If you run a business, you will no doubt have spent a considerable amount of time streamlining your procedures (from production to marketing and sales) to make sure that you get maximum productivity and profit from the minimum amount of time and resources.
So if you have gone to all the effort of ensuring that your staff are trained in how to deliver information to your customers and how to maximize sales or turnover, why allow your staff (and, indeed, yourself) to waste valuable time sifting through unwanted or irrelevant email?
Email management is often neglected in favor of more pressing matters but, in fact, organizing your emails to make sure that they are deleted, archived, sent to SPAM or acted upon, is vitally important. Doing so not only saves the time spent by staff who have to wade through them to find relevant emails, but also makes sure that your business remains compliant with all relevant laws and regulations concerning long-term storage of data.
If your staff’s inboxes are permanently full of unread emails then there is a high risk that something of importance will slip through the net – perhaps an order or inquiry from an important or potential client.
You will normally be required to keep most relevant data for six years but, depending on the nature of your work and the information involved, you may have to keep it for longer. Six years are a long time to have an email lurking in your inbox, and many email providers automatically archive or even delete emails after a certain amount of time.
You therefore need a system of organizing and archiving your emails so that you could produce them, if required, in legal proceedings, for example. If you could not produce them when required and were found to be in breach of a law or regulation then you could face a significant fine; moreover, you might just have lost the only evidence you had that could let you successfully defend a claim made against you.
Even if you do not require access to old emails for a specific purpose such as legal proceedings, you might find that you need to refer back to them at a later date. If you have no proper system of archiving, it can be very difficult to find a particular email (especially if you do not remember the exact date or keywords used in the subject) and you can waste a lot of valuable time searching.
If you organised your email through a company such as Mimecast, which can help you with your email management and security, then you can access old emails quickly and efficiently and can feel safe in the knowledge that you are complying with all relevant laws and regulations around data retention. You can also avoid the possibility that important emails will be deleted by you or your staff in an effort to make room in an over-filled inbox!
This is a guest post by Adam a new Londoner, who has interests in recruitment, all things techie, a passion for travel and a love of fashion. He blogs about recruitment, travel and IT/technology as well as latest trends in men and women fashion. If you want Adam to write you specific content, feel free to massage me on Twitter (@NewburyNewbie).
