If you’re a blogger with even a smallish readership you probably get asked the same questions over and over again by readers.
Oe great way to save yourself a lot of time when it comes to these frequently asked questions is to have pre-prepared answers that you can email back to those asking the questions. Up until now I’d been using a little program called ‘TextExpander’ (a Mac application) to speed up the process of getting these answers into emails – but in the last 24 hours Gmail came to the party with a new featured called ‘Canned Responses‘.
Canned Responses is a feature you can turn on in Google Labs and allows you to type up responses and to save them as templates. I know a lot of other email programs have this capability already – but as a Gmail convert it’s exciting news to me and I know will save me a lot of time.
I’ve already got a few Canned Responses drafted including:
- A couple for most commonly asked questions – pointing people to articles I’ve written on these common topics.
- One as a response to a problem that some of my forum users have with logging in.
- Another as a response to people wanting consulting.
What would you use Canned Responses (or draft templates in your email client) for?
