User of the Week: Dawoon Kang from Coffee Meets Bagel
I am the COO of Coffee Meets Bagel, a new social dating site where a 'Gilt Groupe' style daily deal 
meets online dating. Every day at noon, we match our members with one single who is their friend-of-friends. Members have 24 hours to "Like" or "Pass" their match, with two "Likes" resulting in a first date.
Our team is very small so we work fluidly but I mainly head the team's marketing effort.
A large part of my job entails building relationships with lots of potential partners and influencers in relevant industries. This involves a significant amount of cold-calling and emailing. I use ToutApp to hone my email title, messaging, and play with things here and there to increase the response/engagement rate. I love how I can track when and how many times the receiver views the email, clicks the link etc.
As a single in my late 20s, it's super fun working in the dating industry and in a product I absolutely LOVE to use myself! Part of my job entails socializing with many singles in the city at fun events and talking to them about their dating lives :) I feel so lucky to have this job.
Introducing Tout for Tout
We can make a living by what we get, but we make a life by what we give. -- Winston Churchill
Its a lesser known fact that we never started out building ToutApp to be a sales productivity tool or a email analytics platform. We never imagined that the software we build would end up helping salespeople be better at their jobs or marketing and sales work better together. Although we’ve grown up to do a lot of these things and are slowly becoming the leading provider of Sales Email Analytics, we started this company nearly two years ago with one simple goal: help people communicate better.
In that spirit, we’re more excited than ever to introduce the Tout for Tout program so that we can take helping people and helping people communicate to a whole new level.
Introducing Tout for Tout
Although the majority of our paying customers and our user base (we don’t consider those two things the same thing) are businesses and business professionals, we’ve always recognized that nonprofits could greatly benefit from our platform as well.
For nonprofits, outbound communication is of utmost importance. And what many profits don’t realize is how most of their recipients are super-receptive to their emails. People are more likely to open an email from a nonprofits than most industries combined.
But many nonprofits lack the resources and tools to take that extra step after they have hit send on their emails. They’re often run by volunteers that require re-training, have budgets that can’t always justify the fanciest tools and more importantly, can always use more help.
How does Tout for Tout work?
For Every ToutApp Enterprise Edition Sold, we’ll donate ToutApp, for free, to a nonprofit interested in improving their email communications and productivity.
We hope this model spreads to more startups
The “Tout for Tout” program is about taking our platform and making it available to the types of organizations that can’t necessary spend the big bucks but are out there every day actuating positive change in this world.
And its not about just our software either. Our Happiness Officers and Engineers have also pledged part of their time to help these nonprofits make use of these tools as well. We’re super excited about this program and we hope that over time this type of model gets adopted by other startups as well.
Check out more details of Tout for Tout here.
Join ToutApp today.
ToutApp Tip of the Week: Follow Up with People who Care
This best practice for how to use ToutApp is brought to you by one of our awesome users, Clint Berry, a developer at Weave Communications. Check out more best practices for how to use Tout here, or you can submit your own tip.
We have a small outbound call center with sales reps who call dentists and try to schedule times to demo our software to them. Many dentists will say, "Email me more info and I'll look at it." Sometimes that means "Go away".... but other times, dentists will actually look at the info.
I follow TK (ToutApp's founder) on Twitter because he is cool, and I have always wanted a reason to use Tout and finally saw my opportunity.
As we refined our sales process, I said "You gotta use Tout!".
So we signed up and started emailing dentists that wanted more info through ToutApp. Our reps then would keep a close eye on the real-time dashboard and see if anyone clicked on the links we sent over.
Day 1 of using the product, we saw that a dentist clicked our link... and then it got clicked again, like he was showing someone else. We gave him a call and whamo...! He was interested. We demoed the software to him and his staff, and we got a sale! It was epic.
182+ billion business emails are sent everyday. But which ones are effective?
The 182+ billion business emails sent every day show that email is clearly an important channel for communication. Email connects us not only to our co-workers, but also to key customers. Whether you’re in sales, customer service, product development, or marketing, you’ll likely need to interface with your customers on a regular basis. These users are the bread and butter of your business, so it’s important to communicate well with them. Our platform has processed millions of emails, so we know what types of emails are successful. Below are some tips we’ve come up with for writing effective customer emails.
Should you CC people?
Do CC the people on your team who are going to be working with your customers, as well as anyone on their end who should take part in the conversation. It is important for everyone to be on the same page.
Hi, Dear, Ello, Greetings...
How do you introduce yourself to new customers? Internally we use “hey” because that is part of our voice with users. We make it a point to be informal and accessible to our users. However, it’s up to to find your voice with your customers. Keep in mind that formal is effective, yet boring.
Be concise and to the point
Do not try and make your email longer than it needs to be. It is important the the first few lines convey the key message and anything after that is just supporting information. Do not create heavy content. Long and dense content often backfires because the purpose of the email gets lost. Minimize any non essential content when sending your emails.
Keep it simple, stupid
Communicate simply. Not only do you want to send a personalized email, but you’ll want to use user-friendly language. At ToutApp, we talk a lot as a team about email deliverability, workflow, and servers. In the end, our users want to know that their emails are going out - period. Don’t get too bogged down with internal terms or abbreviations. Your users likely aren’t familiar with them, and your message won’t resonate.
You is kind, you is smart, you is important
Know that you are dealing with actual human beings. You should have a basic background about this person or their company. Figure out and visualize what it would be like if you were actually talking to them person. Be cognisant of the language they are using and relay that into the content you are sending back to them. Show that you have a pulse, that your care about what you are sending and who you are sending it to and show that you aren’t just sending an email en masse. Don't even think about making your emails generic.
Don’t leave them hanging
Don’t be vague. When you send someone an email, you need to ask yourself what it is you would like them to do. Do you want them to reply to your email? Do you want them to join your service? If you need information from customers, make sure to list it out very clearly. Let them know how to get back in touch with you - whether that be via email, your phone, or setting up time for a meeting.
Are you using ToutApp for your sales, business development and business emails yet?
Start Touting Today!
ToutApp Tip: Create Sales Email Campaigns
This best practice on how to use ToutApp is brought to you by one of our awesome users, Levi McClendon from Mobivity. Check out more best practices for how to use Tout here, or you can submit your own tip.
I've created a customized email follow-up sequence using the 'Using this Template in this Category' feature. I love this option because I can drip on a prospect for as long as I need to without logging back in and sending emails out manually. I'm able to market and prospect to hundreds of clients at a time with very little effort.
Being able to then look at the average views and clicks with these templates helps me tweak my other messages to be more successful with open and click rates.
Our campaigns feature lets you set up a series of emails to go out, one after the other. We'll automatically send each email and include tracking so that you can see who's engaging in your live email activity feed.
To to create your own email campaigns, log into ToutApp and click "Edit" next to the email template of your choice. When scrolling down, you'll see the "Whenever I use this template" dialog box, and you can choose a series of sales email templates to be linked together.