Critical Tools for the Small Business Owner: Boomerang for Gmail for E-Mail Productivity

For the small business owner, managing day-to-day operations can be quite a challenge, especially when you have limited resources and only yourself and a handful of people to depend on when communicating with clients. Since constant communication with your team and with your customers is of the utmost importance, it is crucial to have a reliable and efficient webmail service that allows you to send and receive messages whenever, wherever you are.

However, even the most top rated webmail service needs a little bit more help to boost e-mail productivity while at work. Fortunately, there is a web tool called Boomerang for Gmail that small business owners can use to streamline their business process with regards to scheduling e-mails and follow up reminders.

What is Boomerang for Gmail? 

Boomerang for Gmail was launched on August 11, 2010 by Baydin, Inc., a company dedicated to create and develop e-mail productivity software. Their tools allow people to read and respond to messages faster, so they can accomplish more tasks in a day.

Boomerang is a browser plugin that was created for that same purpose, specifically to allow Gmail users to write and respond to emails now and schedule them for sending at a later time. In a month’s time, Boomerang for Gmail went from 55 downloads to a whopping 70,000.

How Exactly Does it Help the Small Business Owner?

How many times have you received an email, read the first few sentences and went back to the main inbox because you want to read it later but end up forgetting to go back to it? Well you don’t have to worry about it anymore when you have Boomerang. Here’s why:

It lets you send emails ahead of time.

As a small business owner, you want to have full control of your time as much as possible.

So when you respond to your clients to get them off your plate but do not want to respond to their replies as soon as you receive them, you can rely on Boomerang to schedule it to go out in an hour.

You can send your mail whenever you feel like it. It has useful shortcuts that allows you to choose what date or time you want your email to be sent. You can wish a client, colleague, or a loved one a happy birthday or remind clients and partners whenever a meeting is scheduled on a particular day. You can also send an email but schedule it to arrive during working hours in a different time zone.

It lets you know if a person has not yet replied to your email.

If you’re the type who does not purge unimportant emails, then you probably have thousands of mail in your inbox right now and have no intention of going through each of them to check who has already replied. As a result, you tend to forget to follow up on people whom you need a response from.

Boomerang can give you a reminder when a particular contact doesn’t reply. There’s an option where you can opt to “Boomerang” the message back to you in x number of days if you have not yet heard from a specific person. You can choose to be reminded a day after you sent the email or set a specific date for the reminder.

You can postpone the receipt of incoming messages.

By postponing the time and date that you receive your messages so they can return to your inbox whenever you are free to read them. This minimizes the chances of forgetting to get back to a client, read an important announcement, and look into a particular issue just because it got lost somewhere in your inbox.