You probably send an awful lot of email, and as a result, that means that your messages are just one of hundreds that other people are seeing. So how can you stand out and increase the chances of people connecting and replying to your emails? Well, in this article, we are going to share with you five Gmail Tools to help you stand out as you’re creating your messages right here within Gmail. Let’s start off simple, and we’re going to work our way up to something a little more complex, including how to create a professional looking in signature, just like the one you see here.
Table of Contents
1. Professional Grammar Checker:
The first one on list is something you’ve probably heard before, and that is Grammarly. Grammarly is free, or at least there’s a free Forever version. But Grammarly has saved me so many times. It’s the reason why I mention it on a regular basis. So here I am crafting an email.
I want to send a relatively short email to this individual, but you can see that Grammarly is helping me out before I hit the send button. Why? Well, it actually hasn’t caught any spelling mistakes. Gmail has some basic spell checking built right in, but what it wants to do is make me sure that I sound great when it comes to writing my emails.
So in this case, you can see I’ve used the wrong form. Yeah, that’s not yours. It should be your or you are, and all I have to do is Hover over these red underlined words, and I can make the change. I can say, yeah, let’s use the correct version here. The second one is a very silly mistake, but how often are you in a rush?
How often do you forget to double check or reread your messages? So, yeah, it’s not meat. It’s M-E-E-T. Can we meet next Monday? And then this last one that Grammarly is suggesting to me. There’s no spelling mistake. In fact, thanks for all you do and keeping us in the loop. It actually looks pretty good to me, but if I Hover over it, you know what? I’m actually not using the proper format here. It should be for keeping.
Thanks for all you do and for keeping us in the loop. So now I’m going to sound that much more professional and that much more accurate when it comes to my grammar. The other nice thing that I like is if you Hover over the Grammarly icon in the bottom right hand corner of any of your emails when you have the Grammarly extension installed is you can also see how your text may sound to your readers.
So, for example, if I click on this icon here, Grammarly is telling me that this particular message is relatively optimistic and friendly. Now I can choose to grade this either up or down to see if I think they are accurate, but I know this can be handy, especially if you’re a little heated. Maybe if you’re a little angry or upset, maybe you want to take a quick glance down below and see, oh, is that really how I come across? Maybe I can change this message.
2. Identify Weak Messages:
The next tool on our list is an extension called Just Not Sorry. And the whole idea behind Just Not Sorry is to look for certain words that often make us sound weak or less confident in our messaging. So with the Just Not Sorry extension installed here, you can see it’s picking up on a few keywords or key phrases.
So, for example, I just wanted to check in if I Hover over Just, it’s actually going to tell me that this often demeans what I have to say. In fact, just often shrinks our power, so I may want to remove just and just say, hey, I wanted to check in and see if you had a chance to review my proposal. I’m sorry. Now Sorry is a powerful word, and I think there are times when we do want to use that term, but if you’re over using it, it may also undermine your messaging as well. And then lastly, here in this last sentence example.
But if we can set up a meeting next week, I think that we can come to an agreement, I think, is another one of those terms that often displays an overall lack of self confidence. And I like these little descriptions that they give us when we Hover our mouse over these words. So instead of I think maybe I can say I know that we can come to an agreement. That’s a much more confident stance. It’s not overly aggressive, but it’s a positive stance as well as I’m replying to this message. So if you’d like some hints as to when you are using some of these weaker terms, you can install the Just Not Sorry extension.
3. Awesome E-mail Signatures:
One of the best ways to stand out from the crowd and look professional is by having an awesome email signature. And for that, we’re going to take a look at a website called My Signature IO. Now, my signature allows you to quickly and easily create a custom email signature that is either as complex or as simple as you like. So for example, here I was creating an email signature here on the right hand side of the screen, but I can swap out or remove or customize any of these call to action settings here as I like.
But I can either go from what I’ve been working on here or let me show you how to start from scratch. So here from the My Signature dashboard, all I need to do is select new signature, and I’m presented with a variety of custom made templates. Now, there’s several different categories in which you can choose from. We can look at professional, modern, elegant, creative. I’m going to stick with this friendly one, and I’d like to get started with this one right here.
