Email is a great communication tool, but there are more efficient ways to manage your inbox and to-do list. We are sharing our genius secrets to help you keep on top of your inbox.
In this video, you will learn:
– The simple filter to cut your inbox in half
– How to delegate your mailbox to your team
– Why shared mailboxes work best for growth companies
Here’s a summary of what we do to end inbox overload (and might work for your team too!):
- Filter out unimportant emails by setting a rule
- Delegate your mailbox to other team members
- Setup shared mailbox like Hiver for your team to access
Links to the resources mentioned:
– https://www.itgenius.com/hiver/
– https://support.google.com/mail/answer/6579
– https://support.google.com/mail/answer/138350
Join G Suite Community: www.itGenius.com/gsc
Did you find this video helpful? Let us know by dropping a comment below. If you need any tech help, connect with our team today.
Transcription:
Hello, hello. Pete Moriarty here, guys. So, if you’re wondering where I am right now, I’m actually recording from a campervan because I’m traveling at the moment, and of course, we want to promote the work-anywhere lifestyle at itGenius. And so, I’m literally working from anywhere out of a campervan at the moment, and I’m on the Queensland coast at the moment. So that’s where I am. That’s what I’m up to. And still going to get my live done with you guys and share what I’ve got.
Am I glamping? Kind of glamping. It’s not expensive to do this, but it’s certainly a lot of fun. And with the wonders of a 4G modem and a power bank and USBC charging, could work pretty much all day from the van, which is pretty cool.
Cool. Let’s get started. So we’re going to be talking about the ways that you can cut down on your inbox and I’m not going to go right through the whole inbox zero content that I usually go through. That is in our members area. If you’re a customer of ours, we have a whole seven steps to inbox zero, which is about how to get your emails productive and managed every single day. But I’m not going to go through that today. What I’m going through today is a couple of tricks and some third party integrations, which are going to make your life easier in the Google world. Now, I’m going to have to drop some of the links below here. I don’t have the ability to share my screen. So some of these you’ll have to go it alone, but it’s all pretty straightforward stuff. I’m going to share some of my tips in the Google world of how you can manage and get smarter with your email. And what these are going to do is these are going to help you get more time to do the work that’s important for you to do. So more time on higher-value tasks is the thing that I always love. And what I mean is for you as a business owner, you should be spending as little time as possible on doing tasks that can be delegated to others.
So let’s get into the first one. How can we get our inbox managed every day? Well, I’m going to help you automate your inbox with one simple, simple trick. And this simple trick to automate your inbox is probably like the 80/20 of inbox management. I teach this to as many people as possible, and this is really something that is quite powerful. And what we’re going to do is we’re going to set up a rule in our inbox. And so you’re going to go, whether you’re in Outlook, this will work as well. But if you’re in Gmail, it’s called a filter and you just run a search. And in that search, you search for the word unsubscribe. What that’s going to do is every email that comes into your inbox with the word, unsubscribe, we’re going to create a rule and we’re actually going to filter those out of the inbox. And so, when you get an email and it has the word unsubscribe, who’s it from? Probably marketing email, or it’s an email from an automated system. In some way or form, probably a non-human email, right? And everyone has to have an opt-out link in their emails. Doesn’t actually have to say the word, unsubscribe, but most people are lazy and they just literally have the word, unsubscribe. So any email with the word unsubscribe, we’re going to create a rule.
What are we going to do with those emails? We’re going to put them in a folder and call that folder, filtered or not important or newsletters or whatever you want to call it or automated. But whenever you do, you create one folder and then we skip the inbox. That’s the important step. Email comes in, has the word unsubscribe, we skip the inbox and that goes straight into that folder. Now, what this does is it means that you’re going to have all of those automated emails, which are just hammering your inbox every day. And for me, I know that’s like 50 to 100 emails per day. All of those emails are just going to automatically skip the inbox and they’re going to go into that folder.
