I would be the first to admit I often download / try out tools and apps and then forget about them after a few days.
Boomerang was one of those things, I don’t remember when I tried it out, but I was recently given a free 7 day upgrade, so I decided to give it a new test.
Boomerang is intended as a productivity tool, and is targeted at Gmail and Outlook users. I have been using the Gmail version, although most features are common on both versions.
You need to download the browser plugin and connect boomerang to your google account to make it work. You need to sign up for the service, and currently you will get a free trial of the top level upgrade for 30 days before it reverts to the free plan ifg you have not paid for an upgrade in the meantime.
Although there are 3 paid plans in addition to the free plan, the first paid plan only offers one additional tool so in effect you only have 2 choices for upgrades.
The Free plan comes with the basic tools, the most obvious is the tool the program is named after – Boomerang Me. It is designed to return an email to your inbox after a certain period of time.
- Say you read an email, but want to follow-up later when you have more time or at a more appropriate time, you can Boomerang the email until then so it’s out of sight and you can focus on the more urgent emails.
- Say you received an email invitation of an event and wanted to be reminded closer to the day of the event, you could Boomerang the email so it returns to your Inbox during the week of the event as a reminder.
- Say you wanted to track the responses of an outgoing email or an email that was recently sent. While composing the email or in the Sent folder, you can enable Boomerang with the condition “If no reply.” This will put that email back in your Inbox if you don’t receive a reply, allowing you to write that follow-up email without having to keep track of replies yourself.
Another tool that comes with the free plan is Notable, this is basically a ‘as-you’type’ guide to how likely you are to get a response to your email. It looks at things like:
- How long is your email? If your email is too brief or too long, it is likely to get response
- What language complexity do you use? The more technical or complex your language or sentence structure, the less likely you are to get a response – as the adage goes Keep It Seriously Simple
- How emotive is your email? The use of emotive words, especially positive words such as great, wonderful, delighted, pleased will increase responsiveness
- How subjective is your email? The more you express an opinion (the sky looks beautiful or I like fried pickles or we should make more widgets and less sprockets) to facts (the sky is blue or fried pickles cost $2.25 or there is a backlog of orders for widgets) the better the response rate.
- How polite is your email? sounds obvious, but it is true – politeness pays.
Other tools in the Free plan are Inbox Pause – prevents new emails from appearing in your inbox to prevent being distracted by mail; Click tracking – how often are links in your emails being clicked; Read Receipts – you can request the recipient acknowledges reading your email; Response tracking – be notified if recipients do not reply to your email.
The Pro and Premium accounts give you additional tools, such as more advanced versions of these tools, the ability to set up recurring emails, email analysis, priority support.
Ultimately, how useful these tools are, will depend on your style of email use. If you are the sort of person who is hyper-organised, and already have procedures for managing your email, this may not be of much use other than possibly putting your tools into a single ‘toolbox’