ToutApp User of the Week: Jason Hitchcock loves ToutApp
Our featured User of the Week entry comes from Jason Hitchcock, Head of Advertiser Sales at Aarki. 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.
I work as the head of Advertiser Sales for Aarki, a global mobile ad network that gives advertisers and publishers more control and better returns on mobile campaigns. We spend a lot of time on outreach. Before Tout I was spending a lot of my time typing up the same email and firing it off. I felt as though I was shooting my emails off into the abyss and I wondered if my time was being used productively. Then I discovered Tout.
Tout let’s me get a lot more time out of my own team. My salespeople can be selling instead of focusing on the mechanics of selling.
How do you use Tout?
- Tout’s view, click, engagement and website tracking has helped me to follow up with the right prospects at the right time
- Tout Templates have eliminated the tedious task of copying and pasting those repetitive emails I used to send
- ToutApp lets me create auto follow-ups and even email campaigns
- Tout has allowed us to do a greater volume of outreach - two weeks of work is now done in a day
I would recommend ToutApp to anybody that is a position at a company where they are doing outbound communication or where they are pitching an idea. You want to know if somebody is connecting with your email, and ToutApp gives you a nice peek at that.
How We Saved $5K By Creating Our Own Product Videos
You can always whip out the flip camera, shoot some action and upload it to YouTube for free. Or you can always use a video production company to produce and edit a quality video for around $4k to $10k. So, you are either saving bundles of money creating a not so high quality finished product or emptying your bank account with a polished professional video. Although both options would result in a finished video realistically you are either wasting your time or wasting your money. So, over here at ToutApp we found a happy medium. By using the following tools and resources below we saved big bucks and ended up with some quality videos.
If I could hug Screenflow I would.
Screenflow offers screencasting and screen recordings. It captures the entirety of content on your Mac desktop, your iphone, video camera, microphone and even your computers audio. Screenflow is super simple, easy to use and offers powerful editing allowing you to easily add images, text, video transitions even freehand callouts, annotations, video and audio filters and more. It can be difficult to create an explainer video of your product or software or service but screenflow, I kid you not, makes it effortless. And when you are ready to ship it out, Screenflow let’s you publish it to any media player (i.e., youtube, vimeo, flash, exports to any quicktime format). Don’t believe me check out their overview video.
Seriously, round of applause for Wistia.
For those of you who are unfamiliar with Wistia they provide professional video hosting offering reliable delivery and professional tracking. While I am sure their services are phenomenal, their content is extraordinary. As a religious reader of the Wistia blog, they offers amazing content and videos that teach you unbelieveable tips and tricks on video editing, production strategy and even video marketing. We recently created our first customer testimonial video and only dropped $100 at Home Depot and Amazon to create a professional looking lighting. Props to Wistia for the tip. Check out our video below.
Tunefruit is music to my ears...literally.
Music truly makes or breaks a video and at times is the only audio throughout it. So, choosing the best music to place in your video is kinda a big deal. In order to make sure our videos stay uppity and have emotion we use Tunefruit. Tunefruit, a modern music marketplace, has a wide variety of content contributors with all kinds of great music genres. You will be sure to find some fresh picks for your marketing videos. Another great music marketplace we have used, a bit cheaper, is Audiojungle.
It’s up to you how you want to go about your video creations. In the end if you want a quality product with your vision, style at an affordable price I would highly recommend using the tools and resources above.
P.S. After you create yout awesome video, Tout it and see what kind of engagement it receives.
User of the Week: Owen uses ToutApp for Customer Development
Our featured User of the Week entry comes from Owen McGab Enaohwo, Co-founder of SweetProcess. 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.
My co-founders and I are working on a webapp called SweetProcess that will make it easy for entrepreneurs to scale their businesses by helping them quickly and easily create Standard Operating Procedures for their businesses. Our process will allow everyone on their team to know exactly what to do in any given situation and they can make use of the SOPs to deliver a consistent level of results to their customers.
