5 Reasons Your Firm Needs Email Management

For your business to run effectively and efficiently, you need a record of both internal and external communications in whatever the form: paper, fax, email, electronic forms, etc.

In small and medium-sized enterprises, most employees devise their own filing systems for documents and email, which are often inconsistent, incomplete and with information that is not available to others who may need access. These organizations need a document management solution.

Companies that utilize document management have a centrally managed repository for important company documents that can be accessed remotely, which facilitates collaboration and workflow. However, the use and effectiveness of document management is largely based on having a complete documentation record, which needs to include email but rarely does—until now with the advent of email correspondence management.

Five Reasons Your Firm Needs Email Management
The points below illustrate why you need to consider utilizing email correspondence management:

  1. 83% of all communications are electronic. With more than 55% of business professionals and 85% of Millennials having smart phones, electronic communications will continue to grow. Whether you want to or not, you must be able to engage a customer or prospect via the communications channel they prefer.
  2. 90% of electronic communications are via email, and frequently with attachments. Email is the preferred method for business correspondence because the sender and the recipient have an accessible record of what was agreed upon, assuming you have a storage methodology that enables you to find sent and received emails easily.
  3. 37% of business professionals retain messages according to their content. Not all email is business critical and end-users are most knowledgeable about what needs to be retained (e.g., a client requested change that will affect the budget) and what doesn’t (e.g., the announcement of this year’s holiday party).
  4. 31% of users are keeping email indefinitely, and 26% retaining it less than 120 days. Neither of these are a good practice, let alone a “best practice.” Keeping emails indefinitely leads to unnecessary and increasingly large expenditures on storage. Likewise, deleting all emails after a certain period of time (i.e., 120 days) will:
    1. Encourage employees to store business critical email on their hard drives before it is deleted
    2. Result in the deletion of business-critical emails that should have been archived; and/or
    3. Cause the firm to fail to meet legal retention requirements in the advent of a lawsuit.
  5. 67% of companies use maximum mailbox sizes as a method for creating de facto retention limits. Similar to deleting emails after a certain time period, setting de facto retention limits on mailbox sizes opens the company up to the same risks of legal consequences, financial consequences, loss or organizational memory, loss of accountability and failure to provide useful service to customers.

The first step is to have your legal, IT and/or records management departments determine an effective email management protocol for your firm based on industry standards and requirements and your individual business needs. Then you’ll need a tool like Email Manager to incorporate these emails into your document management system.

Two Questions

  1. What actions are you and your firm taking to ensure that you have a sound email management policy in place?
  2. What is your plan to ensure that all relevant email is being effectively captured, managed and stored with other important records?

If “none” and/or “I don’t know” are your answers, contact us for a free consultation on Email Manager.