Dealing with email overload: Hire a VA to support you

Emails. They’re the lifeblood of many business communication, but they also suck an unnecessary amount of time as it’s a job in itself filtering through your busy inbox. Feeling overloaded by emails is one of the most common issues for business owners and CEOs. 

As a team of skilled virtual assistants, inbox management is one of our most satisfying services to deliver, as it makes such a huge impact on our clients’ day-to-day. We’ve written this blog post to inspire you to pass on managing your inbox to a VA by breaking down exactly how that works… 

7 inbox management tasks a virtual assistant can help with

Emails aren’t just annoying distractions – they prevent your business profitability from reaching its full potential. Studies show it takes an average of over 23 minutes to get back on track after an interruption, so this impact is literally costing your business money and productivity. 

When you calculate your hourly rate as a business leader, you’ll soon see how spending any unnecessary effort on inbox management is a waste of time and money. You need to be focusing on the tasks that generate revenue, not getting sucked into yet another junk email or unimportant conversation thread… 

So, here are 7 inbox-related tasks you can easily delegate to a virtual assistant to free up your time and energy. 

1. Prioritising emails for you 

Incoming emails need to be reviewed and prioritised based on their urgency, importance, and relevance so nothing gets missed. For example, dealing with customer enquiries should be top of your list.

Once they get to know you, a great VA will play a crucial role in carrying out these actions for you and helping with the decision-making process. They can set up filters and labels to categorise emails, ensuring that high-priority messages are addressed promptly while less critical ones are dealt with later and saving you time on emails. 

2. Managing inbox triage

Once your emails are prioritised, the next step is to sort through all those incoming emails, flagging important messages for immediate attention, archiving or deleting irrelevant ones, and redirecting anything best handled by someone else. This is what we refer to as inbox triage, and it’s a great way a VA can help you to manage email overload.

It helps declutter your inbox and ensures that essential communications aren’t overlooked while helping you delegate tasks to your team members more effectively. 

3. Responding to customer enquiries

When your VA has flagged a customer enquiry as important, you can take it one step further and ask them to respond on your behalf. A great virtual assistant will get to know your company and your email style, so they can draft responses to common enquiries or general requests without you having to step in. In time, your VA will also be able to respond to the more complex emails. 

One of the biggest compliments for VA is when not even the executive they are supporting can recognise whether an email has been written by them or their assistant. Handling these routine email responses frees up time for you as a business leader to focus on more strategic tasks.

4. Scheduling and coordination

If you get lots of emails back and forth with customers, stakeholders or suppliers regarding scheduling appointments and meetings, this is a huge time suck on your business. Imagine how much more time you’ll have when you no longer need to worry about scheduling everything.

When you work with a virtual assistant, they can take this essential admin task off your hands – managing any email correspondence related to scheduling appointments, meetings, and calls. Your VA will liaise with all parties to find mutually convenient times, send calendar invites, and ensure everyone is fully informed and prepared for the meeting. 

5. Follow-up and reminder emails

It’s easy for tasks to fall through the cracks. How many times have you heard, ‘Did you not see this in my email?’… It’s something many of us are guilty of due to the sheer number of emails we receive each day. 

But with a VA by your side, they can follow up on pending emails and send gentle reminders for unanswered emails or pending actions, helping to maintain communication momentum and prevent delays, whether that’s with external stakeholders or your own internal team.

6. Email organisation 

Suppose you’re someone who likes to keep important emails as a reference point but they’re currently all in your main inbox. In that case, your VA can plan and configure email rules and automation settings to streamline email management processes so it’s far easier to locate specific messages when you need them in the future. 

Your VA can help to organise your overloaded inbox by organising and filing emails into relevant folders or categories, setting up rules for automatically sorting incoming emails, forwarding messages to the relevant team members, or triggering automated responses based on criteria you set. 

7. Unsubscribing from emails 

The final inbox management task a VA can help you with is to filter through junk or unnecessary emails, such as mailing lists you’ve been on for years and never opened. Your VA can help decide which messages you actually want, unsubscribing from any unwanted email marketing for you. 

Regain control of your inbox by hiring a VA

So, by leveraging the support of a great virtual assistant, you can stop being overwhelmed by emails and focus on those all-important high-value tasks that will truly drive your business growth and success. If you need inbox management support from a trusted VA, get in touch with Virtually Priceless today.