One of the many common yet vital tasks that business owners and entrepreneurs spend so much time on is managing emails. Emails have been considered the preferred form or mode of communication by most professionals.
As such, responding to and sorting email communications have been a great challenge to the busy folks and are severely more time-consuming than other tasks.
This is where an email virtual assistant comes in – to be a rockstar organizer and email manager to ease the clients’ burden from having a mountain-high of emails in their inbox.
So how and where can you source out this amazing virtual assistant? Let’s go find out. But let us first understand how much help this talent can provide.
Table of Contents
Getting Started
Since we have already covered the topic on the basics of hiring a virtual assistant, this time, we will discuss one important task that most administrative VAs can cover or simply a task that some VAs specialize themselves with (this means that they are really going to do magic in your chaotic inbox!) – and that is Email Management.
Let’s face it. As a businessman, you always deal with outpouring emails first thing in the morning and by lunchtime, you may not be even done yet with responding and sorting as new emails come in your inbox every minute.
This keeps you seated at your desk for half of the day with nothing else going on but email correspondence – from inquiries, meeting schedules, and client meetups to sorting out oersonal emails as airline or service subscriptions, gift vouchers, and family-related emails.
Thus, hiring an email virtual assistant to sort this out for you on a daily basis, until your inbox gets cleared, is the best course of action.
But where do you start? Well, kindly read through.
Granting Email Access
Yes, granting email access to your VA is inevitable, and sure, you’ll feel uncomfortable at first. If you deem it a proper way, you can always have a non-disclosure agreement signed by the VA.
Also, in managing passwords for possibly multiple email accounts, you can make use of lastpass, a popular password management system. Through this system, your VA can just launch a specific email account that you want to be managed.
However, for a single email account that caters to all incoming business and personal emails, you can either create a separate profile account that will grant your VA an access or you can just hand her over your email account credentials.
Task Delegation
Perhaps, delegating your inbox to your VA may be a difficult move for the reason that the emails are meant for you alone, and these are, most of the time, matters of confidentiality.
However, if you can hardly manage your burgeoning inbox, some important email communications – especially those from your prospective customers or meeting appointments – may be left unattended, and can somehow impact the reputation of your business.
What Does an Email Virtual Assistant Do?
Your email virtual assistant simply takes over your inbox, sort it out, and put on a structure that organizes both the existing and upcoming emails.
We have accumulated some of the tasks that your email virtual assistant can do:
Cleaning and sorting your inbox
Your VA will first get into action by sweeping all unread and uncategorized emails, keeping them in folders or having them labeled for easy identification – like urgent emails, FYI-only-and-no-action-needed emails, for-later emails, inquiry emails, family emails, and so on.
Deleting irrelevant or old emails
There must always be those unimportant emails hiding in your inbox somewhere, like personal subscriptions or emails from ten years back. Surely, your VA will coordinate these with you at some point so she gets clearance from you before moving them to recycle bin.
Managing your contact list
Your VA has the talent to manage all your current contacts in the most organized manner. As we’ve said, she is a rockstar organizer.
Formulating draft emails or responding to them in your behalf
Thre are instances that, when you are all too busy with the most important things in the business, your VA can actually help you with some email correspondence.
Once she gets to learn the company’s canned email responses or grasps your style, you can bestow her the privilege for drafting emails (with your approval) or sending them (using the standard or vetted response format) in your behalf.
Email marketing
Your VA can definitely be your best help in formulating marketing emails that will be beneficial to the progress of your business.
Enabling the auto-response setting
When you are away or traveling with no access to email, or when you are simply on a vacation trip, your talented VA can set an auto-response email so your customers or contacts will automatically know that you are not available for that period, or they can contact someone else who you have temporarily appointed to take charge while you are away.
Scheduling your appointments
Your email virtual assistant’s job is to make sure that whatever comes in your inbox that indicates a request for appointment or meeting, she properly tags it as one, clears this in your calendar, and sends a confirmation back to the requestor.
Managing your calendar
It is your VA’s job to ensure that all necessary appointments and meeting requests are reflected and blocked in your calendar. She also has to set the reminder option so you get notified ahead of any upcoming event.
These are just the basics, and you can always add some more on top of this list depending on your needs. Most importantly, all of these changes are discussed openly prior to letting your VA take ove your inbox.
Meaning, you both must be aligned with what items she can delete, keep, or archive, so once the structure is set, you yourself won’t be having a hard time finding specific emails.
Now that you already have a better understanding of having the best help you can get from hiring an email virtual assistant, let’s get to the hiring process.
The Hiring Process
The steps for hiring an email VA are relatively similar to hiring a general virtual assistant or any other remote worker, so the selection process should have these considerations:
- Established Task List
- Work Schedule and Targets
- Pay Scale
- Ongoing Support (once organizing and structuring are completed)
Kindly check here for the complete guide on how to hire the best virtual assistants from the Philippines.
You can always refer to the same online job portals or VA outsourcing companies where a pool of very talented email virtual assistants are more than available to jump in and sort out your inbox problem.
Here’s our own list of recommended VA service companies where you can find these amazing rockstars.
Benefits of Hiring An Email Virtual Assistant
Basically, having an assistant to manage your emails can leave you more room to spend in growing your business, which is the main goal of hiring these talents.
Below is the list of the undeniable benefits that an email virtual assistant can give you:
- More organized inbox
- Not missing any meeting or appointment
- Fully-managed and updated contact list
- Saving you time from reading and responding to emails
- Scheduling emails
- Well-crafted marketing emails
- Properly set auto-replies
- Always available and gets you covered if you are not around
Conclusion
Truly, the presence of virtual assistants in the digital workspace is making the busy world of entrepreneurs and business owners more convenient than ever.
This one bulk of a task like email management can actually be offloaded from your shoulder by hiring an email virtual assistant who takes this work seriously.
Though it will take a couple of weeks or so for your VA to pick up the pace, get your inbox all sorted and cleaned up, and be able to grasp the standard email format, it will eventually go smoothly and efficiently from that point forward.
In the course of the partnership, it is important to have an open type of communication so both parties are up to speed on the updates and progress made or any email items needing urgent attention.
Once this goes on and established, this simply means lesser supervision and more time for actual high-level functions you are supposed to attend to for the continued growth and success of your business.
Berna
Berna is a creative article/content writer who has a strong passion for quality and efficiency.
