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Managing your email inbox can feel like playing a never-ending game of whack-a-mole. Just when you think you’ve gotten to inbox zero and start doing your little victory dance … up pop another email. And another one.

What’s worse, the sheer volume of email we get often exceeds the time we can afford to deal with it. This becomes a bigger issue when we let our guilt get the better of us — the guilt that comes with not responding right away, responding curtly, or not responding at all.

But the fact is, there are more important things on our to-do lists than email. Want to spend less time living in your inbox, and more time doing the stuff that actually matters? Here are 12 tips to get you started.

12 Tips For Better Email Management

1) Unsubscribe. Ruthlessly.

The easiest way to maintain inbox zero? Get less email. The very first step to achieve an emptier inbox is unsubscribing from every single email list that doesn’t provide you with value on a regular basis.

In fact, my recommendation is to unsubscribe from everything. Take a few days to let it sink in, and then re-subscribe only to the newsletters you really, truly miss. In this step, you might consider converting any daily digests you used to follow to weekly ones.

While unsubscribing manually from tens — hundreds? — of newsletters one by one sounds tedious, there are tools out there that can help you do it in just a few clicks. Unroll.me is my personal favorite: It’s a free tool that lets you mass unsubscribe from all the newsletters you don’t read. You can either unsubscribe from everything at once (my recommendation), or you can pick and choose. Read this blog post to learn more about how it works.

2) Remove yourself from any internal company and business threads you don’t need to be on.

Once you’ve unsubscribed from external newsletters, it’s time to evaluate the internal emails you receive on a regular basis. Do you really need to get email notifications every time the sales team closes or deal, or every time someone on the marketing team reports a bug?

If the answer isn’t a definitive “yes,” do yourself a favor and remove yourself from whatever alias or list you’re on. If that makes you wildly uncomfortable, compromise by creating a folder in your email client and send those emails to that folder automatically. (To set at up, you can create filters in Gmail or rules in Outlook.)

3) Understand — and embrace — that you can’t respond to everything.

Part of maintaining a manageable inbox — and your sanity — is to change the way you think about email a little bit. Only you can decide what deserves your very limited time and attention. When it comes to email, understand that there’s simply no way you’ll be able to respond to every single email that arrives in your inbox, let alone read them all.

I love the way Merlin Mann puts it: “Stop thinking of emails like precious family heirlooms, and start treating ’em like pints of milk. Perishable, time-stamped milk that becomes a little less fresh every day until it smells kind of funny and just needs to be dumped. Believe me, there will always be more coming.”

So if you’re looking at an email and know in your heart of hearts you’re never going to respond to it, archive it. Better yet, delete it. As Mann says, “Trust your instincts, listen to them, and stop trying to be perfect.”

4) Keep your replies brief whenever possible.

When you do have to reply to an email, you’ll find that in most cases, you don’t need to craft the perfect response. Often, a few sentences will do; in some cases, a few words. If you let an email with an action item sit for a few days, a quick “Do you still need this?” email might end up saving you a lot of time.

Don’t feel guilty about sending succinct emails. If you’re concerned your brevity will be taken the wrong way, give a heads-up to the folks you exchange emails with the most. Tell them that, in your effort to spend less time on email and more time on your actual work, you plan to cut down word count in your emails.

The better you get at deleting emails you don’t need to read or respond to, the more time you’ll have to write the emails that warrant those long responses.

5) Use pre-written replies.

Which types of emails do you find yourself typing out over and over, without really needing to customize them?

I, for example, often find myself referring people to HubSpot’s guest blogging guidelines page. I used to write one-off emails to folks, meaning I’d have to craft a few sentences, find and copy the link, and so on. Now, I give myself ten minutes back in my day by sending pre-written replies via Gmail’s “canned responses” feature.

Gmail, Outlook, and other email clients offer canned responses. Below are instructions for setting up and using them in Gmail. 

To Set Up Canned Responses in Gmail:

1. Click the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner and choose “Settings.”
2. Click the “Labs” tab, find Canned Responses at the top, and click “Enable.” Scroll down and click “Save Changes.”

