Business Hacks for Gmail

(Introhive Team @ Business 2 Community) Business Hacks for Gmail that Will Change Your Life

With millions of emails sent everyday, it’s no wonder there’s a love hate relationship between most professionals and their inboxes. Gmail is one of the big three in email service providers and has recently allowed for a lot of developer customization through their labs.

Knowing how to use gmail effectively is the first step to hacking your ability to be productive and effective with email. From there, knowing how to use integrated hacks to improve your experience and efficiency is what will truly change your life.

Here are a few hacks that will make you more productive, efficient and ultimately drive real results:

Rapporative

We recognize the importance of knowing as much as possible about your clients and customers to nurture relationships. Knowing a bit of insight into their lives and what they do is important information when crafting an email to someone.

Rapportive gives you a sneak peak of each person you email by connecting their email address to their social networks and social graph. Instead of seeing ads in Gmail you will start seeing a snippet of their twitterfeed, their current job title from Linkedin along with links to their Facebook, Google+ and any other social networks associated with this email.

Another cool trick with Rapportive that can be helpful is identifying someones email that you don’t already have in your address book or isn’t available online. If you don’t know someone’s email address for sure, you can guess it (typically firstname@[company here].com) by typing it into the “TO” field of an email, and if their social profiles show up, you know that you have the right email. Try this with some executives, CEOs, celebrities or media reporters you’ve been itching to get an email out to.

Canned Responses

Repetition is a productivity killer. On a regular basis you will be met with clients who are requesting additional information or requesting a pitch deck of some sort. If you’re speaking at an event, you might be asked for a bio or for a few examples of some of the work you have done in the past. Instead of writing these same emails over and over again from month to month, Canned Responses allows you to write them once and save the message text with the “Canned responses” button. Later, you can open that same message and send it again and again.

Kate Mats wrote a post about her productivity secrets and expressed how she uses this tool for situations like these:

• Recruiter thanks, but no thanks response
• Vendor thanks, but no thanks response
• Introduction templates
• My address (one for home, and I used to have one for work when I worked outside of my house)
• Directions to my house

Inbox Pause

Have you ever tried to get to inbox zero but the emails wouldn’t stop? Have you ever tried to get work done, only to find that every 30 seconds, your new email notification pops up over and over again with everything from Groupons to Cat pictures?

Instead of trying to ignore these distractions. Remove them with Inbox Pause. Using this app you can pause your inbox (surprised?) as gmail stores them in a seperate section of your mail until you turn it back on. Sure, it’s a moment of relief but it’s one that can provide you with quality time to be effective and efficient.

Boomerang

Some people are morning people, some are not. If you’re a night owl, you will love the power of boomerrang as it allows you to schedule your emails the same way that an app like Buffer would allow you to schedule your tweets. Instead of sending emails to clients at 3AM in the morning, you can now schedule them using Boomerrang to go out in the morning bright and early.

It’s also a great tool for lead nurturing and managing client or prospect expectations. If a potential lead expresses that they’ll be out of town for the next two months, instead of putting it in your calendar to follow up with them the day they return, schedule an email to go out upon their arrival.