As I began browsing solutions to manage my interactions with clients all I found were complicated and expensive CRM related solutions. I needed a way to automate my communication with clients. When I first began my career consulting business a few years ago I averaged no more than 20 new clients per month. Responding to each client in complete and detailed sentences was painless. For instance, I needed to confirm that I received the necessary information and payment with an email to each client. As the career consulting process began I needed to let them know that attached in an email was the first draft of their resume or CV. Or that I received their response to my comments and that I would have a next draft ready in a few days.
But as the average amount of clients per month grew from 20 to 50-70 new clients it started getting out of hand. My default response became “see attached” and of course my customer service declined. There was no other way to maintain the detailed and professional communications as just one person.
Enough became enough and tonight as I was browsing my options I found the most simple solution
, Gmail Canned Responses.
“If you’re sick of typing out the same reply every time someone emails you with a common question, now you can compose your reply once and save the message text with the “Canned responses” button. Later, you can open that same message and send it again and again.” -Google
Problem solved! In an instant I have reduced the time and effort needed to maintain professional communication with all of my clients. I can also combine this feature with Google’s email filter to automatically match received emails with my list of canned responses. Google will then automatically send my response. I have since written five different canned responses to manage each phase of my career consulting process. Not only are my responses far more professional but they will help me earn more revenue, easily. Through these canned emails I can now more easily up-sell add-on services and encourage satisfied customers to refer their friends and family in just a simple click.
By this point you must be thinking of how this can benefit your own business, job, or personal life. At least I hope so. Are you in a management role at your job? Create some canned responses to send to your employees each time you need them to complete a common task. Do you want to let someone know you received their email and will respond to them soon? Use a canned response.
It’s so simple and has probably been around forever on the internet but I still feel like I just discovered the wheel.