To create a canned response, compose a new email and click the little arrow in the bottom right-hand corner of the new email. Choose “Canned responses,” and then “New canned response.” From there, you can name your new canned response, write it, and save it. Anytime you want to use it, simply go back to that little arrow, choose “Canned responses,” and click on the one you’d like to use. (Learn more on Google’s website.)

To Set Up Canned Responses in Outlook:

In Outlook, the best option I could find was to set up your canned responses as “Signatures.” That way, when you reply to an email, you can choose the appropriate “signature” and the whole canned reply will appear. Here’s how to do that:

1. On the Outlook menu, click “Preferences.” Under “E-mail,” click “Signatures.”
2. Click the plus icon to add a new signature.
3. A new signature will appear under “Signature name” with the label “Untitled.” Double-click “Untitled,” and then type in a new name for your canned response.
4. In the right pane, type the text that you want to include in the signature — in other words, type in your canned response.

Once you create the canned response as a signature, you can add it to a new email by clicking in the message body, choosing the “Message” tab, clicking “Signatures,” and choosing a signature from the list. (Learn more on Outlook’s support page.)

6) Employ a one-click rule.

This rule might seem simplistic, but it’s a huge time-saver. The “one click” refers to a single click to open an email once. Once it’s open, decide exactly what you want to do with it right then and there: Reply, forward, send to a folder, archive, and/or delete.

The point here is to not open an email, read it, and then decide to deal with it later and move on. That’s the bad habit that’ll guarantee you a clogged inbox and more stress down the road.

7) Triage emails using “special stars” in Gmail.

If you use Gmail and your goal is to get to inbox zero and maintain it, then I’d like to direct you to the email system that’s changed the way I do email. Here are the full instructions. This works great in conjunction with the one-click rule we just talked about.

The premise is this: In Gmail, you’ll set up multiple inboxes and give each of them a name, like “Needs Action/Reply” and “Awaiting Response.” Your general inbox will then appear on the left, and your labeled inboxes (which Gmail calls “panes”) will appear on the right, like so:

You’ll use what Gmail calls “special stars” — kind of like Gmail’s labels, but better — to categorize every single email that comes into your inbox.

Every time you get a new email in your inbox, you’ll want to:

• Reply to the ones you can right away.
• Label the emails you need to deal with later by marking them with the appropriate special star.
• Archive or delete any emails you don’t need to deal with.

In the end, you’ll archive everything. Your inbox will stay at zero, and everything else will either be in its designated pane, archived, or deleted.

Use Outlook?

SimplyFile is a free organizational tool that’ll help you categorize emails using folders. When an email comes in, all you have to do is drag it into the appropriate folder. You can organize both messages you’re receiving in your inbox, as well as messages you’re sending — which you can file as you send them.

Image Credit: SimplyFile

8) Delegate emails to others using a collaboration tool.

Sometimes, you might find that you receive emails that are better handled by someone else. In these cases, you could either forward the email, or you can streamline the process by quickly sharing the email with someone on your team using an email collaboration tool.

There are a number of email collaboration tools out there to choose from. If you use Gmail, Hiver is a great choice: It lets you share Gmail labels (and therefore share folders) with other users, which you can use to assign tasks, delegate emails, and even track their status if you want to. If you need to add a quick note explaining what’s going on in an email thread, you can do that right in the tool.

Image Credit: Hiver

9) Use the “yesterbox” approach.

“Yesterbox” is a methodology for managing your inbox created by Zappos CEO Tony Hsieh. This approach is kind of like inbox zero, except you’re working off all the emails from yesterday and treating them like today’s to-do list.

The basic premise is this: Every morning, you have a fixed number of emails to answer instead of an endless flood of new emails coming in. Once you finish dealing with yesterday’s emails, you’re done with email for the day. Here are the full instructions.

