The State of the Email Union

Email is not dead and its not going to die and in fact, its only going to get better from here.

This past Wednesday, hundreds of people that believe in Email's longetivity gathered at the Inbox Love conference in Mountain View, CA from far reaches of the world including Israel, Australia, Canada and from across the United States to talk about the state and future of Email.

Email Usage and Email Spend Continues to Grow

The latest report says there are 182+ billion emails sent every day (not counting spam), 72 of which are for business. Nearly $13 billion is spent yearly on maintaining Email Infrastructure alone. While the major corporations including Google, Microsoft and Yahoo still operate their Webmail businesses as a loss leader, multi-million dollar budgets still exist for putting money toward Microsoft Exchange, Outlook, and the plethora of Email productivity and automation tools, integrations and plugins that exist to standard platforms. On top of that, when you start to look at the amount of money being spent on Email marketing via leaders such as Responsys, Cheetahmail and Xacttarget, the significance of Emails becomes quite clear. 

Email is a Strategic Loss Leader

Furthermore, with the recent acquisitions in the email space including Sparrow by Google, Pardot by ExactTarget, Context.io and OtherInbox by Return Path and the renewed push for a better Hotmail with Outlook.com, it has become clear that even as a loss leader business, Email is a strategic must-have platform to make other related properties profitable. In the case of Return Path, and with the general emergence of Big Data, it is also starting to become clear exactly how much the data in a person's Inbox is worth in raw dollars.

Email Competitors and Viability

Email is huge and while the likes of Chatter and Yammer (well maybe not Yammer, everyone knows thats just a ghost town) will continue to replace Email for internal collaboration and for collaboration across well established relationships (VIP Customers, Partners, Vendors, etc), Email will continue to grow as the primary ubiquitous and distributed communications network for the Internet.

Email will Evolve

However, it is important to note that Email is not going to stay static. Even in the last 6 months, we've started to see huge advances in Email related features.

Over here at ToutApp, we're leading the movement to build an insanely great business class email experience with things like email tracking, templates, scheduling, and analytics. But even beyond us, companies like MovableInk are doing amazing things with Dynamic Email for marketers, and Boomerang is finally making your calendar behave properly inside your Inbox.

In my next blog post, I'll outline the Top 5 Key Trends happening in the Email space that will help us truly evolve messaging on the Internet for the years to come.

User of the Week: Creighton Green

I co-founded a startup company called Aptivada. We work closely with TV stations, radio stations, and other media outlets to help them quickly grow their social presence. Our apps, tools, and media-specific consulting drives exciting results.

We send a LOT of the same e-mails every day for customer service, sales, and marketing.

ToutApp helps us work smarter, and much faster by providing a suite of tools and features to make sending e-mails better.

We use ToutApp's templates to save time on the daily hours that we were using to write the same type of email over and over again. One of our favorite features is being able to track opens and clicks. This helps us know who we need to follow up with or send another email to. ToutApp is also very simple and easy to implement. Everything ties in easily to Gmail and Outlook. If you're not using ToutApp for your startup or business, you should check them out.

You can get in touch with Creighton through Twitter: @creightongreen

Every other week, we'll profile a different person who uses our app to improve their email productivity. If you would like to be featured in the future, you can apply here.

How Tout Makes the IT World a Little Friendlier

Ah, information technology. Having worked in the IT world for several years, I can confirm that it has a reputation for being unnecessarily jargon-laden and user-unfriendly.

Help with a Smile, however, is an IT company working to shrug off this reputation. Their President and Chief IT Specialist Michael Spadaro has built a company that is friendly and customer-centric, and at the center of all of their communications is Tout.

How Help with a Smile Uses Tout

Michael: We're an NYC-based IT support and consulting firm, and we use Tout for communicating with sales prospects that are (hopefully) looking to improve their IT support situation. We store our e-mail templates in Tout and share them among the sales team. Being able to collaboratively develop sales messaging templates is not only a time saver, but it makes sure that the communications are on-point with our sales strategies. At the same time, we love how easy it is to customize a template on-the-fly to keep things personal.

Before Tout, our sales processes were very "shoot from the hip"- as a small company without a dedicated sales staff, we don't have the luxury of spending a lot of time writing and re-writing e-mail communications to prospects, which is exactly what we were doing before.

3 things you can do to embody the voice of the customer

• Constantly tweak and hone your templates
• Use your Tout templates to keep your team on-message, with a positive and light tone.
• Ask others outside of your field to [read your templates] and give you suggestions.

IT professionals have a well-earned reputation for not being able to relate well to the rest of the business world- bucking this trend is what Help with a Smile is all about, but many IT companies could use a dose of user-friendliness in their sales processes.

