How Dyn Uses ToutApp’s Email Tracking and Analytics to Delight Customers
You’d never thought DNS and email delivery could get this exciting. Dyn are the coolest kids on the block making the internet work. They’ve delighted us with their Most Reputable Sender in the World campaign and their nontraditional take on classic internet memes.
When they’re not busy powering the internet, Dyn’s business development and marketing teams use Tout to improve their emails.
Tout is great for "reaching out to existing customers... Since there are wayyyyyyy more customers than there are BDRs, it helps us keep in contact with them all and inform them of other offerings Dyn has." - AJ Garron, Business Development Rep
As a very customer-centric company (we’ve written about Dyn’s credo and how they put the customer first here), the Dyn team use ToutApp to stay in touch with more customers while keeping the conversation personal. Our templates save the team time re-writing the same communications, and email tracking kicks in to make sure that Dyn’s reps are engaging with the most interested customers.
“Our team loves using ToutApp. Efficiency and 'working smart' are some of our credos here at Dyn, and ToutApp is a major tool to help promote both of them. It's a great connection tool that we use every day.' - John Zahr, Business Development Manager
"ToutApp is a great tool to not only learn how effective you are at first impressions, but also increase the number of first impressions you can achieve in a work day. It makes your emails more about the customers, rather than yourself using its customized templates. If there is one tool in your marketing and sales teams’ hands that is fist pump worthy...this is it." -Ryan O'Hara, Event Marketing
Tout’s offerings not only help Dyn send out a larger quantity of emails, they also improve the quality of them. Template analytics keep the team on top of their game by letting them know how effective each email is. Not only does Tout help Dyn succeed as a business, it lets them give their customers more of the information they want.
In fact, if you’re a Tout customer looking for your own email servers to send from, we definitely recommend that you check Dyn out. Existing Tout users can set up SMTP with them here.
You can learn more about why Dyn loves us by signing up for a ToutApp account today.
How We Made our Customer Support Kickass
A customer-centered company
Here at ToutApp, we’re really dedicated to making our customers happy. My job title as "Happiness 
Officer" is a fairly excellent example of this. A month or so ago, though, as we amped up our marketing efforts, we started to experience some growing pains - especially in customer service. We’d been having trouble listening to our customers, responding as quickly as we used to, and making necessary improvements within the app - all while staying friendly, accessible, and helpful. It felt like a compromise to some of our ideals. To that effect, we decided to make some important changes to our support structure that I’ll talk about below.
Though none of this is directly sales-related, I hope that at the very least it’ll spark a discussion about how to best communicate with customers, as well as how to structure customer service at a growing company.
Here are some important changes and realizations we made where it comes to support:
1) “Customer service” is NOT a happy term.
Before doing any real restructuring of our support system, we meditated on our methodology and language for working with customers. “Customer service” is reminiscent of being put on hold and transferred, having to answer the same question over and over, or getting a nine digit case number to reference. Not the sort of experience we wanted to provide to ToutApp customers.
Since we’ve never been fans of doing things the old fashioned way, we’re throwing these terms out internally. If you want to get in touch with us, you can contact the happiness team to ask a question, report a problem, or talk to our enterprise sales team. No fuss.
2) Support tools can actually hurt productivity.
One of the biggest challenges I personally have been up against is the juggling of many different platforms in my daily workflow. At one point, I sat down, mapped out what I was using each service for (it looked something like this [right]), and decided things needed to change.
Now I’ve got Hipchat, Pivotal Tracker, Salesforce, Google Docs, Salesforce, and our internal database all hooked up to Zendesk and everything is finally in one place. I know when new cases come in through Hipchat, I can log bug reports easily, record user requests in a spreadsheet, and, most importantly, easily reference our customers’ data while chatting with them. Even if it takes some effort to build a custom setup like this, I can guarantee that the final result is worth it. Your customer support, service, or happiness team - whatever you call it - is not one size fits all. And your internal chaos will likely reflect itself when dealing with a customer. Your zen is their zen.
2) Your feedback mechanisms should be customized.
After a ton of research, we decided to migrate from Desk to Zendesk as our help desk platform.
Zendesk provided some standard forms for submitting tickets. However, after looking over them we realized these were too generic for our business. So we decided to design our own forms.
Our main reason for this was the need for two very different forms: one that allowed customers to get simple questions answered (e.g. What’s included with your free plan?), and another for more in-depth problems with our product (e.g. Why won’t my templates load?). We’re a fairly complex platform that has a lot of different integrations, so we built up a really comprehensive “Report a Problem” form that asks as many questions as it can so that we can minimize back-and-forth exchanges by grabbing a ton of information up front.