Like Klinger’s methodology from #7, you’ll categorize incoming emails into folders labeled “Yesterbox,” “Today,” “Action Required,” “Awaiting Response,” and so on. As new emails come in, you’ll label them accordingly. But as for actually dealing with these emails — that’s left for a specific time on your calendar that you’ve designated for handling yesterday’s emails. In the end, your Yeseterbox is a to-do list with static tasks.

It’s that freeing sense of completion that makes this method so appealing — but be wary that if your job requires you to tackle emails as they come in, this may not be the best method for you.

10) Set up filters when you go on vacation.

Vacations are awesome, but coming back to a jam-packed inbox is … not so awesome. One way to manage your email workflow while you’re gone for long periods of time is to set up filters.

This is an approach HubSpot’s Director of Marketing Rebecca Corliss found worked really well for her when she went on her month-long sabbatical. Corliss was working in Gmail, but you can adapt this method for most email clients. In short, here’s what she did:

1. She created a new folder for her vacation (“Spain Sabbatical 2015”).
2. She set up a filter that recognized any emails being sent to *@hubspot.com. By putting the asterisk there instead of her actual email, she was able to capture not only emails that were sent to her work email address, but also emails sent to the company aliases she was on.
3. She added a second filter that deleted irrelevant emails — for example, all the daily and weekly digests she expected to receive, like metrics updates.
4. When she returned, she strategically handled all her unread emails. For example, she searched for emails she wanted to respond to first by conducting key searches for her manager’s email address.

Once these more time-sensitive messages are addressed, she blocked time to go through the remaining emails and respond only to the ones that were absolutely necessary. Here are the full instructions.

11) Block time to get back to inbox zero.

Dedicating specific chunks of time to get back to inbox zero isn’t just for when you return from vacation. It should be something you tackle in short batches on a daily basis, and in larger chunks every week or so, depending how much new email you receive.

The purpose of batching email? So you aren’t handling emails as they arrive. That can be a serious productivity killer, and can pull you away from projects and tasks that are more important than a perfectly clean inbox.

On a daily basis, limit yourself to dealing with new emails during fixed periods each day. For example, HubSpot Demand Generation Manager Amanda Sibley physically blocks off an hour in the morning and an hour in the evening on her calendar for getting her inbox in order. Do what works for you. 

12) Use keyboard shortcuts.

To make the process of reading, replying to, archiving, and deleting emails a lot faster (and generally more enjoyable), take advantage of any keyboard shortcuts your email client offers. Here are tips for keyboard shortcuts in Gmail and Outlook. If you use a different email client, do a quick Google search for the name of your email client + “keyboard shortcuts.”

Keyboard Shortcuts in Gmail:

First thing’s first: You’ll need to activate keyboard shortcuts. To do this:

1. Click the gear icon in the upper right-hand corner and choose “Settings.”
2. Click the “General” tab, find “Keyboard shortcuts,” and select “Keyboard shortcuts on.” Scroll down and click “Save Changes.”
3. Then, go back to “Settings” via that gear icon, click on the “Labs” tab, and find “Custom keyboard shortcuts” (by Alan S). Choose “Enable.” Scroll down and click “Save Changes.”

Once custom keyboard shortcuts are turned on, a new tab will appear in your Settings called “Keyboard Shortcuts.” Head over there to learn the default keyboard shortcuts and customize them if you’d like.

Keyboard Shortcuts in Outlook:

Outlook doesn’t let you customize keyboard shortcuts, but they have a heck of a lot to choose from. Here’s the full list, and below are some favorites:

• Create a new message: ⌘ + N (Mac); Ctrl + N (PC)
• Send an open message: ⌘ + Return (Mac); Ctrl + Return (PC)
• Save an open message and store it in Drafts: ⌘ + S (Mac); Ctrl + S (PC)
• Forward a message: ⌘ + J (Mac); Ctrl + J (PC)
• Display the next message: Control + ]
• Display the previous message: Control + [
• Delete the selected message: Delete
• Mark selected messages as read: ⌘ + T (Mac); Ctrl + T (PC)

Looking for more ideas for gaining and maintaining control of your email? Here are 11 inbox organization tools to try, as well as four solutions to getting “inbox zero” based on your personality.