3 signs your prospects are engaged

There's been several occasions where we've used Tout to focus our sales efforts on prospects based upon their positive interaction with a message we "touted" to them. We can see when a prospect is showing a great level of interest, whether by:

• Repeatedly viewing the message
• Forwarding the message to others who are also viewing
• Clicking on links in the message

Even those bits of information alone can tremendously inform the sales process. Given this knowledge, we can prioritize our sales tasks to reach out to these individuals through other methods of communication as a follow-up to our e-mail.

How to Preserve Your Sanity while Emailing

Ever wonder what happens after you hit the "Send" button on your emails? Some of them are deleted without being opened while others never make it past the spam filter. Without a standard reply or a response to your "Hey, did you get my earlier email…?," you're blind to your recipients’ actions.

“Sending an important email without Tout feels like operating my business in the dark.”

- Forest Linden

Wondering whether your important emails have been received is a pain, but multiply that tenfold when you're running your own company. We had two founders of their own businesses weigh in on this topic: Forest Linden, the founder of Tech Husband, who doles out advice and training around web tools; and Matt Cooper, the Founder and CEO at Addroid, a platform that creates streamlined, affordable video banner ads. Forest and Coop both weighed in on how Tout has helped them stop worrying about email responses so they can start working on what's important: running their business.

Before Tout

FL: If 24 hours elapsed between when I sent an important email and getting no response from someone, I would start to get concerned that they didn't get it, and if a day and a half or two days went by with no response from them, I would send out another email to touch base and make sure they got the first email.

MC: Basically I was just sending regular emails out into the abyss and then days later would just think, "I wonder if that guy got my email? Should I try him again? I wonder if he saw the link I sent? Maybe I should call? Nah, that's crazy. Could I email again to check? Maybe I'll follow up with a quick note, but I wonder if I'm just bothering him at this point?" I'd pretty much go back and forth like this.

After Tout

MC: As the CEO of a new startup I find myself working many different roles. While I enjoy working on the product, I realize that it's not much good if no one hears about it. So, for the time being I'm the lead sales person, and I'm having to get up to speed on the process of sales and the tools of the trade... What I was really struggling with was sending and following up on emails. Tout has helped me dramatically increase the amount of prospecting I can do in a day and now I finally know if I'm getting though.

FL: With ToutApp, the entire worry cycle is gone because I can see if they opened my email... Since I can see whether or not they viewed it and how long they had it open for, I know when people have read an email, and now I can relax and give them a few days before I follow up.That allows me to focus on other important aspects of running my business, rather than wasting energy worrying and sending out second emails to see if people got the first one.

To find out what's working and what isn't working with your inside sales efforts you need to be able to measure the results. Tout solves this one problem and does it well.

- Matt Cooper

You can learn more about how Tout satisfies your curiosity with email analytics here.

Ditch the Business Cards - How to Network More Successfully at Conferences

Any experienced businessperson has attended their fair share of conferences and tradeshows. They’ve networked, they’ve delivered their pitch, and they’ve handed out and received endless swathes of business cards. As our society continues to talk about going paperless, the fact that business cards are still prevalent seems a little outdated.

At Tout, our mission has always been to make emailing simpler and more efficient by providing features like templates, tracking, and easy-to-message groups. Still, our product is flexible and ever-changing; we hear about new use cases from our customers every day. So when we heard about users relying on Tout as a replacement for business cards, we had to share it!

Tout solves a key problem for any salesperson:  following up.

Picture South by Southwest in your mind: It’s a time for concerts, panel sessions, parties, and endless, endless amounts of networking. And with networking comes business cards. And with business cards come dead trees. All that aside, though, keeping track of the sheer volume of contacts met during SXSW is a daunting task.

We caught up with Vivek Sharma of Movable Ink who attended South by Southwest this year to get some insight into his use of Tout.

What was life like before Tout?
VS: [Before Tout, I would] carry a stack of business cards and do a card exchange.  No one ever follows up on collected business cards.  One could spend hours sorting through cards, transcribing data, and following up. Why not skip the steps and go directly to a personalized email? I've saved hours and hours of time with this streamlined process.
My inbox is also searchable so I'll always be able to go back and track older communications with someone I met.  I love Tout!

How did you use Tout at SXSW?

VS: I used Tout to send people my contact information, follow up with them, and demo my company's technology.  My company, Movable Ink, delivers live and streaming content in emails.  Tout's the perfect solution to demo this to people I meet.  I send people I meet a personalized email with an example of Movable Ink technology (see below).

It's the perfect tool to get people to experience what we have built on a visceral level.

Have you recommended Tout to anyone? How did you describe it?
VS: I do… in fact I describe Tout to anyone I've met and I'm about to send an email to.  I tell them it's like a Mailchimp for personal use.

Bonus: What are your favorite Tout features?
VS: Tout's delayed send is an awesome feature.  People are very busy during SXSW so its useful to auto-send the follow-up three days after the event, when they can actually absorb it.
The iPhone app is very easy to use when you're on the go.  Finally, being able to track whether your email was opened or clicked on is a big benefit.

You can learn more about Tout on our homepage - and be sure to look up our iPhone app as well.