One of the questions that I am frequently asked is how do you stay on top of work emails as a solopreneur/small business owner?
The honest answer is that I triage my emails and utilize templates to help me work through email to-dos.
When I survey my email, the majority of my work emails fall into one of three categories:
- Routine inquiries.
- Requests from clients or potential clients.
- Matters that require more information before I can take action.
Since I know that crafting responses can eat up a lot of my time, I rely heavily on templates. It makes me feel like I have a head start each time I respond to an email. Oftentimes, all that I need to do is customize the email a bit to fit the matter at hand.
Since everyone has different needs, my list covers the basic types of templates you need to round out your template library:
- FAQ Templates – This group, is by far, my largest group of templates. Here, I house templates related to inquiries, pricing, scheduling, policies, etc. With a bit of tweaking, I can rapidly respond to inquiries about my services and policies.
- Follow-up Templates – This group of templates will vary based on your business type, but these templates allow me to quickly reach out to clients for information, inquire about their availability for scheduling, or send them a reminder of an upcoming event.
- Confirmation Templates – Since email is prone to all sorts of things, I like to send confirmation emails as a courtesy when I receive information. I have a couple of different versions that I can customize and use on the fly.
- Delegation Template – This is a huge timesaver, if you have an assistant. You can just input your to-dos and use the running email as a method of tracking progress on tasks.
- Out of Office | Out sick Templates – If I need to be out of the office for any reason, the last thing I want to think about is drafting an out of office reply or sick note from scratch. To avoid this scenario, I keep templates that allow me to easily fill in the blanks and move on with my day. If you have kiddos, you can even craft one for their use. Once you get into the habit of utilizing templates, you’ll find that they are massive timesavers.
