5 Steps to Delegate Your Email Inbox to Your Team

Are you a busy business owner or team leader who feels like your inbox in and of itself could be a full time job? Are you spending a lot of time forwarding emails to other team members and hoping that they answer them, but then sometimes replying to the same email they replied to? If you have any of these symptoms, you and I have something in common. Because last year this time I was really struggling with my email. It was a lot. And when I came on YouTube and I was looking, you know, how to delegate your inbox inbox management, you know, for a va, you know, all these different videos I was looking up, nothing answered the question of how to actually delegate your inbox without just having a Gmail account giving your VA access? That just felt way too casual for what I was looking for. So in this video I'm going to share what I had to learn the hard way over the past 12 months or so of figuring out how to delegate my email inbox. In this video we are going to be talking about the five tangible steps you need to do as a business owner or team leader to take your inbox being from a you place to a we place and ultimately delegate your inbox to your team. The first step of delegating your inbox is optional, but I would strongly recommend it, especially if you're just starting out, because it's going to save you so much time down the road and that is setting up email aliases. Now, our good friends on Google gave us a definition for this, but an email alias according to Zoho, is a nickname and I think that's a nice way to think about it. Aliases basically allow you to have one email address that you pay for one time, but have it also receive mail for tons of other email addresses at the same domain. For example, I could have the email address John processdriven Co. I could also have Johnny at processdriven Co or hello hello at processdriven Co. As long as you have your email at your own domain, you are able to set up email aliases like this. So whether you're using G Suite or Outlook or something else, there is a way. I would just suggest you look up email alias and then the name of your email provider to make sure you get the right instructions. If you use G Suite for your business and you have your domain connected to email through Google, your instructions are exactly what I'm showing on the screen here. Just go to admin.google.com, go to your directory of users and click on any user. Once you're Inside the users, you'll have the ability to add new alternate emails such as HiyaroCessDriven Co or any other domains you have connected and then just click save and you're good. Now that we know what an alias is, let's make sure you actually have the two aliases you're going to need to implement this structure. The first alias is an alias for the public. So you need some some email address that doesn't include your name in it that can be used for any time a stranger basically wants to contact your business. All of these will end@yourdomain.com so rocessdriven co for us and you can start with something like hello Info hi Sales inquiries. Just pick one and that will be your public facing alias. So I'm going to go with Hiya at ProcessDriven co. Once you have that alias set up, I want you to set up a sample second one as well. If that was for the public, I want you to set up a separate one for your clients. So this could be something like clients at ProcessDriven Co CX ProcessDriven Co customers at ProcessDriven Co support. You know what I mean? Just any kind of variation that lets people know that this email address is for people who are working with us currently. So we're going to call this customers at ProcessDriven Code. You're going to need to create both of those in whatever system you are using and click save. The sooner you set these up the better because if you start giving all of your clients your personal email, delegation is a lot harder than if you just tell all of your clients, hey, email clientsrocessdriven co. And if you email that, you'll reach me or my team, whoever's there. Getting that email address is a great first step, even if at first first it is just an alias for yourself and it still only goes to you. If you don't want to do this step, I want to remind you that this is optional. If this is stumping you, I want to remind you that this is optional. But if you are able to set up those aliases, please do so now and we're going to move on to the next step. Now that we have our aliases set up, step number two is making sure that our team can actually see emails when people email those email addresses. So to do this there are really two methods. One involves using the tools you already have and one involves buying a new software. So things for both budgets here the free path is to use the tool you're already using. Which is most likely Microsoft or Google and set up a group. In Google they're called groups. In Microsoft you might refer to them as distribution lists. You could also call them groups there. But what's going to happen is this group allows us to send one email and send it to many people. So that way everyone who's on the customer's team will be alerted when that email is received. Okay, so to do that in Google and similar steps in Microsoft will be create a group. We're going to do Team processdriven because we want this to be kind of the reply name. We want it to show cohesively and we're going to change the group email to be customers processdriven co and this is the group for blah blah, blah, blah blah. Describe whatever this is for. This is for internal purposes. Next we're going to choose how this group is used, who can send things to the whole group and who can receive things from from the group. Receiving is the first bit. So I'm actually going to just choose certain people in my team to join this distribution group. Next thing, I'm going to allow only people in this group to see the conversations in this forum posting, which means sending emails to this is something I want anyone to be able to do. I want the public to be able to contact this imaginary email of customers. Then who can view the members in this organization? We're going to say everybody. This means other people on the team will see who gets the customer's email emails. So we'll leave it as such. Next up, I get to choose who is in this group, who gets to actually receive these emails. In this case, I'm going to choose tj. Next I can send him a message. And finally I get to choose how often TJ receives emails. So how often if this email address gets an email, should TJ get an email right away or only once a day or and in this case, if I'm using this as kind of a group email system, I want it to be for every email. So anytime a customer emails this, both