As a business owner, executive, or entrepreneur, you might find yourself drowning in your incoming emails, or just not spending enough time on the things that really matter. You’ve probably heard the saying of working on your business, not in it.
The constant stream of emails, ranging from urgent messages to promotional offers, can consume countless hours of your valuable time. This is where an email management virtual assistant steps in to free up your time, and make you more effective.
In this article, I’m going to take you through the exact steps to set up and hire your own virtual assistant that will take work off your plate, and save you hours every week.
The Benefits of a Virtual Email Assistant
As a busy entrepreneur or small business owner, managing your email inbox can be a time-consuming and overwhelming task. The constant barrage of emails, ranging from urgent requests to promotional offers, can easily distract you from important tasks and derail your productivity.
This is where a VA handling your emails can be a game-changer. It has been for me.
The True Cost of Task Switching
You might be thinking, I’ve handled my emails myself for years, why should I bother changing that now?
The truth is, most entrepreneurs and business owners don’t know how damaging it is for them to be dealing with incoming distractions like email.
It’s estimated that you experience up to 40% loss in productivity by switching between tasks. That’s the true cost of dealing with your emails as they come in.
Multiple studies suggest the effects are damaging not only on your productivity, but also the quality of the work output in the primary task at hand.
It doesn’t account for the time wasted actually dealing with email, either.
Time Wasted on Email
Not only does dealing with emails take up your precious time (which costs the business money), but it also steals away your limited amount of decision-making bandwidth.
McKinsey estimates the average business owner spends up to 28% of their work day dealing with emails – that’s a staggering 2.7 hours!
Assuming their annual salary is $160,000, their equivalent hourly rate is around $76.00 per hour.
Now, let’s consider the situation where a VA handles their emails. A VA’s hourly rate ranges from $4 to $15 per hour, depending on the individual, location, and skill level. That means you’re effectively saving the business $65.00 per hour that the VA is able to remove that you spend on emails.
Not only does delegating your emails to a dedicated virtual email assistant save money, but it also frees up the business owner’s time to focus on more important tasks, like growing the business, building relationships with clients, and developing new strategies.
The potential return from activities like that could be huge!
So we now know the potential benefits you could reap for having a virtual assistant manage your emails. But what does that look like in practise?
The 8 Core Email Functions My VA Handles
These are the 8 things that I have my VA help me out with in my email inbox, alone:
1: Email templates and responses
Your VA can create professional and customized email templates for various purposes such as introducing your business, addressing customer queries, or handling common inquiries. These templates save time and ensure consistency in your communication style.
2: Creating and maintaining a personal CRM
Your VA can help you manage your contacts by creating and maintaining a personal CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system. They can update contact information, add notes, and categorize contacts based on their importance or relationship to your business, making it easier for you to stay organized and nurture valuable relationships.
3: Staying on top of to-do’s and outcomes
Your VA will ensure that important tasks and outcomes required of you are not lost in your inbox. They can filter out urgent emails and create a priority list for you to focus on, ensuring that nothing falls through the cracks.
4: Following up on important emails
It’s common to receive emails that require a response but may slip through the cracks due to a busy schedule. Your Virtual Assistant can help you by following up on these important emails, ensuring that you never miss an opportunity or leave a crucial email unanswered.
5: Sending summary emails
You can have your VA send you regular summary emails, keeping you and your team updated on the work completed or the week’s activities. These summaries act as a reminder and help everyone stay aligned with the progress of projects and tasks.
He/She can either ask your team for updates on their progress towards important company goals, or they can work with you to track your own progress. The power of having someone you’re accountable to is hugely underappreciated!
6: Calendar management
Your virtual email assistant can take care of scheduling meetings, managing your calendar, and sending out meeting invites. They can also help you avoid scheduling conflicts by monitoring your availability and suggesting alternative meeting times.
Another thing I like to have is making sure my meetings are scheduled at convenient times. I hate a day full of meetings. It feels like you get nothing done. My VA makes sure I never have those days.
7: Sending meeting summaries and follow-ups
After a meeting, your Virtual Assistant can send out meeting summaries and action items to all participants, ensuring that everyone is on the same page and knows what needs to be done.
8: Travel management
If you frequently travel for business, your assistant can handle all aspects of travel planning. From organizing itineraries to booking confirmations, your assistant can make sure that your travel plans are seamless and stress-free.
The key thing here is that I’ve asked my VA to be pro-active about what else she can take on. She is self-optimising. If she spots something that doesn’t fit with our current system, she leaves me a note and we work out an iteration that serves us both better.
So, what systems can we use to get our virtual email assistant set up for efficient email inbox management?
Setting Up Your Virtual Assistant for Effective Email Management
Before you hand over the logins, there are a few essential steps to set up your virtual assistant for success.
