Enable Email Workflow Automation to Maximize Productivity

Finding better ways to improve productivity amongst your team can be challenging—especially when they’re dealing with various distractions throughout the day. For many companies, email correspondence is one of the largest distractions from the tasks that actually count toward productivity. 

Adobe surveyed over 1,000 American workers for its annual email usage study and they found that, on average, people spend more than five hours per day checking their email. Five hours per day equates to 25 hours in the five-day work week. And if more than half of the work week is spent reading and responding to emails, and dealing with other distractions, there’s not much time for productivity. Email workflow automation can provide a solution.  

What Is Email Workflow Automation? 

Email workflow automation is when team members use rule-based logic to streamline tasks programmed to reduce human intervention. Since asynchronous communication stands to be the top method to communicate amongst a team, automation can reduce the extra time spent coordinating by simplifying tasks, improving processes, and minimizing manual work. 

Automation also allows team members to communicate more efficiently to save time, make fewer mistakes, and focus on important tasks to maximize productivity. 

Email workflow automation can help:

Reduce Employee Stress

The overwhelming emotions employees experience when tasked with too much can hinder productivity. Since stress can greatly affect mental well-being, it can ultimately affect how an employee operates. 

Loss of focus can cause mistakes to happen, and lack of concentration can cause an employee to drift from focusing on the task at hand. As a result, productivity will steadily decline if not handled properly. Automation can eliminate stress brought on from excessive grunt work by taking over menial tasks such as follow-up emails and responses to eliminate unnecessary email forwarding and cc’ing.

Create Fewer Repetitive Tasks

Email workflow automation features are endless, and if your company uses a shared or collaborative inbox, your team has many options to utilize. The workload of incoming emails from a traditional inbox may become overwhelming for a team. It may also be challenging to understand who on the team is addressing which email. 

If your team uses a Gmail shared inbox, teams can set automation rules to expedite time-consuming tasks. Automation features enable teams to:

• share emails automatically without Cc’ing or forwarding 
• sort emails to the appropriate label or folder (i.e., important)
• delete emails after a certain time frame
• send email reminders for meetings or requests
• generate email templates to reduce time spent drafting
• send out email templates as automatic responses
  

Inefficiency is a financial drain on a company. If your team understands where the bulk of the gruntwork lies, using automation tools can streamline workflow and increase profit. 

Improve Communication and Response Times

Employees may struggle to get through their entire workday without interruption. Automating email workflow can help teams communicate with colleagues or with clients to reduce additional questions and disruptions. For example, automated messages can be programmed to respond when a particular email comes in. 

For customer support, a simple thank you message notifying the customer that the request has been received can improve response times and be an excellent option for your team. Teams can also set up automation rules if a client email has not been addressed after a certain timeframe. This can help to prevent service level agreement (SLA) breaches and maintain quality customer experiences. The improved communication will allow team members to focus without interruption and improve workflow. 

Automate Workflow Using Gmelius 

If your current plan for productivity isn’t working for your company, it may be time to invest in email automation tools. Gmelius offers an email management solution that lives within your Gmail inbox to transform your team's workflow management system using automation and features that save your company time and money. 

Gmelius can guide your company toward better productivity and team collaboration with innovative tools and features that speak to all aspects of your workflow. 

Project Management 

Poor project management can significantly affect how a team operates. When managing an influx of emails, it is essential to find an efficient way to address them. Well, Gmelius offers just that. Let's say your team manages the same group mailbox; Gmelius can help you set up a Shared Inbox and offers collaborative features within your team's Gmail shared inbox. 

This means multiple group email addresses can be collaboratively managed from a personal inbox without sharing passwords or switching between email accounts. So, where does automation come in? 

Let's say you have a shared inbox with an email that needs to be forwarded to support. To eliminate the steps of having to Cc the email, then reach out via Slack, then create a task card in Trello, Gmelius integrates with a number of apps to simplify the process. 

Integrate shared inboxes and Gmail labels with your Slack channels, and let your teammates collaborate on email conversations. Furthermore, task cards in Trello can be synced with your Gmail Kanban Board while email notes automatically show up in Slack as well. Finally, you can tag team members and auto-assign emails as tasks to eliminate confusion and delegate emails with a purpose. 

Delegate Assignments 

With Gmelius' integration features, delegating assignments has never been easier. For example, our email workflow automation tools allow employees to auto-assign emails, automate messages for incoming urgent emails, and tag employees directly on an email to ensure accountability. By following simple automation rules, your company can see a drastic change in reducing manual tasks and reducing human error risk.  

Following a simple "if this, then that" logic can help team members assign specific emails to the right colleague. For example, suppose an email has "invoice" in the subject line. In that case, the email can be automatically assigned to the accounting department. This holds one single department accountable, rather than having an influx of emails for your entire company to see that does not apply to everyone. And since emails can be assigned as tasks, the email can be sent directly to your team's Kanban board to help visualize the project's stage. Kanban boards offer a visual element to help keep projects organized, meet deadlines, and address emails. 

Team Analytics 

Workflow automation tools provide you with valuable information that helps you collect and analyze data faster. Need instant visibility into your team's email management activity? Teams can generate detailed reports to analyze what's going on inside each project to distribute team workload better and easily hit your company goals. 

Team analytics allow you to track key performance indicators (KPIs), control email traffic and distribution, track time to resolve, and measure your team's productivity over weeks and months. You can view assigned conversations per user and see what conversations have been closed out. Analytics help reduce the time spent checking in on tasks and gathering data.

Applying email workflow automation rules for your company can create positive change amongst a team to better handle tasks and boost productivity. This positive change can help your team reduce the time it takes to coordinate assignments and communicate tasks and create more time to focus and maximize efficiency. 

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Ready to see how email workflow automation can work for your team?Check out our features and integrations and learn how Gmelius is built to improve team communication and collaboration. Ready to get started? Sign up today!