It's Google's world, baby. We're just living in it.

Literally decades ago, I created a throwaway gmail account and named it after a a rec league hockey team that hasn't existed in 15 years. I planned on using it to communicate with my hockey buddies and as backup fail safe in case my internet service was interupted.

The hockey team may have fallen apart, but that little throwaway gmail address has now become the center of my universe. As Google grew and added services, many of us have become locked into Gmail.

Fortunately, with a few available tools, your vanilla gmail account can become a bonafide marketing powerhouse.

Many small business turn to mass email services like Constant Contact or Mail Chimp to build an email list and broadcast messages to their customers, but all of that can now be done straight from your Gmail account with GMass.

And using your Gmail as your mass email provider means you can personalize it and customize it in ways you just can't do with the one size fits all email broadcasters.

Take video for example.

Chad Morgan is the founder of Quickpage which allow you to send personalized video marketing messages through your email and text.

"It grabs attention which is the first part of the sale," says Chad of the use of personal video messaging. "then through your voice inflection, tonality, hand gestures, facial expressions, you're able to build a connection with your eyes looking into their eyes."

It really is the next best thing to being there.

The problem of course is email overload. We all have hundreds of email messages jamming their into our inbox every day and it's easy to let the urgent distract us for the important.

Many productivity experts suggest eliminating everything and striving for INBOX ZERO. 

Not me. I personally strive for INBOX UNO.

I use a service called Boomerang to help me clear out the clutter and return the important messages back to my inbox at the time that's best for me to deal with it. That allows me to block out my time, stay in flow, and boost my productivity dramatically.

The goal is to only have ONE SINGLE EMAIL in my GMAIL inbox  at any given time: The email I send to myself with my daily task list. 

When I'm looking at my gmail account, I'm looking at my business's dashboard and I want to to see what's most important to me... Not the 37th email that GoDaddy sent me that day.

How do you use your Gmail account to grow your business?

Terry Lancaster

I help salespeople make more money, get more reviews, more referrals and more repeat business by building better, stronger, more authentically human customer relationships online and in real life