Gmail email analytics (tips & best practices & tools)

If you’re anything like us, your Gmail account is the control center for your business.

You and your team use your inbox every single day to:

• Support your existing customers with their questions
• Answer questions from warm sales leads and move them through the sales pipeline
• Send key assets and information to team members

Despite the importance of your email inbox, most businesses’ Gmail accounts are a blind spot.

In this guide, we’re going to show you how to transform your Gmail account activity into key insights that you can use to improve how your team uses their email inboxes.

Let’s dive in.

What is Gmail Email Analytics?

Gmail email analytics software gives you insights into how you and your team use your Gmail account. For example:

• How many emails you send per day
• How quickly your team responds to customer emails
• Whether you’re hitting SLAs for your clients

These metrics aren’t available in Gmail out-of-the-box, so a Gmail email analytics tool is essential if you want to level up how your team uses email to support existing customers and engage with new ones.

Key features to look for in your Gmail Email Analytics Software

1. Measure email reply times to track trends and productivity

The first feature to look for is that it measures your team’s email reply times.

Once you start using your email analytics tool like timetoreply, it’ll track your inbound and outbound emails, and show you metrics such as the average length of time it takes for your team to respond to customers and inbound emails.

You can break down your reply time metrics by criteria such as:

• Overall average time to reply
• Average time to first reply
• Individual inbox vs. group mailbox reply times

As you gather data, you will be able to see if your team is responding to customers within your target times, and whether or not certain team members tend to reply faster than others.

Using the reply time data you can set new goals and KPIs for your team to ensure you never leave a customer or sales lead waiting to long for a reply.

2. Real-time alerts when new replies come in

To help you hit your reply time goals, look for Gmail email analytics tools with real-time alerts. These alerts will notify you when new emails come in from customers, leads, or team members. When you see the alert, you can jump into your inbox and reply.

Why is this an important feature?

You can use it to ensure the most important emails never get missed or left behind. For example, if you’re working on closing a new contract, you can enable real-time alerts to show in your browser whenever new emails come in from that particular sales lead.

When you get your alert, you can jump into your inbox and ensure your lead isn’t kept waiting.

It’s a feature that will help make your email analytics more actionable — rather than simply monitoring your email activity, it can help you improve it.

3. Track client service agent and team trends

To understand your Gmail activity metrics in context, you need to be able to compare your email activity levels over time.

By having historical email activity data available, you are able to track the key metrics in your business over time to see how they compare.

For example, if you hired a new customer service agent with the idea that it would bring down your time to reply to customer service tickets by an average of 20%, you can look at your trend graph to see if the new hire has the effect you hoped for.

Over time, you can adjust your email reply time goals and best practices to ensure they’re positively affecting your business, rather than just being extra metrics your team needs to look at without full context.

4 Best Gmail Email Analytics Software in 2023

1. timetoreply – Best Gmail Email Analytics & statistics platform

timetoreply is an email analytics platform that connects to your team’s inboxes and gives you actionable insights and analytics into your performance.

Once you start using it, you’ll see historical data on your team’s email usage, including data on:

• Average reply time by individual or team inbox
• The days and times when your team need to handle the most email volume
• Number of conversations your team have per day and week

On top of these powerful Gmail email analytics, you’ll be able to create SLA goals to help you track if your team is hitting your email reply time targets, and schedule regular automated reports so you can track performance on an ongoing basis.

To ensure you and your team always reply to high-priority emails quickly, you can also set up real-time email alerts. When an email comes in, you’ll be notified and you can jump into your inbox to help out your customer or sales lead.

It’s the perfect tool to get your email response management processes up and running and will support you as your business and email needs grow.

Key Features:

• Easy onboarding: No software to install, works instantly after connecting your Gmail account
• Privacy-focused: only reads your email header metadata and can’t access email contents
• Flexible: if your company switches from Gmail to Outlook, you’re covered. timetoreply works seamlessly with both platforms.
• Powerful reporting: Display your email analytics data in various dashboards and find the business-critical metrics you need to know if your email performance is up to par.
• Pricing

timetoreply has various pricing plans to fit your company depending on your needs.

Pricing:

• • Starter: $16 per month, minimum of 5 mailboxes
  • Pro: $25 per month, minimum 5 mailboxes
  • Elite: $34 per month, minimum 10 mailboxes
  • Enterprise: Custom based on your needs

All plans give you access to a suite of powerful Gmail email analytics features, the ability to track email reply times, multiple types of reports to track performance, real-time email alerts, and more.

