Do you often get bogged down with too much email to handle, chewing up your valuable
time online? With email being one of the most popular forms of online marketing
you can be sure you are going to receive much more email in the future, wanted and
unwanted.
Picture this scenario:
You receive 40 new emails in your inbox each day:
1. 10 are from personal friends. 2. 10 are requests for more information from
potential clients. 3. 10 are new newsletters that must be read. 4. 10 are junk mail
So how do you deal with it?
1. Create different email addresses using domain forwarding.
If you have your own web site, your web host allows you to forward all your email
from your domain (domain forwarding) to an outside address (ie james@aol.com). This
is called your "catch all" address ie set up your email aliases (info@yourdomain.com,
sales@yourdomain.com etc) so when you receive email from any of these, they will
be forwarded to your "catch all" address.
The limitation of this method is that you can't send email from your alias addresses.
It can only be sent form your "catch all" email address.
2. Set-up separate email accounts.
To also send mail from each new email address, you need to set up a separate
email account for each address. Usually your web host will give you a number of
free email (called POP3) accounts that come with your hosting package.
Create a new email account for different categories ie
firstname@yourdomain.com - for emailing your personal friends. newsletters@yourdomain.com
- for subscribing to newsletters. articles@yourdomain.com - for submitting articles.
ads@yourdomain.com - for advertising information
ads1@yourdomain.com - a public email address you use for forums, newsgroups and
SPAM. If the spam gets too much you can dispose of this address and set-up a new
one.
3. Create new inboxes for each of these separate email accounts.
Set-up your corresponding email accounts (as above) in your email software (ie
outlook express, eudora etc).
You will need this information:
incoming mail (POP3) = mail.yourdomain.com - incoming mail server (SMTP) = mail.yourdomain.com
or your ISPs - outgoing mail server.
account name = newsletters@yourdomain.com password = the password you select
Do this for each of each of your email accounts.
4. Create folders and subfolders in your inbox.
ie newsletters - marketing tips newsletter - web design newsletter - forum newsletter
This allows you to immediately categorize your incoming email by dragging and
dropping it into each of these subfolders. Now you know instantly where to retrieve
your past correspondence.
5. Set-up filters (message rules) for receiving different emails.
Most email clients have filters or message rules you can set-up to filter your
incoming email. For example to make sure you don't ever receive emails from a specific
email address again, you can block the sender.
To do this in outlook express, highlight the email address you received, go to
message - block sender. That's it!
For a more extensive tutorial on setting up extensive message rules in outlook
express, go to:
http://familyinternet.about.com/library/weekly/aa020603a.htm
6. Periodically delete your received email.
Soon you will get into the habit of automatically hitting the delete button as
you recognize email that is obviously spam. This means your inbox will fill up very
quickly with deleted email and will slow down your email software. Therefore clean
out your inbox at the end of every day.
In Part 2 of this article, I'll go more deeply into how you can effectively deal
with spam. This will help you to be more organized, save time, frustration and enable
you to be more efficient in your online marketing adventures.
