Even with the high rise of social media, email is still one of the primary methods of communication, especially in the businesses scene.
Today, there are over 3.9 billion active email addresses, and the number is estimated to rise to 4.8 billion in 2024, representing more than half of the world’s population. That gives entrepreneurs a reason to leverage emails and specifically shared inboxes if they want to grow their businesses.
But What Is a Shared Inbox?
A shared inbox refers to a mailbox that allows multiple users to send and read email messages. In other instances, companies can use shared inboxes to share a common calendar, making it easy for all employees to view and schedule work shifts or vacation time.
Although a shared mailbox is ideal for business communications, managing everything can sometimes become overwhelming. Fortunately, introducing a shared inbox management software can help streamline operations, improve customer experiences within a company and allow scalability.
5 Benefits of a Shared Inbox
- Simply Workflow for Your team
One of the most direct advantages of using a shared inbox is that it helps you to eliminate smaller tasks. With a shared inbox, every team member can see all incoming messages, so there will be no need to forward messages.
A shared mailbox will also allow automatic sorting of messages, labeling of emails, and collaboration tools within a single platform. That way, your team will have more time to focus on more productive tasks.
- It Reduces Response Time with Automated Messages
Customers always expect businesses to respond to their emails promptly. This may be challenging, especially if you have many incoming customer inquiries quickly.
Fortunately, a shared mailbox makes it easy to instantly send automated responses to customers. In other words, you can analyze your customers’ most frequently sent responses and then use that information to create and save canned responses in your dashboard so you can send them to customers at any time.
- Encourages Team Transparency
It is easy to see what other team members are doing with a shared inbox. Managers can see who is sending and replying to messages, and they can read what other team members are sending in email replies. This helps managers offer effective feedback and promotes accurate metrics.
Transparency guarantees accountability, pushing each worker to do their part the best way they know how. Also, it ensures two members do not reply to the same email.
- They Boost Productivity and Response times
With a shared inbox, everyone gets to know what’s going on in the company or within their department. Thus, it enables teams to make better replies and reach each other. If the response time slows down, the shared inbox allows members to strategize. Groups can talk directly about which emails should be prioritized for faster responses.
In addition, a shared inbox enables teams to divide work easily. Simply put, colleagues can share updates on their ongoing projects on a shared mailbox, enabling everybody to provide value to your business.
- They Empower Tracking of Conversations
Tracking conversations is important as it lets you know how things are running up in your business.
For example, you may want to track how customers move through the acquisition funnel. With a shared mailbox, team members can access all emails in their department, making it easy to follow up conversations and track projects.
A shared inbox also enables you to troubleshoot in case anything goes wrong. You can search for past messages from a shared inbox and pinpoint precisely what went wrong and which team member sent the specific email.