Spark An Idea: Centralizing Emails Saved My Sanity

Sparkplugging is starting a new tradition called ‘Spark an Idea Thursday’. Each week we’ll be sharing some great ideas for a topic of interest to our readers. We invite you to grab our image and carry the tradition through to your own blog! If you do, please link back to this post so we know where you were inspired!

This week we’re Sparking an Idea that about Email

It all starts when you have one web site and one product. Then, when you build another site or another product (or blog) with it’s own domain you think well, maybe we need to create a new address on this new domain for customer support, for you, for the mailing list for… whatever. Then you add a new domain to your empire and you create another email address or *gasp* several addresses. Uh huh. That was me 2 years ago.

You’re probably thinking, it can’t be that bad. You can after all redirect all those different addresses into one. Yes, you are correct but the issue I had was not because I had to log in to different accounts to check the emails. It was the difficulty in keeping them straight when replying to people and most of all, when people ask for an email address, I didn’t know which I should give! Should I give them the real private one? Or the one for this site or maybe that site is more appropriate for this interview. That’s not all, whenever a new email list was created, I struggled to figure out which address would be the most appropriate “From” address for the list.

I decided I had enough. So I spent a whole month consolidating, trimming and re-structuring my email addresses. While I was at it, I also set up a central contact and help center for all products/services. You can call it a help desk I suppose, although I don’t run any help desk software.

The first thing I did was decide which addresses I wanted to keep. Once they were decided, the addresses were assigned a specific purpose. For example, one is strictly private, for personal stuff, staff and clients only. No exceptions. Then another was for mailing lists. Then I have one ‘public’ address and there’s another for support for all products, services, websites.

Just doing this cut down my email confusion considerably but that wasn’t the only thing I did. I hired someone to check, manage and respond to all the other addresses but one. Now, whenever someone asks me for an email address, during an interview or setting up an email list, I use the public one. The contact for all web sites, products and services go directly to the help desk at TechBasedSupport.com. There is no confusion. No setting up new email addresses no matter how many new products or websites I create. It’s all centralized.

If you happen to be a MomMasterminds member, I have a resource in the learning center there that shows step-by-step exactly how I set it all up and give you suggestions to centralize your emails too.

I’m so, so, much happier now and can’t imagine why I hadn’t done it before. At any point in time I know exactly where customers are sent to. This makes it a lot easier when you’re updating pages and giving instructions to people how to get support. It’s all the same and you don’t confuse yourself. Doing this also freed me up to focus on important stuff rather than checking emails.