Right now we are in the process of creating a Minimum Viable Product for SweetProcess. Before jumping straight into coding, we decided to call potential customers and interview them to find the burning problems that they have with documenting how processes work in their businesses and the exact solutions they want from a software.
My email process involves sending an email to a list of prospects in my field and having them click a link to answer a simple three-question survey. ToutApp’s analytics let me know who is interested in and who has completed the survey. From there, I have the opportunity to follow up and prioritize my recipients based on who appears to be showing interest. For example, those who complete the survey then get a phone call where we can drill into the problem and the solutions that they want from the SweetProcess software.
ToutApp’s templates, tracking, and follow-up mechanisms help me get my emails done faster and more intelligently. At the end of the day, these features help me stay in touch with everyone, from my initial outreach to my next follow-up to the final phone call.
Why Email Tracking is a big deal for Salespeople
Marketers have been obsessing over their Email Open Rates since…well.. since the beginning of Email Marketing.
With Tout Email Tracking, we brought the same "fancy" technology to everyday 1-to-1 sales emails so that salespeople could see in real-time how prospects and leads engaged with their sales emails.
Up until now, Email Tracking for Salespeople has been a well kept secret, something that gives you that "extra edge."
Email tracking may soon become a necessity rather than a luxury.
Today's article titled "Email Auto-Filtering - What's a Marketer to Do?" on a Marketing News & Expert Advice Site suggests that the rise of auto email filtering services like SaneBox and Google Smart Inbox are probably relegating those marketing emails to a folder called "Travel" rather than the person's Inbox.
Whether it's a folder or a "stack," your email marketing message has found itself tightly aligned with other email communications from competitors and other vertically aligned organizations. Many systems have default categorizations that look at a variety of information within the marketing message and the email envelope to tuck the message away neatly for the recipient.
Better Inbox management and smart filtering is something that needs to happen. These filters will get better and better to get you, me, and our leads to focus on the messages that matter and ignore the ones that don't. This is something we believe in as well.
Interestingly enough, these filters can start looking into sales emails as well. Pretty soon, I can imagine a world where your sales email will get locked out faster than a smart receptionist knows to block out cold sales calls for the CEO.
What's a salesperson to do?
Use Email Tracking. That way, instead of wondering whether that email got through and ignored or engaged, you'll know. In Real-Time, you'll know whether your email gets opened, whether your presentation gets viewed, and whether your links get clicked.
How does Email Tracking help?
Obviously, being that Tout Tracking provides all this functionality, we're a little biased. But, don't just take our word for it. Here's what Jeanne Burns had to say about Tout's real-time tracking on our recent DIYMarketers article "ToutApp Does Email Marketing Like Never Before":
Here is something even more critical. Here is how Tout’s real time analytics will improve your ability to close sales. That important email you sent two days ago, to the client you are dying to connect with was opened an hour ago. They looked at it for twelve minutes. They clicked on the links. Now is the perfect time to follow up with a phone call. Strike while the iron is hot. Increase the impact and improve your chances of closing that sale. Is there any other way to do this? None that I’m aware of.
User of the Week: ToutApp gains lifetime fans from BabyList
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.
I spearhead marketing and PR initiatives for BabyList. We provide expectant moms the ability to add items from any store to one universal baby registry - it's just as easy to use as Pinterest. BabyList is currently a part of an accelerator program and one of our main goals is to increase user sign-ups. We have a niche target market of pregnant women so we are constantly thinking of creative ways to reach them.
We LOVE ToutApp because it provides us greater insight to how the editors and influencers we are contacting are responding to BabyList. Our emails typically contain several links so we are able to gauge where people are clicking...and what they are interested in. And, at the very least, we'll know that they viewed our emails and how frequently.
Recently, I noticed one email I sent was viewed 27 times - I just knew that the recipient was interested and would respond soon. And, sure enough, she did!
We have just started using ToutApp and are already fast fans. I'm sure as we start drilling into the additional bells and whistles that Tout offers, we'll be lifetime fans.