There is no shortage of email marketing tools out there.  Just run a search for ’email marketing tool’ and you’ll see how intense the competition is.  The first page is filled with enough ads to make you want to pull your hair out.

gmail marketing tool
Luckily, there is a great (free) email provider out there whose hidden talent is sales and marketing.  Gmail probably isn’t the first service that comes to mind when you’re thinking about email marketing and CRM tools, but it should be.

Gmail has a number of great features that you can utilize for your business, here are a few:

Use a Single Account for Personal & Business 

In order to reduce confusion and save time, you should consider using one Gmail account for both your personal and business communications.  It’s a pain to be constantly toggling back and forth between different accounts, especially if you’re using a desktop client like Outlook.

Gmail gives you the ability to link-up with other accounts so you can receive email from other addresses and send it out using that same address.  You can set this up by going to “Mail Settings” and then “Accounts and Import”,  here is quick tutorial.

Labels Make Tracking Discussions Easy  

It used to be a chore to sort through your database and find a specific set of emails.  Did I send that proposal? Did we ever receive that payment?  Now there is no more wasted time searching for emails.

The label feature is a great way to organize sets of emails around a common theme. Similar to tagging a contact, you can assign a label to any group of emails.  This is a helpful way to track things like proposals and payments.  No more guessing if you sent an item and now you have a way to easily track the emails you’re sending out.

Integration with CRMs

It can be a pain to add another layer to your communications with a standalone customer relationship management platform.  Thankfully, most CRMs now integrate with Gmail so you have a one-stop shop to handle your relationships.

Some of the more popular options are SalesForce, HighRise, Gist or Zoho but there are plenty to choose from.

It’s Free!

Getting something for free almost always beats paying.  If you’re worried about the bottom line then a forever-free provider like Gmail is the way to go.  Most email service providers start out free and then get expensive pretty quickly.

You can send unlimited emails, have an unlimited number of contacts and all of your conversations are stored forever in the cloud.

Become a pro at using Gmail for marketing with the FlashIssue Clipper or Full-feature Web App (both are FREE).