6 Tips for Better Email List Organization

What is an Email List?

It’s a special usage of email allowing distribution of information to many people. It’s a list of email addresses that your business might use to notify people of your sales and events. Many people use them to sell their products and services.

An email list can be a simple computer file that contains a list of email addresses. This list can be copied into the “To:” box of an outgoing email. This enables you to send a single email to many people at one time. This method is only recommended if you have a small number of addresses in your list. If you have less than 100 addresses this method can work. A better method is to use an email marketing service. Some of the common ones include Aweber, Constant Contact, and Mail Chimp. There are many others. See below for a list of some popular ones.

Building a better Email List

The first challenge with email list is email marketing. You need email addresses on your list. The more the better. The most common way to get email addresses added to an email list is to include an email signup form on a website. All of the email services provide the capability to create your own forms with instructions for putting them on a website. The forms can also be hosted at the email service company. In that case, you would simply need a clickable link on your website that brings a visitor to the form.

If you haven’t been doing a good job of email list organization, this could be literally destroying your productivity, and wasting a ton of your time. If you take an average 2 minutes with every email, and you get 50 emails a day, that’s 1 hour 40 minutes a day you’re spending on email!

Here are tips to organize your email so that it makes your life easy instead of adding unnecessary time and stress to each of your days:

Make information easy to find:
It sounds simple, but most people I know don’t do this! I know several people who will search for information on their desktop or in their email many different ways before finding it. This of course costs time and energy, and could potentially get you in trouble with your boss, or others who are relying on you! Making information easy to find, in a folder system or something else that works for you is the first step in being more productive throughout your day.

Make your system simple:
You never want to be lost in an abyss of email messages! Take time now to set up your email organization system. The clients that can help on a daily basis see that your email organization techniques work 100% of the time, as long as they are put into use! The first step to simplicity is to organize your inbox so you can find the information you need quickly, easily, and without stress.

Set up an email reference system:
This is easy. Just divide your emails into reference information and action information. Reference information is an email that requires no action on your part. It might be useful later and should be stored in a customized folder.

Set up an action system:
Action emails are those that require you to take some sort of action, whether it be an assignment, request, or a project. Set up folders with a priority level (usually A and B or 1 and 2 works best, but you can decide what the best way is for you). This can also be included in your calendar, your daily to do list, or whatever daily planning system you prefer.

Check your email only at specific times of the day:
Checking your email first thing in the morning can lead to starting off on a stressful note, a lack of productivity, and lost time. An effective way that I have found to avoid this is to schedule your email time, so you allot 3-4 slots each day of about 20-30 minutes to read, respond, file, and delete email messages. You might want to check once mid-morning, and twice in the afternoon to cover the day. This one is probably the hardest for most people, even though it’s so simple. Make a commitment to practice doing these five simple practices over the next 30 days, and then it will become a habit!

Brand Your Emails:
Email marketing is a great way to reinforce the brand of your organization to all of your stakeholders. During email campaigns, include your logo and locate it in the same place each time. Make sure to use both the same colors and fonts in your email marketing as you do on your website and in all printed collateral.