What do you do with that folder? Well, from time to time, you might want to check up on those newsletters. Or sometimes, there’s something important there that you do need to get access to from time to time. So what we do there is once a week, or once every couple of days, you go into that label or folder or whatever you call it, and you check them and you make sure there’s nothing super important in there. Every now and again, there’ll be like an invoice or something that you actually wanted to read and you want to go ahead and get access to that. So there we go. That’s tip number one, make sure you set up that rule. It’s going to help you trim down what’s actually hitting your inbox each time.
Okay. Let’s talk about my next step. It’s called mailbox delegation and mailbox delegation is basically sharing your mailbox with someone else in your company. And so, if you need help managing your inbox, and if you’re a business owner or an entrepreneur, you’re likely getting stuck in your inbox a lot. I know that happens. What happens is when you are constantly having to check your inbox, it takes you away from those productive tasks. So if you can employ someone else to help you out, whether that’s a international team member or VA, some people call them, that person can help you to take care of managing your emails.
And if you want to be really, really, really radical about it, you could even not log into your inbox. And then just have someone send them to you in instant messages or maybe in tasks in Asana or something like that. Now, I still check mine from time to time, but I do get my team to help out with my inbox because it helps me not have to jump in there, particularly on the days that I’m not working, but for anything urgent, sometimes, it’s easier for the team to pick up on those tasks, instead of me. Now, we do this with a process called mailbox delegation, because I don’t want to share my password with my team. And even using a tool like LastPass is potentially going to give access to your full account to somebody else to access. And we don’t want to do that.
So we want to use mailbox delegation inside of Gmail or G Suite and go to your settings. You go to the accounts tab, and then you share access to your account. Like I said, I’ll put a link down below so you can access the help guide on how to do that yourself, if you would like to.
Now, if you’re not a fan of doing things yourself, we have a concierge service and that’s where we’ll do all these kinds of things for you. So if you say, “Hey, Pete said something on this cool video, and I just want it done.” Then you just message our team, message them on the Facebook page on itGenius and say, “I want to set up mailbox delegation.” Our team will know exactly what you’re talking about and they’ll help set it up for you.
So what delegation allows you to do is it lets someone else access your mailbox without knowing your password. And it’s not just sharing it via LastPass. It’s actually accessing your mailbox with their Google user account. And when someone accesses your mailbox, they don’t have to know your password. They don’t have to use your password. And they also can’t access your other stuff. So unless you’ve shared it with them, they can’t access your calendar or your Google Drive or anything else. They can only access the mailbox. So mailbox delegation lets another person jump into your mailbox. They can read, they can respond. They can put emails into folders. They can triage for you. They can delete junk mail. All of that kind of stuff can be done by someone else. So when you log into your mailbox, all of it is already pre-cleaned. And what I love about that is it means that if someone else has gone through kind of like the junk and the pre-cleaning, it means that I’m only left with the ones that are really important.
Now, there’s a couple of different options here. There’s some settings and whatnot. You can choose, if someone replies for you, you can choose whether or not it tells the other person, your client, that your assistant replied for you. You may want to hide that. And you may not want to show that someone else was replying for you. That’s totally fine. But also by the same respect, you might say, “Well, you know what? Maybe they make a typo and I don’t want it to look like I made the typo.” So you might want to leave their name on there. So that’s one decision that you’ve got to make.
The other thing is you can choose, when that person accesses your mailbox, to not mark the emails as read, unless you have read them yourself, so they can read them, but it doesn’t mark them as read for you. So that’s another option that you have there.
So that’s called mailbox delegation and it’s built into Gmail. Just go to the settings tab. If you can’t find it in settings, just drop a message through to itGenius on Facebook and our team will be very happy to help you out with that. Okay, cool. That’s number two down.
