The average professional spends 28% of the workday attending to emails. With so much time spent in the inbox each workday, one of the best ways to gain visibility on work-related activities and increase productivity is through real-time email notifications.
Real-time notifications are emails delivered to your inbox, alerting you about specific events as they unfold. These email alerts serve as instant updates, ensuring you are promptly informed about crucial events and actions as they happen.
This guide will explore how you can use email notifications to boost your productivity.
What Are Real-Time Email Notifications?
Real-time email notifications are alerts delivered straight to your inbox to inform you about important events and actions as they unfold. These notifications are designed to keep users promptly informed about important events or actions related to their accounts, activities, or interests.
Real-time notifications are generally trigger-based. That is, they are triggered by specific events. The user chooses what event triggers the notification. If the event occurs, the notification is automatically sent. For example, you may choose to be notified via email when there’s an update to a product of interest. Whenever the product is updated, you’ll automatically receive an email notification.
Also, the “real-time” in real-time email notifications means that these alerts are delivered instantly. The notifications are sent immediately after the specified event or action takes place, ensuring timely updates.
Benefits of Real-Time Email Notifications
Real-time email notifications offer many benefits, like:
Improved Productivity
Real-time notification enhances productivity. First, it helps you stay informed about important updates without having to check your inbox manually. This ensures you can focus on your tasks without worrying about missing an important message. And not manually checking your inbox minimizes interruptions from work, enhancing email productivity.
Also, real-time notifications help you respond swiftly to developments that require your attention. These instant alerts arm you with the latest information, enabling you to make informed decisions for better work outcomes.
Immediate Awareness of Important Emails
When you set real-time email notifications for critical work activities, you will be instantly aware of critical updates relevant to your work or personal tasks.
Whether it’s a new request from a client, an important update from a team member, or an instruction from your supervisor, real-time notifications alert you about the email immediately. With these notifications, you do not need to check your email to learn about important work emails manually.
Enhanced Responsiveness
Real-time notifications enable immediate awareness of important emails, and being immediately aware of an email enhances responsiveness.
Responding promptly to team members can resolve issues and provide feedback to help projects stay on track. Prompt responses to customers show a commitment to excellent customer service, which can increase customer satisfaction and loyalty. Prompt responses to sales inquiries and partnership proposals can help you clinch deals and seize opportunities.
Thus, real-time email notifications enable you to take immediate action on time-sensitive matters. The instant alerts allow you to respond to urgent inquiries, address issues before they escalate, and make decisions based on up-to-date information.
Reduced Risk of Missing Critical Information
Real-time notifications ensure you are promptly informed of developments that require your attention.
Despite the inconvenience of constantly checking the inbox for updates, many people do it anyway because of the cost of missing critical information delivered via email. For example, missing urgent requests from team members may lead to delays, and missing inquiries from customers or partners can lead to lost sales or opportunities.
Timely notifications mitigate these risks by ensuring you do not miss important messages requiring attention.
How to Enable Real-Time Email Notification
Setting up real-time email notifications is easy, no matter your device or email client.
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Setting Up Real-Time Email Notifications on Gmail
To set up real-time email notifications on Gmail on your desktop, follow these steps:
Step 1: Open your Gmail account on your computer
Step 2: Click the Settings button (gear icon) at the top left of the page
Step 3: Click See all settings
Step 4: In the General Settings tab, go to the Desktop notifications section, and choose either “new mail notifications on” or “Important mail notifications on.”
To set up real-time email notifications on Gmail using mobile devices, follow these steps:
Step 1: Open the Gmail app on your device
Step 2: Click the Menu icon (the three stacked horizontal lines)
Step 3: Click the Settings button
Step 4: Click General settings
Step 5: Click Manage notifications
Step 6: Toggle on Show notifications
Setting Up Real-Time Email Notifications on Outlook
Follow these steps to set up email notifications when using Outlook:
Step 1: Open your Outlook account
Step 2: Select Options
Step 3: Click Mail
Step 4: Under Message arrival, check the box next to Display a Desktop Alert.
Another option is to sync your Outlook account with Gmail to receive all emails in the same inbox. Combining your inboxes means you’ll only have to set up notifications once instead of in two separate places.
