How To Keep Track And Follow Up On Emails?

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Published: May 13th, 2020

I will break down these strategies into two parts:

#1 - Keeping Track of Emails
#2 - Follow up on Email

#1. Keeping Track of Emails

1 - Answer anything that can be answered right then

Instead of just taking a peek and putting it off until later just respond to emails right away if it only takes you a minute.

2 - Snooze or categorize all other emails

For those emails that you can't immediately to, snooze them for later or put them into another category for later triage.

3 - Use a separate email address for different things

To keep track of your sales emails, it might make more sense to separate your sales emails from your customer support emails, or even your personal emails. It will be easier for you to handle your emails that way.

4 - Use an email CRM / help desk software to keep track of business deals and tasks.

If you’re the person who receives a lot of emails (especially inbound inquiries) and you don’t know how to handle it all, use a CRM like Pigeon for Gmail.

You can tag your emails with deal status, automate email outreach, set reminders to follow up, collaborate with your co-workers on an email.

5 - Delete or unsubscribe from unnecessary emails

Another way to keep track of emails is to just have less:

Unsubscribe from all newsletters or promotional emails you don't need
Use inbox filtering to have certain emails skip your inbox
Clean up your inbox using tools like Leave Me Alone

#2. Following-up on Emails

How to keep track of emails to which a response is requested or required? You might be expecting a reply, but not get one, and you still want to follow up.

There are a few things you can do to get better at following up:

1 - Use reminders to follow up at the right time

Set reminders to follow up, such as next week or next month. Instead of having to look up who you need send a follow-up, just get notified when you need to do it.

2 - Use canned responses to spend less time typing out emails

Create email templates to commonly asked questions or situations. Copy/paste, fill in the blanks, and send. You can use a tool like Pigeon for Gmail to save your templates for easy access.

3 - Use email software that can automatically follow up on emails

There are even email tools that will do the follow-up work for you - sending automated replies at the time of your choosing, such as Pigeon for Gmail.

4 - Improve your time management skills

If you open an email and addressing it takes five minutes or less, it may be easier to just reply right then instead of "saving it for later." Remember, it takes time to open the email and if you mark it unread, you will have to reread it again to remember what it was about.

Hope this helps :)