Sometimes, you're ready to send an email or reply to someone, but the time just isn't right. They might be in a different timezone and it's 4AM for them, they might be on vacation and your email will get buried... there's plenty of reasons why you should use Gmail's inbuilt scheduling feature!
How to schedule emails in Gmail
First, choose your recipients, write your email, and don't forget to include any attachments.
To schedule your email, click the arrow next to the Send button in the Gmail compose window, then choose how far in advance you want it sent from now. You've got some preset options, or you can choose your own date, up to 50 years in the future!
Why should I schedule emails in Gmail?
You can send your emails at a time that people are more likely to read them
Scheduling your emails allows you to send them at a specific time of the day when you know people are more likely to be reading them. The morning, around 9am when someone has just started working, is a great time as it's most often when someone checks their email. Just after lunch or around 5pm just before the end of the day is also a good time. Catching people at the right time means less wasted effort on sending emails that no one reads, and more/quicker responses!
With the Best Contact Time metric in your Email Meter dashboard, it’s even possible to see what time is ideal to schedule for. Check our post with instructions here.
You can schedule your emails to avoid sending correspondence over the weekend
Most people are not available to read or respond to emails on Saturday or Sunday — and some companies even have restrictions that prevent employees from responding during these days. By scheduling your emails for Monday through Friday, you can avoid sending any correspondence over the weekend and ensure that it's read right away when it's most likely to get noticed.
If you have colleagues in other time zones, you can schedule your emails to arrive at a particular time
In a world where more and more companies work on a global scale, it's important to be able to communicate effectively. You don't want your email to arrive at 3AM, where it'll be buried and forgotten. You want it to arrive at a time when they're awake and able to reply before it slips their mind!
You can schedule emails for when you are offline
The most obvious benefit of scheduling emails is that you can actually send them when you are not available — or even while you're asleep! This is again especially useful if you work on different time zones with your clients.
You can schedule emails when you don’t want to seem too eager
Email communication, like all other communication, can be a very nuanced thing. There's certain situations where you receive an email, and you want to reply immediately while you have everything fresh in your head. But unfortunately, doing so might make you seem abit too eager or pushy. Instead of waiting and potentially forgetting what you wanted to say (or worse, forgetting to send it), write up the email and schedule it for later!
Scheduling allows you to plan in advance if you're planning on being away or otherwise unable to send an email
For example, if I'm going out of town for a week and want to make sure that my clients receive their invoices from me while I'm gone, I can schedule them to be sent at the correct time.
You can schedule emails to make sure you don't forget to follow up
I've used this recently with an airline customer service department which decided to stop responding to me. Your single email might be buried, but by scheduling a follow up I was able to hassle them twice as much. They got back to me eventually!
As we've seen, scheduling your emails is good for productivity and effective communication in general. It helps you get more responses and avoid the risk of annoying anyone with a late night email. So don't forget, it's as simple as 2 clicks from the Gmail interface!
