Communication today relies heavily on email correspondence and other online applications.

And the time we waste crafting the perfect pitch or the outreach email that hits all the right notes is significant. Time we could have easily spent on getting more work done. 

Sales teams could potentially save hours every week if they were to send hundreds of outreach emails at the speed of light. Or answer customer queries almost instantly. All while being grammatically correct, consistent, and on point with the voice of the brand. 

So is there a way to automate the mundane task of repetitive typing and unleash this level of productivity? Of course, yes. Welcome to the world of text expanders.

What are text expanders?

Text expanders are shortcuts that you can use for text snippets you repetitively type out. You can use a text expander to automatically fill out a text block with content in emails, pitches, customer responses, blogs, or code. 

With a text expander, you would be able to summon up content in a matter of seconds. These can be used everywhere you work to insert snippets that include words, paragraphs, formatted lists, images, rich text, or anything you need.

For example, typing out o/intro can expand to 

The power to go “Accio content” whenever you want would help you save: 

• Time
• Effort
• Your soul from boredom

Tab bit dramatic? Well you can ask your outreach team but we’re pretty sure they will be too worn out to comment. 

These snippets inserted by a text expander can be used across the workplace. They ensure:

• Consistency in messaging
• Fewer or no mistakes/typos
• Pervasiveness of the voice of the brand
• Updated information 

Regardless of which team or function you may be in, using a text expander can be the one-way ticket to supercharging your productivity.

Types of snippets you can use with a text expander

With a good text expander tool, your snippets can be a lot more than simple text. Snippets can include images, your favorite emojis, formatted text, dynamic variables, and more. They can be used no matter where you work. 

Simple text snippets

You can insert textbook replies on Slack for commonly asked questions.

o/ty can be “Thanks a ton for all the help. Really appreciate it.”

Snippets with links

These days most of the information exchange happens via links because that has become the default place of work. Everything important is a URL, and fortunately, snippets can expand texts to include the destination links of the webpages you want. 

o/product-intro can be used to say “Thank you for your interest in what we’re building. To know more about it, please check out our product demo and intro video. 

Snippets can include links to your calendar, to the product deck, or to a marketing video, so you can repurpose the content without making any tweaks at your end. 

Snippets with images

Text expanders bring with them endless customization options so you can format the text as well as include images where you need to. 

Images and screenshots are especially helpful when responding to customer queries. They work well as you guide a user through a series of how-tos while answering FAQs.

Dynamic snippets with variables 

To allow endless customization and personalization, snippets can be dynamic in nature. 

You can simply insert variables wherever they are required while creating a snippet. While using the text expander, all you’d need to do is replace the variables with actual names of the people or their companies and you’ll be good to go. 

How to use a text expander to do more in less time

1. Recruitment

Hiring. From inviting candidates to apply & scheduling interview calls to sending out rejection or acceptance emails, a human resource professional sends out multiple similar emails every day. Instead of allowing crafting emails to take multiple hours from the workday, it would be so much easier to automate the emails with the use of text expander. Craft each type of email and assign them shortcuts that can be inserted in the mail copy within seconds. 

Onboarding. Poor onboarding can leave a new candidate disengaged with low confidence, disassociated with the long-term company vision, and culture and at an increased risk of jumping ship if confronted with a better offer elsewhere. On the other hand, companies that implement a formal onboarding program could see 50% greater employee retention among new recruits and 62% greater productivity within the same group. While onboarding can be a tiresome task, it can be made super simple to implement across various teams with a text expander. Simply create shortcuts for onboarding candidates in different teams and create a flow such as

o/onboarding-design-1, followed by o/onboarding-design-2 and o/onboarding-design-3 to send out emails instantly. 

Outreach. Despite the Great Resignation, good candidates are not easy to come by. Talent recruitment teams have to continually send out the perfect company pitch to multiple personas at once to clock in sufficient leads. Wouldn’t it be awesome to type a word and have the pitch email or LinkedIn message ready to go?

2. Customer Support

Canned responses: Most live support chats follow a prescribed series of steps broadly including greeting a customer, enquiring about their problem, providing more information or offering an immediate solution, and ending the chat. While it is easier to repeat the same thing verbally to more than one customer, typing takes a lot more time. This is avoidable because each of these steps can be templated using a text expander. As a team, you can significantly reduce the time it takes you to reply, thereby keeping customers happy with immediate solutions. This helps nurture leads and hasten the road to conversion. 

Recommended reading: The ultimate guide to canned responses

3. Sales

Outreach: You can templatize your cold sales outreach emails to prospective customers and add fields such as {first-name} or {last-name} for personalization. You can even create a snippet with a meeting link/contact details/pre-recorded demo video that goes out to prospects as soon as they sign up on your website or express interest in being contacted. This outreach pitch can be carefully crafted and based on the development cycle of the product, it can be updated regularly for the entire team. 

Queries redressal: If your product is technical in nature, then your pre-sales and post-sales time will be inundated with multiple questions about the product. To not waste much time and respond to potential users as soon as possible, using a text expander is a brilliant idea. 

With text expanders that work for the entire team, you can ask the IT team, founders, support engineers, or product managers to craft the right response to technical questions and use them easily. Text expanders, thus, allow you to benefit from collective knowledge in an organization. ‍

4. Marketing

Company intro: As a marketer, you want to ensure that every time you communicate what your company does, you use the same blurb. There is nothing more important than maintaining consistency in communication and messaging. Marketers can easily use text expanders to create a shortcut such as o/company-intro to insert the message wherever required. 

Social media: ​​Twitter, Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, TikTok—they’re not just places to entertain ourselves anymore. They’re also how your customers find you and get in touch with you to ask questions, raise issues, and if you’re lucky, shower compliments. According to a study, 20% of TikTok users use TikTok to keep up with brands and products". To get more compliments than criticism, make sure to use text expanders to insert responses for the most common questions asked on your social media channels and for dealing with the trolling that is sometimes part of the job. 

Try out the best text expander in the market for free

Convinced that you want to give text expanders a spin to free up more time in your workday? Give the best text expander - OSlash - a try and thank us later. 

Using a text expander like OSlash can have a truly amazing effect on your work. You will be able to save close to 30 hours a month by automating your most frequently used snippets, formatting them to look beautiful, and inserting variables in highly personalized messages. 

It is super easy to use and share with the entire team. You will be able to create snippets for your team, your workplace, or just for yourself. Additionally, you can also highlight anything on the web, right-click and convert it into a snippet with OSlash. 

The best part? OSlash also helps you transform your most frequented pages/links into simple shortcuts such as o/daily-standup or o/q1-priorities. So that you can find, access, and share information blazingly fast. It is the best tool to streamline your workflows and be more productive.