I built an inline-reply extension for Gmail

People don’t read emails anymore. They skim.

TL;DR: Install this chrome extension and start writing better emails faster

📣 Update:
Version 1.0.4 released:
- Firefox version launched!
- New UI (quick access via Gmail reply window, next to SEND button)
- Tons of bugs fixed, including major language support

People are visually numb to the things they see everyday.

In the book “Pitch Anything” by Oren Klaff, he talks about the primitive lizard brain that we use to differentiate familiar from new. This part of the brain selects whether something is old, new, strange, useful, dangerous, or a waste of our time altogether. Whether it’s someone approaching us on the street or an email landing in our inbox, this part of the brain is the gatekeeper to our attention.

If you are marketing or selling anything to anyone, this is a crucial point to grasp. Most material never gets past the lizard brain. Remember that company presentation where everyone yawned and stared at their phones the whole time? Those presentation materials weren’t deemed worthy by the viewers. No thought was put into how they might be received, and the introduction didn’t pique enough interest for the lizard to pass it on up the chain. Don’t make the same mistake when approaching potential customers.

How does this relate to email communication?

In the lizard brain of all of us lives a fuzzy picture of what a boring email looks like. This is the standard format that we see day after day, thousands of times per years. I imagine it’s something like this…

The blurry pattern of a boring email

You know this image because it follows the guidelines of what we were told was a good email. It’s worked for years, but that doesn’t mean it’s still the optimal way to convey information.

Tactic #1: Change the format

How we usually do things:
Read an email, click ‘Reply’, then type our response in full blocks of text.

How we could be doing things:
Read an email, copy and paste the points we want to reply to, then write our answers below each line (this is what we call ‘inline replying’).

Let’s send an email with this new visual pattern

Breaking the visual pattern

Quite different, isn’t it? Simply changing the way we space or color items in our mails is enough to make us look closer. It breaks the visual pattern we are familiar with and thus automatically sends it up for processing. In fact, the color change isn’t even necessary. Simply bolding the lines you want to reply to works just as well. You’re also breaking information into smaller, digestible chunks, which everyone appreciates.

Tactic #2: Repeating it back

You’ve probably heard that old adage by Dale Carnegie…

“Remember that a person’s name is to that person, the sweetest and most important sound in any language”.

The same is true when you repeat back a person’s words to them.

By repeating the points we want to reply to, the reader begins building a conversation in their minds. When they see you’ve not only read their message completely, but also repeated back their main points, it makes that conversation clear. You’re both on the same page. Why is this better than a big block of text? Well…

It’s simple. People are used to conversations.

Humans have been using email for what, 30 years (at most)? Verbal conversation has been working for hundreds of thousands of years as far as we can tell. If we ignore this default mode of communication, we are missing an opportunity to better connect with people, the natural way.

For the past three years, I’ve been manually creating inline replies to really put these theories to the test. So far, the results have been…

1. I get better, more concise responses, with my questions answered
2. People tell me how impressed they are with my emails
   (seriously, it happens all the time. Professionalism gets noticed in a world where most people can’t properly differentiate your and you’re)
3. Since I am formatting my replies, I automatically make sure I’ve covered everything I need to reply to (saving me from forgetting something)

But, writing emails this way isn’t easy. When you’re copying, pasting, and formatting your inline responses all the time, you’re spending a few extra minutes to edit every mail.

So, I thought I’d build my own solution.

Say hello to Reply.Ninja

Rather than copying, pasting and formatting every single line of every single email, now you just…

1. Install the ReplyNinja extension on Chrome or Firefox
2. Click the lines you want to copy (in the reply message window)
3. Write your responses underneath the copied lines, and send it

That’s it. No extra formatting needed.

I think you’ll find that using Reply.Ninja will increase your email reply speed drastically — and I assure you, someone is going to compliment you with; “damn, you send good emails!”

We’re live on ProductHunt:
https://www.producthunt.com/posts/reply-ninja-2

PS: If you liked this article, or my free tool Reply.Ninja, please give me at least a dozen claps for good luck.