Randy Dean shows how to set up Gmail Templates to automate repetitive emails. Enable it in Advanced settings, create templates from drafts, and use Google Keep to paste them on mobile since the Gmail app doesn't support templates natively.
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Alright, hi everybody, this is Randy Dean, the Email Sanity Expert, and tonight I want to share with you a monster Gmail time-saving tip. This thing used to be called canned responses, but in the last year or so Gmail has renamed them into what is probably a more accessible name called templates. And I want to show you how these things work because these things, if you use Gmail, are going to save you a ton of time. So let's go in and show you what I mean by this. Let's pop out. Let's go into my Gmail and let's see, as we pop in, what I want to do is go into my inbox. And have you ever been working on an email and as you're working on that email you realize pretty quickly that this email that I'm typing right here could be a template for future emails? I could use the same basic format, the same basic text, to allow me to create future emails that'll save me time when I'm sending out this email. So, and if you've ever been to one of my email programs, you know, I show a very similar tip using multiple signatures in Microsoft Outlook, which I'll probably link to later in the video. But I want to show you this tip here in Gmail because it's so useful. Now, in order to make this work though, you got to do a little setup thing first. So let's go up here to Settings in Gmail, and I actually want you to come down and click on the word Settings. And then what you're going to do is you're not going to go into the General tab. Because inside the General tab you only get one signature. See, if you come down here you get that one signature. But if you come over instead over here to the Advanced tab, click on Advanced, and you'll notice there's several different features in here. You might want to sort of scroll through these to see if there's anything in here that you think might be nice to take a look at. I could see some people liking the preview pane and things like that. But what I really want you to do is come to this one called Templates and enable it. You have to turn it on so it's set up, because once you have it set up, now watch what you can do. Let's come over here and just hit Compose. And so I'm going to open a new email, and I've sort of set this up to make this work. Watch what I'm gonna do. I'm gonna do a paste from a previous email, Ctrl+V, and notice that I've got a sort of a formatted thing here. This is a standard type message I send out to my list when I know I'm going to be in a city speaking at an event somewhat near some of the people in my database. So I've sort of set this thing up, but now watch what I can do. I've got this information in here. Now you come down down here to the bottom right corner, and I really wish they would change this to the word more instead of these three little dots, because a lot of you probably never even noticed this was down here. But if you open this up, now watch what you can do. You can come up here into template, and then you can come over here and save draft as template. And what I'm going to do is hit save as new template, and I'm going to give it the name nearby city message. And I'm going to hit save. And now watch what happens when I do this. I can close this email that I just created here. I'm going to hit compose again. I'm going to come down here to the one that I created. More options. Let me go to templates. And now notice nearby city message is now one of my options. Now watch what happens when I click on this. Boom! Look at that. I'm in business. I am completely in business. Now one thing, little thing you might want to notice. Take a look at this little watch out. Notice that when I created the template, I had my signature in there and Gmail is auto-appending my other signature. So I've already got a signature plus a signature. So when you make this, you want to make— you might want to make sure that you don't actually keep your signature in there as a draft. Select your signature and remove it before creating your new template, because then it's going to add in the text and it's going to include your signature if you have that set up in your General Settings tab. But now watch this. Of course you've got this set up. Let me show you a little something here. I'm going to take this and I'm going to do a Ctrl+X, and then I'm going to overwrite the nearby city message and put in a Ctrl+V. Now notice that what I've done, I've actually made it to going to be in— and let's just put this down here— Orlando. Going to be in Orlando next month. Hi, and then of course you can personalize this. Hi Joe, and just wanted to let you know that I'll be in Orlando in February. Etc., etc. So see how quickly you can use this as a way to set up a message and make it so it's ready to go, ready to send out to people in your list. And hey, while you're at it, little bonus tip right here. Check this out. You've already created this little, this little message here. So I'm going to close this. I'm going to hit compose one more time. Let me bring back in that message text. Oops, well, let's go down here. We'll actually just go ahead and use Templates here. Let's go into nearby city message and notice that I've got this in here. Now watch this little bonus thing I want you to do. Select the same text. Let's come down here. I will grab the signature this time. Let's come down here and grab the signature and I'm going to do a Ctrl+C, which is a copy. Now watch what I'm going to do while I'm doing this. Why not go into Google Keep? And while you're in the Google Keep, let's take a note and and let's do New City Visit Message. And now I'm going to come down here into Take a Note and I'm going to hit Ctrl+V, which is a paste. And now let me show you what I just did. I hope you see what I just did. I've actually put this text inside of here. Now I might want to clean it up a little bit because what I can do now, if you take a look at this, is I've actually created a note that allows me to use the same text if I happen to be away from my computer trying to respond to emails on my phone and I know that I have the draft of the message here now in Keep. And so by doing this, what I've basically done is I've automated it not only here in Gmail on a PC, but I've also automated it so when I'm on my phone I can do a quick copy and paste operation out of Google Keep into that same message if I'm using the Gmail app on my phone. Alright, so with that combination of both setting up a new template for this type of message as well as using the Google Keep capability, you can really speed up how you respond to some of your more formulaic repeating type of messages. Alright, so with that, let's finish this one up. I'm going to do a Shift+F5. Notice that takes you right into PowerPoint presentation mode. I'm going to say thank you for your time. Hope that this is a very useful tip for for you. If you'd like to find out more about me and my programs, notice that I do have regular— I speak at events 75 to 100 times a year. I have full online streaming programs and even webinar programs that I do. Just go out to my website, randydean.com. If you like this video and you want to get more tips like this in the future, please go ahead and subscribe. And I'll even give you a little bonus opportunity here. I have a whole series of bonus little productivity tip sheets in electronic PDF format on time management, email management, smartphone Tablet usage, Gmail and Google usage, Microsoft Outlook usage. If you'd like to get access to those tip sheets, just send me a quick email at randy@randaldean.com, put YouTube PDF in the subject line, and I'll get you enough information to keep you busy and learning for several weeks. Thanks a lot for your time. Hope you had fun tonight.
