According to a recent survey from Adobe, business professionals spend roughly six hours a day attending to e-mails.
Not exactly a surprise considering that roughly 269 billion e-mails are sent every day. If you are an entrepreneur, small business owner, or any sort of business pro, chances are you spend more time than you'd like dealing with your constantly brimming inbox.
Because of how e-mail-centric most workplaces have become, effectively managing e-mail communications is a must. E-mail is leveraged to connect with prospects and customers to boost sales, manage internal conversations, and oversee task lists; e-mail is everything for most brands. This level of use, however, can quickly create cluttered and disorganized inboxes.
Fortunately, there is a myriad of valuable Gmail plugins to help turn chaos into order and make running your business a bit easier.
If you need to enhance your inbox, check out these powerful plugins.
1. ToDosit for Gmail
ToDoist is one of the single most popular Chrome extensions available, with more than 10 million users.
ToDoist for Gmail takes the power of the original plugin and applies it to your inbox. This extension acts as a feature-rich task management system that enables Gmail users to transform e-mails into actionable tasks with a single click, track important deadlines, create sub-tasks and priorities, and share information across the plugin and the ToDoist application.
With a clutter-free interface, ToDoist for Gmail doubles your inbox's productivity powers.
2. ActiveInbox
ActiveInbox serves as a (paid) supplement to Gmail by providing most of the features that the system is missing.
ActiveInbox enables users to add tasks, assign due dates to tasks and e-mails, schedule e-mails to be sent later, implement follow-up reminders and create notes, among many other useful elements.
Since ActiveInbox also works on mobile devices, you can keep your inbox organized and maintained while on-the-go.
3. Boomerang for Gmail
Sometimes, brilliant ideas or failed follow-ups dawn on us at inopportune times. That's when Boomerang for Gmail becomes a lifesaver.
This Gmail extension enables users to specify when e-mails will be sent, ensuring the timing is always right. Additionally, recurring messages can also be scheduled to future dates, giving you one less thing to worry about.
You can also use Boomerang for Gmail to manage when you respond to messages - the plugin can filter messages to be handled later, reducing inbox clutter.
4. FullContact for Gmail and Inbox
Contact management is just isn't some people's forte. Duplicate contacts are common occurrences and mysterious connections are commonplace.
FullContact helps these folks to effectively manage their contacts' information right from Gmail. Users can easily locate and delete duplicate contacts, scan business cards into contact lists, see recent social media activity, search contacts from Gmail, and leverage tons of other useful contact management features.
5. Sanebox
Almost none of us read every e-mail that lands in our inbox. A lot of messages are unimportant or outright junk. It's dealing with the chaotic mess these messages create that makes Sanebox a sanity-saver.
Sanebox filters out unwanted e-mails by analyzing your inbox and e-mail history to determine which communications should be prioritized.
Additionally, Sanebox offers tools for applying non-reply notifications, unsubscribing from newsletters, and many other organizational gems.
6. Clearbit Connect
Clearbit Connect is essentially an e-mail-enabled prospecting tool that allows users to collect e-mails and uncover valuable information about prospective leads. After receiving an e-mail, Clearbit reveals data on the sender such as the company they work for, their position within the organization, the size of the business, and other beneficial details.
Moreover, Clearbit provides users with outreach data. For instance, users can enter the name of a company and a job title in the compose window and Clearbit will recommend who to contact.
This tool even helped the startup, Mention, to increase signup conversions by more than 54 percent.
7. Sortd Smart Skin for Gmail
To-do lists are an invaluable tool for busy entrepreneurs and business owners. Sortd revamps your Gmail inbox to become an e-mail-based to-do list while providing a high level of customization so that producers, movers, and shakers are always well-organized.
Users can drag and drop e-mails into designated lists, name lists how they please, and even rename e-mails to make to-do lists clear at a glance.
Sortd also allows users to hide their inbox and work exclusively from the tool, without logging out of Gmail.
8. Mailvelope
Just about everything that lives in digitized form is vulnerable to hackers. This includes major institutions like Google and its e-mail service, Gmail.
This means that extra precautions should be taken when dealing with sensitive business materials. Enter Mailvelope.
Mailvelope provides Gmail users with end-to-end security encryption, based on the OpenPGP standard.
Using this tool, e-mail senders can request for any e-mail to be encrypted. Users are then provided with a unique key to share with the designated recipient so that they can view the communication. Just be sure to not share this key via e-mail as well. If you share the key through an alternative communication method (like text), you can rest assured that your data will be delivered safely.
If you deal with e-mail communications in your business, check out these awesome plugins to help supplement your efforts, keep you well organized, and always on top of your inbox.
What are some of your favorite plugins for Gmail? Which extensions from this list do you already leverage in your business operations?
About The Author:
Conscious online marketer, web executive, and multi-faceted writer Tina Courtney has been creating and fostering online innovations since 1996. Tina has assisted many clients in maximizing online production and marketing efforts and is the Web's foremost webmaster and tech news blogs. She's produced and marketed innovative content for major players like Disney and JDate, as well as boutique startups galore, with fortes including social media, SEO, influencer marketing, community management, lead generation, and project management. Tina is also a certified Reiki practitioner, herbalist, and accomplished life coach. Learn more on LinkedIn, and Facebook.
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