Hey there!
Many people ask me why they should hire a virtual assistant to help them go through their emails. They tell me that they can go through their own emails and that’s true.
I have been a virtual assistant for over 20 years. One of the things that I would come across is that a lot of important people, spend a lot of important time going through unimportant emails.
I worked for national executives for 14 years and one of the first things that I noticed about most of them was that they had no or very little email organization. Very few of them had folders and filtering systems and those that did have them, didn’t use them effectively.
Can you get back to an email from 6 months ago? Can you do it quickly and efficiently? With the correct email management you absolutely can. Yes, you can put the email subject into the search bar and find that email that you are looking for but can you go to a specific folder and find not only that email, but all of the emails related to it?
The great thing about having a virtual assistant is that you have someone that can help you get that process in place. A virtual assistant can spend some time with you and figure out what folders you need and what email filters will work best for you. Maybe you need a sales folder or a ‘business trips for this year’ folder or perhaps a networking folder. Whatever folders you need, you and your virtual assistant can talk about in a preliminary meeting.
Next, you need someone to triage all of those emails for you. When a virtual assistant triages those email for you, she doesn’t sit and contemplate each and every email. The difference between you and your virtual assistant opening emails is that when you open your emails, you see everything about the person behind the email. You might even see yourself in the email. If might remind you to take a specific action and you stop to do that task. That takes away from the triage process. An email that might take your assistant 2 minutes to triage, might take you 10, 15 maybe even 30 minutes to triage.
Image that you have 100 emails for a particular week. How much time is it going to take you to get through just the triage portion of all of those emails? My rough math says that if you spend 15 minutes on each email, you are going to spend 25 hours a week on emails. This doesn’t include the time that you are going to take action on those emails. This is just sorting through them!
When you and your virtual assistant have already put into place what is going to happen with those 100 emails (by way of folders and filters) those numbers go down drastically. Let’s say that out of those 100 emails, 20 of them are spam. They can get the basic, “no thank you” email or the “thank you for reaching out to us. At this time…” email. You and your virtual assistant have already put certain “canned” replies in place that can be taken care of for you.
As for the rest of those 80 emails, wouldn’t it be nice to, once a week or however often you plan for it, get a concise document outlining what emails you received, asking for what actions need to be taken. Many of those will be quick replies -- “send them reply A or B”. Some of them will require information that is already prepackaged and your virtual assistant can email or snail mail the information to them. So, out of 80 emails, you may decide that you need to handle 25 of them. The rest go to your virtual assistant and that person handles them for you.
Instead of spending 25 hours a week on emails, you have to spend maybe 2 or 3 hours on a very specific subset of emails. Even if you decide to spend 4 hours on emails, it’s 4 hours on emails that you want to reply to -- emails that will move your business in the right direction. The rest of them are taken care of for you.
Now, you aren’t going to have 100 emails come in at one time (if you do, we have a package for that!). Most emails come in a few per hour. The problem is that you stop every time you see that an email has come in. Or maybe you check them at the top of every hour. How much time is wasted when you do that?
Your virtual assistant can check your email 2 - 3 times each day, categorize those emails for you and at the end of the day, send you information on the emails that you need to handle. If there is an emergency email, he or she can forward that to you immediately using a predetermined process.
Your time is valuable. You should be spending it growing your business. Let someone else help you with the administrative side of your business while you spend time building your business or spending time with clients.
It just makes sense to make The Wright Connections!