So let’s move onto my third tip now. Third tip now is shared mailboxes. Now, this is really popular in the IT industry to have a common mailbox that multiple people can work from. So we’ve got about, I don’t know, 10 or 12 people on our support desk and they are working with customers all day long, doing support tickets. We’ve then got a project delivery team. We’ve then got a sales team. And rather than you, our customers or prospects, having to remember 40 different people’s email addresses, well, we can just give you one email address and that’s [email protected]. Now, that’s for anything delivery in our business. Might be project delivery. It might be doing a support ticket. And if you just email that one email, [email protected], then you can get access to our support team nice and easily. And so, the sales team will also have a separate one. It’s called hello@itgenius, right? So we’ve got two.
But what that means is we don’t have to expose the individual email addresses of each one of our staff members to all of our customers. And so, we do that using shared mailboxes. Now you can implement shared mailboxes inside of G Suite, but it’s not my recommendation because they’re really not that great, to be honest. The implementation is a bit clunky. So it’s better to use third party software for that. Now, there are help desk apps and that might be something like Teamwork Desk or something like Help Scout or Zendesk is another popular one as well. And they are definitely useful if you’re doing a high volume of support requests from your customers or a high volume of customer service requests. But to be honest, they’re not the easiest to use because you’ve got to log into another third party app.
And so, we use an app called Hiver. We’re actually a Hiver partner. So if you’re interested in the app, please get in touch with the team. Even if you don’t need our help setting it up, it still helps us out a little bit if you buy the licenses through us. And what Hiver does is it’s an overlay inside of Gmail, and inside your Gmail, the Hiver app will allow you to have a shared mailbox, but not only can multiple people see into the emails that are going into that mailbox, you can also have assignees. You can have SLAs, which mean guaranteed response times and reporting on your response times, you can make internal notes on emails, and if you make internal notes on emails, everyone can see them.
So if you’ve ever had like a customer request and you need to maybe make some notes on a report that you ran or some thoughts on the customer before you go ahead and reply to the customer, or maybe something you’re wanting to share internally with your team before you then respond to the customer. Well, you can use internal notes inside of Hiver to actually make those notes there before you go ahead and reply. And everyone who has access to that shared mailbox can see all of your notes.
The other great thing this is for is just keeping your brand nice and consistent. It means that your customers don’t have to worry about who to email. They can just remember one email address. And when they’ve emailed one email address, they all come in to the one mailbox, nice and easily. Now, think of Hiver as like a shared label. If you’re familiar with labels in Gmail, you’ve got all your own labels, but you can’t really share them with anyone. Well, Hiver just lets you share a number of labels and anyone who emails that shared mailbox is automatically going to go into that shared label.
The other great thing is you can drag and drop emails into there, and it’s going to automatically share all of those emails with your team as well. So you’ve got a common mailbox, which is accessible by everyone. So we really love that app. It lets us bring our support into one place, makes it nice and easy. And what that means is our customers have a really great, consistent experience working with us.
Okay, they’re my three tips, guys. I’d love to know which one of those was your favorite. Please go ahead and drop those down. Or if you have a challenge with your emails right now, let me know what your number one challenge is with emails. I’m open to accepting any questions that you guys have, whether it’s something Google-related, non-Google-related. If you’re wondering why you might switch from Outlook over to Google, happy to talk about that, if that’s interesting to you. But just go ahead and drop a comment below. Let me know. What’s your number one challenge with email right now? Or if there’s a particular piece of email technology that you might be interested in learning about, let me know and I’ll go ahead and answer live for you.
So on the final thing that I want to share with you is how email is changing. Now, I’ve been in the business of email for a long time, over 10 years now. And in that time, we’ve gone from servers to running things online, to now everything being in the cloud, whether you’re on a Mac or a PC or any device, whether you’re in the Google ecosystem or the Microsoft ecosystem, you’re able to access your emails nice and easily, from wherever you are. And email is still a big part of many businesses.
