The Must-Have Gmail Optimization Tool – Hiver
If you’re a heavy, everyday user of Gmail (like I am), you know for a fact that there are some things lacking when it comes to following up on emails with clients or with people in your team, or turning emails into tasks. Because let’s face it: Emails are as good as tasks and follow-ups are a pain. Hiver fixed that for me and my team. Here’s how.
I got an email from Niraj of Hiver. Frankly, I didn’t give it time when I received Niraj’s first email. I had too much on my plate. Shame on me. In fact, this honest review of Hiver is very late from when Niraj first reached out. Here’s his email:
When I finally found time to go through each one of my emails in my inbox, I decided to give Hiver a try. After all – why not?
After a month of using Hiver, I can honestly say that it is an extremely helpful tool that I use EVERY DAY with my team. Obviously because I use Gmail everyday. It’s the epicenter of all the work I do and opportunities I get.
First, Hiver makes it extremely easy to sign up:
When you click on that blue-green button that says ‘Install Hiver for Gmail’,you will be prompted to install the Hiver extension. Here’s how it looks like for Chrome. Obviously you have to click on ‘Add extension’ if you want to start using Hiver.
Here’s how it looks like for Firefox.
After the installation is complete, make sure that you’re logged into Gmail in the same browser. If you are, Hiver will automatically redirect you to Gmail in 5 seconds.
When you are redirected, you will immediately notice two things:
- The Hiver logo, notifications icon and settings icon will be on the upper-right section of your Gmail interface
- There are new ‘labels’ created by Hiver on the left menu section
Here are some of the features that I love about Hiver
Send Later
Hiver lets you schedule emails to send any time in the future. If you don’t like sending emails on weekends because it makes you look like a workaholic, well, now you could send it on a Monday morning without having to do it yourself.
Now reminding someone via email is a lot easier.
Email Tracking
If you’re the type who wants to know if your email has been viewed, you can now do so via email tracking. This, in my opinion, is a bit weird as I personally don’t want to stress out whether someone has read my email or not.
But that’s just me. Perhaps some people do like the lingering notion that their email was already given some attention.
Email Templates
I don’t like repeating myself. Especially on emails. Hiver’s email templates feature lets you ease off by making an entire email message into a reusable template.
Not only that, it enables you to share these templates – just in case if some people in your team would be sending out similar emails to yours. Easy does it.
Shared Labels
What I love most about Hiver though is the shared labels. This made my life so much easier. You could, create a label name, pre-set the color of the label, share it with users or groups, and assign a label to notify a user or group. The screenshot above is a live representation of the labels I personally use with my team.
Here’s how to create a Hiver Label. Go to your Hiver dashboard and select ‘Create New Shared Label’
Then you could check the advanced options if you want to select or deselect any of the advanced options available.
After that, you could assign the label to someone so that whenever a label is selected for a specific email or email thread, that person will be notified and it will be added to the person’s tasks.
Shared Mailbox
If you’re using Gmail for support or sales emails anyway, this is an extremely helpful feature for you. You could assign emails to individuals in your team and they would also be notified whenever you do so.
You could add notes about an email (for example, you did some level of troubleshooting or reaching out already), close an email (if you have been able to solve a pending task or issue), get notifications when someone else is already writing an email, and so on.
Try it out! Hiver is free for up to 3 users and their paid tiers are definitely worth it.
