Microsoft Outlook is an email program developed and provided by Microsoft for business and personal use. It is a comprehensive solution designed to supply you and your employees with everything you all need to communicate effectively in the workplace.
The user-friendly features of Outlook may not be obvious at first glance, but they can help you streamline communication and collaboration efforts and maximize the value of the solution. With these tricks in your company’s repertoire, you and your team will be supported by one of the most innovative business communication solutions on the market.
Tips for using Outlook efficiently:
1. Use the pin feature
You and your staff deal with important emails every day. But when schedules start to fill up, and clients start making additional requests, it can be easy to lose track of your vital messages. In these circumstances, taking advantage of the pin feature will allow you to organize your emails and relocate the most essential emails to the top of your inbox.
How to pin emails in Outlook:
- Place your cursor over the email that you wish to pin. The following icons should appear: An envelope, a flag, a pin, and a trash can.
- Select the pin. The email will be automatically moved to the top of your inbox.
- If you wish to remove the pinned message, click on the pin icon again. The email should return to its original place in your inbox.
According to Adobe, when checking work-related emails, people take “an average of 3.1 hours”. While this may not seem like a serious hit against workplace productivity, it can be distracting and force your staff to shift their attention away from deadline-driven tasks. Pinning emails can help create a hierarchy within an inbox, ensuring that urgent messages are always at the top of the message list.
2. Use an email template
In Outlook, email templates are predesigned messages that contain layouts and information that you can easily reuse for recurring exchanges. Easy to set up, a template is meant to serve as a foundation for an email. You can customize the template with additional information before sending it to its intended reader.
An email template offers various workplace benefits, such as:
- Saving you and your employees time.
- Increasing productivity and email efficiency.
- Promoting or marketing a standardized image and tone that you can control.
3. Schedule emails to send at specific times
Today’s businesses are no longer restricted to customers and stakeholders in their immediate vicinity (or even their time zone). Scheduling emails gives you the ability to control when the recipient receives your message, allowing you to contact them at times that are most beneficial to them and you.
To schedule a specific email in Outlook:
- Write your email.
- Click on the downward-facing arrow beside the “Send” button.
- Go to “Schedule send”.
- Choose either to send the email “Tomorrow morning” or “Sunday morning.” You can also choose to create your own time and date using the “Custom time” feature.
- After you have set your delivery date and time, click on “Send.” The email will sit in your “Drafts” folder until the scheduled time.
4. Utilize the calendar feature
Microsoft Outlook’s calendar feature can help you keep track of important dates and tasks. The calendar in Outlook is a powerful tool that syncs with Microsoft Teams (another of Microsoft’s business communication solutions), making it easy to book meetings and manage your business’s social and collaborative operations. In Outlook, you can access the calendar from the sidebar under the envelope icon.
5. Make additional folders in your inbox
Keeping control of your emails is key to staying organized. You can use Microsoft Outlook to create folders to categorize your emails and keep them easily accessible. These folders can be used for any purpose that streamlines communication management and productivity.
You can create folders by right-clicking a space under the “Folders” list in Outlook. Then, select “Create new folder”, write a name in the provided field, and hit “Save”. Or, you can simply select “Create new folder” at the bottom of the “Folders” list. On top of this, you can also develop rules that automatically send your emails into their intended folder, a process made stress-free with the help of a managed service provider.
6. Cover all bases with @mentions
@mentions is a feature in Outlook that allows you to add a person’s name to an email thread, notifying them of the email’s existence and drawing their attention to its content. @mentions are a useful tool for promoting transparency in your business’s emails and for keeping your team informed of important changes and developments.
To use the feature, type “@” into the message before typing the person’s name until they appear in the drop-down menu. Click on them, and they will be added to the message.
Update your business communication solutions with Outlook specialists
Microsoft Outlook is a foolproof email solution for organizations wanting to enhance their communications. It can be used to compose, send, receive, and manage critical work emails. This ensures messages are organized and up-to-date, keeping your employees well-informed of operations, and your customers satisfied.
The Microsoft consultants at Everconnect are experts in all facets of Outlook and its business communication solutions. The team can assist you with a range of supportive services, from implementing access control measures to showing your people how to store messages at the top of a folder for maximum efficiency. Contact us today to see how a secure, reliable email solution can revolutionize your workplace.
