Send Email Reminders Using Gmail Templates (Non-Automated)

Hi, everyone. This is Lara Hammock from the Marble Jar Channel and in today's video, I'll show you how I send email notifications or the same email text multiple times using Gmail templates.

The non-profit counseling center that I used to work for did not have a system that sends automatic email reminders to clients for upcoming sessions.   As a therapist, I like to give people a heads up since it is helpful to know in advance if someone needs to cancel.  And, since we have a 24-hour notice policy for cancelations, it is also a nice courtesy to our clients.  For this reason, I send out my own email notifications one day before sessions. 

Obviously, it would be great if these went out automatically, but I couldn't figure out a way to do this without having to pay for a subscription service, so I end up using Gmail's templates.  You can use Gmail templates to resend any email that has the same text and that you might want to send multiple times.  This makes templates perfect to use for email reminders or notifications.

I can only do this from a browser -- this is not available in the Gmail mobile apps yet.
  • Go to mail.google.com and start a new message. 
  • In the body of the message, type in what you want the message to say. 
  • The subject is how Gmail saves these templates, so you have to be specific.  You can't just say "Reminder - Session tomorrow" if you are going to have multiple templates with the same subject.  I use initials for all of my clients, so I might make the subject "Tu JB Reminder - Session tomorrow".  That helps me find the clients with Tuesday sessions by client initials.
  • Remember -- if you have a signature block, you may want to remove it at this point, since it will duplicate the signature block each time you resend this email.
  • Now save this template by clicking on the 3 dots down here, then Templates, then Save draft as Template, and Save as new Template.
  • I did this for each of my clients.
  • If I needed to make an edit to the email -- say this client changed their session from 4pm on Tuesday to 5pm.  First, I would make the change in the body of the email, get rid of the signature, and ensure that the subject was correct.
  • Then to save this change, I would go back down to the 3 dots, then choose Templates, then Save draft as Template, and choose the template to overwrite.  This saves the change rather than creating a brand new email.
Okay -- now, say it's Monday morning and I want to send out all of my session reminders for Tuesday.  I just open a new email, go down to the 3 dots, choose Templates and then that template that I just saved "Tu JB Reminder - Session tomorrow."  You can see it pulls up the email and appends my signature block.  Now, I just edit the subject to get rid of my date and initials reminders and enter an email address and boom -- it's ready to send.  So much easier than having to cut and paste the subject and body of the email each time. 

One thing I really wish is that Gmail had the option to sort the templates by title so that you could control the order of the templates better.  As it is, Gmail sorts them by last edited, so it's harder to order them the way you want.  In my next video, I'll show you how I send reminder emails using a different methodology on my iPhone. 

And let me know what you think!  Comments are always appreciated and thanks for watching.

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