Email Best Practice #6
In a recent conversation with a Manager in a Fortune 50 company, I was told that he receives close to 400 email messages each and every day, and more than 80 percent of these emails are junk. Although he uses the best spam protection software, these emails find their way through to his email box. On further discussion, I found out that he uses only one email account; and he uses the same email address for his Facebook, Linkedin, Twitter and several other web logins. Most of the emails he receives are daily newsletters from websites he registered himself. Despite several attempts to unsubscribe from these websites, the sheer volume of emails just keeps increasing. He often lands up in situations, where he misses important email because of the sheer scale of the junk. Every day he has to spend his precious time carefully scanning his in-box and deleting hundreds of junk emails.
This teaches a salutary lesson. Often, as you surf the internet, you come across websites that ask you to sign up just to read the content. During the sign up process these websites cunningly add you to their newsletter subscriptions and administrator alerts. They often even confuse you with ambiguous negations in the same statement. For example,
You confirm that you DO NOT wish to opt out of our partner marketing programs.
Clicking on that confirmation will ensure that junk mails will soon be entering your email box.
As a best practice, we suggest that everyone should have at least two spare background email addresses. Corporate email addresses or the primary email addresses should be used only for important communications, and an alternate email address should be used for all signups on websites. Care should be taken during signups to recheck options for newsletter and marketing campaigns. Spending 20 seconds more here to read these statements, will save you many minutes every day. Also, it lessens the chances of you missing that important mail hiding in a bunch of junk emails. Additionally, as previously mentioned in Email Best Practice #2, you may want to flag some emails as spam or create filters to reduce the bulk entering your inbox.
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