Over the last several months, you’ve shared your experiences with our products. We are grateful to you because you know what it's like to use our products, and your feedback helps us do even better with every release. Today, we’re taking a closer look at what a mailbox can be using the powerful tools in our Spark email application.
Before we get started, let me ask you this! What does your mailbox look like?
Does it resemble a neat and well-organized filing system, or does it seem more like an endless list of unopened emails, many of which are newsletters that you once subscribed to and a lot of emails from senders you don’t even recognize; altogether making up a collection of unimportant things crowding out the important emails, all jumbled together in a stew? In all probability, it’s the latter, which means that you can’t focus on what is important, so you end up a poor communicator with little time to focus on the genuinely productive things.
Working with many emails reminds me of planting a field: you need to cultivate seeds properly to have a good harvest.
Dare we say it: the future of email is Spark.
Recently, we had the pleasure of chatting with one of our users, Sophie, a nutrition coach who has lots of experience in establishing good and effective communications with her customers in their request to come to a healthy and mindful diet. Her coaching business has proudly helped over 2000 customers, and written several recipe books while launching her company.
Now Sophie talks about how she unravels the tangled mess of incoming and outgoing emails, with all those questions and replies, and keeps in touch with her customers for real.
I’m living by the motto "work less and live more."
Let me be clear: I’m a control freak. Remember Bree Van de Kamp? (Editorial note: Bree Van de Kamp is one of the four main protagonists in Desperate Housewives, who keeps everything on a short leash.) That’s what my colleagues used to call me.
One of my obsessions is productivity. Whether I work in a freelance context or within huge teams, I constantly search for optimizing processes to be more efficient.
Moreover, I’m a hard-core-uber-user type. I love automation, smart features, and highly customizable apps. I’ve probably tested every productivity app, every project management tool, and every possible mailbox app.
Love leaped out with a first click
In this permanent quest, I often question my processes & my tools; and thus, find myself switching quickly from one to another to check new opportunities for a “better way” to do things.
That’s how I discovered Spark, about 3-4 years ago. I can’t remember exactly, but I remember falling in love immediately with the unified Smart Inbox and the Smart Folder features.
They’re a delightful set of nifty features that help you sift through the clutter and access what’s important, and also make it easy to move emails to the appropriate folders (they get me!)
I also fell for them because they work perfectly not only with any Gmail account but also with accounts from other services like iCloud, Outlook, Yahoo, etc. — even a simple IMAP email account. Spark also seamlessly works across devices on iPad, iPhone, Android, and Mac — and now on my Apple Watch.
Easy to handle even with dozens of emails
The template feature is my favorite. It literally saves me hours every week because I'm constantly sending the same email to different people and answering questions about my business, which are quite often alike.
Here are some examples of templates I have created:
- standard reply to an email asking details about my coaching program, of course, with some variations;
- coaching session follow-up with attached documents and pre-filled customer info;
- reminders for/about failed payments;
- the ‘FAQ’ emails, which I send to customers when they are lost in my training tool usage;
- and lots of "customer service" templates that I send out if a shortage or a bug occurs, making it easy to respond to all related inquiries.
The other features I love for helping me be more efficient include:
- integration with Google Drive, iCloud, but also Tick Tick which I discovered recently, and most of the cloud services;
- integrated multiple calendars, of course;
- ability to create a link from an email, which lets me fill in my customers' file with links to important emails;
- snooze feature to have an email pop back in my inbox at the time I need to work on it;
- reminders, which helps me to keep track of emails I’m waiting for a reply to.
All these features and the top-notch look and feel of the app on all devices make Spark a valuable asset in my productivity quest, and my inbox becomes a hub connected to all the apps and services I use in my daily work as a freelance nutrition coach.
And even if I regularly try and test other apps, I always return to Spark because of its perfect integration with my processes and existing tools.
Some features or tools discussed by Sophie aren’t currently available on all devices, but we are working on creating that parity.
Do you want to read more exciting stories? Our users have shared how PDF Expert helps in writing a PhD thesis on microbiology, from the beginning of the research to the last full stop, and how convenient it is to edit and store chords in the app.
The Readdle Team 
