Optimize Your Email Strategy: How Send Later Can Transform Your Workflow
In today’s episode, we’ll discuss how you can amplify your effort by using the Send Later functionality of email. This episode follows our previous one about batching, and together, these strategies can work wonders for your effectiveness and ability to get stuff done. We’ll discuss the problem, the purpose of using Send Later, the possibilities it offers, the process of implementing it, and the payoff you’ll experience.
As entrepreneurs, we often find ourselves juggling various tasks, including email communication. Responding to emails throughout the day can be time-consuming and interrupt our focus on more critical tasks. Moreover, sending an email at the wrong time might result in undesirable outcomes like the email being missed, or setting expectations that you’re responding to emails immediately, or at all hours. So, let’s talk about how to improve email management, ensure messages are seen and create the right expectations around email communication.
Why Send Later is a Game-Changer for Email Communication in Business?
It’s important to preface this with my stance on email: it is NOT a good default communication channel and should be used sparingly. In fact, within our company we do not send any emails to each other. That’s right, no team communication happens via email.
With that being said, it is still universally used in business and having a way to use it effectively is important.
This is where the Send Later feature comes in! At this point pretty much all email services and apps offer a Send Later functionality that allows you to schedule emails to be sent at a future time. The purpose of using Send Later is to allow you the freedom to create email messages and responses when it suits you and then enable those messages to be sent at an optimal time for you & your recipient.
Brad Martineau of Sixth Division has a very relevant saying for business owners: we teach our clients not to be crazy. If you are responding to emails within minutes or sending emails at 11:30pm, you are setting expectations with your clients that you might not want to live up to later.
Email marketing & social posts suggest best times to send, why wouldn’t you use the same approach for your direct emails?
Maximizing Email Productivity with Send Later: Benefits and Strategies
By using the Send Later feature, you open up a world of possibilities for better email management. You can schedule important messages to be sent during your recipient’s business hours, increasing the chances of it being seen in a timely manner and that information used when it is needed, instead of getting lost in an overflowing inbox. This also allows you to batch your email writing, further improving your productivity by reducing context switching.
Batching your responses may mean that you are typing a reply to an email that has just come in. You can also schedule that response to send an hour or several hours later so that the recipient doesn’t expect that all their emails will get immediate replies.
To start using the Send Later feature, follow these simple steps:
- Check your email client: Ensure your email client has a Send Later functionality. Popular options like Gmail, Outlook, and Apple Mail all offer this feature both on desktop and mobile.
- Write your email: Draft your email as you normally would, including the recipient, subject line, and message content. In the context of batching, you could set specific times during the day where you are checking & replying to emails. A place to start with this is setting aside 30-60 minutes at 10am and 3pm to process email.
- Schedule the send time: Instead of hitting “Send” immediately, look for the Send Later option in your email client. Choose a future date and time when you’d like the email to be sent. I recommend making sure emails are sent during your preferred working hours, and at least an hour after the email has been received.
- Review and confirm: You typically can go to your Drafts folder to review all the emails that are scheduled to send, and edit them if needed before they are sent.
Before now, you might not even have thought of the benefits of implementing the Send Later functionality in your email routine. Not only will you have better control over your email management, be able to optimize your message delivery times, and further amplify your batching efforts; you’ll also be teaching your clients not to be crazy!. Ultimately, this powerful tool can help you save time, reduce stress, and ensure more effective email communication.
That’s a wrap on send later. I hope you got a few insights on how this seemingly simple functionality can amplify your time and reduce stress. If you enjoyed this episode, please leave us a review on Apple Podcasts and share it with a friend or fellow entrepreneur.
In the next episode we’re discussing how to amplify the impact of the efforts you are putting into tasks, actions and activities.
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Keep leveraging your spark to ignite your possibility and I’ll see you in the next episode.
