What is the average amount of time you spend browsing through your inbox? The average employee spends approximately 28% of his or her workweek reading and responding to emails. No matter whether you use a Gmail CRM or not, this manual work involves many repetitive tasks that can be easily automated to free up your time for more creative endeavors.
Are you interested in learning more about automating your email routine in Gmail? The purpose of this article is to provide you with a comprehensive overview of email task automation.
Gmail Automation: What Is It?
If you are wondering what inbox automation is, we will briefly explain it. Gmail rules are used to automate the handling of incoming emails and repetitive email tasks, which allows you to organize your inbox more effectively.
Most people spend a great deal of time answering the same questions, scheduling meetings, and sorting newsletters. This type of repetitive and mindless work can easily be automated, which will allow you to devote your time to more important tasks. To manage your inbox more effectively, you can also use Gmail’s native features in addition to automation techniques.
Do You Need to Automate Any Tasks?
Take some time to determine which processes really require automation before automating them all. You should review your email inbox and determine which repetitive tasks you have completed recently. You should also track the emails to determine what types of emails you receive most frequently. By preparing such a plan, you will gain insight into the scope of automation that is required in your particular situation.
How to Automate Email Tasks in Gmail
There is a built-in feature in Gmail for managing your inbox that you may not be aware of yet. Let’s take a look at some of the tasks that can be automated.
1. Automate the removal of promotional emails from your inbox
Your inbox can be overloaded with marketing emails, newsletters, and automatic responses from websites. In spite of the fact that they do not require much time to handle, they can still distract you from more important matters. If you do not wish to lose focus every time you receive such messages, you should delete them as soon as they appear in your inbox.
The easiest way to avoid annoying promotions is to use Gmail filters. You can filter similar emails from this address by selecting the message you have received. Once you have sorted emails by sender, you can choose whether to label, archive, or delete them.
Make sure you repeat this procedure for every incoming marketing email to ensure that you will not receive them in the future.
2. Emails can be automatically forwarded and marked using filters
It is also a good idea to deal with irrelevant messages and requests that can be handled by your assistant to maintain an organized inbox. In the case of an email with a meeting mentioned in the subject line, you may wish to forward the email to your secretary without worrying about the scheduling.
Using Gmail, you can sort emails by sender or subject and have them automatically forwarded to your assistant or the appropriate department. Additionally, you can mark emails as read or important, move them to another folder, etc.
3. Automate the sorting of incoming messages using labels
You receive tons of emails, all of which are important to you in different ways. The best way to manage them is to create several categories and then sort messages manually, but it can take a long time. In Gmail, emails can be automatically sorted into folders.
In the search bar, there is a dropdown menu that lets you sort messages by subject, sender, or date. In addition, certain terms can also be set up as labels for more precise filtering. The incoming messages in Gmail can be automatically labeled so you can just click on this mark to read them all.
Additionally, you can set up as many labels as necessary to organize your inbox precisely.
4. Send pre-written/saved responses using canned responses
In responding to a large number of typical requests or sending multiple follow-ups to your clients, you probably write similar messages almost every time. Why not create several templates and use them to respond to different types of emails? Gmail allows you to store saved responses in your mailbox so that you don’t have to write the same message over and over.
You can use Gmail’s canned responses if you wish to send pre-written emails. By enabling it in “Settings” (the gear icon), you can save any message as a canned response. By using such automatic emails, you will be able to quickly respond to incoming requests in just a few clicks.
Organize your Gmail and Don’t Waste Time
Automating your Gmail account is a powerful tool that can greatly increase your productivity. In order to avoid wasting your time on unnecessary tasks, we have gathered some final tips for you to follow.
When dealing with requests that appear in your FAQs, you may wish to consider automating the responses using canned responses. To make your communication more personal, create templates with blanks that you can fill in with the name of the recipient.
Conclusion
You should automate your Gmail tasks if you deal with hundreds of emails and would like to keep your inbox organized. This mailbox allows you to configure Gmail filters, label incoming messages so that you can understand their subject at a glance, send automatic emails in response to common requests, forward certain letters to colleagues, and eliminate annoying marketing emails. Make use of Gmail’s in-built functionality, tools, and scripts to automate these tasks, improve your inbox organization, and maximize your productivity.
