Brent Lecompte Blog: Don’t Waste Time! These 16 Gmail Hacks Will Make Your Small Business Hum (INFOGRAPHIC)

These 16 Gmail Hacks Will Make Your Small Business Hum (INFOGRAPHIC)

Take your use of Gmail for business beyond sending, receiving and attaching a document. The below infographic by GetVoip has some tips and tricks to use Gmail more efficiently with tools you might not know about.

For small business owners without the staff to check and respond to all of the emails they receive, each optimization can add valuable time to your day. This is because the average person spends 28 percent of the work week reading and responding to emails, which comes out to 650 hours a year.

Why should you know more about these tools? Reuben Yonatan, Founder and CEO of GetVoIP, says on his company blog, “By optimizing your email account to work for you instead of against you, you can boost your productivity levels, get more work done, and reduce the risk of allowing an important email to slip through the cracks.”

10 Gmail Hacks

Here are 10 tips from the infographic to help you use Gmail like a pro for your small business.

Turn on Priority Inbox

You might receive 30, 50, 100 or more emails per day. By turning on your priority inbox to see important messages first, you won’t have to scroll through less significant emails.

Use Labels

Using color-coded labels allows you to tag and assign emails that need your attention. This easy to use feature will ensure you don’t forget about that very important email you need to reply to.

Use Tasks List

If you don’t have time to deal with an email you just opened, you can move it to the Tasks list. When you are ready, you don’t have to search through all of your emails. Just go to Tasks and you will find it there.

Protect Your Email

You should always secure your email. You can encrypt the email you send and, using Snapmail, you can set it to self-destruct in 60 seconds.

Create a Filter

You can create filters to identify emails from a particular sender with word count, date, keywords and more. When you get a message that fits the criteria, you can choose to have it deleted or skip the inbox.

Learn Keyboard Shortcuts

Using a mouse might seem efficient, but it really isn’t compared to keyboard shortcuts. For example, when you have your Gmail open by simply hitting C you can compose an email. If you hit R you can reply and hit K to jump to a new email. You can see more shortcuts in the infographic below.

Use Plug-ins

Gmail has many plug-ins. Everything from timers to management tools, security, and more can be added to make your Gmail experience better.

Set Undo Send

At some point, you have probably screamed some expletives after clicking the send button on an email. With Undo Send, you can set a grace period of 5, 10, 20, or 30 seconds to recall the email so you can edit it.

Use Canned Response Feature

If you are in the middle of a particular marketing campaign, you might be writing the same emails multiple times with very few changes. By turning on the Canned Response feature, you can save a considerable amount of time.

Use Stars

Stars is another feature to help you remember emails that are important to you. You can assign different stars to signify what the emails mean to you.