Should you bother sending your Sales Emails on Cyber Monday?
After successfully avoiding Black Friday, my next challenge is Cyber Monday. There is no dodging this day as my email inbox is full with subject lines, “Tara we have a deal for you” and “Cyber Monday 50% off.”
If you’re a fan of email marketing and jump-for-joy deals today is your day. Inboxes are bound to fill to the brim and traffic on the email freeway is likely to get a little backed up.
On Friday I stayed inside, eating Thanksgiving leftovers shielding myself from the aggressive crowds at the local shopping centers. Even sad to say I did not part take in Small Business Saturday. Well, I obviously cannot boycott checking my inbox or sending emails today and so face-to face with Cyber Monday here I am.
Tips for Sending your Sales Emails Today
1) Schedule a follow up. Even if your subject line is incredible today, some emails are destined to get lost under a pile of others. Use Tout to schedule an automatic follow up email. After creating your template select:
2) Keep your eye on the Live Feed. The good news is your recipients will be glued to their email today. If you see someone going click happy engaging with your email jump on the opportunity to pick up the phone to call.
3) Use Tout to send your emails later. Avoid the Cyber Monday traffic hours. Don’t send emails between 12:00-2:00pm. Schedule your emails to be sent before or after the traffic.
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.
User of the Week: Reese Miller from Superhero IT Services
Hi, I'm Reese Miller, the head of Business Development for Superhero IT Services. I help identify and reach out to people who could benefit with some help with their IT infrastructure.
We do everything from cloud consulting to email marketing, so I need to stay productive and organized with my emails. Once I have a list of leads to reach out to, I'll send them each a personalized, templated email.
Seeing which leads have the most engagement through ToutApp lets me prioritize them.
I'll usually give a call to the people who have the most views or clicks on an email, and this helps me close a lot more deals. We've been using Tout for nearly six months now, and it's made a huge improvement to our sales process.
If you are a small to medium-sized business and need help with your IT, shoot me an email and I'll connect you with one of our superheroes.
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: Max Altschuler from Udemy
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I'm Max Altschuler and I've been doing Business Development and VIP Outreach as part of the content team for Udemy for over a year now. Udemy helps students make moves and learn new skills online. Whether you want to get promoted, break into a new industry, start a company, further a passion, or just accelerate your life, Udemy helps you learn from the amazing instructors in the world, so that you can get there and get there faster. Our expert instructors have taught over 400,000 students on Udemy, helping them learn everything from programming to yoga to design to salsa and more.
We've been using Toutapp since the beginning of my tenure and couldn't be happier with the product and service it provides. We are able to track our emails and tailor them to convert better every time.
With ToutApp's analytics, we can usually pinpoint whether we need to change the subject line, parts of the body, or the email recipient list in general. We can email a group of recipients in minutes, even with slightly different copy using mail merge dynamic fields. With an emphasis on user data, Toutapp's tracking allows us to analyze data and react quickly and properly.
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.
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.