I want you to be so much more productive within Gmail, and I'm gonna show you how to do that by introducing you to some new Gmail extensions. Hello everyone, Scott Friesen here at Simpletivity,
Scott Friesen
helping you to get more done, and enjoy less stress.
And today I want to show you some extensions, some Gmail add-ons from CloudHQ. Now CloudHQ actually has nearly 40 different Gmail extensions to help you be more productive,
Vbut I want to share with you three of my favorites, and we're gonna get things started with Gmail Tabs.
Gmail Tabs
Here at the top of the screen you will see that I have a few different labels.
These are called Gmail Tabs, and once you have the extension installed, the first one you're gonna see is your default, your inbox, but you can now add additional tabs at the top of your inbox.
So a few weeks ago I showed you a very simple Gmail workflow using a couple of labels that I have here: Action Required and Waiting for Response.
But you'll probably recognize if you're a Gmail user that after you have about five or so labels, this can get really difficult to manage here. You're scrolling up and down, and you may even have some that are hidden down below. Where do you go to find those labels?
Well, why not have the ones that you use most frequently at your fingertips at the top of the screen?
If I select Action Required, it's just going to immediately go to all of those emails there. If I want to select Waiting for Response, it's immediately gonna show me any of the emails with that particular label.
So how do you use it?
Well, let's say I want this Completed label to be up top here as well. All I need to do is select these little three dots, which gives me some more options.
And once you have the extension installed, you'll see this little CloudHQ menu addition. In this case, I'm gonna select Add to Tabs, including Sublabels, and you can see immediately, I now have it at the top of my screen. I can click on it, and all of my emails that have that particular label will appear.
Now on the right-hand side, there's an Edit Tab function. If I want to clean things up, I can remove that asterisk. The only reason I added that asterisk is that I wanted this to sort at the top of my labels because I knew how difficult it was to manage labels over here.
So I'm gonna remove that asterisk. I'm gonna hit Save. Now it's a lot cleaner, and you can also rearrange these as well, right? I can rearrange the order of my tabs. So let's drag it.
I want to drag that all the way to the end. Let's move it over there. There we go.
So I can drag things around if I want to, hit Done, and now I've got my tabs here at the top.
But let me click over to the inbox for one more second. I want to show you an additional way to add a tab here because you don't have to have an existing label.
You don't have to use labels at all if you don't want to. I'm gonna type in BestBuy here in the search bar because I know I've got a bunch of emails here by BestBuy, and let's say this is something that I'd like to review or I'd like to take a look at on a regular basis.
Well, you'll notice I now have another option here called Add to Tabs. So I get to select that option, Add to Tabs, and immediately I've got this filter. So even if I get new BestBuy messages going forward, it's gonna show up underneath this tab.
And if I don't like the way that it looks there, let's go in here. I'm gonna hit Edit, and let's give it the proper capital B space, capital B, we'll hit Save, we're gonna hit Done.
So I've just immediately created this filter. It's not a particular label, but now I've added it to my tabs area.
So you might want to check out Gmail Tabs.
Alright, let's move on to extension number two. And this all has to do with saving time.
Gmail Snippets
when you are crafting a message within Gmail.
So here I am, I've opened up a brand new message, and I think perhaps the most common scenario for this particular add-on is gonna be when you're replying to someone, and think about some of the questions that you reply to very, very often, right? It's the same set of wording. It's the same sentences that you use time, and time again. Well, why not just save those phrases? Maybe you could even save an entire email, and then retrieve it with just a few clicks.
So at the bottom of the screen here, you'll see I have this little T-plus. That lets me know that I have Gmail Snippets installed, and all I have to do is select the backward slash on my keyboard, and it's gonna pop up this tiny menu here that is showing me all of these preloaded phrases, which either I've created, or the ones that we're looking at right now are some of the default ones. So I can either use my cursor, but probably what's easier is just to use the arrow keys, because I already typed something into my keyboard, and I can select this answer one, hit enter, boom, I've got that phrase right in there.
Let's hit backslash again, and I'm gonna say, thanks for using our app. Boom, there it is. Now those are two very, very short sentences. You can craft an entire email if you'd like to.
So let's go down to the settings here. I'm gonna click on this, and I'm gonna say you've got two options here. We can either create a new Snippet from this message. That's actually a really smart idea. If there's a particular email that you do quite frequently, or phrases that you use quite frequently, you can actually create it from the particular message. But let's select browse Snippets here, and here you can see all of the ones that we have installed so far, each has a shortcut itself, a name, and then the content itself. And of course you can always edit, and delete these ones as well.
