Managing the Marketing Madness

Marketing is the very activity you do to attract leads and customers to your business. It’s also the very same activity others use to attract you to them. With everything going on in your inbox and on social media, it’s becoming difficult to manage the marketing madness of messages and notifications.

Let’s face it, you’ve got notifications on three to five social networks easily, you’ve got messenger inboxes on all of those social networks and you’ve got your regular email inbox to manage.  It’s a lot to stay on top of. Navigating your way through the distractions to get to important stuff can be challenging and tiresome.

Here are a few ways you can manage all of these inbound messages and restore some sense of order to your life.

1. Eliminate all junk. Unsubscribe from every subscription email that lands in your inbox, especially the ones you did not subscribe to.  Be relentless about this and don’t worry about other people’s feelings. Let them know you use an anonymous email address to subscribe to newsletters to ensure that priority emails only hit your business inbox.

2. Take it off social. Ask people to email you when you receive messages on Social Media so you can redirect all communication to one place, your inbox. If you don’t want to do this to “them” then ask for their email address and reach out to them this way.  Explain to them that you prioritize email communication and the best way for you to manage your conversation and respond in a timely fashion is to move it from social to email.

3. Set expectations up front when working with people. Let them know the best way to communicate with you and why, and how to communicate if it’s an emergency.  My clients know that my team and I prefer all communication via email and if something is urgent, to please text us.

4. Use flags, stars, or Asana to stay organized.  You can have a “follow up folder” for emails you need to follow up with, use a system to flag, star or forward emails to a project management software like Asana so you don’t forget to respond.  Pick ONE system and use it diligently to help yourself identify, and mark priority conversations so you don’t forget to follow up.  We rely too often on our brains to remember. With messages and notifications coming at you from 6 different places, it makes remembering everything challenging for the best of us.

5. Have your social media messages show up as messages in your inbox, too.  This decreases your need to check social media to see if anything needs to be responded to.  You know because you receive the notification via email.

6. Use rules to file, filter and or delete any emails with an unsubscribe link in them.  If someone is really emailing you, they are not using an email marketing program that requires an unsubscribe link. You can create a filter:  label:^unsub to only put emails that have an unsubscribe button in these folders, so legit emails from contacts still make it through. (Thanks for the tip Michelle Weger from Venture Creative Collective).

The reason for all of this is simple:  Your customers and your inbound leads expect a response from you.  When you let overwhelm and chaos get in the way of effective communication, you run the risk of losing business and creating a bad impression of how you treat and respond to customers.

No one is perfect. The chaos that runs out of control eventually needs to be organized, systematized and fixed if you want to continue to grow your business. Otherwise, you’ll continue to run around spending all kinds of time and energy on low pay-off activities that don’t positively impact your business.

Leave a comment and let me know, how do YOU combat the noise that goes on in your inbox? I’d love to hear your tips and tricks.