Mastering Email Overload as an Interior Designer: How to Get Out Of All Those Emails
Do any of these sound familiar?
“I have 456 unopened emails in my inbox right now”
OR
"Clients are constantly emailing me."
OR
"My clients only want ME to respond to their issues, even though I have a team."
Yeah. I get it. Happens all the time. Clients want YOU and only YOU, even if it means higher billing, longer lead times, more team communication, greater inefficiencies, etc. You chose the profession of interior design because you love solving creative problems. But email seems to take up most of your workday sometimes, right?
A 2019 study conducted by Adobe found that workers spend an average of 209 minutes checking and responding to their work email during the workday. That’s three-and-a-half hours out of a typical eight-hour workday!!! (I know, your work day might be nine, ten, or more sometimes - EEK!). With email correspondence occupying almost half an average workday, it’s no wonder designers feel like they’re spinning their wheels without ever getting their actual work done!
PS: People spend an additional nearly two-and-a-half hours per day checking their personal email! Added together, that is nearly six hours of just EMAIL!!!!! Have you ever spent an entire workday doing NOTHING but reading and answering emails!?!?!?! I know I have!!! ← In fact, my Fridays are dedicated solely to emails and Office Hours. Gulp.
If you feel that your time would be better spent on project execution rather than emptying your inbox every day (which I imagine is true for any creative business owner), there ARE ways to more effectively delegate email correspondence tasks. Because guess what? The best part of owning your own business is you get to call the shots. Woo hoo!
The first step is to consider yourself the creative director of your interior design business, rather than the workhorse. This will be much easier for those with longer established businesses who already have other team members (besides the owner) on board, and more challenging for those with newer businesses that may still be a one-person operation.
If you are operating a single-person design firm (you!!!) and you are dealing with the issue of needing to hire support (which is a great thing, it means you have a steady inflow of work!!), your first inclination might be to hire a junior designer to help you with project work.
That might not be the best option for you. With a new designer on board, yes, you can unload many design-related tasks. But that means you’ll have MORE design projects and MORE clients → which means more reading and responding to emails each day.
We typically recommend hiring an administrative support person (part-time, contract, or full-time) rather than a designer. That person can handle your orders, invoicing, record-keeping, and client communication duties, freeing you up to do what you do best: the design delivery and design execution parts of the business. THAT is where your focus should be because you are the one who can bring all the elements of a thoughtful design together into a beautiful space that thrills your clients (not to mention: creating designs is what brings in revenue for your company!).
Knowing when to hire another person can be tough. Bring someone in too soon, and you may not have sufficient work to delegate. Wait too long to bring on an additional person for support, and you will feel too buried to be able to handle their training and oversight.
Wondering when the best time to hire is? Check out our complimentary resource.
So, whether you have newly hired administrative support on board, or a seasoned team to support you and your clients, the key is to assign the right tasks to the right people and to set up the correct processes so you can stop spending six hours per day working to clear your email inbox.
Here's how to get out of your inbox and back to your design work.
CREATE A DESIGNATED POINT OF CONTACT - THAT’S NOT YOU
To get things started off on the right foot, create a support@yourcompanyname.com email address which will be managed by a designated customer service contact person. Then have any email correspondence that is sent to a new prospect or client sent from that support@ email address. This way responses are handled by your support person, not you, AND there is less chance for scope creep (a client isn’t going to ask your office manager for design advice, but you know they’ll ask you for advice any chance they can get).
HAVE ALL EMAILS SENT FROM YOUR SUPPORT EMAIL - NOT YOU
At client onboarding do the same. Have all onboarding materials (welcome email, Welcome Packet, client questionnaire) sent from that support@ email address. In the onboarding welcome email, reiterate that any correspondence can be sent to that address. And introduce the people on your team who will be the key designer or designers on the project. Clarify who does what on your team.
This is all part of educating your client about your process. You cannot be frustrated with a client who emails you instead of the person you want them to communicate with if you haven’t told them that! They are playing in your playground, and you just need to, very cordially, tell them how things operate in your sphere.
