Custom Mail Merge for Outlook and Gmail Users

Generic Emails Blow 

The average person receives tons of newsletters and email marketing every day addressed to “Dear Sir or Madam.” These generic emails are far from effective at generating a good amount of user replies. The best way that we’ve seen to get your messages read is with custom tailored text.

We introduced dynamic fields like {{first_name}} and {{company}} to ToutApp over a year ago so that you could personalize your group emails. Being able to use mail merge fields saved all of our users a ton of time. They still restricted personalization to a number of preset options, though.

Introducing a new level of personalization for your emails. 

We’re giving you more: you can upload and email groups in Tout and reference whichever mail merge fields you’ve created. For those in Gmail and Outlook, you’ll need to use our web app at www.toutapp.com to send group emails. You’ll be able to reply and have your follow-up tracked right from with your email client, though.

Here’s how to get started with custom fields:

1) Create a CSV file with all of the contacts you’d like to email at once. Put any information you want in your columns. 

2) Create your group in Tout, click “Import CSV,” and upload your file.

4) Click add to group.

5) Now you can send everyone a really personalized email that may look something like this:Alexander, Hannah, Charlie, and anyone else being emailed here will get a unique email delivered to their inbox. Sending group emails like these doesn’t mean you don’t care about the people you’re emailing. It means you care about the time you’re saving.

ToutApp: Managing your Email, saving your time, allowing you to get back to doing what you love. Start your free trial today.

New! Why and How You Can Use Custom Fields in your Emails

Earlier this week, I explained how you can send email to up to one hundred people and make it look personalized. Now I’m going to explain how to make these communications even MORE personalized with custom fields.

What do I mean by custom fields? You might know of them as merge tags or dynamic fields. Basically,you’ll be able to store something like “blue” in a personal contact’s record. Then when you type out {{favorite_color}} in the text of an email, “blue” will be substituted. And “vermillion” and “burnt umber” and “#E500ff” and so on, and so forth, for various contacts.

We’re rolling out this feature because you, our 26,000 users, hardly fit into a one-size-fits-all model. And now we’ll let you create custom dynamic fields to store any sort of customer data you’d like, from your contacts’ favorite color to their children’s names.

Here’s How to Use Custom Fields:

1) Create your Field

• Head over to the Relationships page. You can create a contact or search for a current one.
• Click “Edit” next to your contact and scroll down to the bottom of the popup.
• Enter your custom value and field, and then hit “Save” to store that information with us.

• Repeat this for all the contacts you’d like to email with a given template.

2) Reference your Field

• Head to the Templates page and create a new template.
• Click the “Dynamic Fields” button
• Choose “Custom Fields” from the left-hand menu
• Select the field you’d like to use in your template. We’ll fill out the rest.

Example custom fields

• Industry - “I’d like to chat about how what we do fits into {{industry}}....”
• Job title - “Congrats on your new role as {{job_title}}...”
• Target audience - “{{Target_audience}} find our product really useful...”
• Conference name - “Great to meet you at {{conference_name}}...”

Custom fields use case

One really neat story around custom fields comes from Douglas Arrison, founder of dasolar.com, which sells solar energy and wind power solutions. Douglas wanted to reference the average wind speed of his leads’ hometowns in Tout emails... without having to input it over and over again. Now he can pull this info from Salesforce over to Tout and save the effort of personalizing each and every email.

This degree of creativity and personalization can apply to anyone in literally any industry. Which custom fields will you use going forward? Let us know in the comments!

3 Ways to Use the New Tout

In case you hadn't noticed, we rolled out an entirely new interface for Tout pretty recently. Beyond the basic facelift, we’ve made some major product improvements and introduced some cool new functionality.

Here’s three ways to use our product’s new features:

1. Group your contacts

Within our release, we’ve made it much, much easier to organize and categorize your contacts into groups to avoid an unwieldy address book. You can now add multiple contacts to groups and drag and drop an individual contact into a group. With this, you can also use mail merge to send large batches of personalized emails. 

2. Personalize your emails with tons of dynamic fields

Sometimes first name, last name, and company aren’t enough information to personalize your emails. If you want to reference a contact’s website, phone number, account type, or more using custom fields, we’re now able to automatically input this information for each contact.

Special bonus for anyone using Salesforce: we’ll import all the custom fields you’ve created so you can use them in Tout as well.

3. Look through your email history with a contact

Can’t remember what you said to a customer in an old email? You can now pull up your entire history of communication with each contact in Tout. There’s no need to switch between your mail client and your CRM to pull up your email history, or search through your entire Tout outbox.

Bonus: Use social media to strengthen connections

There are links to Twitter, Facebook, and Linkedin in each contact’s tab now, so it’s easier than ever to do due diligence on your message recipients. If your future recipient is tweeting about their weekend, now you can ask them how it was in your messages. Bam. There’s your social selling strategy.

Take some time to look over all our new features and let us know what you think!