Boomerang is a very powerful extension to help you be more efficient and productive with your email and manage your inbox in a better and smarter way.
Now, Boomerang allows you to bring emails back into your inbox if you don't want to deal with them right now, and that's a feature that we're seeing more common in other email clients as well—an ability to defer an email. But Boomerang is so much more than that. It adds some additional powerful features to help you manage your messages.
I'm using Gmail, so I'm using Boomerang for Gmail. You can see below my send button, within my message dialogue, I have an additional row that Boomerang adds to all of your messages.
With this, I can schedule messages for the future. Maybe I don't want to send this email right now or I don't want the person receiving it to get it today. Maybe I want to schedule it for an optimal time. So, I'll schedule it for tomorrow morning. Boomerang allows you to do that.
It also allows you to bring a message back into your inbox if the person who receives this does not reply in a certain amount of time. Here, you can see it says "two days." I can pick any time that I would like, and then it will reappear in my inbox. This is fantastic for follow-up.
Well, Boomerang has introduced a brand new feature as part of its extension called Boomerang Respond. As the little help text tells us, it uses artificial intelligence to help you write better emails.
So, what does that mean and how can that be helpful? Well, most of our emails, we want a reply. We are desiring a response. We're asking a question and we want someone to reply to us with an answer or at least to continue the conversation.
So, Boomerang is giving you a score to see how likely it is that that person will respond to you based on what you've written—based on the combination of your subject line and what you've actually written in the message.
Here, you can see Boomerang has given me a relatively poor score. I've only got two of these green bars out of, I think it's a total of eight. It's unlikely that someone's going to reply to me with this hypothetical email that I've written here.
So, you see my subject line is "Meeting." No surprise there; that's pretty boring. I'm not even sure if they're going to open this email, let alone reply to me with that type of subject line. And then my two sentences here that consist of the body are pretty basic and really don't have a call to action.
I was planning to attend the meeting this week to discuss the collaboration opportunities with our vendor. Let me know if we can discuss. Again, there's no really concrete call to action. I'm not surprised that Boomerang is giving me a low score.
So, what exactly is it looking at and how can I improve my score? Well, by clicking on this meter, it's going to open up a small dialogue that will show you what it's looking at.
Right at the top it says, "Not very likely to receive a response." Why? Here are the criteria that they are looking at:
- Subject Length: I've got a one-word subject. Well, that is relatively poor. The recommendation is going to be to increase my subject length, and you see they've got some nice color-coded bars to see if you're below or maybe even above a certain level.
- Word Count: Sometimes email messages can be too short, right? Too short to grab the reader's attention. They just skim over it or they don't give it the full attention that it deserves. Maybe they don't think that you're very serious if you write an email with so few words in it.
- Question Count: Of course, this is a big one. I don't have a single question in my email, so it shouldn't be surprising that the chances of me getting a response are so low.
- Reading Level: I think this is really interesting. While the first three we could probably count ourselves if we wanted to, might as well let the AI do that for us. But reading level, you know, I don't have an English background. I don't know how they're calculating reading level, but in this case, they're suggesting that my reading level might be slightly too complex. Maybe I'm using some words that could be simplified or some words that are too long, and that will increase my chances of getting a response.
They have a nice little help icon beside all of their criteria, so if you want to find out more about reading level, I can click on it. Here, the recommendation is to consider using simpler words and sentences. It goes into even more detail in a short paragraph below. But these little help windows are available for all of the criteria.
- Subject Length Recommendation: Consider a longer subject line. They say that around two to six words is the sweet spot—that's the ideal length.
Now, there are some additional pieces of criteria that they will add if you subscribe to their Pro or Premium subscription. These are the advanced features. They will also look at positivity, politeness, and subjectivity.
I am not currently a Pro or Premium subscriber, so I can't really comment on these pieces of criteria, but some additional things to help you craft an even better email.
So, we only have a two-bar ranking right now. Let's see what we can do to increase our chances of getting a response to this email.
Let's start with the subject line. "Meeting" is pretty bland and boring. How about "Can you attend the meeting?" With a question mark. So the question mark is probably very helpful. You'll notice that Boomerang actually doesn't look at the question count in the subject heading; they're only looking at the question count in the body itself. But from a subject length perspective, we are in good territory. "Can you attend the meeting?" That's much more attention-grabbing. The chances of someone clicking on this and opening this email are that much greater.
I'm going to reduce some of the complex words I've got in here. "Collaboration opportunities" sounds a little too technical. I'm going to assume that this person is a colleague—someone I know quite well. This sounds a little too formal for my case. Let me review some of the things in here.
"I'm going to attend the vendor meeting in the Smart Room on Thursday." As you can see, as I'm writing, it's checking this dynamically. My reading level has just reduced. Remember, it was about 7.2 because I've gotten rid of some of those more complex words. Now my reading level is 2.5, and it's saying that that's a good thing. Already my chances of getting a response have increased a little bit.
So it's actually doing this as you write, which I think is fantastic—giving you that feedback immediately.
"John will be attending as well." And I've got to have a call to action, right? I don't have a question count here. "Can you actually, you know what, let's talk a bit more details about what is happening in this meeting." You can see that my word count is a little low.
"Why should this person reply to this meeting if they don't know exactly what we're going to be talking about? We will be talking about the upcoming conference and how we can serve them better."
So now I'm a little more specific as to what the meeting is going to be about. My word count is a bit higher. They know exactly which meeting and what the meeting is about.
Let's end with a call to action because we still don't have a question count. You can see my response level is still very low.
"Can you please let me know if you will attend?" Question mark.
Wow, just with that last piece of information, you can see I've got greens and really all of these areas of criteria. But it was that last one, the question count, that really put me over the edge. I've got full bars down below and at the top it says it is very likely for me to receive a response with the email that I have crafted right here.
Now, of course, Boomerang Respond—this feature—is not going to be necessary for all of your emails. In fact, it's probably just the minority of your emails. But think of the four or five really important emails that you are going to be writing today. Think about those individuals that perhaps you're reaching out for the very first time. Think about a project that has an upcoming deadline, and you need an answer by the end of today. That's where Boomerang Respond can come in really handy to make sure that you're crafting a message to ensure that you get a response.
From an efficiency or productivity point of view, think of how much more efficient you are by crafting one really well-written email where you will get a response versus crafting or writing three or four messages just to get that one response a few days later or several messages later.
So, check out Boomerang and try out the Boomerang Respond feature. It's very.