However, I predict that email is on its way out. I really think in the next five to 10 years, that email is changing. Thankfully, Google have other apps apart from email in the G Suite ecosystem, which means that we’ll still have work to do in implementing G Suite. But once we’ve got businesses into the Google world and we’ve got their email a lot more efficient, well, then we start to look at different ways in how email and how business may be changing.
Now, I’ve spent a lot of time in Asia, southeast Asia particularly, plenty of time in the Philippines considering we have a large team there. Now, what I found is many businesses don’t actually rely on email to get their work done. Isn’t that fascinating? And so, when businesses stop using email and start using other ways of doing business, you’d think, “Okay, well maybe they’re texting or working on their mobile phones.” No, actually businesses are transitioning to using Facebook and social for all of their business communication. And I find that absolutely fascinating.
The things that are changing in the southeast Asian and broader Asian region have not yet caught on here in Australia, or let’s say, they’re slowly catching on. I went and I found, this is the kind of story that I like to tell everyone. I was helping my partner fit out a studio and we needed to buy some mirrors. And so, we went to the mirror person in an industrial area, and the mirror person, rather than having a website, rather than having a phone. They didn’t have any of those two things. The shop was a shitheap, there was glass and just junk everywhere. But the business owner had a phone and a Facebook page. And on that Facebook page, they basically said, “Well, this is how you get in contact with us. And this is how you get a quote.” So rather than us sending them an email or any of our details via a text or a call or anything, we had to message their Facebook page and send all that information through. Now, of course, they got a push alert automatically and they were able to respond straightaway.
And so, what that really illustrated to me was the power of using other forms of communication with your customers that are maybe more convenient than email, because emails are really formal, formal mode of communication. And it works, yes. And it is a part of business right now. Yes, that is correct, but it’s not necessarily the most frictionless way of communicating. And if you think about how we do our consumer applications now, if you think about the way that we interact with each other via WhatsApp, via Instagram, via Facebook Messenger, via Facebook Live we’re on right now, we are changing the way that we are communicating and email just is really starting to feel a bit outdated. It will eventually go the way of the fax.
So I want to implore you, if you’re a business owner and you want to get smarter about your communication, yes, getting your emails down and managed and taken care of and delegated to your team is absolutely a good idea, but the real leverage and the benefit is actually opening up to doing new ways of business. And I think you should absolutely consider doing business via Facebook Messenger, doing business via live chat, allow your customers to work with you in different ways.
Now, I came back to Australia after traveling in the Philippines and having that experience with the glass manufacturer. And what I found was that I’d get back here and I wanted to book my car in for a service with my local service. And what happened was I felt the need to just message their Facebook page and send them a message and see if they would respond to that message. Now, what I found was they didn’t even reply to me. I waited a couple of days. They didn’t reply and had to actually pick up the phone and do business the old way.
However, millennials are now expecting businesses to be able to work in different ways. And so, that’s why we’ve set up our concierge service to work via Facebook Messenger, super convenient. You can use text-based chat. You can send us pictures on there. You can just message from your phone or from your computer, wherever it’s convenient to you. And you get push notifications if you have them switched on, which I’d recommend you don’t, but you get push notifications if you want to get alerts from our team in that way. And so, opening up your business to work in a different way is something that I highly recommend.
Quick recap for you guys on all of our tools. Number one is make sure that you filter the unimportant emails out of your inbox. That’s going to save you like half of the junk that’s hitting up your inbox every day. Number two, delegating your mailbox to someone else to help you manage it. And number three, setting up effective, shared mailboxes for all of your team to access those. Lastly, take advantage of the email landscape changing. We’re in the business of email, but I am very, very interested in how businesses can use technology to get smarter and to get more time back for the business owner, so you can do more of what I’m doing right now, which is enjoying some holiday time in the van.
Anyway, until next time, guys, I will catch you soon. And if you’ve not already connected with us, go ahead and jump down onto all of our channels. We’ll have the links below, make sure you subscribe so you get alerted to all of the videos that we have upcoming. And from here on out, see you in the next one.
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