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.
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.
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.
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.