sticking plaster of an inbox tool without addressing the cause of your email overload too.

• Three tools to help you declutter for 2013
• Choose the right type of business email system
• Streamline your email and save time

TOTW: Control yourself (and your emails)

This week's Friday tip is about a couple of overlooked features in Outlook 2010 that could save your bacon. Please note that some of these features may only work if Outlook is connected to a Microsoft Exchange server.

When editing a message in Outlook, have a look under the File > Info menu. The first option, 'Restrict permissions to this item' allows you to control whether the email you send can be forwarded to other recipients. This is handy for anything confidential, including HR and salary related emails. 

The second option of interest is the message delivery report. If the message you're looking at has already been sent, selecting this option will take you to a web based service that shows you if the email was delivered or not. Sometimes this might prove useful with clients that aren't receiving your emails but don't check their spam folders.

Next we have 'message resend and recall'. As the name suggests, this allows you to resend or recall emails. Resending an email this way is different from just sending it again, as it will delete your previous email from the recipient's inbox, and replace it with this updated version. Very useful for correcting mistakes you noticed after the email was sent. Recalling an email works in a similar way, where the email is removed from the recipients inbox. (Note: you can only recall an email if the recipient has not already read it, but I suppose in that case it's too late anyway.)

The last button on the info page brings up properties of the message. Here you can control any flags, such as 'high importance' or 'sensitive', as well as controlling message expiry date (if desired). This will notify the recipient that the message is out of date if they read it after the date you specify.

Bonus tip: Many of these features can be added to your Outlook ribbon toolbar, by right-clicking on it and selecting 'Customise the ribbon'.

• How to delay sending emails in Microsoft Outlook
• How to speed up your broadband connection
• Get the software you need in one go

Friday Donut tip: keeping on top of your Outlook inbox

A bulging Microsoft Outlook inbox can be a fact of life. The more emails you send, the more you receive - and that makes it all-too-easy to forget to follow up important messages. So, to help you keep track of what's in your inbox, here are three key Microsoft Outlook tips:

1. Use coloured flags

All recent versions of Microsoft Outlook (since Outlook 2002) allow you to flag messages as they come in. There are lots of different coloured flags available (so you can use them to indicated different things) and flagging a message turns it into a task, which then appears on your task list.

Just click the grey flag by each message to set a flag. What's more, when you right-click a flag you've set, you can add a deadline, helping you prioritise tasks.

2. Use folders

Folders are a great way to group emails about a particular project or subject, or from a particular person. For example, I have an IT folder, with a Projects subfolder, and then subfolders within that for individual projects.

Getting into the habit of filing emails in the correct folder makes life a lot easier when you need to find an email quickly. And if you're feeling confident, you can also use rules to automatically move emails to folders based on who they were sent from, the text in their subject, or a number of other factors.

3. Search and you'll find

The search option in Outlook has improved considerably with recent versions, and it's often now the fastest way to find a message. In the latest version (Outlook 2010), the search happens as you start typing.

Just enter someone's name, a keyword, or another word you know will help identify the email. Results should start appearing as you type. If you are having trouble finding what you need, try some of the more advanced search options.

Previous Friday Donut tips:

• How to delete files forever
• Protect your mobile phone from theft
• Generate unique passwords for almost any website

Email is dead: long live instant messaging

When I tell people that email won’t be around in five years’ time, they look at me like I’m mad. It’s true though – email hasn’t changed for 20 years, and we all know what happens to technology that doesn’t change. It dies.

Email is as secret as Twitter

At a presentation I did recently, I told people email wasn’t secure. To illustrate this point, I explained that information sent by email is as open as your Twitter stream, as long as you know where to look for it.

Some members of the audience looked at me in shock, admitting to sending all sorts of sensitive data via good old Microsoft Outlook.

I went on to explain that instant messaging is the future for corporate communications. I don’t care if you don’t believe me. It’s true and now I’ll explain why.

Twenty years ago people did business over the phone. When you needed something from someone, you picked the phone up or went to their desk, had a conversation and got what you needed.

Email changed all that. We became accustomed to sending a request for information, waiting for a reply, replying to the reply, waiting for another reply … and so on. A conversation that could have taken a few minutes turns into a four-hour email trail.

The only positive aspect is that email gives us an audit trail. I’m not sure about you but to me that feels like a backwards step. Of course, we didn’t see it like that at the time. 

Real-time communication is changing

Well, the world of real time communication is changing and instant messaging is the new black, if you’ll excuse the cliché. Now when I want to discuss a subject I can go into my copy of Outlook and click ‘reply with IM’:

This instantly opens a text, voice or even video conversation with recipient. You can discuss the subject and get an outcome - and best of all the entire chat is recorded in Outlook so you can check what you actually said. You can even share data directly from Microsoft Word or Excel using the share button in the review tab.

Of course, these functions aren’t only available in Microsoft Outlook. There are plenty of other services that do similar things, including free ones like Skype. So, next time you’re tempted to hit ‘reply all’, why not try instant messaging instead?

