Being a creator can be tough. You have to either already be or learn how to be good in front of a camera, learn how to edit, design thumbnails, wordsmith titles, optimize it all once you upload it, market or promote it once it’s published, AND deal with elements of your brand or business outside of YouTube.
The main one I want to talk about today, though, is email.
Email is my worst enemy.
Don’t get me wrong… I love connecting with people.
I just don’t love connecting through email.
Being the CEO of my business makes it difficult for me to have the time to personally respond to each and every email that comes in to us, so I hired someone to help me with it instead!
I recently brought on my Executive Assistant, Stephanie, to the podcast to talk about how to handle email on top of everything else you’ve got going on! She shared a couple of tips I think a lot of you may find particularly helpful. Here are those tips.
- Define your email objectives. What do you want to accomplish by answering incoming emails? It’s important to know this because it’s easy to just get inundated with emails and get notification anxiety and try to get rid of them, but when you can figure out what you want to accomplish, you’ll be able to better prioritize what emails need answered now and which ones can wait. Stephanie shares some examples of the Video Creator’s objectives in the full podcast episode.
- Decide how you’re going to organize emails or consider an email management tool. If you’re a creator or brand dealing with an influx of emails, you know that it’s not just a matter of replying to an email and calling it a day. A lot of the time, you’re having to wait to reply to someone until you hear back from someone on your team, you’re coordinating schedules, or if it’s a deadline – you’re not going to answer an email that day, but you need to hold onto it to get to it later. If you want to make sure emails don’t get lost, we’d recommend 2 tools. If you can swing it, we’d 110% recommend Help Scout. It’s what we use to manage our inbox and we couldn’t recommend it more. We’d also recommend a task management tool, like Trello, to keep track of those bigger emails you don’t want to forget about (i.e. sponsorships, events, etc.)
- Get rid of the junk mail. I know if you have 100 emails sitting in your inbox, it can be really daunting to tackle or feel like you have the time to tackle it. A lot of the time, this can end up being junk mail, automated mail, or spam. The first thing Stephanie does when opening up our inbox is just clearing out (archiving) everything that’s spam, newsletters, etc.
- Start chronologically and answer easy emails first. Once you’ve cleared out your junk mail, you can start answering emails chronologically. Most of us want quick responses, so it’s best to start answering the person at the bottom first and work your way up. Also, in order to get to emails as quickly as possible, you can answer the easier emails first that you already know the answers to and save or mark other emails as pending. These could be sponsorship requests where you’re going to have to do research on the brand, more complex client questions, or someone interested in having you at their event.
- Last, handle those harder-to-answer emails. This is where you can utilize your task management tools. Usually, emails we’ll pend and come back to are sponsorship requests, people who are interested in having Tim at their event, at an interview, or just a wildcard question that I don’t necessarily have the answer to off the bat.
Is keeping up with your email a struggle? I hope these tips can help you moving forward to spend less time in your inbox and more time doing things that will grow your business.
Thanks for reading!
Keep changing lives,
Tim
P.S. Email management can be hard. Do it better by listening to our full podcast above to spend less time in your inbox and more time doing the things that will grow your business!
Thanks to Mary for moderating today! Check out her channel, Maximalist Minibus: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCI_LzjybqHKBJNK8IF7VYOA
CREATOR SPOTLIGHT: Changing Lanes: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC2o84Ea1Z-HiiYlbBbKkVqw