14 Gmail Tricks and Tools to Supercharge Your Inbox
When most entrepreneurs talk about email, they talk about what a distraction it is. But what if you could give your inbox a turbo boost, turning it into a valuable tool for managing leads, amping up productivity and best of all, facilitating sales?
Fourteen founders from Young Entrepreneur Council share their best Gmail secrets:
1. Rapportive and Yesware
Install Rapportive and Yesware to convert Gmail into a powerful sales tool. They make it so much more productive. Tweet These Tools
– Ruchit Garg, 9SLIDES
2. FollowUp.cc
I love this tool and use it every day. It allows you to BCC a certain date, then get an auto-reminder. I use it to schedule follow ups so I don’t have to go to a separate calendar or CRM to put them in. It’s a subscription service but well worth it. Tweet This Tool
– John Rood, Next Step Test Preparation
Related: 5 Tips for Marketers on Wrangling Their Inbox
3. Multiple Emails
I have five different email addresses that I either respond to or just monitor for my business and personal life. Gmail allows me to have all messages from each address forwarded to one central inbox, and gives me the ability to respond to each message from any of my accounts in the same place. It took about 30 minutes to set up, and it probably saves me hours each week. Tweet This Trick
– Mark Krassner, Knee Walker Central
4. Boomerang
I am a big fan of Boomerang, which allows you to have an email sent back to you at whatever future point in time you select. It is an extremely helpful way to remind myself to follow up on emails I have sent to others without setting calendar alerts and cluttering up my calendar. Tweet This Tool
– Doug Bend, Bend Law Group, PC
5. Streak’s CRM Mail Merge Tool
We recently completed a Kickstarter campaign, and couldn’t have hit our goal without implementing Streak. Aside from tracking engagement and email opens, they have a very simple mail merge tool. This allows you to send out personalized emails to a wide group without it coming from a generic email service. Tweet This Tool
– Aaron Schwartz, Modify Watches
6. Filters
Most Gmail users have folders, but I’ve found that very few are using the filtering feature to move emails into a folder automatically. We strive to have 90 percent of our incoming emails filtered, even if the tag is applied but the email remains in the inbox. Combine that with the “reply and archive” feature in Labs, and I’m able to be at inbox zero about 90 percent of the time. Tweet This Trick
– Kelly Azevedo, She’s Got Systems
7. Auto-Detect Fakes
How many fake emails do you get from people claiming they’re PayPal, eBay or the like? Gmail can help you weed out these spoofs be enabling an “authentication icon for verified senders.” It’s simple to activate. Just follow these steps. Tweet This Trick
– Nicolas Gremion, Free-eBooks.net
Related: The Minimalist’s Guide to Small Business Efficiency
8. Google Voice and Gmail Sync
I have Google Voice set up to send all voicemails from my phone to my Gmail inbox and can play them directly from email. By doing this, I am able to never have to check my voicemail via my phone. Google Voice also translates the voicemail to text so that I don’t even have to listen to the message; instead, I can quickly scan it and see if it’s relevant or not. Tweet These Tools
– Dave Nevogt, Hubstaff.com
9. Undo Send
Did you hit “send” too soon on an email that wasn’t ready yet? Undo Send is a great app in the Labs tab of Gmail that lets you stop messages from being sent for a few seconds after hitting the send button. Definitely one of my favorite hacks! Tweet This Trick
– Joe Apfelbaum, Ajax Union
10. Email Delegation
This hack is so good I almost don’t want to give it away. You can set up email delegation through Google Apps for anyone within your company. That user can look through your inbox and respond to messages but will not be able to chat on your behalf or change passwords. It only takes two minutes to set up. Watch how. Tweet This Trick
– Liam Martin, Staff.com
11. Unroll.me
It’s no fun waking up in the morning to 18 newsletters in your inbox. It’s even worse to get bombarded with 23 more while you’re trying to get work done during the day. Unroll.me offers a genius solution to this issue: the free plugin aggregates all of your subscriptions into one daily digest. It also makes unsubscribing from lists a breeze. Tweet This Tool
– Brittany Hodak, ZinePak
12. Star
I use Gmail’s star function to flag important emails that need more thought than a real-time response. It becomes my de facto to-do list and helps ensure that I go through my email both productively and thoughtfully. Tweet This Trick
– Brewster Stanislaw, Inside Social
13. Toggl
Toggl is a time-tracking tool with a plugin for Gmail that notifies you if you’re spending more time than you wanted to spend reading or responding to an email. Toggl also tracks the time you’re spending with each given email, so you can have a deeper understanding of your email usage and time consumption. Tweet This Tool
– Doreen Bloch, Poshly Inc.
14. SaneBox
I swear by SaneBox: It filters all of the unimportant messages out of your inbox and provides you with a digest you can review once per day. Tweet This Tool
– Sean Kelly, HUMAN