If you are like me, you use one of the free email options out there such as Gmail or Yahoo Mail. Gmail has become a fairly robust program, so if you don’t use it you might consider it. Whether you are just signing up or have had your account for a long time; here are 7 tips from Small Business Trends that may support your efficient use of the program. I added two of my favorite email services at the end. If you try out any of these or have any of your own favorites to share, let me know.
- Let Gmail be your business email and have your email address be @yourdomain as opposed to @gmail. The truth is customers are more likely to trust a brand that has a domain name of that business, as opposed to a free service. The cost for this service is $5 per email address a month.
- Juggle multiple email accounts from one interface: I find this tremendously helpful. Many of us have more than one email account. One account may be dedicated for work and another personal. Gmail allows you to download up to five other accounts and you can send from them through Gmail as well.
- Use Labels. You can organize your inbox and keep yourself on task by creating labels. Select the message you want to label, hit the Label button in the toolbar and choose Create New. Once your label is created, you can apply it to different messages. You can even create filters to label messages automatically.
- Use Boomerang. Boomerang is a mail plugin that allows you to write emails now and schedule them for sending later. Maybe you can’t sleep and decide to be productive and respond to emails. You might not want your business contacts to be aware of your insomnia problem and this is the answer. Write it now and schedule it to be sent at 8am when the rest of the world is awake. Boomerang can also remind you to check up on people who haven’t gotten back to you.
- Answer faster with Canned Responses. If you look at your emails, you may find several are waiting for you to write the same answer to a question you receive over and over. Canned Responses gives you the ability to write your message once, save it, and use it repeatedly based on certain keywords in the message.
- Reply by chat or video. Sometimes a quick conversation will resolve an issue must faster than back and forth email. Voice and video chat is a free feature that installs in seconds.
- Mute Emails. If you are on an email group or listserv and there is a discussion going on you are not interested in, every new reply all comment can be annoying. The Mute feature allows you to exit the conversation by using the shortcut M.
- OtherInbox is another one I use personally. This is a tool that organizes your email inbox for you with folders that organize by sender. I read a lot of blogs about small business, social media and technology. OtherInbox automatically places them in a folder separate from the coupon folder alerting me to the latest specials at Starbucks. I choose how often I want it sorted and then the app sends me an email letting me know what emails were sorted where. It’s a great time saver.
- Email Game by Baydin. I got into the weeds with an overflowing email inbox and discovered this game at the end of the year. It’s easy and quick to play. In 2-minute intervals, the game asks you to decide what to do with your email. Reply, delete, archive, skip or boomerang. Skipping causes you to lose points. Boomerang means you put the email temporarily in archives and it is returned to your inbox when you ask it to be. It’s very helpful for items you won’t need to deal with right away but do not want to lose track of.
