How much time do you spend on email each week?
According to a recent survey from Adobe, the average American professional spends about six hours a day checking email — that’s 30 hours during the work week.
That’s a lot of time spent on unbillable tasks that could be spent focusing on work that meets the goals of your paying clients.
Getting bogged down by your inbox is especially problematic in agencies where account managers and other client-facing employees must deal with managing requests from a number of different clients who are all considered priorities.
When you communicate with your clients primarily over email, it’s easy for important messages and tasks to get lost in the seemingly constant shuffle. Your inbox can quickly become an unmanageable time sink.
You could use a project management tool to reduce the amount of email clutter created from projects. But you could also better optimize how you use email, prioritize requests, manage communication from your inbox.
Check out these 13 Gmail plugins and apps to start improving how you use email to communicate and collaborate with clients.
13 Tools to Improve Client Communication & Collaboration Through Email
SaneBox weeds out unimportant emails after examining your inbox content and history, surfacing only the communications you want to priortize. You can train the tool by moving miscategorized emails to your inbox to make it even smarter.
The tool also provides features for setting notifications for when people don’t reply to a message, unsubscribing from unwanted newsletters, and snoozing emails you want to deal with later.
Price: Snack plan for $7/month for annual contract, Lunch plan for $12/month for annual contract, Dinner plan for $36/month for annual contract
Communicating with clients in a direct, assertive manner is easier said than done. This plugin helps you write more confident emails by scanning your messages for extraneous words that undermine your tone, e.g., “Sorry,” “Just,” or “I think.”
When you use a word or phrase in an email that could potentially weaken your positioning, the app highlights it and explains specifically how it could make you seem less confident and proficient.
Price: Free
This iPhone app upgrades the user interface of your email client by displaying emails as chat dialogues. It also separates newsletters from emails from people in your inbox, and provides an option for you to unsubscribe to irrelevant communications with one swipe — perfect for decluttering your inbox. The app works with both Gmail and Outlook.
Price: Free
HubSpot Sales is a free email tracking tool that allows you to see when a client or prospect has opened an email — basically, you’ll be able to tell if your email got lost in the client’s inbox or if she’s actually ignoring it.
The plugin also highlights key contact information about the person you are emailing, such as links to their social profiles, so you can gather intel on what the person is interested in or recent events in their professional life and personalize your messages. With HubSpot Sales pro, you can create up to 1,000 templates and track the performance of your sent emails and content.
Price: Free,…
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