Tips on Customizing Notifications to Suit Individual Needs
Since your email account can be bombarded with incoming messages, getting notified of every email can be overwhelming. Hence, it’s important to customize notifications to suit your needs. Some tips for customizing notifications include:
Filter Notification by Sender or Subject
Filtering notifications by the sender or subject helps you avoid notification overload by ensuring you are notified of only emails from specified senders or about specific topics.
For example, you may choose to receive instant alerts about only emails from your supervisor or specific team members. Also, you can choose to receive notifications about emails featuring certain keywords or phrases in their subject lines.
Prioritize Notifications
Different websites and applications allow users to enable notifications for specific events. Decide which apps are most important to you and your work, and enable notifications for only those.
Then, turn off notifications for apps that are not crucial. This minimizes the number of notifications you receive, preventing overload and helping you focus on important activities.
Customize Notification Sounds
Assign different sounds to different types of notifications. This allows you to identify the importance of a notification without looking at your device.
This allows you to choose to leave less important notifications until later, minimizing interruptions and thereby enhancing your email productivity.
Features of Email Notification Services
Email notification services refer to automated tools that monitor websites and applications for changes or updates and then send notifications to users when specific triggers occur.
The main features of these services include:
- Automated monitoring: These services monitor specified websites or applications, saving users the need to check these online sources for updates manually.
- Instant delivery: The notifications are delivered to the user immediately after the specified action occurs.
- Customizable: Users can choose which events they should be alerted about.
Mailsuite’s real-time email notifications allow email marketers to receive instant alerts regarding the behavior of receivers. When receivers open the email or click links, the service alerts you immediately via email. And this allows you to craft more appropriate follow-up emails that convert.
Importance of Real-Time Notifications in a Business Context
Real-time notification enhances communication and efficiency in business settings. When professionals receive timely updates, they can take necessary actions promptly, leading to better business outcomes.
Uses cases for real-time notifications for customer support include:
- Get instant alerts when customers make complaints.
- Respond promptly to customer inquiries or complaints.
- Receive feedback about your service.
- Provide real-time updates on the status of an order.
Use cases for real-time notification for sales teams include:
- Notify sales teams immediately when a new lead is identified.
- Send reminders about scheduled calls or meetings.
- Alert sales teams to news of competitors’ activities (like product launches and product-related announcements).
Use cases for real-time notifications for team communication include:
- Get alerted as soon as a team member sends a message.
- Send reminders about upcoming meetings.
- Receive notifications about important milestones and deadlines.
Real-time email notifications are of immense benefit, especially to remote teams comprising people who work together from different parts of the world.
Instant alerts bridge the gap between remote team members, enabling them to receive and respond to important updates promptly. This ensures that irrespective of the distance between team members, they remain connected and can work the same way a traditional in-office team would.
Real-time notifications are also crucial to project success. For example, notifications about task assignments and project status can help everyone stay on track. Also, notifications about project issues can prompt swift action for resolution, minimizing project delays.
Gmail offers seamless integration with all the popular project management tools (including Asana, Trello, and Monday.com). When you integrate Gmail with these tools, emails related to your projects can trigger notifications within the project management platform itself.
Team members can respond to project-related emails directly from the project management interface. This centralizes project-related communication and ensures everyone is on the same page.
Best Practices for Managing Real-Time Email Notifications
When not managed properly, real-time notifications can become a distraction and reduce productivity instead of improving it. Some of the best practices for managing real-time notifications are:
1. Reduce the Volume of Notifications
Too many notifications can be overwhelming, increasing stress and reducing productivity. So, one of the first steps in managing notifications is to reduce the amount you receive.
Evaluate the necessity of the notifications you receive and turn off notifications about non-essential updates or activities. Optimize the use of customizable notification settings to set notifications that suit your needs. For example, consider using filters to ensure you receive notifications about emails from only specified contacts or about specific content.
2. Focus on Important Notifications
When it comes to using notifications to boost productivity, it is not just about limiting the amount of notifications you receive but also ensuring you receive notifications that are important to your work and projects.
When prioritizing notifications, consider factors such as urgency, importance to current tasks or projects, and impacts on stakeholders. When the message requires urgent attention or about high-priority events, you should set up notifications for them.
