Make Email More Productive

There are tools you can use that make email more productive during your job search! Yes, email is great for communicating, but it can be so much more.

These tools will help you market yourself and conduct research to help you gain valuable information you’ll want during your hunt for a new job.

While these tools are great, don’t forget about to read 7 Quick Tips For Getting Your Emails Read

Email Signature Block

You are missing a golden opportunity to communicate that you’re job searching if you are not using an email signature! Even if you aren’t job hunting, using an email signature is smart self-marketing! You never know when someone is hiring!

Your email signature block is the information that automatically gets appended to your email message… you know, that stuff your past employer made you add- company name, phone, tagline, logo, website…that information but about YOU!

Here’s what I’m talking about.

I use Wisestamp and can have 3 different signatures depending on whom I communicate with. One is personal, one is for volunteer work I do and one is for my business.

Using an email signature looks much more professional that a bunch of text and long links.

One small caveat, you may not want to use images if you are concerned about your messages getting sent to spam or blocked by corporate email systems.

Go read this post about what information you should include in your email signature as a job seeker!

Use your email signature block to make email more productive and market yourself!

Sleuthing Tool for Email

There’s a lot you can learn from someone’s email address…without even leaving email.

Have you ever realized you weren’t connected with someone on LinkedIn after emailing them for months? Or have you wanted to see what your email recipient is saying on social networks? It is kind of amazing the information you can gather about someone when you use a gmail extension!

Directly from my inbox, I can learn a lot about someone I correspond with.

Clearbit Connect – Supercharge Gmail™

WHAT IS CLEARBIT CONNECT?
Clearbit Connect is a small widget that lives in Gmail’s sidebar. It displays useful information about the people who email you, and allows you to find anyone’s email address without leaving your inbox. And it’s free.

First, install Clearbit extension using the link above.

When I received my confirmation email from Clearbit Connect, I hovered over the email and clicked on the Clearbit icon

Then, to the right of my screen, this appeared.

You can see the company’s profile and links to Twitter, LinkedIn and Facebook social media profiles.

Imagine using this to research someone (a recruiter) who has emailed you. Or anyone who you don’t know well or know what their company does.

By conducting a little research using Clearbit, you’ll have easy access to information.

And try using Clearbit’s free email lookup tool. (You get 100 free lookups per month)

Just type in the company’s name (or domain) and see if it’s in the database. Then you’ll see employees listed. You can even search by name or title.

Another Email Lookup Tool

MailScoop by Cultivated Culture is free and straightforward.

It’s a great productivity hack for those times when you want to find the email address of someone on LinkedIn when you have no connections, this is a great solution.

Schedule Your Email Message

Boomerang for Gmail

With Boomerang, you can write an email now and schedule it to be sent automatically at the perfect time. Just write the message then click the Send Later button and you can chose when you want it sent. Boomerang can even remind you if you don’t hear back! This way you won’t let messages slip through the crack and will never forget to follow up with people. (Which happens to me all to often!)

Email can be a time-suck, if you let it. But you can make email more productive if you use it the right ways.