Just curious as to how long you guys are keeping client/inquiry emails. 1 year? 2 years? Indefinitely?
I'm starting to rack up multiple thousands of emails in my "weddings" folder for my email account and its becoming a bit unwieldy. I want to trim some stuff back, but I hate losing records of past communication with people.
As far as past inquiries that didn't sign, I've been toying with the idea of starting some sort of inquiry database to keep track of where my leads came from, etc, but just haven't had enough free time to do it.
Is it worth keeping all of this stuff or not? Thoughts?
deepbluejh wrote:
As far as past inquiries that didn't sign, I've been toying with the idea of starting some sort of inquiry database to keep track of where my leads came from, etc, but just haven't had enough free time to do it.
That's a little besides the point. I know where my inquiries come from and I keep my ads targeted to only the highest performing outlets. Starting a database and analyzing everything to the Nth degree has been a thought, but not a high priority given everything else I have on my plate.
The first questions in my original post was more important than my second.
I've been doing this four years and still have them all. Even if I deleted them, they're backed up on my servers and on my hard drives via Apple's Time Machine. Works well...
Tony Hoffer wrote:
I've been doing this four years and still have them all. Even if I deleted them, they're backed up on my servers and on my hard drives via Apple's Time Machine. Works well...
Do you plan on keeping them forever? At what point does it just become dead weight on your email server? 10,000 emails? 100,000 emails?
It all depends on what you want to do with the data in the future. Do you see yourself sending out offers to people who inquired with you more than a year ago?
For actual client emails, I'll keep everything handy for about 2 years after the last email. Beyond that, it's just not necessary IMO.
I keep client emails indefinitely with the job. I keep inquiries with no follow through for about a year. I don't bother tracking any of them. That's pretty much in my head. I don't need to see it in black and white.
I keep every single email that isn't spam or junk. Sent and received, both. I don't store them locally on my computer, but rather I have a pretty beefy hosting setup (more than most, I'm sure, given the nature of my other businesses) and they're safely stored across two servers.
Even if you don't have a big expensive setup, it's easy to keep every email locally, or use gmail as others have mentioned (though I prefer using my own email).
Emails are generally quite small in terms of data (given there aren't attachments or pictures with every email). Why not just save everything? As Vince said, you can setup a Gmail that's specific to your business, and just forward everything there. There's more than 7GB of space on that thing, which should keep about a decades worth of email. It's always better to be safe than sorry.
