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Welcome to Coffee Powered Systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome, overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host, Miranda Merten. Welcome back to Coffee Powered Systems. Today, I want to talk to you about your email inbox because there is a big sore spot with email.

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Our email inbox is like something that we're super protective of, yet somehow it always ends up overflowing with stuff we don't want. I have about a half a dozen email accounts that includes a personal account, my business account, and then I have one for each of my main clients. So whenever I have a big ongoing client, I usually get set up within their organization as my own account Miranda at whatever their company name is. So I have one for each of those clients.

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And that's a lot of email. That's a lot of inboxes to check every day. And just in my business account, I get about 100 emails a day. And as I was checking email this week, I realized that there's a lot of stuff in there and a lot of accounts in there. And I haven't done an unsubscribe day in a while.

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Do you do unsubscribe days in your business or even just with your personal email accounts? If not, I want you to listen up to this episode. I'm going to tell you why you should have unsubscribe days, what they are, and a little action that you can take on it just this weekend. It won't take very long. You can incorporate it into your weekly or your monthly review and clean up your inbox once and for all.

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And sidebar, I'm going to take a sidebar here for a second, as I'm talking about email inboxes, some people have fake or alias email accounts that they use just for their junk mail or their opt in emails. Listen, I can't be bothered with all that, it's too much to keep up with. Like I said, I already have enough email addresses and email accounts to keep up with. I don't have time to be putting fake emails in to opt in forms.

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If I want something, I'm signing up for a reason. If I don't want it, then I don't want you to have my email.

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If you are really just joining someone's email list just to get their free thing, then do yourself and them a favor. Just get the free thing and unsubscribe. If that's what you're looking for. Just unsubscribe when you're done and when you've gotten it, because they want your fake email just as much as you want to be on their list. Neither of you want it, right. So do them a favor. Don't make someone keep paying for your fake email to keep on their contact list, because we do have to pay for all of the contacts that are in our account.

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Right. You get a certain number of contacts with your email marketing plan. The more you get, the higher your rate goes with, you know, with most of them. That's that's how it goes. So do them a favor. Get off their list. If you don't want to be on it, if you're immediately putting their things to the junk bin, just leave the list. OK, rant over. Now back to opening up my emails this week.

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What I did, I opened my inbox and as I scanned through all the messages, I take the boxes box after box and I mass archived a bunch of stuff. Of course, after I look through and you can typically scan your email inbox and see what's important and what's not. Or maybe you see certain people and you know that you want to read that from them. So after you scan through those and you uncheck everything and check the ones you don't want, I mass archive everything right.

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Marked them as read and archive. And I noticed that I haven't opened emails from a lot of accounts in a while and I'm staying on the list just because I like the person. Have you ever done that like you are on somebody's list? Either they're your friend or you just got on their list for a long time. You've been a long time subscriber. Or maybe you just listen FOMO, right? I sometimes say just in case they send something cool one day.

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Right. I got something from them. I really enjoyed it. Or I like the person. I like their personality and I don't want to miss out on something down the line just in case they send something that I might be even remotely interested in. What are some of the reasons we stay on people's email list? You want to hear their personal stories? Maybe you have no intention of buying, but you just want to follow their story because you like them.

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It's like following someone on Instagram. Maybe you don't really want to buy from them and you're probably not going to buy from them. But you like their personality, you like their attitude, you like their feed.

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It's kind of the same thing when you are on someone's email list, you like their little funny stories or the anecdotes or their family vacation photos, whatever it is. You like this person and you stay on the list. What about you think like their email list gets the first dibs on things. If they have new products out, they send out to their email list or they announce things to their email list that they don't generally announce everywhere else. Maybe they don't put it on social media.

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You have the special insider's thing. Or if you are signed up for something like maybe Marietje for Leo's email list because you know that you want to join B school the next year. She only opens that program once a year. So you didn't join it this year and you just missed the cut off and you want to stay on the list so that you know when it opens again. So things like that, you tend to stay on the email list for well, going back to the Marietje for Leo example, if it's that big of a program, trust me, you're going to know when it comes around.

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If you're not on her list to get the rest of her information all year long, then you probably don't need to be on that list. Maybe you can just add a filter so that her stuff gets directly archived into a folder and you can always go look at it later. But some of these big programs, they have a lot of affiliates. And trust me, if you're signed up to other people's email lists, you're going to know when these big programs open things like B school, try any of these big marketers.

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They always have big programs that they open once or twice a year and a lot of people are marketing them. So you typically will still be on the inside. And when their affiliates market it, they usually throw in something as a bundle. So you can kind of watch out for affiliate bundles and get the inside scoop that way as well.

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But I want you to think about. Your e-mail list. What does it look like, how many emails do you get every day? Is it worth your time and sanity to stay subscribed to all of these email lists? I'm guessing it's not. So what I want you to do, your action this week is going to be to get a handle on your email subscriptions. And I want you to choose one day, each week or each month to unsubscribe from your unwanted newsletters and those emails.

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So if you use folders or tags within your email system and for this one, in this case, I would recommend just using a folder and then instead of archiving the emails when they come in, I want you to file them into that folder. So you're going to create a new folder, name it unsubscribe or something similar to those lines. And whenever you go through that big, long email list every day, if you notice something that you're not quite wanting to stay on the list, go ahead and archive it into that unsubscribe folder, then on your unsubscribe day, whether that's going to be a Sunday or if you're going to do it the last day of every month, the first day of every month.

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However you want to do that, I want you to open up that unsubscribe box and go through each message. You're going to open up the message, scroll all the way down to the bottom and hit that unsubscribe button. Now, this won't take very long. It shouldn't take very long, depending on how many emails you have. It should definitely take like 20 minutes or less. If you're doing it every week, then definitely it'll just take you like five minutes to go through all those emails.

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And of course, the more you unsubscribe, the faster this process will be because you'll have less emails to unsubscribe from. If you do find that you have some of those lists that you do want to stay on, but you're not really opening their emails, you only open them when the subject line really is intriguing. Maybe you can use a tagging system for those and then have those tagged automatically as they come in and archived into a different folder as they come in.

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So that kind of keeps your email inbox clean. And then you can also use that unsubscribe day as your reading day so you can go through those separate folders and then see if there's anything in there that looks interesting. Now, if you are subscribed to some people that tend to run deals or sales or they have programs all the time, and you're genuinely interested in that, those are the things you want to keep in your inbox because you don't want to miss out on something that's like, oh, it's only a three day thing.

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And then five days later, you check the inbox and the deal has already passed. So definitely you want to keep those types of emails coming into your e-mail inbox. But the things that you haven't opened in like four months, because really I do have some that I haven't opened in a while. A lot of people don't send out scrubbing campaigns or cleaning campaigns, so just help them out, get off the list and save everybody the time and money.

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And once you've taken your 75 miles a day down to a good like twenty five, you're going to feel so much better and it's going to be a lot easier to see what is actually important. OK, that is it for today. So I want you to take actions on those emails this weekend and I will see you next time.

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Thanks for listening to Coffee Powered Systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode. Down in the show. Notes are on the website at mirandamerten.com. If you enjoyed this episode, rate and review it in iTunes or where you enjoy listening so others can find it too. And join me here next time.