What other ways have you gotten to inbox zero? Share with us in the comments.

85% of ecommerce brands are looking to add value to customers beyond discounts and promotions. Yet, 97% of rewards programs are transaction-based.

Giving discounts to attract customers is often a knee-jerk reaction to boost sales. But competing on price is a race to the bottom.  Most ecommerce businesses can’t survive by giving deep discounts to one-time customers. To succeed in the long term, you have to shift your focus to customer retention.

Loyalty programs can drive high margin repeat business, but most programs fail to add value to the customer experience. To get real value from your customer loyalty program, you need to go beyond the discounts.

Rewarding your customer for engagement or shared values creates a powerful connection that results in loyalty and repeat business.

The infographic below from Selfstartr shows that loyalty programs are often misunderstood by brands. The anatomy of a profitable rewards program is one that avoids discount hunters and focuses on building relationships.

Launching a new program at your school is a huge and exciting undertaking. Yet it isn’t merely about creating the new curriculum, or finding the right faculty to deliver the program. Your biggest responsibility is finding students for it and getting them to enroll.

You’ve been thinking a lot about how to market this new program. The good news is you’ve got building blocks already in place that you can leverage. All it takes is uncovering them and suddenly you’ve got a launching off point for your marketing efforts.

Here’s our list of inbound marketing priorities so you can make the most of these building blocks as the foundation of your new assets designed to promote the new program. 

Marketing Must-Do’s Checklist for Promoting a New Program

Build Personas Specific for the Program 

A new program is definitely one of those events that should trigger new persona development. Start with some of the information you already know about the persona of your institution’s general ideal student. Then do your research to refine the personas for this program. Talk to:

• The program director or manager who created the program and got it approved. They will certainly have an on-the-ground view of the type of student the program was created for and what their needs and priorities are.
• The admissions officer responsible for the program, who can provide perspective on what questions potential applicants are asking and what factors loom largest as they make their enrollment decision.
• Academic and career counselors who are steering prospective and current students into the right programs suited to their interests, abilities, and strengths. These can be counselors both at your school and at some of your feeder schools.

Don’t overlook the students themselves, or their parents! Research social media to hear from students enrolled in similar programs, or talking about enrolling. Visit relevant blogs and forums to read through the comments section. Note the language they’re using, as well as the concerns and preferences they express about researching and selecting the right school or program.  For more info on creating personas for your school, check out this post. 

Craft Messages that Resonate with your Personas

Personas in hand, you job now turns to content creation. Here’s how to take the personas you’ve developed, and put them to work:

• Clarify where your new program fits in your school’s current landscape. Does it fill a gap? Or expand a popular study area that needs fresh, new challenges?
  • Use how the program is related to, or different from, other school programs, to give prospective students a context that’s appealing to them. For example, let’s say you have two different programs you want to feature, astronomy and history. Your messages would be different for each. You could tout technology in the classroom for one, and access to online research tools for the other.
  • Review what you’ve learned about your past messaging for related or similar areas. Now you’re not starting from scratch wondering what language, style, and content will engage prospective students.
• Align your new, very specific messaging for the new program, with the established message priorities you’ve set for the school at large. In other words, make sure the two messages don’t conflict or contradict each other. If one of your key messages for the school is to tell the stories of your instructors’ real-word expertise and experience, then show how that applies in your new program.
• Outline the flow of the main messages you want to deliver at each stage of the enrollment cycle, including the messages designed to draw prospective students into the next phase.

Develop Unique Content that Drives Eyes and Enrollments

Put your new personas and messaging at the center of all the content developed specifically for this program. 

• Select your primary persona. Do you need to quickly start showing enrollment? Then select the persona most likely to be looking at your initial enrollment date.
• Build your smart lists criteria so you know exactly what information you want to capture about website visitors showing interest in this program.

