Composing the perfect, confident email message takes time. There’s always an endless amount of writing and rewriting. Finding the right words and the best format to get your message across isn’t an easy task, well, unless you simply don’t care.
In 2020, we spent a great deal more of our time sending out emails, which means we’ve spent a lot of more time typing, deleting, and typing again. Now, wouldn’t it be nice to have a tool that could help us improve our emails and increase our open rates, too?
Well, Lavender says they can do just that. Lavender is a browser extension tool that is both a writing and productivity assistant specifically for your inbox. “Our mission is to build the most helpful email assistant on the planet to help you write more thoughtful, confident, and effective emails faster,” said Co-founder and CEO of Lavender, William Ballance.
To become “the most helpful email assistant,” Lavender has an array of cool features. So, here are some of the things Lavender can do.
AI-Generated Sentence Recommendations from CATIE
CATIE (Creative Algorithms for Text and Image Enhancement) is Lavender’s language and image AI. The assistant helps your writing be more “confident, concise, and clear” by offering sentence replacements.
Always-on Email Coaching
Similar to Grammarly, Lavender will highlight text that needs work, could use some improvement, or is ready to go. In doing so, you can make changes before hitting send.
Easy-Insert GIFs
You can easily search for and add GIFs into your email without having to leave your inbox. And, Lavender’s computer vision models can detect if and how that GIF changes the tone in your email. So, you are less likely to accidentally add a GIF you thought was one thing, but, unfortunately, turned out to be completely something else.
Mobile Preview
Most of the content we consume today is through a mobile device, and Lavender recognizes this. The app has a Mobile Preview right in the inbox so you can quickly edit and see how your email will look like on a mobile device.
Company Insights
The tool does pull insights on the people you are emailing with, such as a photo, bio, and social media posts, but it doesn’t stop there. Lavender shows you insights and data on the company the people you email work for, such as revenue, headcount, tweets, etc. According to a company blog post, this feature will make it “super simple and quick to research your prospect and send a personalized email without ever leaving your inbox.”
Deliverability Score / Spam Check
No one wants their email ending up in the spam folder, but sometimes it happens. To avoid this from occurring, the tool runs a language analysis on your email to search for “common spam triggers”. Depending on what it detects, it will tell you if it’s safe to send or not.
Email Address Verification
Don’t know if that email is correct? Well, Lavender makes it easier to know by automatically verifying email addresses. It will show you if the address is valid, invalid, or if the target mail server responded with an error message.
Email Scoring
Also similar to Grammarly, the tool scores your confident email from A through F. (Wait, did I forget to mention Lavender works with Grammarly? Well, it does.) The score is based on “how likely your email is to be opened, read, understood, and positively replied to by your recipient.”
Best Practices Check
Based on data from millions of emails, Lavender checks your email to make sure there isn’t something that might lower your reply rate.
Open Awareness
With Open Awareness, you are able to see when, on what device, and what time someone opened your email. By tracking this information, the tool can calculate your recipient’s local time so you know when to call or email them back.
Writing Time
When you start drafting an email, Lavender starts a Writing Timer that keeps track of how long you’ve been crafting your message.
Reading Time
Let’s face it. No one likes to read LONG emails. And, when one does come our way, who doesn’t just flag it so you can follow up later? I know I can’t say I’ve never done it before. To prevent you from sending recipients long emails, the tool also has a Reading Timer.
Based on the average reading speed, Lavender calculates how long it will take your recipient to read your email. If the timer is getting big, you can gauge whether you should shorten your email or not.
Overall, Lavender’s offerings seem very interesting, especially if they help make your emails better and increase open rates. Currently, the tool works on G-Suite and Outlook 365. If you’d like to give it a shot, you can check out the different pricing tiers here.
