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Welcome to Coffee Powered Systems, equipping women with actionable steps to overcome, overwhelm and streamline business and life. So grab your favorite drink and come hang out with me. I'm your host, Miranda Merten. Welcome back to Coffee Powered Systems, I'm your host, Miranda Merten, and today we are talking about how many times you spend writing the same emails over and over again, what I mean is when you get emails from people and you start to see the same questions over and over again, whether it's working with you or what your prices are on your products or maybe any of your frequently asked questions that are actually on your website.

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But nobody reads those before they reach out. So they send you an email and ask you those or maybe you have a blog or a podcast and someone is wanting to do a guest post for you on your blog or come on as a guest on your podcast, you tend to write the same answers over and over again, and we start to notice that after a while. But in order to be more effective and productive, you want to go ahead and start creating some emails, some template emails that you can shoot off really quickly to these people so that you're not constantly reinventing the wheel.

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I know you know it all in your head. It's like a robot. It's like a broken record. You know it it's immediately you hit reply and you write out the response in the same way you've done it for the last 10 or 15 times. When you start noticing that you have emails that you respond to or you start noticing, hey, I'm saying this quite a bit often. You know, maybe even after the second or third time, you realize people are starting to ask me this a lot.

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I want you to go ahead and start creating canned emails. You can start with opening up a word doc or a Google doc and just jotting down quickly some messages that you come across all the time or the messages that you seem to respond to a lot. And that's a good start. It's always good to have a backup place for them anyway. So opening a document, let's create a document that says can't emails and just start writing down emails that you always respond to.

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I am going to walk you through today how to actually create canned emails with templates in something like Gmail. And if you're using a different email provider, a lot of them, do you have an option to create can templates? You'll just have to check the documentation for your email provider to figure out how to do that specifically. But today we're going to walk through step by step how to set up your canned emails for your business so that you can spend more time working on other things than writing the same emails and answering the same questions over and over again.

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Because let's face it, no matter how many times we put those frequently asked questions on our website or at the bottom of our emails, we still get the same questions over and over again. This will be a quick walk through workshop. You can do it with me as we're going through it. Or you can save this episode for later when you are ready to go ahead and do that. Now, first things first in Gmail. You want to go ahead and set up the fact that you do want to create canned templates.

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What you're going to do is open up your Gmail. There's a little gear icon at the top where your settings are on the top right corner. Go ahead and click on that. And Gmail has changed some things. You know, they're always changing things. And this may be a little bit different when you go through this, if this is a little bit down the line. But for right now, if you click on that gear icon, you will also need to click the button that says see all settings, and that's going to open up your entire settings area for your Gmail.

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You want to go ahead and click the tab at the top. There's a whole menu of items. Towards the end of that menu. There's a button that says advanced and you're going to click on that button and a couple down. It says templates. That is what we want to turn on because it's not automatically on, I don't believe. So you're going to have to turn that on and let Gmail know that you do want to create some templates. So go ahead and click enable for that and you're going to go ahead and click save changes down at the bottom.

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All right. So how do you create the emails? First, you have to actually be writing a physical email. So if you've already got that list of canned templates that I just told you to create, go ahead and pull one of those up.

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Or if you already have something, maybe you've written an email in the past week or two. Go ahead and copy that old email and we'll test it out for this. So go back to where you create your messages. You're going to compose a message, hit the compose button and you're going to type your message just as if you were typing it to someone. Here's a note, though. If you do have a signature that repopulates, remove the signature from your template, because what's going to happen is when you add the template to your new compose email, it's going to add whatever you have in that template.

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And we don't want that. We don't want the signature already in there because of your signature is going to populate twice. You're going to have to delete that every time you create a new email. So we don't want to even deal with the hassle. So first, start with a blank email, delete your signature from the bottom, and then you are going to craft the email just as you would normally. Once you're done crafting the email, I want you to do one of two things.

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If this is something that you typically reply to people, you probably won't need a subject because it's going to automatically populate a subject when you hit the reply button. So go ahead and leave the subject blank. But if you if this is an email that maybe you do sales outreach, you want to go ahead and put the subject line in there. All right.

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So once you are done composing, you're going to click the three dots on the bottom right hand corner and then you're going to save the draft as templates. Now that three dots is right next to the trash can, it says more options. You're going to go up to the top where it says templates. Hover over that and then scroll down to where it says save draft as template. You're going to save as a new template. Now, once you've done that, your template is complete.

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There's a couple other things I want to point out here. If you wanted to maybe replace that template, maybe you've changed some things. You want to update that you're going to do the same process all the way through. Save draft a template. But once you have a template already in there, you do have an option to overwrite a template so you can pick the name of the previous template that was saved and that is going to overwrite the template already in there.

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When you click that save draft as template, it's going to pop up and ask you to name your template. Go ahead and name your template.

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If you don't have a subject line or if you didn't do the subject section already, whatever you name, your template is going to be the subject unless it's a reply to email. So once you had save, that is going to be your template. And that is so super easy. It takes like 30 seconds to create these emails. But once you have them created, it is so much easier than typing your response out every single time. Now, when you're ready to write the email, you're going to hit your respond or you're going to hit compose.

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If you're going to start a new email, you go back down to those three dots next to the trash can and scroll up to templates and you will see your name of your templates that you have created. You'll scroll down to the template that you want to insert into the email. You hit the template and it's going to automatically populate in there for you. If you want to personalize anything at that point, maybe adding their name or any personal tidbits that you wanted to add for them specifically, you would go ahead and do that before you hit send and then that's it.

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You can hit send at that point. So your task for this week is going to be think about some emails that you create all the time or you respond to all the time. And I want you to draft up a document with some of these can't email ideas that you might have or go back the last couple of weeks or the last three weeks and find some emails that you responded to, you know, at least two or three times or more.

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Go ahead and copy those emails and then create some canned emails. I want you to go ahead and get some canned emails in your business so that you don't have to spend all of this time writing emails over and over again. So that is your tax for this week. Create some canned emails. That's all I have for you today. I'll see you next time.

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Thanks for listening to Coffee Powered Systems. You can find links to everything mentioned in the episode. Down in the show. Notes are on the website at Miranda Merten dot com. If you enjoyed this episode and would love to continue mastering your workflows and processes, subscribe on your favorite podcast player and join me here next time.