Using the Right Email Service Provider
First, consider transitioning to email an email platform that offers user-friendly features to streamline email management.
Gmail – my recommendation – provides various tools and functionalities that can support your virtual assistant in efficiently handling your inbox.
Granting Access
To get started, you’ll need to grant your virtual assistant access to your email account. Whether it’s through Gmail’s delegation feature or by sharing your login credentials, make sure you take the necessary steps to give them permission to access and manage your emails.
More on doing this securely in the “Pro Tips” section below.
Setting Up Rules and Filters
Next, collaborate with your virtual assistant to establish specific rules and filters to automate the email sorting process. By creating rules that categorize and prioritize emails based on sender, subject, or keywords, you can ensure that essential emails are addressed promptly while non-essential ones are filtered to separate folders.
Setting up a Folder & Label System
There are a ton of options available for ways to set up your inbox, and categorize your incoming mails. GTD (Getting Things Done) method, or the Inbox Zero method.
I like to keep things simple and use a simple folder structure that looks like this:
- NB
- Response
- To Do
- Interesting
- Deferred
- Delegated
- Stored
- Admin
- Finance
- Deleted
I have my email management VA move all my emails into one of these “buckets”. I only work out of the NB bucket. Those are the only emails I ever see on a workday.
When I have spare time, I might look into the You Might Find Interesting and Deferred buckets. But during a busy work day, I know that I only have to review my NB folder once or twice in the day.
Setting Up a Rule System
Once you have your structure in place, you now need to give your email management virtual assistant rules about how she treats different emails.
It will end up looking like a bit like a bunch of “if this, then that” statements.
In the beginning, setup a “Not Sure” folder or label where she can add emails she isn’t sure how to categorize. Make sure you empty that bucket every day, and tell her how to treat those emails in future – and adjust your rules.
Bonus
Chris Ducker is an expert and someone I learned a lot from when I hired my first email management virtual assistant.
Expert Tips
Some handy tricks and tips I’ve learned over many years of delegating my emails.
Empower your virtual email assistant with decision-making capabilities
Trust your virtual assistant to make decisions on your behalf.
Provide clear guidelines and instructions on how to handle different types of emails, and grant them the authority to respond, forward, or take appropriate action without needing your constant approval.
With the power to make decisions independently, your virtual assistant can handle routine tasks and resolve issues efficiently, freeing up your time for more strategic work.
Setting up a private inbox for sensitive emails
Consider setting up a separate private inbox that only you have access to.
This ring-fences all your bank, identity info etc. away from your work email inbox which your VA has access to. That way, everything stays secure.
Only ever use this inbox for sensitive sign-ups.
3 Steps to Hiring a Virtual Assistant
With the rise in remote work and the tools that easily facilitate cross-border collaboration, its become easier and cheaper than ever to find and hire global talent.
Here are 3 quick steps to hiring a virtual assistant that can help you with your email management (among other things):
- Develop a pipeline of applicants
- Conduct interviews
- Set up an employer of record and hire.
Developing a Pipeline of Applicants
The process of finding applicants starts with deciding what locale you want to hire from. Some affordable options include:
- Indonesia
- Philippines
- Pakistan
- Vietnam
Each country has specific skills that they are better at than others, and also different cost and culture considerations. It’s important to get up to speed on the candidate’s requirements and maintain an open dialogue about expectations and roles.
An end-to-end hiring and headhunting solution like RecruitGo comes in super handy here. Not only do we take care of sourcing, but we also do the next two steps seamlessly for you as well.
Conducting Interviews
Once you’ve got a pipeline of applicants and whittled down the candidates to a list that you want to interview, you need to set up and conduct interviews with each of them.
Because of the language gap, this can sometimes be a challenge. Obviously, if you’re hiring for an email management virtual assistant, you’re going to want someone who has impeccable conversational English skills – they will be interacting as if they are you in some instances.
For other roles, like software development for example, spoken English might not be the thing that matters most, and if the candidate demonstrates the ability to write and communicate fluently then that could be okay.
Again, using a head-hunting service like RecruitGo where all of this is taken care of for you and candidates arrive automatically for you to review is super handy and a big time-saver.
Making the Hire: Setting up an Employer of Record
The last step is setting up an employer of record in the country you’re hiring from.
This is important for a number of reasons, and it’s something we go more in-depth on here, and here, so I won’t go into too much detail for now.
Last punt for RecruitGo which takes care of steps 1, 2, and 3 all automatically for you. The process is as seamless as:
- Tell us who you want hired, and what you want them to do
- Reviewing candidates we have sourced for you
- Choosing the best ones
- Using our EOR and HR solutions in the candidate’s country.
And that’s it, the ultimate guide to helping you hire a virtual assistant to manage your email, and save you hours every week.
