4 Email Habits You Should Break Today
by Robin Amster /Email. Can’t live with it. Can’t live without it.
Managing the avalanche of daily emails can be a challenge for travel agents. An indispensable tool for doing business and relating to clients, email often turns into a distraction that burns valuable time — time better spent on other tasks.
“It’s the curse of technology,” said Rieva Lesonsky, founder and CEO of GrowBiz Media. “They invent things that make it easier to be productive, yet those things sap our productivity.”
A small business consultant, Lesonsky is editor of Start Your Own Business (Entrepreneur Press, 5th ed.) and a former editorial director of Entrepreneur magazine. She writes a blog on small business issues at www.smallbizdaily.com.
Lesonsky spoke with Travel Market Report about the four email habits that travel agents should break.
Bad habit #1: Multitasking while emailing
If there’s one strict “don’t” for emailing it’s, “Don’t email while you’re multitasking,” Lesonsky said.
“Everyone has sent an email that they later say, ‘I can’t believe I’ve done that,’” she said. Examples: Accidentally hitting “reply all” on a message meant for one person; mistakenly emailing an internal document to someone outside your company, and, worst of all, sending an email complaining about someone to the very person you’re complaining about.
All of these can happen when you’re distracted by doing too many things at once, Lesonsky said.
You should always take the time to focus on your email message. Spell checking and double checking attachments plus the To, CC and BCC fields should be routine.
Bad habit #2: Constantly checking email
Lesonsky advised agents to use folders to prioritize different types of email messages. An easy step is grouping newsletter and non-urgent communications into folders that don’t require immediate attention.
Agents can also create a separate email address for newsletters then check that email just every two days.
“Once a quarter also look at your newsletters and promotions, see if you’re paying attention to them, and if you aren’t, take the time to unsubscribe,” she said. “You can always go back and re-subscribe.”
“You have the ability to set up as many email accounts as you want,” Lesonsky notes. For instance, if an agent has signed up for alerts from airlines—potentially very important—establish a specific address for these that “has nothing else in it, so it’s easy and fast to check.”
She also recommends turning off email alerts—that ping or ding every time an email comes through. “Like Pavlov’s dog,” people tend to respond by dropping whatever they’re doing to check their email, Lesonsky said.
According to a study by Loughborough University in the U.K., it takes people an average 64 seconds to recover fully each time they’re interrupted by an email, Lesonsky noted. “During the course of the day, that could add up to hours and hours of wasted time.”
Bad habit #3: Replying immediately
“I tend to answer emails immediately, but once you do that you’ve now set a tone; people get used to that instant response,” Lesonsky said. “It’s up to you to set the tone at the beginning.”
For travel advisors, this can be tricky because agents need to respond immediately—or as soon as possible—to clients who have a problem. They may also want to respond quickly to inquiries from prospective new clients.
For true emergencies, create a separate email account, including for traveling clients, Lesonsky advised. “It can be called ‘priority@’ whatever your domain is. Tell clients, along with your last minute instructions, to email you there with any problems,” she said. Agents can then check that address every 15 or so minutes, or at whatever interval works for them.
For prospective new clients, Lesonsky said agents might buy themselves time by creating an auto-reply message that says, “‘Thanks for contacting me [or us]. I’m working on booking client trips and will get back to you later this afternoon.’ That way people don’t think they’re being ignored.”
Bad habit #4: Defaulting to email
Many of us have become accustomed to using email for all our communications. But sometimes it makes more sense to shout to the person next to us in an office or to pick up the phone and call a client, Lesonsky said.
“Email is not always the easiest or the most efficient thing. Sometimes you might as well pick up the phone, especially if you find yourself typing a War and Peace length email message.
“Don’t let yourself think that you’re behind the times because you maintain so-called old-fashioned habits like using a paper calendar,” she added.
At the same time, agents do need to be in sync with their clients’ use of technology, she cautioned. Corporate agents, or those whose client base includes a younger tech-savvy clientele, have to be more technologically sophisticated than a “mom and pop agency,” she said.
“The primary rule of communication for a business owner is to be where your clients are,” Lesonsky said. “You need to embrace the technology or methodology your clients use.”
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For more on effective email habits and strategies, see Get Focused: How to Manage Interruptions at Work