Most of us have tons of e-mail we answer on a daily basis. Even with the best social media routine, e-mail is just one of those things that keeps piling up. If you’re a blogger, you also likely receive pitches for story ideas and product reviews – probably turning down many of them.

Do you find yourself using the same response over and over again? Instead of typing out your response each time, why not use an e-mail template?

What is an E-mail Template?

An e-mail template is simply a response you save so that you can use again in the future. It will save you time from typing out a reply e-mail and will instead allow you to simply copy and paste your response.

How Do You Create an E-mail Template?

The simplest way to create an e-mail template is to save a document on your desktop with your response(s). I currently have a Notepad text document on my desktop with a few variations of my response to PR pitches. This is the standard “no, thank you” response for those pitches I’m not interested in.

However, I just found that if you use Gmail, you can actually save responses within Gmail as “canned responses” and simply insert your response into a new e-mail or reply. Doing that, you won’t even have to copy and paste the text, just click a button and you’re done! Plus, if you use filters, you can automatically reply to certain e-mails using your canned response, without ever seeing the e-mail. Here’s a quick how-to for setting up canned responses on Gmail.

How Does this Help You?

Just think about the amount of time you’ll save each day if there were less e-mails to answer. Or, how much faster you could empty your inbox if all you had to do was copy and paste a response or click a button for each e-mail!

Of course, you can’t possibly answer every e-mail in this manner. Some will still require you to type up a customized response. But I’m sure you can find a set of e-mails you receive that you can use an e-mail template to answer them faster.

Do you currently use an e-mail template? Have you ever thought about doing so?