Okay folks, today I have a super simple gmail hack for you that will be huge once you see how incredibly useful it is.
whether you’re building online courses, building an email list, giving away content upgrades or giveaways on your website, you’re a coach booking appointments online, you’re a freelancer using some kind of crm to manage your your clients, contracts and invoices…
Whatever you’re doing, you should test those systems as a customer to make sure they work and are easy for your customers to use.
sounds like a no-brainer, but I’ll point it out anyway; if you never test it yourself to see what they see, you’ll end up with frustrated customers and lots of tech support emails.
and who has time for that.
Recently, a client and I had a little misunderstanding. I set up some integrations and systems to do a certain thing. It was the night before launch and I thought everything was working great.
client: so when someone signs up, what’s going to happen is <this particular thing>, right?
me: no, when they check in, this happens and then that happens.
client: wait what?!
Me: I asked you to try it out so you could see how it works. did you try it?
they hadn’t. and the reason, they explained, was that because their primary email address was already an administrator account in this particular software, testing the customer experience meant using a secondary email address. they had one, but they couldn’t remember the password and it felt like a hassle having to go through password recovery hell just to try this little thing.
You’ve done this too, haven’t you? good news.
If you use a gmail or gsuite email address, you have unlimited email addresses at your disposal, all from your main inbox.
even if you use gsuite with your own domain name and your email address is you@yourdomain.com, this still works.
It’s that simple: add a plus sign and a few more words after the first part of your email address.
For example, let’s say my email address is hello@mydomain.com.
When I want to test something as a client, for my email address I could use:
- hello+testing@mydomain.com
- hello+headeroptin@mydomain.com
- hello+popup@mydomain.com
Whatever system I’m testing will recognize those addresses as new, separate accounts, but whatever comes after the + sign will be ignored by the gmail servers, so all those emails will still arrive in my inbox.
by changing the language after the + sign, I can keep track of what I’m testing.
Let’s say I just installed some new email options on my entire site. I have one in the header, one in the sidebar, and one at the bottom of all my blog posts, and I want to make sure they all work.
I would register for each of them with a different email:
- hello+header@mydomain.com
- hello+side+slash@mydomain.com
- hello+blogfooter@mydomain.com
then I go to my email list and check that those three email addresses are subscribed. if one of them doesn’t show up, I immediately know which optin is broken.
Note that if you’re testing a system that involves creating an account, you’ll first want to log out of your admin account or use an incognito window to ensure you’re getting the real customer experience.
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bonus: add email filters
Although gmail will ignore the extra text in the email address when it is sent to your inbox, it will still send it to that email address. meaning that in your inbox, that email will still show that it was sent to hello+whatever@mydomain.com.
you can combine that with a filter in gmail in settings > filters, if you want to treat emails sent to that particular address in a certain way.
You could do a lot with this, but the most useful thing is to filter spam: when you have to enter an email address to sign up for something and you know you’re going to get a lot of junk, you can sign up with you+junk@yourdomain. com and then create a filter that takes email sent to that address and automatically archives or deletes it.
(but don’t do that if you sign up for my email list, okay?)