Gmelius Transforms Gmail Into an Efficient Space for Teams

Workspace platform Gmelius turns the familiar Gmail inbox into a team communication platform, project management dashboard, email marketing tool, and support ticketing system; it even offers some basic CRM functionality too.

Boosting Gmail with Gmelius means Gmail users get to keep that coveted familiar interface, declutter their workflow, collaborate better, and ultimately, work more efficiently. 

The Gmelius experience

Gmelius seamlessly integrates inside Gmail and easily be found in your familiar left hand pane, keeping the whole Gmail experience intuitive.  

There is also a sidebar to switch from the inbox to some of the other Gmelius dashboards, such as the project management board or the sequence visual builder.

Aside from Google Chrome, the platform works on Safari, Opera, Brave, and Microsoft Edge; plus, you can download Gmelius at the Google Play and App Store for mobile.

Shared inbox and shared labels

Gmelius offers a shared inbox that can eliminate a company’s need for help desk software. Teams can easily manage group emails without leaving their personal inboxes. Don’t worry though, this shared inbox does not require you to share the rest of your personal Gmail account.

Shared inboxes are handy for group emails such as sales@, support@, info@, etc. Like many project management tools, in Gmelius team members can @mention each other in internal notes to drive attention to a certain conversation or to add context.

Assignments work per email conversation. Inside an email conversation, there is a ticketing sidebar that allows you to choose the right teammate from a drop-down list. This way accountability is clear.

For even more detailed organization, all assigned emails to a specific person can be found in their "Mine" folder on the left sidebar.

Shared labels are useful for further organizing your inbox by project and client communication. This helps keep everyone in the loop for cross-department collaboration. The shared inbox also offers calendar syncing features, handy for booking events or managing deadlines. 

Helpdesk and project tracking

This Gmelius feature transforms Gmail into a near-complete customer support platform. 

New emails come into an ‘unassigned’ folder where you can choose the right person for the task from the drop-down list. 

From there you get Trello-like functionality to track tickets or any other project managed through Gmail. In this function, email tickets serve as kanban cards, which get moved from column to column as the ticket progresses through stages.

Gmelius boards are a freshly released feature and are optimized for team collaboration, helping you visualize your project and client communications, organize your team’s processes, and manage your personal assignments. 

With the new feature you can turn an entire shared label into a board and visualize your ticketing workflows with columns that may look something like: 

Unassigned -> Columns per each agent's name (with a subcolumn for pending tickets) -> Closed

Smart sequences

As automation becomes an ever-more important work tool in the customer service industry, so too does it have its place within the inbox.

Setting up workflow automated sequences is not too difficult with Gmelius’ visual editor. It uses arboreal design flows and basic if-this-then-that (IFTTT) logic, as in:

• If no rep opens an email within 2 days, then label that email ‘urgent’.

• If the customer has not responded to our email within 1 week, then send them an automated follow-up reminder.

You can easily share these smart automations among your team and collaborate to make new ones.

Gmail-friendly CRM

Gmelius aims to help sales teams with more than merely responding to incoming emails, but using email outreach to stay top-of-mind with contacts and to extend one’s network. 

It lets you import a CSV list—which is computer-speak for a list of things, and in this case, those things are contacts (you export to CSV from the source app). 

All activity in your email gets logged for you. That data integrates with popular CRMs like HubSpot and Salesforce.  

You can send single blast email campaigns or set up drip email campaigns to all your contacts. You can also set up automatic CC and BCC rules from your CRM’s contact list.

Emails 

Any email you’re working on can be saved as a template (which are also shareable), or you can craft a template from scratch. There are dynamic fields so that blast campaigns can include details like name or company name. 

Email tracking gives the inbox what many of us have come to expect thanks to our mobile devices—being informed when a communication has been delivered, received and opened. Gmelius makes this feature as natural with emails as it has been for SMS. 

Not only does your ‘sent’ folder show you a read status—with two ticks turning green—but you can also arrange to get notified in your inbox when someone has opened an email. This includes those CC’d and BCC’d.

Analytics

The emails you send generate data to collect—such as the location of the recipient, how many times they opened the email, if they clicked any links therein, etc. The analytics dashboard is simple but intended to clearly point out which contact might be ready for a follow-up to guide them further through the pipeline.

You can also track the performance of a team and/or individual agents by viewing how many emails each individual opened, or the amount of time on average it took to open a fresh email.

To each their own 

For even further extended collaborative activities, every team member working in Gmelius has the option to choose their preferred platform: Gmail or Slack. 

Thanks to two-way, real-time data syncing, teams can reply to emails, change statuses, assign emails to relevant team members, and add email notes—all this without leaving Slack.  

Pricing 

Gmelius was designed as a free Chrome extension. Now, there are premium tiers at $9, $19 and $49 per user/per month, billed annually. The higher the tier you go, the more shared inboxes and shared labels you get. 

However, the option for a free extension is still available.

A top contender

Gmelius is headquartered in Geneva, Switzerland. It was founded in 2016 by Florian Bersier, a former Oxford Ph.D. and LSE researcher who focused on, among other things, economics and social sciences in online systems.

Now, the company is backed by the well-known Silicon Valley accelerator, Y Combinator (YC S19).

Gmelius took their place at Disrupt Berlin in December 2019 and made it all the way to the final five.

Perhaps what’s so disruptive about Gmelius is that it’s not trying to drop a whole new platform on the oh-so-crowded SaaS scene of workplace-efficiency products. Rather, it’s aim is to make work better by allowing everyone in a team to choose their preferred platform. 

While so many other companies are vying to replace each other to become your one-and-only solution, Gmelius is smartly shifting into a workspace where most of us are already comfortably well settled: Gmail and Slack.