TJ and I receive the email. I don't want to confuse tj, so I'm going to disable that right here and I'm going to click Create a Group. Now I'm going to go to that group. And inside group settings, there is one more adjustment I need to do to get this ready to go and ready for others. And that is enable Collaborative Inbox. Now, when emails arrive in this inbox, such as this email here, I'll have the option to assign that email to myself or assign it to others or even market complete or as a duplicate. So I'll have some options around managing these emails that other people who are part of this collective group will be able to share. This is a really nice way to start getting into that collaborative inbox environment. It's actually what I started with when I started trying to get my team helping me with my inbox. Because more and more of our emails would go into this collective area and people would assign them to themselves and I would just take whatever's left. But the downside of this is this is still just an inbox. So if you have questions about what happens on this email, if I were to sign this to somebody else and maybe they didn't know how to handle it, they needed to ask me a question, well, they'd email me and that would cause more emails and could potentially unwind the whole delegation process by making it really hard to collaborate. So I do want to present to you the second option to achieve this second step, which would be to actually use a tool called Missive. And I just want to be clear, this is not sponsored, I'm just a huge fan. Missive allows you to have conversations and chat right alongside emails and delegate and assign things back and forth to people in one kind of purpose built tool. It's really pretty, really organized and there's a lot of shared automations and other features which I find to be a huge time saver versus those free options like Google Groups. So I actually have a whole video on Missive up here if you want to check it out. We'll also put the affiliate link below. Again, not sponsored, just saying. It's like a really, really nice option for this second step of making sure that everybody can access that email address. Now once you have that alias set up and access to your team is provided, you've technically finished the delegation of your inbox. Because technically emails are going to the right people and other people can see what you got going on. But as you probably well know, having access to something and knowing how to handle something are two different things. And the next step of this process of delegating your emails is addressing the people part of the equation. And that brings us to this flowchart. This is a flow that breaks down how we handle our inbox. Currently we actually are up to five different like subcategories of inboxes right now. So yours at this point, if you're following this instruction, will only have one of them, but it'll start at the same point the first question we ask ourselves is who sent the email for us. We use this to help figure out who's in charge. And if you're following this tutorial, you've done the same. You have the people who are clients and the people who are not yet clients. And that's your two branches from here. So for example, if we said someone who generates US revenue is who's emailing, well, we know it's heading this direction. Then we ask how are they going to generate US revenue by. By buying our services or something else? Well, if it's something else, it goes to the lead who handles all the wildcards and otherwise it goes to our social seller who handles all of the inbox communication. And notice there's also this little guy here that says if the social seller needs help they can go to the growth lead. And if the growth lead needs help, they can go to the operations lead. And if the operations lead needs help, they can go to Laila. We kind of have this chain of command and support available here. Another path this could go down is someone who's paid us money. And that could lead to another question. What are they looking to pay us money for or what are they asking about today? Well, if it's any kind of billing issue, like upgrading, login billing, add ons, all this kind of stuff, it's heading over to customer support. And if it's about affiliates and then depending on what they're talking about, it goes to either growth or back to customer support. If we're talking about buying more products, perhaps in bulk, then it can go to a different level. But basically we just have these paths of common scenarios to help us figure out who is in charge of what email. And I'm just going to be honest here. This process started with who sent the email internal. If it's internal, go to Layla me and if it's external, go to Layla me. And eventually it evolved into if it's internal go to this person and if it's external, go to Layla. And then eventually, you know, it just kept expanding until it got to the point where it's at right now. And I still think it's going to expand significantly more as we have more scenarios come up. When you first get started, almost all of the lines are going to lead to you having to answer it. But over time that's not going to be the case anymore. And having this as a working draft that you can keep updating as you continually delegate is great. Just keep in mind every time you receive a new type of Email. So maybe you receive a sponsorship request, that's a new thing you haven't had before. Every time you get a weird email like that, add it to this chart and say, oh, okay, someone who may help us generate revenue, how okay, they want to sponsor us. All right, maybe sponsorships always go this way. You know, add those branches into it. As you start to think about how do we want to handle those, who is the point of contact? That is what this chart is all about, is just saying who's the person in charge or responsible for that type of issue. We actually talk a whole lot about process and accountability for processes inside our membership. I won't talk a lot about that here, but if you are someone who is a member or if you're in our description below and you want to become a member, this is the kind of stuff that you'll probably already have in your process org chart for your business. But now we're just putting it in terms of emails. Who is responsible for what? Now once we have all this stuff set up, our fourth step is making sure we know how to respond to an email. So let's say we send an email to customer support or to our assistant about a billing issue. That person needs to know how to handle and respond to a billing issue. Besides just jumping in and telling everybody what to do or doing things yourself. There are three ways that we can make sure people know how to respond to a given