I was asked the other day about what are some of my favorite Gmail things for business. Many of these are enabled in the Labs settings of Gmail. Here is a list:
- Undo Send: Here there even been a better email tool? Probably two times a day, I need to hit “undo send” at the top of my Gmail. This feature from Labs allows me to prevent an email from sending for a few seconds after I hit send. This helps calm my nerves when sending an important email or quickly fix something that flashes through my brain as I hit send.
- Hubspot Email Tracker: This is not a Google Product, but HubSpot has a great sales tool that acts like a modern read receipt. I use this when I am sending important email or email to people who I am not sure that open them. This ends up giving you date, time, frequency, and even location of the opening of the emails. Check it out here. PROTIP: Only send these tracked email to one person at a time or the tracking gets difficult to interpret.
- Send Later: This is another product from a third party. Boomerang allows me to schedule emails to go, which I tend to use a few times a week. Maybe its reminders for a meeting or an email I type out super late in the evening or on the weekend and I want to be recieved in normal business hours. I occasionly even use it for emails that I don’t want ot deal with the consequences of at the time but am reminded to write it.
- Canned Responses: These allow me to generate form emails and load them with two clicks. I use this for requests to come on my podcast or if I am doing some sort of repetitve emailing. It takes a few times to get use to the method of how it works so practice with it first.
- Mark as Read Button: I am a digital horder, so I do not usually delete emails. But I love the mark as read button because it allows me to group remove email from my inbox. My inbox also acts as a to do list in someways to this helps keep it clean.
- Unread message icon: Many times I have two many tabs open in my browser and I am unable to see the new email count in the page description. This feature ads a small counter to the Gmail Icon in the browser. Helps me stay on top of things!
- Filters and Labels: I use these for various things but one particular use is in client work. I use several tools to generate leads for my customers that I want to keep a record of but I do not want to read them. So I am cc’ed on all the emails coming in from those sources. I use filters and labels to mark them as read and move them to a specific inbox. This saves me lots of time!
- Grammarly: This is another third party program that helps me with spelling and even grammar. They have a free service and a paid version. I am currently on the free version but I am super impressed with its ability to improve my writing!
What are some of your favorite Gmail hacks?
