Write Emails Faster with Canned Responses

Do you ever need to send the same or similar emails and wish Gmail had a feature where you can store templates? Well, guess what? They do! Canned Responses is another underused, but super helpful Gmail feature located in “Labs”. Canned Responses is a Gmail lab feature that allows you to save and reuse emails.

Check out this 2 minute tutorial to become a Canned Responses expert (yep – it’s not hard!) or the written tutorial with screenshots below.

To get started, go to your Gmail inbox and click on settings.

2. Choose the Labs option then press Enable next to Canned Responses. Then save changes.

3. Go back into your inbox and click on “Compose”

4. Write the email you want to save as a template.

5. When you are finished with the email, click the little down facing arrow on the right corner of the email next to the garbage to delete. Then click on Canned responses. Then click on New Canned Response.

6. A pop up will appear to save it. Give it a title which will enable you to remember what was in the email (when you see the title in the list of all your canned responses). I usually save it as the subject title.

When you want to use the saved template, just go back to Compose, click the downward facing arrow, then click on Canned Responses, then, under the Insert list, choose the saved response you want to use.

Your email will be automatically populated with the text of that Canned Response. Definitely beats writing the same email over and over, or even copy-pasting from a different document.

(One important note: if you have an email signature, erase that from the email before you save it as a Canned Response (step 5 above). Otherwise it will become part of the Canned Response text, and then when you insert that Canned Response into a new email, you’ll end up with duplicate signatures.

Go ahead – try it out! What email do YOU write over and over again?

Submitted by Naomi