email. The easiest one is step one, and that's just trust people. That's, that's the hardest one, honestly, but it is the most common, especially when you're just getting started. You know, your va, she knows how you do things. And when they get that email, you just hope or trust that she just knows what she's talking about. Your consultant who works under you, that junior consultant, they know what you generally do, so they're going to respond to the best of their ability and you trust that they know what they're talking about. For some teams, trusting people is the only system they need when it comes to email because they are dealing with a high skill, small, tight knit team and they're good for the rest of us. There are two other tools we can put in our pocket to supplement trust. Because no matter what, we need that trust. But it's not the only tool we can lean on if we feel like we might need a little more help. The second tool is the one you're probably thinking of and that's templates. So for example, if we have a billing issue that we send to our va, we might want to also have a pre written email of how to handle that particular type of billing issue. And we could do this for every type of issue that comes up, or have our VA do it, have us approve it, and then have them continue to use that template that they drafted, whoever creates it. Templates are a great time saver and also a great way to standardize and let you feel that you trust the response that's going out, because you know what the response is going to be if you set up your collaborative inbox in a free tool. Most often the easiest way to create these email templates is by creating a Google Doc where you just throw all of these email templates in and people copy and paste them into emails when they're ready to use them. If, however, you went the specialty tool route and you started using Missive or whatever else, Missive, for example, has a templates area where you can actually have fill in the blank spots that pop up in a form that prompt you to fill in your template and it automatically populates an email based on that information. So whether you store your templates in the tool or in a Google Doc or Word file, it doesn't really matter as long as you have the content written. But no matter how much you trust people, and no matter how great your templates are, there's always going to be emails that fall between the cracks that require a good amount of ingenuity and creativity to answer them. But also you don't want people to be stuck having to create things from scratch. For that, I want to bring you the third solution we have for actually responding to emails, and that is creating a framework. A framework is a lot like a template, except rather than telling you what to say, it just kind of tells you the main chunks to include. So for example, if I was going to write a letter, my framework might be something like greeting what I'm about to tell you, body, concluding thoughts, and then salutations. You know, those are the five main pieces of a letter. And we're basically just going to do a similar thing but slightly more detailed for any type of email that we can't fully template Echo is actually a framework we created here at ProcessDriven for that exact purpose. It's basically a four piece framework that lets the team know what I expect to see in every email. It's kind of the four essential pieces for us. Those four pieces are empathy, challenge, honesty, and opening. And each four of those have their own meeting. We're a really small team, but we take the time to teach Echo to every new employee during onboarding and we've even had a lunch and learn on it recently because we just continue to find new ways to to refine what is our collective team voice and how can we make sure we're all continually raising the bar for how we handle emails and that one on one communication that matters so much. Is it perfect? No, but it definitely helps and it gives kind of a guiding principle to let people know what we expect when it comes to an email. If an email is lacking something, I can almost always say, hey, you know Melissa, this email isn't quite right because it's missing the see in Echo and she'll immediately know what I mean. We have that common language and we can revise drafts moving forward based on that. So to wrap up step four here, the first way to make sure people know how to respond is just trust people. The second way is to have awesome templates, and the third way is to create a framework or some guiding principles to help everyone be clear on what the expectations are for every single email. Last but not least, the fifth step of setting up email delegation is one I alluded to before, and that's making sure you have one clear spot for communicating about emails that are confusing. No matter how great your frameworks or templates, there's going to be curve balls in the inbox and it's really valuable for your team to know how, where and when to ask you questions if they need help delegating your inbox, it can be bumpy at first and you want to make sure that you are open and available for communication to help set your team up for success. Success. If you're using a free collaborative inbox tool, this could look like using a Slack channel or maybe a Voxer. If you're using a communication tool and just having one dedicated thread just to talk about emails whenever an issue comes up. If you're using missive and you're using the software route like we do here, every single email in Missive allows you to have comments back and forth so you can have those conversations there in real time. Either way, whatever your method is, make sure you have a way and that you are clear that at least at first, it's not going to feel that easy. When you first start delegating your inbox, it's still going to take you a lot of time to help your team know how to answer. But that's okay because the second or third time that same issue comes up, they'll know how to handle it on their own because you've guided them along the way. And those are the five steps you need in order to delegate your inbox. You need the tools, you need the workflows, and you need to let people learn and be patient through that learning curve. If you want to learn more about anything I talked about in this video, check out the description where we're going to include some links of what I've mentioned and the related videos and all that good stuff. If you run into any roadblocks that I forgot to mention in this video, please comment below so we can make a future video about your suggestion. Keep me posted on your email delegation journey. And until next time, enjoy the process. Not of email, but of like the process of getting away from email. You know what I mean? See ya.