Want to learn more about the right plan for you? Schedule a demo now and discover the future of elevated communication strategies!

2. Email Meter

Email Meter is an email statistics platform built for Google Workspace, and is another good option for your email management needs.

Once you connect it to your inbox it will keep track of your activity and display your most important metrics in visual dashboards and reports.

One key thing to note about Email Meter is that it’s best for enterprise companies. This is because the lower-tier plans have limitations that restrict the number of filters and metrics you can access. For small companies, it’s not going to deliver the value you need.

Like timetoreply, there are alerts and goal-setting features built-in, which you can access on the Pro plan and above.

Key Features:

• Reporting: Highly visual reports that make it easy to see key metrics
• Privacy-friendly: Like timetoreply, Email Meter only looks at your email metadata and doesn’t read any of your email contents.
• Segmentation options: You can create reports and segment data based on recipients, domains, or subject lines.
• Data export: You can export all of your data to a CSV to work through it and create custom reports

What Email Meter’s missing

Email Meter is an excellent tool for Gmail users at small companies that need extra insights into their team’s email usage.

That said, there are a few drawbacks.

• Most features are only available on the Pro plan and above
• Alerts and goals not available on lower tier plans
• Cap at 15 inboxes for non-enterprise plan users

Related: Read our in-depth, side-by-side comparison of Email Meter and timetoreply here.

3. Email Analytics

Email Analytics is a platform to help you visualize your team’s email activity and response times across your company.

It’s primarily designed for Gmail, so it’s a good option. Once you connect your team’s Gmail accounts, it’ll pull in your past email data and start tracking everything moving forwards.

There are highly visual dashboards that make it easy to compare and contract trends over time, and it’s ideal for managers who want to get a quick overview of their team’s email performance.

Key Features:

• Visual dashboards to easily see your team’s email activity metrics
• Track the number of emails sent and received per day
• Track email activity by Gmail labels and segment your data

What is Email Analytics missing?

Email Analytics is an excellent option, there’s no doubt about it. But, it’s not the only solution on the market.

It’s missing several key features that you might need in order to translate your Gmail analytics into real business performance.

• There are limited options for filtering and analyzing your data
• You can’t set reply time goals for individuals or teams
• You can’t manage client SLAs inside the platform

If you want to integrate your Gmail Analytics tool into your business, features like goal setting are essential, as they ensure your team can use the data in an actionable way.

Related: Read our in-depth, side-by-side comparison of Email Analytics and timetoreply here.

4. Front App

Front App is an email management platform designed to help your team bring all of your email activity to one place.

Rather than being a Gmail analytics tool, it has a much broader goal — to be the go-to place for all of your email activity. Your whole customer service team can use it to track interactions with customers, and add notes or jump into conversations that other team members are having, making it ideal for collaboration.

There are email analytics built into the platform, but you’ll need to be ready to commit to working from Front, rather than using your regular Gmail inbox.

Key Features:

• Unified inbox: See all of your team’s inboxes and email activity in one place
• Collaborative: Mention team members, leave comments on email threads, and assign email tasks to people
• Integrations: You can connect Front App with 100+ other tools to improve your email workflows
• Analytics: See trends in your email volume and activity

What Front App’s missing

Front App is designed to unify your inboxes and improve collaboration. It does have some email analytics features to help you understand your activity, but it’s not specifically designed to be a Gmail email analytics tool, like timetoreply or the other options we’ve looked at.

• Requires a full migration onto the platform to take advantage of it
• Mainly focused on helping customer service and success teams over sales teams
• Doesn’t include all of the Gmail email analytics features that timetoreply does

Want a full breakdown of Front compared to timetoreply? Read the comparison here.

Best Gmail Email Analytics tools (a recap)

All of the Gmail email analytics tools we’ve looked at are solid choices.

But, in our option, timetoreply stands above the rest if you’re looking for a powerful, feature-rich, and easy-to-use Gmail email analytics platform.

Once you connect your team’s Gmail accounts, timetoreply will start collecting your activity data and showing you crucial email and reply time insights in rich reports.

You can track every metric you need to judge email performance, from average time to reply across all teams, to individual inboxes.

As well as showing you performance data, timetoreply will help you hit your goals thanks to real-time alerts and SLA management.

Once you start using it, you’ll see your team’s average reply time quickly improve and you’ll know your key customers and sales leads are never being left waiting.

Schedule a demo now and discover the future of elevated communication strategies!