As someone who sends dozens of emails a day across several different prospective brands, agencies and individuals, I would be lost without using a few simple features within Gmail that I was surprised many people do not take advantage of.

📝 Gmail Templates

If you already use Gmail Templates, you know how much of a time saver this can be, especially for prospecting emails, check-ins and proposal responses. If are currently using Gmail for work but don’t use templates, get ready to be able to send out 3X the number of emails in half the time using this tool.

Within your Gmail Settings, simply go to Advanced tab and next to Templates select ENABLE

This will have the Templates section populate in the Smart Compose menu in the bottom right corner of each email you are composing.

To optimize this for best use, we recommend doing the following –

Go through and flag your prospecting emails that got the highest response, proposal recommendations you ended up winning or even just check-in notes you often send to clients and colleagues on a regular basis. You can then add each of these emails as a labelled template to easily be able to insert this text within seconds on future emails.

Members of our sales team have mentioned Templates to be “LIFE CHANGING” in their ability to have prompt well-written responses ready to go and save hours every work week.

TIP: When saving templates make sure you remove any other content in the email thread except the excerpt you would like to use as a template. The Template feature will save any content within the email thread selected, including signatures, previous replies, etc

😴 Gmail Snooze

How do you ensure you are following up with everyone within an appropriate time frame? Gmail Snooze is an amazing feature that allows you to schedule when an email is pushed back to the top of your inbox as a reminder. This puts you at a huge advantage to keep track of your active conversations, outstanding proposals or a simple reminder to follow up with someone at a later date and time.

Many of you may have noticed that Gmail has started automatically pushing emails back up in our inbox when there as been no response as an automated reminder.

To use this feature more proactively, after you send an email, select it and you will see a clock icon displayed within your Gmail toolbar. Use this to select a specific date and time to have that email bounce back to the top as a reminder for you to take action.

As someone who used to use an Excel spreadsheet and To-Do List to track follow ups, Gmail Snooze as been an incredibly easy and effective tool to keep me on top of all my accounts and conversations. While there have been several 3rd party tools such as Boomerang and FollowupCC that offer similar features, it is great to see this now built in natively within Gmail.

⏰ Schedule Send

Have you ever waited to send an email at the right time knowing the recipient is in another time zone or you are drafting a note out of work hours?

This happens all too often and the most common way we deal with it is to either save it as a draft to send later or forget to write it at all.

Google has taken notice and “Schedule Send” which used to be available via an extension is now built in as a standard feature.

To use it simple click on the arrow to the right of the send button

It’ll bring up a prompt for you to pick the date and time you want your email to go out.

This is a great feature not only for prospecting emails but for everyday communication.

Don’t wait to write up all those important emails you will get to later. Draft it up, schedule it out, and let it send on its way.