I'm gonna select add just to show you how easy it is to add a new Snippet. Just gonna call this one Test. The name I'm gonna say Test as well, and I just gonna say this is a test Snippet from… Yup, CloudHQ. Alright, now remember again, you can add a lot more texts than just a single sentence. You can have paragraphs in here, you can have line spaces if you want, and at the bottom you can even add a few variables as well, including name, including email, or day of the week. I'll show you that in just a moment.
So I'm gonna save this one here. You can see that it's been added here to this list, and if you get a really long list, you can even search for all of your Snippets here as well. I'm gonna hit done, and I'm go back to my emails. I'm gonna go down a line, I get to hit backslash again, and I don't see test in this menu, right? It's only gonna show you about six here in this first preview, but if I start typing in T, well now I just get the thanks with T, and hey, Test. There's my test one. So I can input that one immediately.
Let me show you this other one that has this day of the week built right into it. I'm gonna go back slash, and this one. Oh, what is the day of the… And yeah, that's right. And have a fantastic, it's blank here, because it's gonna be built into this functionality. If I hit a return, and have a fantastic Tuesday, and that's right, it is Tuesday today. So no matter what day of the week it is, it's going to automatically input that into this particular phrase.
So you might want to check out Snippets, especially if you want to save time replying, and writing those very, very lengthy emails.
Alright, I'm gonna close up this message for just a second, but we're gonna get back into that for our third, and final Gmail extension. And that has to do with email tracking. And I want you to think of how many times have you sent
Email Tracker
an important email, or maybe you've reached out to a particular client, and you just, you wish you'd know when they opened up that email, because when can you follow up with a phone call? When can you follow up with another email? When would be the ideal time to check back in with them? You want to know when they have read the email. I don't mean reply, but when have they read the email.
So let me type in an email address to a test account that we're gonna use here. And I'm just gonna call this a test tracking in this case, and I'm not even include a message, I don't need a message for this, because we just want to track when this person has actually read this particular email.
So down below you can see there's a little, it almost looks like a wifi signal, but this is the icon for email tracking options. So if I click on this, I have a few different ways, a few different selections I can choose here, I can get it to automatically send me a reply, or send me an email if this person doesn't reply in a couple of days. But really what I'm after here is this, send me an email upon open. When they open it, I want to be notified of it. And then there's a few other options you can choose from here as well, including send me a text message, and get a text alert if you want. But I'm just gonna keep this one selected. Send me an email when this person opens this particular email.
So what I'm gonna do is I'm gonna go right ahead. I can get a select send. Alright, so just sends the email like a normal email. And then what we're gonna do is I'm gonna switch over to this, to that test account here. And of course, email is not always instantaneous, but let's see if I can… There it is. There's that email. This is this test tracking email. So of course it's unread at this state, right? I haven't clicked on it yet. So I'm going to click on this message. Of course now it has been read.
Let's see what happens if we go back to our original account. So let's go back to our Gmail account, and it may take a few seconds. I mean it may take up to a minute, or so. I might just, I'm gonna refresh my inbox here to see how quickly it's gonna actually come back, and notify me that that particular message has been read.
Alright, so there it is. Here at the top of my email, I've got an email from, it's given me a notification saying that this email address has just read, and here's the subject line. Now if I click on the message itself, it's gonna give me some more details. So and so has read your email less than a minute after it was sent. So it's gonna tell me how long it actually sat in their inbox before they read it. It's gonna give me details sent on read on location, if it can give it to me, and it's even gonna give me a small preview of the message down below. So if I'm curious like what? Like which email was that? What was that email about? It's gonna let me know here down below as well.
So regardless if this is a sales conversation, if you need to follow up with confirming a particular date, maybe now that you know that they've read it, you're gonna follow up with a different message. Are you gonna give them a phone call an hour from now?
So if you want a very useful, and free email tracking tool, you might want to check out the tracking tool from CloudHQ. I'll be sure to include a link to all of these tools so you can try them out yourself.
And I'd love to hear from you next. Which of these three are you most excited about? Which of these three are gonna be most helpful to your workday, or most helpful to your business? Be sure to let me know down in the comments below.
I want to thank you so much for watching today's video. I hope you subscribe right here to Simpletivity. Please give this video a thumbs up, and don't forget to leave me a comment, or a question down below. Remember, being productive does not need to be difficult. In fact, it's very simple.
