How Much of Your Inbox Is the Same Five Emails?

For most small businesses the inbox is where the evening goes. Not because any single email is hard, but because there are eleven of them and they all want answering after you have finished the actual work.

Before deciding what to do about that, it is worth finding out what is actually in there. The answer surprises most people.

Open your sent folder and read the last thirty replies you wrote to customers. For each one, note roughly what it was about. Not the detail, just the category.

Almost everybody who does this finds the same thing: four or five categories cover the overwhelming majority. Do you cover my area. What does that cost roughly. When could you come. Can we move the appointment. What happens on the day.

The rest, the genuinely one-off emails needing your judgement or your knowledge, are usually a small minority. They are also the ones that matter most, and they are queued behind everything else.

The repetitive ones are not hard, so they get postponed. You are mid-job, you will do it later, later becomes the evening.

By then you are tired and you are writing the same answer you wrote on Tuesday, slightly worse, because nobody writes their best work at ten at night.

Meanwhile the customer who emailed at nine in the morning has spent the whole day not hearing from you. For anything competitive, they have probably emailed someone else too, and whoever answered first is now in front.

Saved replies, templates or canned responses in Gmail and Outlook are worth setting up, and most people never do. Write your five best answers once, properly, when you are not tired, and stop rewriting them from scratch.

Add an auto-reply that says when you actually respond. "I am usually on site during the day and reply to emails each evening" is worth more than silence, because it stops somebody assuming they have been ignored.

Be clear about the limit though. Templates make the typing faster. They do not decide which template applies, personalise it, or stop the job landing on you at the end of the day. You are still the bottleneck, just a slightly quicker one.

The two get confused, and they solve opposite ends of the same journey.

A chatbot works on your website, before anyone contacts you. It answers the person who is still deciding, so they never need to send the email at all.

An email agent works on what has already arrived in your inbox, including everything that comes from people who found you some other way entirely: a recommendation, your van, a directory, Facebook. Those never touch your website, so no chatbot will ever see them.

Most businesses have both problems. They are worth thinking about separately.

It reads what comes in, answers the routine ones the way you would, drafts a reply for the borderline ones, and flags the few that genuinely need you. You go from writing every email to approving a handful.

The control is the part worth being fussy about. The sensible way to start is with everything as a draft for your approval, and only letting the routine ones send automatically once it has earned that. The rules are yours and can change whenever you want.

Anything it does not understand gets flagged rather than guessed at, with the context summarised, because a confused reply to a customer is worse than a short wait. The replies are in your voice, built from your information, sent from your own address, and it works with the Gmail or Outlook you already use rather than asking you to move.

It is bespoke and quoted per job, based on the volume and kind of email you actually deal with.

Nobody started a business because they wanted to get better at email. The reason this is worth fixing is not tidiness, it is that fast replies win work and slow ones lose it, quietly, without anybody telling you why.

And the emails that genuinely need you get you, properly, rather than at the end of a queue at ten at night.