So I’m going to click on it. And yeah, it’s a beautiful email signature. It just doesn’t have my information, but no problem. It’s quick and easy just by filling out the fields here on the left hand side, I can customize all of my branding, all of my colors. I can add a logo so I can keep that branding consistent.
Whether they’re coming from my website to my email, to my social media, I can bring it all together right here from within my signature. So for example, let’s just put in my name here so it’s myself. And the very next thing I want to do is actually swap out this image. So I can either click on the tabs over here on the left or I can click on the different elements here within the signature preview on the right. So maybe I want to swap out that picture.
I’m going to remove that and let’s go back and choose a file that is a little bit more me. Shall we say the great thing is that there’s a lot of customizable features here. So if I want, for example, maybe some rounded corners on the side, maybe I want a rounded picture here. All I need to do is now drag this so my face is within that circle. I’m going to hit apply, and immediately it’s added to the signature here on the right hand side.
Maybe I want to customize my social buttons here. Maybe I want to add my Facebook page. Well, no problem. All I would need to do is put in my Facebook ID over here, and then I can drag and rearrange the order of those social icons. And if you have a call to action, if you want a Book Me button or anything of the like, you can do so and include it right here within your signature.
Now, when you’re all finished designing your signature, all you need to do is Select Save Signature in the lower right hand column. Now this will give us the ability to copy it to our clipboard. So I’m going to copy it right here. And now if we go back into our Gmail account, all we need to do is hit the Gear icon and select see all settings and on the very first tab. If we scroll almost all the way down to the bottom, we can add a new signature.
So I’m going to Select Create New. In this case, I’m going to call this one a my signature. For example, I’m going to say create and right here, all I have to do is paste what we copied to our clipboard right here on the right hand side. Now at the very bottom. Don’t forget to hit save changes.
And now let’s go ahead and compose a new message. I’m going to swap this default signature out for the one that we just created here. This my signature. You now have a professional looking signature, which is also useful to your readers.
4. Embed Meeting Times:
The next tool in our list is designed to remove friction when it comes to creating meetings. Many of us are using scheduling tools such as Calendly, and you may be used to just copying and pasting your meeting link right here within the email. But why not stand out from the crowd and make it that much easier for your recipients to select a time? If you have the Calendly browser extension installed, all you need to do is select it from your browser window. And here you can see some of the meetings that I already have set up here. Now I could just copy the link for this 30 minutes meeting and paste it in my message.
When they select that link, they would be brought to a new browser tab and see my entire calendar. But what if I choose this option? Add times to Email this is a fantastic solution, especially if you want to propose just a few specific days. So I’m going to say add times to email, and I’m brought up with a miniature calendar here. I’m going to select the Thursday and Friday of next week and I’m going to say finish and share.
It tells me that the times are copied to my clipboard. I can now close this and I’m going to come back to my message and just paste it in here and look at this. I’ve got the options embedded directly into the calendar. So when I send this message, the person on the other end can come right in here right from the email itself and select a time that works for them.
5. Gmail Tools to Email Video Messages:
The last tool on our list today is only for those who really want to wow the socks off the people they’re sending emails to. You know we are so used to a text based world whether that text messaging, instant messaging or of course email but if you really want to impress the people that you are messaging with why not send a video email? in this case we are going to be using Loom and in particular the loom extension.
Loom is great tool for recording screenshots and screen casting, especially if you are trying to solve a problem or share something online. but in this case we are just going to use video format and embed in into our gmail message so here with the look extension install. I click on settings and click up here a little bit closer to my camera. so it looks like I’m looking at you i can adjust my setting here in terms of the microphone and which camera that I’m using but all i need to do is start recording and its going to give me a quick countdown.
To finish the recording just click the check mark button to stop recording. its going to open loom in new tab where i can make change and adjustments, including trimming in particular video and i can always preview before sending here is another quick tip. Loom allows us to add a call to action button.
So for example if i click this option here on the right hand side i could say something like book a time with me or something like that and maybe I could add the link directly to my calendly appointment or to do some other booking tool. im just going to put in some text here just so i can save this call to action. if i want to change the color and be on brand i can do that as well lets give this a color like blue this don’t look like a valid URL.