Did you know that you can automate Gmail in many different ways? One possibility of automating Gmail is to automate responses to common messages.
For example you’re a business owner or you work in customer support and customers often ask you what your opening hours are. You might have the response to this request saved in a Google Docs file and simply copy paste the content to reply to the customers message. Or maybe you’re actually manually responding to this request by tipping the opening hours every single time.
What if there was a better and more efficient way of dealing with this repetitive message? In this tutorial you’ll learn how to automate gmail by sending out automated responses to common messages. You can also watch a video tutorial of these steps if you prefer.
When you first start using Gmail the functionality of email templates is not activated. So our first step, in order to automate gmail auto-responses, is to activate templates. We do so by navigating to the Gmail Settings (click on the gear symbol in the top right corner of your browser).
Click on the Advanced pane and under Template choose Enable. Save your changes to return to your inbox.
Compose a new message which contains the information you want to automatically send out in reply to the common messages you receive.
Once you’re done writing the message click on More options (the three dots symbol), choose Templates, Save draft as template and finally Save as new template. You’ll be prompted to give your template a name which you do to finalize this step.
Click in the Search mail field and on the right side a dropdown symbol will appear which you click on. This action makes the search and filter interface show up.
Here you want to enter whatever keyword or term you want to filter for. In our example we’re choosing incoming messages that have the words opening hours somewhere in their content. Once you’ve defined the term for the filter you click on Create filter to proceed.
The final step is to define that whenever an email is identified that the filter applies to the a message gets sent out. For that we choose the action Send template and in the displayed list we choose our Opening Hours template we created in the preceding step. Click on Create filter to finish off.
From now on any email you receive containing the words Opening Hours will be identified by the filter you created. This then will trigger that our Opening Hours template will automatically be sent to the person who sent us the email.
Go ahead and watch this tutorial in video form to see the exact workflow of automating Gmail by setting up automated responses to common messages.
If you wish you can read the official information on automating responses by Google. It’s not a step-by-step tutorial but it still might contain interesting information for you.
Are you interested in further ideas on how to optimize your Gmail inbox? Head over to this tutorial where you’ll see more examples of creating filter that automatically manage Gmail.