Gmail Labs is a feature of Gmail wherein you can use experimental features before they become officially launched. Most of these potential features are developed so that the average user can save time and be more efficient in using the mailbox. This gives a better overall experience with email, as it’s now one of the most widely used forms of communication.
Aside from being built for general purposes, Gmail Labs features can also be useful for marketing and sales processes. This stems from the fact that people involved in marketing and sales nowadays are constantly interacting with leads and prospects through email. In this article, I discuss 5 Gmail Labs features below that are suited for marketing and sales. You can enable any of these features by going to the “Labs” tab in your Gmail settings page.
Auto-advance
A common behavior in Gmail is that upon archiving or deleting an email, you are automatically redirected back to your inbox. As salespeople, we regularly have to reply to dozens of emails per day. By using the auto-advance feature, you can reply to leads in your inbox in succession and archive those threads of conversation at the same time. This saves you time from going back to the inbox and selecting the next email you have to attend to. It also removes inbox clutter from emails that you’ve already replied to, i.e. inactionable emails (not unless you need to do a follow-up).
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Turning leads into customers requires pointing out what’s important for your contacts as you interact with them, so you can ultimately turn them into paying customers. These valuable snippets of information are found as part of a contact’s email as you engage with them through every stage of the sales funnel. It’s useful to be able to easily reply to a specific part of a message. Also by outrightly quoting what your leads or customers just said, you can show that their messages have your genuine attention.
Email templates
It’s true that personalization is becoming more essential for every email that’s meant to be for marketing or sales, but there are inevitably still some parts of an email that can be reused. Salespeople can now save time from doing repetitive emails by using the email templates feature in Gmail labs. This also removes the stress associated with writing the same thing over and over again, so that salespeople can focus more on personalization rather than repetition. In order to use email templates in Gmail, you have to enable the “Canned responses” in Gmail Labs.
Undo Send
Possibly one of the most important features in this list. One incomplete or unorganized email that’s mis-sent can result to losing a potential customer. So if you’ve accidentally pressed the “Send” button before finishing to write an email, or if something immediately came up in your mind that you want included in the email you just sent, you can still do so by pressing “Cancel” within a few seconds after hitting the send button. Undo send is an indispensable safety feature, it’s like having insurance for your emails!
Multiple Inboxes
If you’ve written drafts of follow-up emails in advance, you may want to have a separate inbox for them, apart from all your other draft emails. This can be done via multiple inboxes. It adds another layer of customization to your pre-built categories such as drafts, starred messages, and labeled emails. This feature allows you to classify emails into buckets of work, which proves efficient for marketing and sales people interacting with various sorts of emails throughout the day.
