Have you ever wondered if you could customize Gmail to both improve the professional look of the emails you send, and automate the process? Well, yes you can…in part.
What Google offers is the ability to enhance Gmail by enabling add-ons in “LABS”. Firstly, it should be noted that “LABS” are Gmail add-ons that are in beta-development (they reference these as “some crazy experimental stuff”), which simply means that they haven’t undergone enough testing, or revisions to make them ready to be presented an an official release upgrade or enhancement. Yes, they will work, but not always as flawlessly as one might expect being that they are from Google. That being said, the one’s I am noting here are being used by many people effectively, so are well documented.
The two add-ons which I find most effective are called “Canned responses” and “Inserting images”. To enable these, and others, go into Gmail “mail settings” (the gear icon at the top-right of your screen) and navigate to “Labs” (one of the links on the orange bar at top), and then activate the “canned responses” and the “inserting images” options.
Canned responses will allow you to reply to an email using a predefined response for a given inquiry. This works similar to what an automated response would provide, such as an “out of the office” message, yet in this case the message is one you select manually from a list you have created; from which you can edit the message for personalization, and then send. To get the most out of this be sure to define the text styling (font face, color, size) sine these will be saved with the template, add hyperlinks to your important pages or resources, and add your social media links.
The next add-on I suggest, “Inserting images”, works in tandem with canned responses. This will allow you to insert an image into the body content (by default all images are “attached”); in-line image insertion is what is used by Outlook, Outlook Express, and many older email applications.
To bring it all together, … you start a new email as normal, select “canned responses”, title it (something like “Client Followup”). The first thing I would suggest is to add an image at the center-top of the templated message (the new green picture box icon). You can either upload your header image from your computer (this could be your company logo or name added graphically, or the header of your website) or you can link to it if it is online (it could be in a folder on your hosting account server, or on Flickr, etc). I would suggest sizing this header image to no larger than 600px in width to ensure that it will work in most email programs and tablets. Below the header/logo you will add your text copy; here I would left align the copy, and add your links. With links you simply mouse over the text and select the “chain” icon, which will allow you to have regular text attributed to a URL, such as “visit E. Curtis designs” with the URL “https://www.ecurtisdesigns.com” assigned to it. Below the email body text you can add your footer content, which would be effective if you wanted to add a graphic here such as a signature, or social media icons. After you’ve completed the templated message as you want, you will save it as a “Canned response” by selected “new canned response” titling it, and saving it.
It is important to note that in my use of Canned responses the images were not being saved, though there was a place holder indicated. Upon searching online some people don’t have this issue. It is possible that my inability to save the images in the template is a result of my using Internet Explorer 9; the Firefox browser, and others many not be so affected.
A few other “LAB” options you may wish to consider are:
“Default Text Styling”, this way you can set your typeface, type color, and style and they will be set automatically for all emails. Enable this lab, head over to the ‘General’ tab on the ‘Settings’ page, and change the default text styling to better suit your preferences.
“Quote selected text” may also be handy if you wish to highlight the message, or a section of it, you are replying to. Note that this won’t effectively work with Canned responses since the template will automatically overwrite any text copy from a previous message, so in this case, you will want to be sure to copy the text you wish to quote first before selecting the canned response option.
“Signature tweaks” is another nice option that places your signature before the quoted text in a reply, and removes the “___” that appears before it.
On a final note, upon doing some research, some people are using one of the Google chrome extensions to customize Gmail emails. One that appears popular is called “wisestamps” add-on which allows you to customize the email footer (effective since by default Gmail has a limitation on the number of characters you can use in the signature area). You can visit their page at: https://www.wisestamp.com/google-chrome-extension
