From writing headlines with AI to using sound assistance, here are 14 answers to the question, “What are your favorite email productivity tools/hacks you will use this year and why?”
Lightkey
AI-Crafted Headlines
Auto Text Expander
David Allen's Two-Minute Rule
Voila Norbert
Sanebox
Turning Off Notifications
Snov.io
Unroll.me
Boomerang Browser Extension for Gmail
Establish Responsiveness Expectations
Effective Folder Use
Templates and Shortcuts
Sound Assistance
Lightkey
Although email is a crucial component of a company, it can also be your biggest time waster. To stay current, many people send dozens of emails every day, which can consume valuable time and clog your inbox.
Fortunately, Lightkey is now available to assist you in maximizing productivity and minimizing downtime. As you type, Lightkey provides grammatical and spelling suggestions and anticipates 12 words, including punctuation. This simple email productivity tool uses real-time text prediction to shorten processing times.
You may reduce the time you spend emailing by incorporating email productivity apps into your platform. The best option for you to increase productivity and keep your sanity is Lightkey.
Andre Oentoro, Founder & CEO, Breadnbeyond
AI-Crafted Headlines
For the future of email productivity, automation is where it's at. From text prediction software to apps that alert you about words that sound "spammy", deploying the right tools can make an enormous difference and improve your open rates.
Naturally, having a great subject line when crafting emails always reigns supreme, which is where AI-assisted writing tools help. If you can't seem to crack the perfect one-liner, it makes a lot more sense to use AI to get the job done, and will save you a ton of time.
Harry Morton, Founder, Lower Street
Auto Text Expander
This tool allows me to save snippets of commonly used phrases and automatically expand them with a few keystrokes, saving me time and energy. Auto Text Expander ensures I don't have to type the same phrase multiple times, allowing me to spend time on more important tasks.
As a bonus, Auto Text Expander also supports multiple languages, making it perfect for those who frequently write in multiple languages. In short, Auto Text Expander is an essential email productivity tool for anyone looking to maximize their efficiency and stay organized!
David Allen's Two-Minute Rule
The "Two Minute Rule" is a productivity technique used for answering emails without getting bogged down in your inbox. It involves responding to any email that can be completed in two minutes or fewer.
You can respond as soon as you receive an email, or set aside a specific time each day for inbox review. During that brief window, focus on addressing any emails which can be quickly dealt with. Usually, these will be emails that require a quick response, such as simple project updates or acknowledgments that you have received a document. If an email requires more time or thought to respond to, move it to a separate folder and address it when you have plenty of capacity to do so.
By responding quickly, it prevents your inbox from clogging up with unanswered emails. You'll find it easier to identify high-priority emails that need direct and immediate attention. This keeps you organized, prevents procrastination, and improves your responsiveness when communicating with others.
Max Wesman, Chief Operating Officer, GoodHire
Voila Norbert
I know it can be a pain to look for email addresses. As a prospector, you can save time by using an email locating tool to locate a contact's email address. Voila Norbert is highly recommended by me because of its user-friendliness and impressive accuracy (98%).
With this rate, Norbert is the best email finder available, making it a must-have for any business seeking new leads. The most useful feature of Norbert is its ability to search for several emails at once.
To begin, compile a list of potential customers' names and business websites in an Excel file. Upon submitting this to Norbert, you will promptly receive a CSV, including contact details. You can increase your email productivity and save a lot of time by doing this.
Max Whiteside, SEO & Content Lead, Breaking Muscle
Sanebox
Sanebox is a powerful email management tool that helps to streamline organizing and managing inboxes. It uses AI to automatically prioritize emails, filter out unimportant messages, and intelligently sort emails into different folders to reduce inbox clutter.
It effectively detects and eliminates spam, sets reminders to follow up on important emails, and snoozes them when needed. Overall, I believe Sanebox is the perfect tool for me to use this year as it offers a wide range of features that will make managing my emails much more efficient and save time.
Arkadiusz Terpilowski, Head of Growth & Co-Founder, Primetric
Turning Off Notifications
It can be tempting to answer emails as soon as they come in, but leaving your email notifications on all day can make it really difficult to focus on other tasks. I stay productive by adhering to a strict three-times-per-day policy for checking my inboxes—once in the morning, once right before lunch, and finally about an hour before I'm set to finish work.
