One of the coolest things about Gmail is their Gmail Labs, a collection of experimental (but infinitely useful) tools that improve our email experience. Here are my personal favorite Gmail Labs features:

Canned Responses

This is my favorite: a very useful feature for professional photographers because of the time saved, not to mention the wear and tear of your fingers, typing the same email response over and over again. The canned responses allow you to save a templated reply, easily accessible from within your Gmail Compose window. I have a standard reply that I use as a template to further customize for each client, before hitting the Send button. Now you can use the time savings to shoot more, and plan the future of your business!

Boomerang for Gmail

The Boomerang plugin for Gmail is one of the best things ever invented. I use it to auto-remind me to follow up on a client enquiry if they don’t respond within a pre-determined time frame. Saves me the hassle of manually keeping track, and also potentially improves client sign up rate too!

Signature Tweaks

This allows your custom email signature to appear before the quoted text (the correspondence history) which does wonders for marketing. The default setting of Gmail places the signature after the quoted text, so if you have a looooong email thread your nicely formatted signature only appears right at the bottom of all that. Actually I only just discovered this feature, so my emails will be better off from now

My signature looks like this:

Andy Lim

Right-side Chat

This feature sends the Google Chat panel to the right-hand side, enabling me to see most of the mail folders on the left column. This is especially useful if you have a large screen (monitors 22″ or larger) because the right-hand side is used for ads anyway, with the default settings.