• Five email blunders you really don’t want to make
• Ten ways to use email effectively
• Five free conferencing tools

Lee Wrall is founder and MD of Everything Tech, an IT support and service provider based in Manchester.

Friday Donut tip: how to delay emails in Outlook

Every Friday afternoon we bring you a great business IT tip. From nuggets that make repetitive tasks easier to simple ways to banish business tech annoyances, we’re here to help.

If there’s something you’d like our help with, send an email to info@itdonut.co.uk or just leave a comment on this post. We’ll try and cover it in a future IT Donut tip.

Ever hit ‘send’ in Outlook, then regretted it?

What is it about making mistakes with emails? You can check your message ten times, but the second after you hit ‘send’ is always when you realise you’ve forgotten a vital piece of information, said something you wish you hadn’t … or even sent the email to the wrong person altogether.

If you use Microsoft Outlook and get carried away bashing at the keyboard, a misplaced tap on CTRL and Enter will even send your half-finished email. I know – I did it many times before I got wise to this trick.

Delay your emails by a minute or two

If you use Microsoft Outlook, it’s easy to delay the sending of every email by a minute or two, so you have time to cancel it if you’ve made a mistake or hit ‘send’ by accident.

Here’s how. These instructions assume you’re using the latest version of Microsoft Outlook, although they should be similar in older versions too.

1. With Outlook open, click the File tab
2. Click Manage Rules & Alerts
   (If you can’t find this option, click the Tools menu, then select Rules and Alerts.)
3. A box should appear. Make sure the E-mail Rules tab is selected, then click New Rule
4. Another window should open. This is the Rules Wizard, which helps you set up rules for how Outlook should handle your email.
5. Look for the Start from a blank rule heading, click Apply rule on messages I send and then click the Next button.
6. The next window will ask you to Select conditions. Don’t select anything – just click Next.
7. A box may appear asking if you’re sure you want to apply the rule to all messages. If you see it, click Yes.
8. On the next screen, check the box beside Defer delivery by a number of minutes.
9. You’ll see some text appear in the step 2 box. Click a number of, which should be blue and underlined.
10. You can now set how many minutes to delay emails by. Two minutes gives you plenty of time to cancel an email, so type 2 into the box, click OK and then click Next.
11. The next screen will ask you to set any exceptions. Let’s assume you want to delay all emails by a couple of minutes, so ignore this screen and just click Next.
12. Finally, type a name for your rule into the box (it can be anything) and click Finish.

That’s it – next time you hit Send, Outlook won’t send your email straight away. It’ll sit in your Outbox for two minutes. If you suddenly realise you’ve made a mistake, just go to your outbox and open the message to edit it.

Has our tip saved your bacon? Any other email delay advice you want to share? Just leave a comment to let us know.

• How to choose the best email software for your business
• When it comes to email replies, is faster better?

Switching off from email in the always-on world

Put the smart phone away! (Image: Gulltaggen on Flickr)

With laptops, smartphones and other mobile devices, your email is always with you - wherever you are. So how can you get away from it without appearing rude to people who expect an instant response? Is it even realistic to always be available?

It's interesting that most surveys, including my own, show that we stay connected not so much because people expect us to be available but because we think they expect us to be available. That reflects either our inability to switch off and delegate, or an equally worrying 'email addiction'.

To check your level of email addiction use my email addiction tool.

The key to surviving in this 24/7/365 world of business is to manage people's expectations. Here are five ways to take time off from email:

1. Check your level of email addiction to make sure your reluctance to switch off is not driven primarily by your own assumptions rather than other people's expectations. More on how to deal with addiction in a future column.
2. Use your out of office message no matter whether you're away on business or holiday. Set a safe, simple message saying you are out of the office with limited email access. Offer a point of contact for urgent matters and a date when you will reply. Make this the day after you actually get back, so you have time to catch up.
3. Ask someone else to manage your email whilst you take a break. If you're a one-person business or don't have someone you can ask, consider using a virtual PA service.
4. Lock your smart phone away and take a conventional mobile phone with you which only handles voice and text messages.
5. If you do take a smart phone or laptop with you, only check your email once or twice a day - preferably at the end of the day. At all other times, shut down your email software and turn new message notifications off.

We all like to think we are indispensible but at the end of the day most of us need time to recharge our batteries and switch off. Staying switched on around the clock has been shown to reduce our overall effectiveness - and never mind the health implications!

Be honest. Ask yourself if there's ever been an email which would cause a disaster if you didn't deal with it immediately. For most of us, the answer is no. And that means there are alternatives to always being connected.

For more ways to take time out without jeopardising your business and professional image either go to one of Dr Monica Seeley’s ninety minute Brilliant Email Master Classes or get a copy of her latest book, ‘Brilliant Email: How to improve productivity and save time’.

• Choose the right type of business email system
• Is free business email right for your business?
• Streamline your email and save time