Knowing how to group your email list will save you lots of small pieces of time which will really add up in the long run. By grouping your contacts you can arrange and manage them easily and even use your list as a Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) system and mailing list.
You might already use Gmail, but if you don’t then I’d highly recommend doing so. I started off importing my mail into Windows Live Mail and only used Gmail for my personal account, but I recently decided that Gmail’s features were so useful that I really needed to move my business account over as well.
How to group your Gmail contacts:
Get Started – To import your mail into Gmail you have to create a Google account (most of you will have one anyway if you’ve ever used any Google products) then go to ‘Accounts and Import’ in your Settings (the cog symbol at the top right of the page) and follow the instructions to bring in all the emails from your server. You can use any email to create a Gmail account so don’t worry if you don’t already have a Gmail address.
Grouping Manually – If you already use Gmail but do not have your contacts grouped then you’ll have to go through your contact list and tick all the ones that you want to come under a specific category such as clients, co-workers, and suppliers etc. Then you click the ‘Groups’ drop-down button at the top of the page and check the box or boxes that you want.This is handy if someone comes under multiple categories, and being able to select lots of contacts at the same time means you’ll get them done quicker.
Obviously this could take some time if you’re not actually sure who the person is and how they came to be in your contact list, but clearing your list of such contacts is probably a good idea at this point! If you find it’s a big undertaking then just do a page at a time over a few evenings in front of the TV and leave the ones you’re not sure of until last.
Creating a Contact - If you’re creating a contact from scratch then go into the contacts section, select ‘New Contact’ and add their details. You then click the ‘Groups’ drop-down button and check the group you’d like to add them to. You can also create a new group here as well as straight from your full contact list.
Importing - If you’re importing your contacts in from LinkedIn, another email account, or a spreadsheet, you are given the opportunity to label the group when you import them. You can easily change the group the contact is in either by changing the name of the entire imported list, or by individual contact.
Easier to Find – Once you finally have your contacts grouped it makes it much easier to find people – recently I needed to contact a lot of suppliers from last year’s Green Man festival so I just went straight to their group and there they were all listed together. When we took on new suppliers this year, I then made sure I checked the supplier group when creating the contact and now they’re all ready for next year’s event as well.
Easier to Contact – When you want to send an email to an entire group, if you click the ‘To’ button when composing the email, it brings up a box, if you click the down button next to the ‘contacts’ box it will bring up all your groups. You then click the group you want and all their addresses will appear in the ‘To’ field. If you’re emailing a lot of people remember to add them to the ‘bcc’ field though!
This turned out to be a revelation to my festival bars client. He didn’t know that he could email all his bar managers or crew in one go and had been adding them manually. So by spending a bit of time grouping his contacts he’s now saved himself loads of time coordinating his new upcoming event.
Although you may have to put aside a bit of time to get your contacts sorted and arranged into groups; being able to export, contact, and use them effectively is now really easy. If you are a small business and are not sure if you need to fork out for a CRM system, then using your Gmail contact list is a great alternative.
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