By turning off email notifications, I find that it's easier to stay productive. If someone needs to contact me urgently, they can always call or send a text. Checking my inboxes three times per day also helps me to keep my emails organized and sorted while ensuring that I respond to people in a timely manner.
Alex Mastin, CEO & Founder, Home Grounds
Snov.io
Snov.io is an all-in-one email master key that can help you cover every dimension from A to Z if emailing people is your preferred way of communication. The number one aspect is email deliverability.
Often, we are required to send cold emails about our latest product launches to prospective buyers, and those emails not landing in a valid mailbox hurt our deliverability score and sales opportunities can be missed.
With Snov.io, we can verify emails in bulk and also have a specific warm-up feature that doesn't pose us as spammers. In 2023, I believe deliverability will be key. It doesn't matter if you're sending out a thousand emails; the sales would only grow if thousands of recipients actually receive your mail.
Walter Lappert, CEO, Triad Drones
Unroll.me
Unroll.me is a free service that scans your inbox and gives you an easy way to unsubscribe from all unwanted newsletters or other emails at once, without needing to open each one and click the unsubscribe links.
I find this super helpful, as I often sign up for different email lists to look at what different brands and competitors are doing with promotions, or to get offers from e-commerce sites. However, this means my inbox quickly becomes cluttered. I'd recommend everyone use the tool twice per year to keep their email inboxes clean and manageable.
Ryan Turner, Founder, Ecommerce Intelligence
Boomerang Browser Extension for Gmail
Boomerang is a browser extension that allows you to schedule emails to be sent at a later time, set reminders for follow-up emails, and archive emails until a specified date. This can be helpful for managing email overload and keeping your inbox organized.
For example, you can use Boomerang to schedule emails to be sent when you know the recipient will be more likely to see them or to remind yourself to follow up on an email if you haven't received a response within a certain time frame. You can also use Boomerang to temporarily remove emails from your inbox and have them automatically reappear at a later date, which can be useful for decluttering your inbox and focusing on more pressing tasks.
Brian Meiggs, Founder, My Millennial Guide
Establish Responsiveness Expectations
Email responsiveness is an unspoken metric for measuring how much a brand values a customer. Therefore, some business owners feel compelled to attend to customer email inquiries or requests within seconds of receipt. But this is an unsustainable approach to customer satisfaction and a serial (but shameless) productivity killer.
What I have done is mutually establish metrics for evaluating email responsiveness with each client. For example, I could agree with Client A that I must respond to every email from him within 16 hours of receipt. Therefore, responding within five minutes of receiving his email and responding within 15 hours and 59 minutes of receiving his email communicates the same level of commitment to the project.
So regardless of how urgent the situation is, the client cannot classify me as unserious until 16 hours elapse. This saves me the horror of URGENT client emails bumping into my schedule and disrupting my output.
Effective Folder Use
Make your own system to stay organized; for instance, you could use colored tabs and file names like "Requires Response" and "No Action Needed." You'll save hours of time each month and make it easier to browse through your email if you set up a system that uses color coding and names for each folder.
Also, I recommend learning email shortcuts. Don't go crazy as I did and try to memorize them all. Write the shortcuts that are useful to you and keep them near the keyboard. The timesaving ones are the ones you will pick up the quickest.
Nely Mihaylova, Content Editor, Unagi Scooters
Templates and Shortcuts
Email is repetitive work, especially when you're managing multiple email accounts at an agency. What helps a lot is when you already have templates in place that you can reuse every time. This allows you to stay within the brand guidelines and produce the email copy quickly.
It's also good when you use shortcuts. For example, for phrases that come up constantly in your email copy ("think about it," "here's the thing," "Product XYZ"), it's good to have keyboard shortcuts that allow you to generate them in one click, without having to type them every time. It sounds trivial, but it saves 1-2 minutes per email copy, which, yearly, saves hours.
Ernest Bio Bogore, Head of Marketing, Nerdy Joe Inc.
Sound Assistance
Because of my astigmatism, I have quite an issue with looking at digital screens for too long. I have to spend quite a lot of time per day emailing and messaging all the people I work with about the state of affairs, as well as contacting companies for software and hardware issues.
That's why I'm trying to use sound assistance daily lately. I want to learn how to type without having to directly stare at the screen. Sound assistance is a great help in the learning process of doing just that. If this feature is turned on, it will play a sound each time a user enters a correct character, assisting them in keeping track of their typing and reducing errors.
Miroslav Munitlak, Technical Manager, Ask Gamblers