How to Automate Your Email in Gmail

Many of us live in our Gmail inboxes and send and receive numerous emails every day. In fact, there will be about 320 billion emails sent daily.

Sending all these emails can take up a ton of time, so it’s important to be as efficient as possible. Here are some handy tips for doing just that by automating your email in Gmail.

Using Right Inbox to Automate Your Email in Gmail

Right Inbox has tons of helpful features that enable you to automate your email processes in Gmail. Here are just a few:

Automating Email Follow-Ups

When you’re sending out a lot of emails, it can be tedious and incredibly time-consuming to follow-up with any recipients who don’t respond. With email sequences, you can set up the sequences beforehand, and they can be applied to the recipient before you even send the first email.

If they don’t respond to the first email, you can automatically send an email to follow up with them. If the recipient does reply at any stage, then the follow-ups automatically stop, and you can step in with more personalized messages.

When you apply this feature alongside Right Inbox’s templates feature, you have a productivity powerhouse that allows you to concentrate on warm leads rather than continually chasing down cold ones.

Additional Reading: Ultimate Guide to Email Sequences

Recurring Emails for Automation

No matter what business you’re in, there will be times when you need to send recurring emails – these could be meeting agendas, expense reports, or invoices. And nothing kills productivity more than relentless repetition.

Right Inbox’s recurring emails feature allows you to automatically send these out at the right time without having to think about it. You simply write the email and then choose the frequency at which they are sent.

Using Email Templates for Automation

Do you find that you often write the same (or very similar) emails over and over again? Maybe you have a Word doc with all of your best templates, which you copy and paste into Gmail. While this saves time, there is a quicker and more productive way to achieve this.

This is where Right Inbox’s email templates in gmail feature comes in. Instead of saving your template elsewhere, you can keep them inside Right Inbox and make them accessible from the Gmail interface.

With one click, you can populate your emails with your best-performing templates, and adjust and personalize them accordingly. Not only does this streamline your process, but it also makes you more consistent with your email communication. That’s a win-win situation.

Automating Email Reminders

With the amount of time we spend in our email inbox every day, it’s easy to miss an email – or forget about it entirely. When these are important emails, it can mean that you lose business or end up upsetting a contact. And that’s not ideal at all.

By using Right Inbox’s automatic email reminder, you can choose to remind yourself later of any emails that you don’t want to deal with immediately. It will pop back up to the top of your inbox at the exact time that you specify. This useful feature will help make sure that you never miss a deadline or forget about important emails again.

Gmail Features That Can Help You Automate Your Gmail Inbox

Beyond Right Inbox, there are many ways that you can set up native settings in Gmail to help you automate your Gmail inbox and be more productive. Here are a few of our favorites.

1. Labels

So what are Gmail labels? Essentially, they are tags that you can add to every single email that you receive. Think of them like the folders you see in other email providers – but with the added bonus of being able to add more than one label to each email.

You can also automate these, which can save you a lot of time.

How to Use Gmail Labels to Sort Incoming Messages

Step 1. First off, you need to sign in to Gmail.

Step 2. On the left-hand side navigation menu, click More.

Step 3. Then, click Create new label.

Step 4. Simply name your label and then click Create.

Step 5. You can now add the automation – click the little triangle to the right of the search box to activate the automation.

Step 6. Add the name of the email address (or subject or keyword or similar) and then click Create filter.

Step 7. Choose Apply the label and then choose the label. Then click Create filter.

Step 8. That’s it, you’re done. Every email from that recipient moving forward will be automatically labeled.

Bonus tip: If you click the Also apply filter to matching conversation box, Gmail will go back and retroactively add the label to all the other emails based on your rule. Very handy.

Some Handy Gmail Labels Tips

Want to take your Gmail labeling to the next level? Here’s how:

• Color code your labels. There are many colors to choose from, and you can also add custom colors. Not only does this make your inbox a more beautiful place, but it also allows you to scan for labels based on their color.
• Don’t be afraid of sub-labels. The granular detail allows you to apply more context to your automatic labels. It makes for a more organized and productive email inbox.
• You can see up to 500 labels on the left navigation (although we would say that’s quite a lot!). If you have more than 500, then Gmail gets a little slower to load – and that’s not going to help your productivity.

Additional Reading: Gmail Labels: Everything You Need to Know

2. Filters

If you’ve just read through the section on labels, you will have noticed that we applied the label and then used the filter function to automatically label them. Gmail filters allow you to filter in many other ways than just with labels.

Here are a few useful ways to use filters to automate your Gmail inbox.

How to Use Gmail Filters to Automatically Forward Emails

Step 1. Obviously, you need to be signed in to Gmail.

Step 2. Click the little triangle to the right of the search box to open up the filters option.

Step 3. Add in the email address that you want to create a filter for. Then click Create filter.

Step 4. Click Forward it to and then Add a forwarding address. 

Step 5. This will take you to the setting for adding a forwarding address.

Step 6. You will then get a little pop up to authorize. Click Proceed. 

Step 7. This will send a confirmation code to that address. Click OK and go grab the code.

Step 8. Once you have verified, you will have set automatic forwarding of emails from the first email to the second.

How Use Gmail Filters to Remove Promotional Emails

Step 1. You’ve guessed it – start by signing in to Gmail.

Step 2. Click the little triangle to the right of the search box to open the filters settings.

Step 3. Add in the email of the promotional email that you want to remove. Click Create filter.

Step 4. Simply click Delete it and Create filter, and emails from the address you entered will never appear in your inbox again. Plus, you haven’t had to jump through the several hoops that some people add to their unsubscribe list. This way is much more productive.

Bonus tips:

If you don’t want to delete the emails (say you want them not to appear in your inbox, but you might want to read them later), then use the Mark as read option.

If you prefer to keep your marketing messages separate, you can use labels like those earlier in this article.

If you want to be really organized, you can set up a new Gmail address specifically for promotional emails and forward them to that address based on the steps earlier in this article.

Some Handy Gmail Filter Tips

Need some quick extra tips? Here you go:

• Never be afraid to experiment. You can always delete filters if they don’t work out the way you want.
• Categories are your friend if you use the standard inbox. Categorizing different types of emails automatically pushes them to those tabs.
• Got important emails that Google keeps marking as spam? Use the Never send to spam feature.

Additional Reading: How to Create Filters in Gmail

With the amount of time that we spend in our email inboxes, finding ways to increase productivity is vital. Using these tips and Right Inbox to automate your emails as much as possible allows you to spend more doing and less time sorting.