3 tips to drive your business forward with email
Email is an integral part of modern business, but one that teams often neglect. How can we use it to our best advantage?
Most businesses run on email – but email isn’t exactly built to run a business. Even though we all use it every day, there is no inherent business process for email, leaving it up to teams to decide how to deal with it.
Many businesses simply put up with email, seeing it as a messy, but unavoidable, part of how to get things done. (This is a big reason why we built the Email for Trello Power-Up in the first place!) Email certainly is here to stay, so businesses that do email well will be ahead of the game.
Harness the hidden power of email
Effectively processing and acting on email has the potential to turn your inbox from a regrettable necessity into your business superpower. Here are our tips to streamline your email processes and set your business up for success.
Manage your inbox in Trello
No matter what kind of business you run, Trello has both the features and the flexibility to manage your tasks, team and timelines. With the Email for Trello Power-Up, it’s even more powerful, merging your email inbox and your business operations in one single dashboard.
Instead of dealing with business comms in Outlook or Gmail, your emails are automatically directed to your Trello board where they appear as new cards, and where you can reply, forward and discuss with your team. This makes it possible to organize your emails just like any other Trello card, streamlining your communications, saving your team time, and making sure no tasks slip through the cracks.
If you need some inspiration, take a look at our 5 essential Trello boards for your business. We show you how to organize your Trello board and your email workflow for different kinds of teams, including sales, marketing and accounts.
Visualize your email workflow with Kanban
Trello’s flexible, Kanban-style layout means that all your work and emails are easily visible at a glance. The pipeline of work is completely transparent, so anyone in the team can see what’s going on and who’s responsible for getting it done.
Unlike traditional email clients, working with email in Trello means that the team shares the email workload, rather than working in separate inboxes. Outlook’s (now discontinued) Trello add-in was rightly popular – there’s a big demand for better ways of turning emails into concrete, actionable tasks. (There are other integrations to try if you’re looking for an alternative to Outlook’s Trello add-in.)
Using the Kanban workflow, all your emails and tasks are separated into lists that represent the steps in your workflow. We have Trello board templates you can copy to get started!
By structuring email communication as a process, the Kanban methodology helps teams respond to emails strategically instead of reactively. And who doesn’t want a little more calm and purpose to their email inbox!
Automate your emails
Dealing with email can be time-consuming! Often, it’s the small tasks that add up to create the heaviest workload. That’s where automation comes in – the more repetitive tasks you can outsource to automation, the more time you free up for deeper work.
You can automate plenty of routine work tasks in Trello like assigning work, adding checklists, posting comments and more. Check out our copy-able Trello automations for inspiration!
However, the real power of automation is that you can apply it to email too. For example:
Send timed follow-up emails. This useful Trello automation can automatically send a template follow-up email after a certain number of days.
Send email notifications. Make sure emails are attended to at the same stage of your workflow, every time. You can set up an automation to send an email when you drag a card to another list.
Comment to send an email. Trello automation works on triggers and rules. Since you can send an email from Trello by typing a comment, it opens up a host of opportunities for automation! This is how Email for Trello makes it possible to send emails from the Trello app.
Get the edge – with email
While email may seem like a necessary evil, it holds the potential to be a powerful tool for business success. By making the most of Trello, it’s possible to transform your email processes, streamline your workflow and improve your team’s productivity.
