How to auto reply email in gmail?
Hello Everyone!
If you run a small business, say for example if you run a cake shop and get lot of feedbacks, questions and suggestions from your customer via emails or let’s say you run online business and get lot of queries through email, the first thing you would like to do is immediately reply to your customers with the proper information.
But more queries you get, it gets very difficult to reply to all of your customers. As per study, if you don’t reply to customer within 2 days, then almost 80% of the people get disengaged and lose interest in your business.
How would you avoid that? The best and easiest thing you can do is send auto reply to these emails with common information or FAQ’s.
In this blog, we are talking about “how to automatically reply to emails in gmail” and answer below common questions.
- How to automatically reply to emails in gmail ?
- Can I set auto reply in Gmail? How do I set up automatic emails in Gmail?
- How do I setup an automatic email response?
- Does Gmail have an AutoResponder?
To automatically reply to the emails in Gmail, we can use “Out of Office or Vacation Reply” feature provided by the Gmail. The basic intention of this feature is to auto respond to your sender in case you are out of office or on vacation. But we can use this feature as auto reply for our day to day business. You can configure it on mobile app as well as on the browser.
Set up on computer browser
- On your computer, open Gmail.
- In the top right, click Settings
Settings.
- Scroll down to the “Vacation responder” section.
- Select Vacation responder on.
- Fill in the date range, first day as Today and keep last day as optional. Keeping last day as optional will make your auto reply run forever.
- Fill subject line. Few example as “Thank you for your email”, “We have received your email” etc.
- Fill message body. In this message body, make sure you address all possible queries and FAQ’s. I would recommend you have a web page and provide all necessary details and FAQ’s and refer the link so that body doesn’t become a lengthy to read. Also you can mention your contact in case someone has urgency to connect with you.
- Under your message, check the box if you only want your contacts to see your vacation reply.
- At the bottom of the page, click Save Changes.
Set up on mobile app
- Open Gmail app
- Go to Settings from Menu (3 lines on top left corner)
- Select your gmail account
- Find “Out of Office AutoReply” option
- You will find exactly similar options as above.
Below are some common points you should note down when auto reply is sent
Your vacation reply starts at 12:00 AM on the start date and ends at 11:59 PM on the end date, unless you end it earlier.
In most cases, your vacation response is only sent to people the first time they message you.
Here are the times someone may see your vacation response more than once:
- If the same person contacts you again after four days and your vacation reply is still on, they’ll see your vacation response again.
- Your vacation response starts over each time you edit it. If someone gets your initial vacation response, then emails you again after you’ve edited your response, they’ll see your new response.
- If you use Gmail through your work, school, or other organisation, you can choose whether your response is sent to everyone or only people in your organisation.
Note: Messages sent to your spam folder and messages addressed to a mailing list you subscribe to won’t get your vacation response.
Turn off your vacation reply
To turn off your vacation, just go to the same settings and switch off “Vacation responder”
What are the advantages of this feature
- You don’t need to download any separate app, plugins to auto reply to your customers. You can use this built in feature hence safe and free.
- Since customers are only sent this message for the first time, and not sent for every message, end user experience is very good.
- You can control start time and end time, make changes to your auto replies.
- You can provide link to your FAQ web page and address different queries. For example, if you run a cake shop and also have some other products, you can have an option box in your webpage asking user if they have query for cake or other products and present information/ FAQ accordingly.
What are the disadvantages of this feature
- You can not have separate response based on an email. For example, if you are an app developer and have 3 different apps, it is not possible to compose separate auto reply based on subject line or message description.
- Gmail also try to send auto replies to emails from Facebook, Quora, Instagram etc. Such emails are basically no-reply emails and Gmail still try to send auto reply which results in unnecessary “email not found” error. Gmail should really avoid sending auto replies to “no-reply” emails.
In short, there is an easiest way to auto reply to your customers using Gmails, OoO / Vacation auto reply feature. Hope you liked this article. Feel free to comment down below if you want to provide any additional information or correct something.
You can refer this link from Google in case you want to follow the complete guide.
Write down your comments below if you more questions.
Hidden Camera Detector app developer and blogger. We are in a process to build something useful and also provide tech information to the readers.
How can I set up an automatic reply in Gmail to send common information or FAQs to my customers?