Inspired by the best-selling book, I decided it was time to clean up my retail email newsletters with a few guidelines.
You need to put yourself in the driving seat when you decide on the time you spend reading shopping emails and marketing material. You can always visit the online shop when you feel like, not when someone sends you an email.
If your current shopping habits are dictated by glossy flyers and weekly emails you’ll end up just chasing shiny objects and postponing achieving your long-term financial goals.
1. Create a folder called “Things to buy”
While you are culling your emails, you might like to create a folder called “things to buy” or “wish list”. Move any of the emails you want to keep to this centralised spot.
2. Cull by email title
Afterwards, you’ll need to cull out all of the old emails, especially the ones with time-sensitive discounts or sales. It is best to sort your emails by sender and do deletions in bulk. You don’t even need to email the open them individually.
3. Select the best email about a topic area
If you like visiting the cinema, then select one email newsletter from your most frequented cinema and delete the other film-related emails.
4. Select 3 to 10 Favourite Shops to Keep
Write down a list of your favourite shops – the ones you want to keep subscribing to with the reason why next to them. For example, I’ll often subscribe to an email newsletter to receive a discount code – but then I probably won’t be back to that shop. Another reason I subscribe to retail newsletters is that I want to buy a certain product. However, it’s a better use of my time to add the item to my wish list in Evernote rather than continually receive email newsletters of unrelated products that I don’t want.
Select the shops to keep what you are reading about – because you frequent them often or you plan to buy something from them in the next 6 months.
5. Be disloyal
Joining loyalty programs might make you feel like you’re part of an exclusive club, but these days they usually aren’t worth the effort. Unless you love the brand, cut up any of your remaining loyalty cards and unsubscribe from their emails.
6. One spot for your shop updates
Think about the best place for you to keep up to date with your favourite shops. Is it via their paper flyer, your favourite apps such as the new shopping App Sweep, magazine or fashion blog, Instagram, Facebook or their email newsletter? You don’t need to see the same message three times from different sources.
I hope these ideas help you to keep your email focused and uncluttered. Please leave a comment, if you have any great strategies around email organisation to share.