4 ideas for Gmail templates

On Tuesday, we talked about how to set up Gmail templates. That was all well and good, but now you want to step up your game.

And that is precisely what we're going to do today. Step up, step up ladies and gentlemen!

Another tool for your processing toolkit.

1: Send entire emails

You can write full emails and send them with one click. This is the vanilla use case for templates - the way it was meant to be used. They typically look like the two examples below and are normally used for:

Answering questions that you get repeatedly ("Holger, how can I install this awesome free Chrome extension?")
Reacting when you change functions. Prepare a nice email with whom to contact from now on - write once, send for years...
Reaching out to people. Templates may be better than one big email, and are certainly more efficient than copying and pasting until your mouse burns.

Hi,

Thank you for your email. I have moved out of function XYZ in 2017, please reach out to regloh@pwc.com in all matters XYZ.

Thank you!

Holger

This is the actual email you'll get if you ask me to approve server patching. Servers that in 2019 still aren't in GCP.

Hi!

Thank you for subscribing to Collab Thinking! You will now get more or less funny articles delivered every Tuesday and Thursdayish.

Thanks,

Holger

This is almost the email subscribers get. The real mail is even nicer - try yourself!

2: Send text blocks

Your job may require you to work with fixed text blocks a lot. Perhaps you have standard answers or write emails that differ a little, but not by much.

Here we take advantage of the fact that templates don't modify the subject (unless there is no subject) and that they insert text at the cursor position.

Typical use cases might be:

Yes we can/No we can't
Talk to this person/talk to that person
Do this first, then do this

I hear lawyers do this a lot. Gmail is not the place to create contracts, but you get the gist.

Your friendly wine merchant pivots to vodka, ever so easily thanks to templates!

3: Auto responses

If this condition is true, reply with that template. Saves you tons of time!

I'm having a hard time coming up with use cases. If you get emails so similar that they can be filtered with rules, but still require your input, you'd better look for a new role because the next wave of 🤖 is coming for your job.

"Thank you for your email, we'll be with you shortly"
"I left this role, please write to X instead"

In any event, it's a good tool for your toolbox. When you enable templates, this new option shows up when you create filters. As always, be careful with the filters. This filter will send people email - so don't make the filter too liberal.

4: Team mailboxes

Team mailboxes are a PwC invention. They are Gmail accounts managed by a group of people (delegates), with the effect of having a shared mailbox. One person archives something, it applies to everybody. Super efficient.

If your team uses team mailboxes, you will be happy to hear that they support templates, too. This means that you can set up templates for the entire team (or each team member can set up their own!).

Auto-responder templates (see #3) - "Thank you for your email, our SLA is 3 days, talk to you soon"
"Your TPS report is incomplete. Please submit a proper cover sheet."
"Dear XYZ department, this case should have gone to you."

I hope you got some ideas of how templates can make your life easier. If you didn't - don't worry, we're done with templates for the foreseeable future. It's time to talk about AI again. Thank you for reading!

#gmailPublished 2019-08-01 by Holger Matthies.Modified 2019-08-01 by Holger Matthies.Written listening to Max Richter - On the nature of daylight.

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