Also, when filtering notifications by the sender (to be alerted about messages from specific contacts), prioritize messages from managers, clients, or team members, especially those whose messages usually require prompt attention.
3. Allocate Focused Time
Reacting to incoming emails draws you from work. You’ll have to mentally switch from your tasks to attending to the notification and then switch back to the task. So, even when you reduce notifications to the barest minimum, they can still interfere with work because of the cognitive overload of switching between tasks and notifications.
For this reason, one of the best practices for managing real-time notifications is time blocking. Time blocking refers to allocating focused time for tasks so that you can work without interruptions from notifications. During your focused time, disable all notifications or activate “Do Not Disturb” modes.
When you allocate uninterrupted time to work on tasks, you can maintain momentum when working, enabling you to complete tasks quicker and more efficiently.
4. Schedule Check-In Times
Blocking off long periods to focus exclusively on work may be unwise because of the urgency of certain messages. For this reason, another best practice for managing instant notifications is scheduling check-in times.
Scheduling check-in times involves allocating specific times during the day to respond to notifications. This helps you balance blocking time for focused work sessions and responding to notifications. For example, you can schedule a check-in time during an extended blocked time for focused work.
This minimizes interruptions during focused work sessions and reduces the risk of missing time-sensitive updates during extended focused work sessions.
5. Review and Adjust Regularly
Work priorities change over time, so notifications that were once important to you may lose their importance. Therefore, you should regularly review and adjust your notification settings.
Review the notifications you receive to identify those that have lost their relevance. Then, fine-tune settings to discontinue receiving these unnecessary or low-priority notifications and only receive essential and relevant notifications.
Common Issues and Troubleshooting for Real-Time Email Notifications
You may encounter some problems when you set up notifications to receive real-time alerts about important events. Some of the common issues and solutions for overcoming them are as follows:
Delay in Delivery
Email alerts are expected to be delivered in real-time—as the particular event occurs or immediately after it happens. However, there could be a delay in delivery, causing the notifications to arrive much later. Delivery delays may be caused by various factors, including network congestion, server delays, or issues with the sender’s email infrastructure.
To troubleshoot this problem, ensure you have a strong and stable network connection. Check the email service provider’s status page to see if the sender’s email server is experiencing delays or downtime.
Spam Filtering
Ideally, email notifications should be sent to users’ inboxes, where the messages are more likely to be seen. However, email clients may mark these alerts as spam and send them to the spam or promotion folders, where they can be missed.
A simple solution to this problem is to regularly check your spam and promotions folders instead of always checking only your primary inbox. This way, you can catch important alerts that are filtered out of your inbox.
A better solution is to mark email notifications filtered out of your inbox as “Not Spam.” An even better solution is adding the sender to your contact list in your email client. These steps tell your email client that the sender is trusted and future emails from them should be delivered to your inbox.
Permission Settings
Permission settings dictate whether a website or app can send notifications to a user. If users do not grant these permissions, the app will not deliver the notifications.
To solve this problem, review the notification settings on your device to ensure permissions are enabled for important notifications. If notifications are blocked, grant necessary permissions.
High Number of Notifications
Another problem with real-time notifications is allowing too many. This causes notification overload, and too many notifications entering your inbox can make you miss or ignore important ones.
A solution to this problem is to prioritize very important ones. You may also consolidate notifications so that you receive periodic summaries instead of receiving multiple notifications for minor updates.
Takeaway: Boost Productivity with Real-Time Email Notifications
Setting up email notifications can improve your email management process and boost your productivity. Real-time alerts ensure you are immediately aware of important emails, allowing you to respond promptly to urgent messages.
If you never want to reply to an important message after it’s too late or miss it altogether, consider improving your email management by setting up email notifications.
Are you an email marketer? Then, email tracking information is one of the most important real-time notifications you can set up. This alerts you when your recipients open and read your email, giving you insight into improving your email campaigns and crafting more effective follow-up messages.
When looking for the best email tracking service, you can’t go wrong with Mailsuite. Mailsuite is a Chrome extension with superior email tracking capabilities. Mailsuite will send you instant alerts when your email recipients open your email, click your in-mail links, or view your attachments.