Gmail is such a common email platform that many of us use for personal and business use. Google recently announced an update to the Gmail we’re familiar with and unlike crazy YouTube refreshes this one feels just right. The new update includes some of the features that Outlook has that were missing from Gmail. This article from Tech Crunch outlines what the new features are and how we can utilise them.
Gmail has a more comfortable look now with an added right-hand sidebar and some amazing new features that will benefit all of us. A feature that Outlook does so well is incorporating a calendar that makes organising meetings seamless. Previously Gmail lacked this feature, instead users needed to switch apps to access a calendar through their programs. Now there is a calendar icon on the new right-hand sidebar that opens up your Google calendar and lets you know what you have to do for the day.
To complement the sidebar we now have a ‘keep’ feature where you can take down notes and save them to access later. This is a great way to keep notes from calls, meetings or other activities and allows you to keep it all in Gmail for easy access so you don’t have post-it notes everywhere that are so easy to lose. The last feature on the side bar is the ‘tasks’ option where you can write down all the tasks you have for the day and tick them off as you go. This is another move to keep everything within Gmail and develops the platform to be a really handy workplace tool.
On top of the useful new sidebar, you can now choose to snooze certain emails. When you hover over an email in your inbox, you will now see a clock icon that lets you snooze an email to reappear later today or up to a week. This feature enables you to worry about an email later and have a clean and empty inbox in the meantime, which for me is a game changer. Gmail now also has a nudging feature, where Google’s artificial intelligence technology will scan your emails and decide whether its important to you and will keep bringing it to the top of your inbox for your convenience.
A really interesting change is the ability to make an email confidential, which gives you the option to make an email disappear after a certain time frame. This is a fantastic way to protect yourself from hackers as emails sent via confidential mode will be out of their reach once they disappear. You can still screenshot and take photos of it, but the fact that it’s not stored on your email is reassuring. The feature that affects marketers the most is that Gmail will send users suggestions to unsubscribe from emails that are never open. This will impact marketers as they are likely to lose subscribers more often and their customers are less exposed to their marketing material. However, by losing inactive subscribers who never open your emails your likely to only have customers who are interested in your business and will improve your open rate statistics.
This new Gmail update is groundbreaking and the sleek familiar look really shows that Google cares about their customers and don’t want to give them dramatic updates like with YouTube. The new features are innovative and really add to the user experience with the added productivity tools. This new update could lead to more workplaces leaving Outlook behind and adopting Gmail.
Image sourced: https://www.xda-developers.com/gmail-nudges-suggests-emails-reply/
Social Nimash 