If you love productivity, then you probably already know all about Boomerang for Gmail. It helps you follow up, schedule emails, keep relevant info at your fingertips, and generally stay on top of your inbox. Anyone who knows me could tell you that I’m a huge fan.
Well, now my favorite tool has added a nifty new feature: “Boomerang Respondable.” At the bottom of your Gmail compose screen, there’s a little green bar indicating how likely your email is to get a response.
If it’s low, you can click in and get detail on which of the four dimensions needs improvement: Subject Length, Word Count, Question Count, and Reading Level.
Based on insights from over 5 million emails, the plugin offers more specific recommendation for each of those dimensions. For example, asking no questions reduces reply rates, because there’s no answer being requested. On the other hand, asking a ton of questions is overwhelming and can make the recipient want to crawl in a hole and ignore your message. Fact: Boomerang recommends one to three questions for the best chance of getting a response.
After a few tweaks to my initial email, I’ve gone from very unlikely to receive a response, to likely. Without too much effort!
With everything you have to think about at work, it’s nice to have a tool that thinks about email respondability for you. So, take one this one thing off your plate and get Boomerang here. Just make sure you’re ready for all those replies to flood in.