INTRODUCE YOUR CLIENT’S POINT OF CONTACT WITH CONFIDENCE
At the project kick-off meeting, YOU, the owner should communicate to each new client that — yes, you will be overseeing their project — but that so-and-so in your office is their designated point person. This may be your lead designer, or maybe it’s your client experience coordinator. Doesn’t matter. The whole point is to designate someone other than you as the main point of contact throughout the project and do it in a way that gives your clients confidence. You could even throw something in there about how they’ll get the quickest response from your team.
DON’T USE YOUR EMAIL FOR ORDERS
Also create an orders@yourcompanyname.com email address to be used for any vendor correspondence, including product inquiries, purchase orders, product payments, or vendor questions. There are three benefits.
All of these emails and their responses will stay out of your business inbox.
When searching for past correspondence regarding a product order, you will not have to sift through ALL the emails that come and go through your business email. They will all be attached to this address.
When you do bring someone on to manage your orders, you won’t have to give them access to your inbox or change the email addresses on alllllll your vendor accounts and logins so they route to them (gulp!); they can simply use the orders@ login to access the separate inbox on their own. Phew.
USE AN APPOINTMENT SCHEDULER TO AUTOMATICALLY SEND REMINDERS
Use an appointment scheduler to send automatic emails on your behalf (or from your support@ email). Appointment confirmations. Appointment reminders. Appointment recap emails with the next steps. Plug the templates in once and it’s like you have your very own personal assistant.
SET DESIGNATED OFFICE HOURS FOR RESPONDING TO EMAILS
Designate email hours. The creative process takes deep focus work and blocks of uninterrupted time (it’s why some designers I work with who have teams specifically tell their staff NOT to come in on certain days or before certain times so they can focus on design!). Once you have designated email hours, include them in your contract, your welcome guide, and in your email signature and/or auto-responder. This way when someone emails you on a Monday and you respond to emails on Tues/Thurs, they’ll get your autoresponder and know you’ll respond on Tuesday (and if you have a support team, they’ll see that they can simply email that person instead to get a quicker response).
SEND COMPREHENSIVE EMAILS AND GIVE CLIENTS THE INFO THEY NEED
And, this one is key: be sure that each time you do email your clients, you are providing them with all the information they need (remember: they don’t know what they don’t know, and have likely never done this before!). Stop making them pull information out of you email by email.
Include all the information they might need in each email: what is coming up, what they can expect from you, what you need from them, how long this next phase takes, and any other key milestones.
I see time and time again emails that have very little information and then the client is left with tons of questions (resulting in several emails going out to the designer) OR, NO emails at all going out during typical quiet times, and then the client starts to get frustrated and anxious and then starts to take things into their own hands, which results in an influx of emails with more questions and concerns. (Check out our client experience email templates: designers have said by using them their clients know exactly what to expect each step of the way and send waaaaay fewer emails. Woop woop!)
STOP SENDING EMAILS TO YOUR TEAM
For internal communication, I strongly suggest Asana (or a similar project management software) for corresponding with your team. Unlike standard means of email communication, Asana allows all correspondence regarding a single issue to be in one place (meaning, if we’re working on the Smith project, all correspondence for the Smith project will be right inside that project and the related task). You don’t have to search through the last two months’ emails to find the one email you need. Any emails pertaining to that topic can be found together. It also allows you to track task assignments and completion dates and connects those tasks to the correspondence that relates. Everything is all in a single place — files, links, tasks, conversation history, due dates, etc.
My team and I use Asana exclusively and maybe send one traditional email or fewer per week to each other because Asana works so well for 99% of our communication needs. We use email when something comes in from a client or prospect and it needs to be forwarded, we receive an interesting article that would be helpful for someone on the team. Otherwise, everything else happens in our Asana. In fact, I was talking with one of my team members this past week and she said something along the lines of “we would not be able to do our job if we had to correspond through email. Could you imagine tracking all those emails and trying to stay organized? It would be so inefficient and time-consuming. How do people NOT use Asana?” Haha. :-) Clearly, we all love Asana.
Thinking of using Asana for your business? Grab my free downloadable resource that walks you through how we use it with our designers.
Still need more help? Check out my Asana Workshop and learn how to run your interior design business seamlessly using Asana.
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What would you do with your newfound time if you could get out of your inbox? Market for new clients? Streamline other key processes in your business? Maybe spend a bit of time with family? I hope all of the above!
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