We all email people on a daily basis. Its part and parcel of most of our lives and we’ve gotten used to it. However, is there a way to make emails more useful? Maybe we aren’t using the right email tools or any tools at all.
According to an Adobe study, people spend 6.5 hours checking new emails. Come on guys, this isn’t normal. Or is it?
Saving time by improved efficiency can shave hours off our day, where we can focus on being productive or watching cat videos. Basically, whatever we really want to do.
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We can probably spend more than half of our day on email. Whether it’s reading, checking, searching for or referring back to emails. A recent McKinsey Social Economic Report has found that the average knowledge worker spends almost three quarters of their day on just email-related tasks.
Here are some email tools put together by the Tech Collective team, which we find helps us save time and be more effective over email.
Boomerang
Boomerang is an email follow-up tool to help manage your time more effectively. It is useful to make sure you follow-up on every lead and automate responses where necessary. It is quite a versatile tool that can even be used as personal reminders if necessary.
Gmail Metrics
Gmail Metrics is an email analytics tool that allows you to visualize how you use email. The tool shows you how long it takes you to respond to emails; tracks many emails you send and receive by day of the week and time of day. it also tracks whom you send the most emails to (or receive emails from); average word counts; and other interesting data points.
UnrollMe
Probably our favourite out of the lot. It is great for tidying up your inbox by removing marketing emails you probably don’t want to be part of anymore? UnrollMe gives you a full list of all the email lists you’re currently subscribed to and allows you to un-enroll from them. It’s free and therefore is very awesome.
Text Expander
Text Expander is a tool to improve writing speed by creating a shorthand list of commonly used words. Your actual word speed doesn’t increase, but it eliminates the need to type out full words all the time. It’s great for those who have to draft long reports or articles like we do.
Inbox Pause
If you’d like to press pause sometimes and slow down, then Inbox Pause is for you. It adds a pause button to your Gmail that quite simply, pauses your inbox.
When you “unpause” your inbox, all the messages that would have appeared will appear, so you can work stress-free without letting every new email distract you from whatever you’re working on. It is now part of Boomerang for Gmail as well.
Aeroleads
A huge value of email is that it is your direct connection to a potential customer, partner or anyone you believe is important enough add to your network. However, there are not that many free directories available with the emails of everyone you want to engage with.
This is where email finder tools come in handy, and you can use products like Aeroleads and other tools like that, which allow you to easily find the contacts of the people you want to connect with. This makes it easier to directly reach out to a potential customer or lead without having to go through multiple steps in the chain of command.
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Give each of these email tools a try to determine which ones work best for you. Most of them are free, so there almost no barrier to entry to try it for yourself.