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.

Tout and Salesforce: Email Templates and email tracking within your CRM

With many recent user questions about this key aspect of our product, we thought we’d highlight one of our most popular plugins: Salesforce.

We built out a plugin to send trackable, HTML Salesforce emails from templates that you create. While Salesforce has its own templating feature, what Tout adds to the equation is our email tracking and analytics. We’ll also give you a central repository to send templates from. If you’re using an iPhone, Gmail, or Outlook, you’ll be able to access and use your templates across all of those services.

To reach out to a lead within Salesforce using Tout, we’ll automatically fill in all the info you need to get in touch with someone. Below is a shot of an example Salesforce template to load up for a lead. You can see all the information in red that will be filled in when you email your lead:

Now you can pull up your lead and click the “Email with Tout” button to get in touch.

Click the name of your template, and this is what pops up almost instantaneously:

This entire process takes less than 15 seconds, and it gives your lead a personalized email right from within Salesforce. Finally, we’ll log the record of that email in your lead’s Activity History so you and your team can reference it later.

If you rely heavily on Salesforce at your job and also happen to be emailing a lot, Tout can be a lifesaver. Check out our Salesforce email tracking, template, and productivity app in the AppExchange.