Alot has happened since Gmail was first released in April, 2004. One thing sadly has not changed. Gmail does not have a great system for email templates.
I came from the old days of CRM systems such as ACT! and Goldmine; desktop CRM's that had built in mail clients and therefore were quick, easy, and made communication much faster than their cloud counterparts of today.
But its 2019 and today I released a simple, free Gmail add-on that provides the fastest, most-efficient way to automate repetitive emails. You'll save hours on copy-and-pasting by inserting email templates into gmail.
Step 1. Open your web browser and install the Email Templates for Gmail Chrome extension. This free extension takes the place of canned responses and will make creating and sending email templates in gmail quick and easy.
Step 2. Create your first email template by clicking on the red icon in the upper-right corner of your browser window.
This will take you to your email template dashboard where you can create an unlimited number of email templates that will appear in your Gmail account. Click New Template.
Here you will be able to give your template a name, define a subject, and create the message that you wish to use as a Gmail template. Here I have created an email to follow-up with my sales demo calls.
There is no limit to the number of templates you can create to go ahead and make life easy!
When you have created several templates your dashboard will look more like this:
Step 3. Now you are ready to insert your first template in Gmail. Open your Gmail account. and click the New Message button. The compose window will appear. Fill in the TO information as you would normally and then click two lines below where you see "Templates".
A popup will appear displaying your new templates. If they don't appear click the circular-arrow button to refresh the templates.
To insert a template into your email click on one. Your template and subject line are updated with your desired template. If you used a merge code while creating your email template you may also see the first name of the TO person inserted into your email.
At this point your email template is ready to be sent via Gmail. Simply click the Send button as usual.
After more than 10 years there is finally professional way to use templates in Gmail to automate the repetitive copy-and-paste that so many of us do each day. It's important to note that this article is not intended for those wishing to send graphical newsletter or full HTML emails. There are many great plugins for that such as FlashIssue. Rather this step-by-step guide makes you more productive every-day by reducing the tedious email writing process.
Happy Days Using your New Email Templates in Gmail!