Create Content For Each Stage in the Enrollment Journey

 Generate Awareness

• Research and create your working list of SEO keywords
• Will you run a PPC campaign to raise awareness?
• Set up program page within school website
• Does any aspect of the program lend itself to a creating a microsite? If it’s filling a gap, what gap is it filling? Does it prepare students for a field expected to have high job growth over the next decade? A microsite exploring an issue that attracts people interested in the area of study — and provides an opportunity to get them into your contact database — may be worth the investment.
• Write up a list of blog topics and create your editorial calendar. Use your research from the persona stage for keywords to create your topic list, and consider setting up a category tag for the program.

 Convert Strangers into Leads

• What is your key piece of premium content that will convert visitors into contacts? Look to your persona research to find the most compelling question to answer.
• Set up the download form on the program’s webpage. Do you want to create a separate landing page for the premium content offer as well?
• Outline an email nurture campaign that will move contacts into actors. What different actions do you want them to take? Read about the practicums available in the program? Set up an interview appointment? Go to a “meet and greet” with the program faculty?
• What criteria move a contact to the smart list ready to receive application CTAs?
• Develop your follow-up sequence to move accepted applicants to enrolled student.

You can find some email tips for the admissions process here.

Leverage Existing Assets and Channels

There are lots of ways you can take existing content and re-use it, again and again, as well as ways to draw people’s attention to your programs. Here are three sure-fire cost-effective ways to do that:

• Add special announcements on every relevant asset with a link to the program webpage or landing page:
• Website homepage
• Community newsletter(s) to students, faculty and alumni → get your word of mouth network going!
• Rotate announcements focusing on your different messages through your social media channels. What fun, attention-grabbing content can you create specifically for social media? Does your school have an active Snapchat channel? Have one of the program faculty or student in a related program create a Story showing their day on campus.

Freshen up some older blog posts that will interest these personas.

• Insert a program keyword into the text.
• Tag it with the program’s category.
• Add a new CTA offering premium content related to the program for download.
• Add a link to the program’s webpage.
• Re-promote and distribute these posts with applicable keywords and hashtags.

Audit your existing content to find repurposing material

• Look at content for a related area of interest or addressing similar concerns and priorities expressed by this program’s personas; prioritize content with a track record of success
• Re-promote and distribute content as-is with new hashtags and headlines
• Re-work the content, or pieces of it, customizing it as a new piece of content for the program

Our “must-do” checklist is part to-do list/ part issues to consider. Step through the entire list to design a campaign plan that will attract the attention of the right applicants and hook them in with awesome, informative content they can’t bear to ignore.

This post originally appeared on Agency Post. To read more content like this, subscribe to Agency Post.

Having trouble attracting and retaining top talent? You’re not alone. 

With competition for talent increasing, a lot of businesses are renewing their focus on company culture and employee engagement. But for a company culture to exist, management must be focused on employee happiness — and this isn’t an easy task.

Deloitte outlined 20 engagement factors companies need to consider and excel at to keep employees engaged. And most organizations are starting from a place of weakness: Gallup found in 2014 that 13% of all employees are “highly engaged” and 26% are “actively disengaged.”

To start, businesses need a better idea of how happy, fulfilled, challenged, and dedicated employees are. They need to understand the health of their company culture and how employees perceive the organization. They also need a system for eliciting feedback and tracking satisfaction and issues over time. Only with this information can leadership address issues, make changes, and improve their employee engagement. 

To get you started gathering this information, we’ve put together a list of some of the best employee feedback and culture tools. Check them out to see which one might help you make improvements in your own office. 

10 Employee Review & Feedback Tools to Consider

1) 15Five

Employees take 15 minutes to answer a survey from their managers, and managers need five minutes to review: That’s the basic idea behind the platform. But the tool provides a lot of other useful features. Managers can create custom survey questions (15Five provides a library of valuable question prompts), set different reviewers for different employees, and send along answers to other people in the organization who need to see the feedback or would be responsible for enacting change, such as a hiring rep. You can create groups within the system if you manage multiple teams, which allows you to ask company-wide while also team-specific questions. The app also has a section for goals and accomplishments so that employees can list out the important tasks they plan to accomplish by next week, helping to keep people accountable.

