Marketers spend a lot of time on Gmail. For most of us that means staying on Gmail from the second we get up to the second we sleep. Email is an important tool in any marketer’s arsenal so whether you are a blogger, webmaster, or an entrepreneur using Gmail is a must. Here are five solid ways you can use Gmail like a marketing machine.
If you use Outlook or some other email client, this post isn't going to be of too much help to you. Sorry about that.
1. Manage Your Gmail Better
If you are sending a lot of emails to potential clients or bloggers for potential guest post opportunities, you understand how difficult it can be to manage all those emails and stay on top of replying to all the right people. There is nothing worse than missing an email from someone who could have been of great help to you. This is where Streak comes in.
Streak makes management of important emails easy by allowing you to not only categorize different emails but also make sub categories for where each email thread is in your process (are you still making the pitch, negotiating, is it a closed deal, etc..). You can even group all the emails from the same person together.
You can also use streak to preset when to send the email. You can write the email whenever you want and send it at the time they are most likely to read it. Write an email and set it to send tomorrow morning exactly at 9:30 AM and you can sleep right through 9:30, wake up at 10:00 and see that it has been sent. Isn't that enough to make you get Streak? All you have to do is click on the send later button when you are composing an email and choose a timing.
With Streak you also get the option of creating email templates. Like most marketers you probably have to send a lot of emails that are very similar to each other, with only a few minor changes. A perfectly crafted outreach email asking for a guest post for example. You can create a template for this in minutes and save a lot of time not recreating the same message over and over again. This will make sending out reach emails a lot quicker. The only thing you have left to worry about is coming up with great blog post ideas to pitch to bloggers.
Get Streak. It will make your life easier.
2. Use Gmail Faster
If you are not careful, Gmail can suck your time away. It is a great tool to help you procrastinate when you are trying to put things off, but even when you are trying to actually be productive, Gmail can eat up your time. I like to think that I have learned a few life lessons throughout my existence. One of the most important ones being that you should always use time efficiently. Here are a few ways you can save time on Gmail.
- Multiple Uploads. I like to include images in my posts, even if I am writing that post as a guest author at someone else’s blog. When I am sending that post, I generally have to attach all the images along with the word document. This used to take a few minutes because I would attach each image one at a time. This is a mistake that you can easily avoid. You can save time by uploading multiple files at once. When you click attach a file and the window pops up, you can simply hold control and click on all the files you want to upload to the email in one fell swoop (multiple images and docs all at once).
- Use Gmail Shortcuts. Anyone who is a PC gamer knows that it is faster to do most things with your keyboard than it is to do with your mouse. You save time by using keyboard shortcuts instead of using the mouse to click on the appropriate button on your screen, and this time adds up fast. You can find the full list of Gmail shortcuts here, but here are the most useful ones: undo: z, reply: r, reply all: a, forward: f, save draft: ctr + s, compose: c.
- Make Search Easier. When you get a lot of emails, searching through your archives to find a particular email can be a long process and if it is an especially old email, it can even take hours to find. Usually this happens because most people do not delete any emails and archive everything, so that they never have to lose any email. This is great and all but when you need to go search through your emails to find something, you now have a huge clutter to weed through. Delete emails that you absolutely do not need, especially if it spam. There is no need to archive that.
- View more in your inbox. Aren't you a little annoyed that you have to click next every time you want to see more than 25 messages in your inbox? This just wastes time. Go to your Settings and change the maximum page size in the General tab to 100.
3. Get A Better Understanding Of Your Contacts With Rapportive
You talk to a lot of people and naturally, keeping track of who all these people are, what their likes and dislikes are, and what their deal is, can be difficult. Rapportive does this for you. Every time you are emailing someone or reading an email from someone, Rapportive will display important information about them as well as their recent tweets. You can even attach notes to each of your contacts.
It even gives you the option of connecting with your contact via social media right from your Gmail. Sure, this won’t take the place of any social media management tools but it still a great convenience and just adds to the list of awesome things that Rapportive can do.
4. Undo Sending Stupid Emails
Sometimes you look over an important email a million times before sending it and find no mistakes. You only realize that you had made a horrible mistake in that email seconds after sending it. This is where this very awesome undo-sending email link comes in. It actually allows you to un-send an email for a few seconds after you sent it. (It just doesn't send it for a few seconds after you click send and just cancels it when you press undo) This new undo button can be an absolute life saver.
Set it up by going to Settings and clicking on Labs.
Scroll down until you find Undo Send, click enable and click Save Changes.
5. Tweak Your Inbox: Show Unread Messages First
Weeding through all your messages to find the ones that are unread just makes you less efficient. You can change this by tweaking your inbox to display unopened messages first. Since all your unread messages now float to the top, it will be hard to miss any important emails. As an added bonus, your inbox will also look a lot cleaner and more organized which will make it much easier for your brain to process what’s going on in your inbox. This will also make you less likely to procrastinate because you won’t be tempted to browse through all the emails that you already opened.
Setting this up is simple. Go to Settings again but click on Inbox this time. Where it says Inbox type, choose unread first.
6. Bonus: Remote Sign Out
You may sometimes have to log into your Gmail from an computer that is not yours. If you end up forgetting to log out from that computer, it could end up coming back to bite you. Luckily, you can log out of all computers from anywhere. If you scroll to the bottom of your Gmail page, you should see a link that says details. Click on details and a window will pop up and if you are logged into any other computers, it should give you the option of logging out of all other computers.
How do you tweak Gmail for marketing?