Check them out:
3) Showing is telling.
Throughout this support facelift, it had become fairly apparent recently that we’d outgrown our
homemade help/FAQ pages, so I completely redid these. Our two worst problems with these FAQs were a lack of up-to-date information and too much text. Rather than spend the necessary time updating these FAQs, I typically ended up communicating one-off with customers to show them a feature or walk them through a necessary process.
I’m cringing a bit as I write this, because we all know that’s not a sustainable process. Investing the time to make your help pages great and create good articles and video content goes a huge way in making any support organization successful. After just a week on our new FAQ pages (using Zendesk’s framework - thanks!), I can already notice a lot more customers educating themselves about the product, which makes everyone’s lives happier.
4) Our customers’ priorities are our priorities.
We previously asked customers "How are you feeling?" in our customer forms. This was a suggestion that Wufoo made at Userconf (a conference that was really helpful in us defining our support priorities!).
In the end, though, we made a basic realization: customers who have to fill out a “Report a Problem” form usually tend to be annoyed - who wouldn’t be?
We wanted to have a more meaningful way of humanizing communication with our customers, so we took a tip from Zendesk and added in a “Priority” field instead. Is this a low urgency issue? Or is it highly impactful? Now we can determine if something needs to be solved right away or in the near future.
In conclusion....
We realized we weren’t scaling something well, so we fixed it. It was this realization that allowed us to create an even better experience for our customers. ToutApp customers can now get help more easily and quickly - with a friendlier face.
I’m sure we’ll continue to have challenges as we continue to scale, but now our revamped infrastructure will better scale with them. If your company is experiencing anything similar, I’d love to talk about ideas, techniques, and tools. If you’re a user, I hope you notice the improvements. We’re here for you guys!
Team of the Week: Ambassador always has their Live Feed running
Our featured Team of the Week entry comes from Derek from Ambassador, writing this on behalf of his sales team. Every week or so, 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.
At Ambassador, we help companies track and manage customer referrals. We'll let you reward your customers (or affiliates) for referring their friends, family, community, or users to you. Once you've tracked referrals, you can issue cash rewards using our integrations with Paypal and Dwolla. We're a hustling Techstars NYC startup in the one and only Detroit, Michigan. I'm managing our sales and customer service communications.
We LOVE ToutApp because we can see how effective our emails are at educating new customers about our product and its features.
ToutApp also lets us see which attachments are opened, when people reference them, and when they go back to review them. Tout also lets us know that a follow-up email has been read or clicked, letting us know that it was compelling to the recipient. Really useful - I always have my Live Feed running!
User of the Week: David Robinson’s Torrid Affair with ToutApp
I run musician services for a music-ed, tech-startup called Chromatik. I oversee outreach and customer service for the company and am constantly emailing people, telling them about our product and getting them on board. We have been building Chromatik for over a year and have had a tremendous response, including getting the American Idol band, Bruno Mars and tons of schools and institutions to use our product already!
From an outsiders perspective, one might think we have a seriously unhealthy love affair with ToutApp at Chromatik. And to be honest, the outsider might be right.
We thoroughly love ToutApp and use it daily in our office for reaching out to potential new users. I blame this torrid affair on ToutApp's email tracking and analytics, especially the Live Feed... not to mention the total integration with my browsers! Emailing has never been easier. We are able to A/B test emails and subject lines that are all tracked and neatly organized - and in return, it effectively helps us grow our company. We're looking forward to using ToutApp for a long time.
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.
User of the Week: Eric Wu from Bracket Labs
I'm one of the founders of Bracket Labs. We're a Boulder, CO startup building enterprise software apps for the Salesforce AppExchange. Our apps are TaskRay and Campaign Calendar, and together they're helping thousands of sales and marketing people around the world work more productively in Salesforce.
We're a small company, so as a founder I wear a lot of different hats. One of my primary roles is sales, so I spend a lot of time talking to customers who have found our apps through the AppExchange and are looking for more information so they can make a purchase.
I love ToutApp for three big reasons:
1) It helps me do more faster! We have a set of emails we send to new leads to help them understand the apps and determine whether there's a good fit for their team.
ToutApp has allowed me to send (and schedule) my emails in a way that has reduced my time per lead by about 30%.
2) The ability to deliver nicely formatted, trackable follow-up email responses from within the Salesforce Leads tab but sent from my own email address (rather than Salesforce's mailer) is great because I don't always trust the deliverability of the Salesforce mailer.
3) The Live Feed of activity on my sent emails is awesome and gives me new insight on customer engagement with my emails. I can prioritize my follow-ups based on their activity and interest level, timely response to an engaged customer is a big part of showing them you're paying attention and you are ready to help.
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.