Control your email
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If you are an Internet marketer then you are going to receive a lot of email! Spend a few minutes setting up the Google-mail tools to keep your email under control.
Inbox/Spam
It is fairly obvious what these are for. Google will put your emails into one of these two folders, based on the track record of the sender and the settings you have in place.
What is spam?
Spam (also known as UCE – unsolicited commercial email or UBE – unsolicited bulk email) is NOT the messages you have no interest in! If you have opted into a subscriber list or joined a program then you have agreed to receive emails from them. If a message arrives in your spam folder and it’s email you have agreed to receive, please do take a second to click the ‘not spam’ button.
If someone contacts you out of the blue trying to flog you something then don’t hesitate to ‘report spam’. If you aren’t sure whether you agreed to receive emails from that person or not then take a quick look at the end of the message – if it says something along the lines of ‘you are receiving this message because you contacted us’ then it probably is spam (some people seem to think that if they sign up to your auto responder they can send you junk) or ‘if you have received this message in error please click here to unsubscribe/ send an email with the subject line ‘unsubscribe me’ then this is probably a spam message.
Some spammers even have the bare-faced cheek to tell you that reporting messages as spam when they are not is illegal (which it is in some parts of the world) yet seem to have forgotten that it is just as illegal to send spam!
Legitimate email senders will tell you when you signed up, from where and offer a ‘one click’ unsubscribe link.
Important! For your own protection read the CAN-SPAM Act – each email in violation of the CAN-SPAM act is subject to penalties up to $16,000!
Set Up Filters and Labels
Understand how to use the in-built filters and your emails will be much easier to manage. You can choose to set up filters and labels by program, program type or any way you want to.
1. From the ‘More actions’ button, select ‘Filter messages like these’ from the drop down list
2. You will see the email address of the sender already filled in – you can leave this as it is and/or add other key words to sort out your incoming mail. Once you are happy, click ‘next step’.
3. All that’s left to do now is select the actions you want to take. I suggest you click the ’skip the in box’ and ‘apply the label’ buttons (click the ‘choose label’ drop down, ‘New label’ and call it whatever makes sense to you and select ‘never send it to spam’.
4. You will see a list of emails from your in box that your new filter would select – click the ‘also apply label to xx conversations below’ and then click the ‘Create Filter’ button.
You will now see the filters you have created listed on the right hand menu. Google will display the ones you use most often with ‘more’ underneath – drag and drop your choices to edit the list. When you get an email into one of your filters you will see the filter title in bold and the number of new emails in brackets.
Googletalk
Googletalk is a chat program you can quickly install – not only does it give you an instant messenger, you will get little snippets of incoming emails appear at the bottom of your screen while you are working. This means that you can keep an eye on your incoming messages and react quickly if it’s a request for help or notification of a time-sensitive offer without having to log into Googlemail umpteen times a day.
I tend to use Googlemail alongside Skype – these two messengers make you easily reachable to most of the people you would want contacting you, without the security issues surrounding some other instant messenger systems.
Other Gmail features
Set up indicators of whether the email was only sent to you, change the background, set it to UK, rather than US English, set it up a vacation mode…. there are many features you can play around with. If you run into a problem then Gmail Help is a good place to start.
If you really want to get organised then read use Google to clean up your life!
Unsubscribe
If you are drowning in email you never have time to read then it may be time to start weeding. I hate unsubscribing from anything because I get upset when someone ‘un-subs’ me but it is very easy to end up subscribed to far too many email newsletters.
It is an acceptable and effective practice to offer a report or ebook in return for an email address but if you have no interest in the follow-up emails then unsubscribe. You can always change your mind and sign up again later on. The more subscribers a marketer has on their email list, the more expensive their auto responder bill so you could argue you’re doing them a favour!
Email in-boxes can be one of the biggest time-traps for Internet marketers – get your email under control today!
