Tuesday Time Management Tip: Email Templates for Outlook and Gmail
Aug 24th, 2010 | By Darlene MacAuley | Category: Inspiring New Tip, Time Management
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Do you find yourself responding to requests about your services or classes with the same information, again and again?
Do you send all new clients a welcome email with basic information or forms to complete?
Do you have a class series and send your students a follow-up email that’s basically the same from series to series?
Now the important question. Are you writing these emails from scratch every. Single. Time? If you are, consider creating email templates from those old emails so you can recycle them from here on out. Then when you need to send out responses or new emails, all you do is select your template, personalize it a little bit, and hit the send button!
Rather than recreate the wheel and write a post with detailed instructions for creating templates, I’m going to give you a few links with directions for creating email templates for both Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.
Email templates for MS Outlook
What I like about creating email templates in Outlook is that you can also include attachments! Click here to get directions for creating a template.
Now, I have found that it takes a few steps to open and use your template. So, I learned how to create a new toolbar to access the email templates easily with just a couple clicks. It takes a little more time to set up, but I really believe it’s worth the effort.
Email templates for Gmail
Gmail has great template feature too, called “canned responses”, and it’s very easy to set up. Unfortunately, you aren’t able to include attachments with the template, but adding an attachment after the fact is quick and easy.
I challenge you to spend some time today creating some email templates to save you time in the future. If you already use templates and want to share some additional tips, inspire us with your comments!
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Sweet. I do have e-mails I send out on a regular basis, but I have them saved in word and cut and paste into my g-mail. I will go check out the template info!
Thanks!
Unfortunately Microsoft’s HTML formatting is often different than other email client’s and the resulting formatting can be messed up for the recipient. You can fix this is by using CSS style sheets. You can find James Prion’s paper on the web by going to his website OpsisLtd.co.uk.
I hope this helps. We use custom stationary and forms in our business: helping companies determine appropriate pricing and then ingeniously raising them without losing customers.
Cheers!
Chris Blanton recently posted…Ingenious Sales-Follow the Leader
Thanks for pointing this out and suggesting a resource.
How is this different than simply creating a draft?
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Rob the Techie recently posted…Printing in Outlook 102 – Contacts
A draft could work too, but I think it would need to be saved into a document of some kind in order to use it over and over again. Once you send a draft in an email, to recall it you’d have to look for it in sent mail. Creating email templates saves you from having to do that.