In this tutorial, email productivity specialist Randall F. Dean walks viewers through Gmail’s newly expanded signature settings. He demonstrates how to access the full settings page, create multiple signatures (including ones with images, links, and custom formatting), and assign different signatures for new messages versus replies/forwards. Dean shows how a longer, artwork‑rich signature can be set as the default for new emails while a concise version is used for ongoing conversations. He then repurposes a signature as a quick template for an “info request” email, using copy‑paste shortcuts to personalize the message in seconds. Dean briefly references Gmail’s native template feature as an alternative method, encouraging viewers to explore both approaches. Throughout, he emphasizes the time‑saving potential for users who send repetitive emails, invites feedback, and promotes his productivity PDF tip sheets via email.
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Hi everybody, Randall F. Dean, email sanity expert here. Hey, I wanted to do a video for all of my Gmail users because they've done a really nice little change to their signature options in Gmail. So let's jump right in and show you, show you what they've got going on here. I've been sort of watching this change recently, but I've noticed now that it's pretty robust. Take a look at this. Go into your settings in Gmail and then click on See All Settings to get past the little quick settings bar. Under your General tab, page down to Signatures. And I want to show you something sort of cool. You can have multiple signatures now. And taking a look at this, I have my basic signature, my signature. Now notice you can now bring in pictures and images. Obviously you can set in things that activate all of the links. Notice that I have my signature. I also have my reply and forward signature. Now notice the reply and forward signature is much shorter. Here's what I really wanted to show you. Take a look down here. For new emails, use my signature, the longer one with the artwork and additional links. For shorter ones, for replies and forwards, I'm using the shorter reply and forward signature. Because that sort of assumes we've already been talking. And so now you— what you can do is you can actually have a longer, more substantial signature for new emails and a shorter, tighter signature when you know you've already been sharing communications. Yay, that's good. But now look at this. This is super cool. I've even gone in and set up an info request signature which is a little bit longer than the previous two. And let me show you what I can do with this, which is super cool. I'm going to hit compose and open a new email. Now notice it brought in the new signature because that's a new email. But if you come down here to the bottom, notice right here, insert signature. Click on that little icon, looks like a little, uh, fountain pen. Click on this, and if I switch it to info request, it brings in that longer signature. Because what I've done is I've basically created a template.. And now I can take this top line right here, do a Ctrl+X, come up to subject, do a Ctrl+V, and come down here and just quickly clean this up just a touch and click on name and type in Randy. Dear Randy, look at that personalized email that fast. You can do this in the signatures tool. Now what's interesting, I've made another video which talks about how you can utilize the templates in Gmail to do very similar thing And let me show you a little something about that real quick. Once you get that set up, that'll be down here in the more options, and you can come up to your templates and once again insert standard info request, which would be right there. But go watch that other video because now you have a couple ways to do this. Um, I, I could see, uh, people ending up with several potential signatures in their Gmail beyond just the 3 that I'm showing right here for very specific auto responses. So take a really good look at this. This is a game breaker and could really save people quite a bit of time using their Gmail, especially if they're sending similar messages for similar things quite frequently. All right, so I don't want to talk too long. Let's finish this thing up. Did I miss anything, by the way? I'm very curious about that. And let's finish the video here. If you think of any other ideas related to what we talked about, please send them to me. The other thing I want to say is if you like the video, obviously please give it a like, consider subscribing to the channel, and if you want to get my productivity PDF tip sheets on time, email, productivity, distraction management, Outlook, Gmail, Google Workspace, Microsoft 365 tips, Send me an email, randy@randalldean.com. I'll be happy to send you a whole bunch of stuff to look at. Thank you.