2) Culture Amp

Culture Amp provides tools to run performance reviews and pulse and culture surveys, and managers can review data based on the lifecycle stage of their employees — from candidates to onboarding to exit — or by demographics or time frame. It also has a reporting feature that performs a driver analysis, so you can see the most important “drivers” for engagement and happiness. Account managers of the system can set up teams, so that personalized questions are sent to specific employees and only the right managers have access to the reports. 

3) TinyPulse

TinyPulse makes it easy to create staff pulse surveys so that you know exactly how engaged and happy your team members are. The platform sends out one question per week — they recommend sending yes or no, scale or NPS, or open-ended questions. Answers are anonymous, and managers can pull insightful reports by teams. In addition, employees can send colleagues “cheers” to show their appreciation and send suggestions for improvements to the company and its policies. It’s a simple app, but it’s all you need to stay current on the health of your company culture. (Full disclosure: HubSpot is a TinyPulse customer.)

4) Weekdone

Weekdone is an advanced employee feedback and progress tracking platform. The default is to have employees fill out information about their plans for the week, progress on projects, and problems. It can also be customized with specific questions and prompts. Weekdone integrates with Asana, Basecamp, and JIRA, allowing managers to better analyze the progress and productivity of team members. It also provides reporting on alignment between the employee’s objectives and the company’s goals. 

5) Subcurrent

For those teams that ignore email but have plenty to say on Slack, this integration is an easy way to quickly get an opinion on a company event or policy. You simply log in with Slack, type the poll command, and then you receive a unique URL to customize your poll. There are paid options for turning anonymity off, asking open-ended questions, or for allowing users to select more than one option. 

6) Impraise

This is a full-featured employee review, feedback, and peer praise platform. Impraise can help managers set up reviews and ask key employees for quantitative and qualitative feedback on a staff member, as well as gather feedback on their own management performance from their direct reports. A unique feature is its key strengths dashboard, where employees and managers can list out the skills for the employee’s role and then track feedback on that skill and measure the proficiency of the employee over time, providing them with a roadmap for professional development. 

7) RoundPegg

RoundPegg is a custom survey tool that polls your team members on eight areas — such as job fit, expectations, growth and development, trust, etc. — that have been shown to align with employee engagement. It then provides you with recommendations to improve your score in weak and failing areas based on the culture types of your employees. You can use the tool to send short pulse surveys for feedback on an initiative or to gauge happiness and satisfaction. The company also offers products and services aligned with hiring for culture fit and determining your company’s individual culture.

8) Reflektive

Managers can conduct yearly, quarterly, or even monthly performance reviews through the platform. It also has a feature where you list company and team goals so that your direct reports always know what they should be working towards. Employees can provide feedback to other team members through Reflektive, in addition to being able to provide responses to manager-controlled morale polls. 

9) 6Q

Washington-based agency BAM Creative designed this tool that lets managers ask six questions each week. Supervisors can choose from a question bank or add their own prompts. Employees can send virtual “high fives” to their peers to recognize a job well done, and the platform lets you pull reports on past survey questions to get a better idea of how employee engagement is trending. 

10) Hppy

Hppy helps you understand what factors are affecting your employees’ moods and tracks them over time. Managers can customize questions, but users can only reply with on of three moods: happy, ok, or sad. Managers can request meetings from the app if they notice a downward or worrying trend in an employee’s responses, and you can send thank-you cards to staff to motivate and inspire their work. Managers can also calculate their team’s or company’s HppyIndex or happiness index and use this in reports or display it on a screen in your office. 

How do you collect employee feedback? Share your best tips in the comments section below.

The past few years have been exciting ones for great design.

Some of the web design trends from last year have proven themselves popular enough to stick around in 2016, like flat design, background videos, and robust mobile app design. More importantly, we’ve seen the rise of a few new trends that marketers and designers alike need to stay on top of, such as card-based interface design.

Which design trends should we be keeping an eye out for this year? Catch up on what’s popular in the design world — and what’s shaping up to be the next big thing — with this infographic from Coastal Creative.