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.
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.
New to ToutApp? How I am managing my new email.
I just entered the world of ToutApp. My email received a makeover and I joined the team as a Happiness Officer. Let’s talk about what’s important here. As a new ToutApp user I came to an important realization.
It is always difficult to make a change.
I was accustomed to the glaring subject lines in my inbox. In the chaos of my inbox, where were the emails and replies I actually cared about? With an outbox full of emails the one pondering question in my mind was the big uncertainty of who read my carefully handcrafted email send out the day before.
My email is now an outlook for productivity, helps me manage my workflow and discover what communication is working and what is not working thanks to ToutApp. In real- time I see who viewed my email. My questions are answered. Did my prospect engage with the information I sent? When should I make my move and call?
Some highlights from my week
- Discovering and becoming addicted to the Live Feed
- Learning the ins and outs of integrating ToutApp with my Gmail and Salesforce
- Crossing Market St. during the Giants parade to get to work
If you have a cool tip or best practice to share about how you make ToutApp work for you, we'd love to hear! Submit your own tip here.
New! Why and How You Can Use Custom Fields in your Emails
Earlier this week, I explained how you can send email to up to one hundred people and make it look personalized. Now I’m going to explain how to make these communications even MORE personalized with custom fields.
What do I mean by custom fields? You might know of them as merge tags or dynamic fields. Basically,you’ll be able to store something like “blue” in a personal contact’s record. Then when you type out {{favorite_color}} in the text of an email, “blue” will be substituted. And “vermillion” and “burnt umber” and “#E500ff” and so on, and so forth, for various contacts.
We’re rolling out this feature because you, our 26,000 users, hardly fit into a one-size-fits-all model. And now we’ll let you create custom dynamic fields to store any sort of customer data you’d like, from your contacts’ favorite color to their children’s names.
Here’s How to Use Custom Fields:
1) Create your Field
- Head over to the Relationships page. You can create a contact or search for a current one.
- Click “Edit” next to your contact and scroll down to the bottom of the popup.
- Enter your custom value and field, and then hit “Save” to store that information with us.
- Repeat this for all the contacts you’d like to email with a given template.
2) Reference your Field
- Head to the Templates page and create a new template.
- Click the “Dynamic Fields” button
- Choose “Custom Fields” from the left-hand menu
- Select the field you’d like to use in your template. We’ll fill out the rest.
Example custom fields
- Industry - “I’d like to chat about how what we do fits into {{industry}}....”
- Job title - “Congrats on your new role as {{job_title}}...”
- Target audience - “{{Target_audience}} find our product really useful...”
- Conference name - “Great to meet you at {{conference_name}}...”
Custom fields use case
One really neat story around custom fields comes from Douglas Arrison, founder of dasolar.com, which sells solar energy and wind power solutions. Douglas wanted to reference the average wind speed of his leads’ hometowns in Tout emails... without having to input it over and over again. Now he can pull this info from Salesforce over to Tout and save the effort of personalizing each and every email.
This degree of creativity and personalization can apply to anyone in literally any industry. Which custom fields will you use going forward? Let us know in the comments!
How to Send a Personalized Email to 100 people
You’re staring at a list of hundred people you need to contact by tomorrow for your [pick one: upcoming event/ weekly sales quota/ new customer outreach efforts/ etc] and you have no idea where to start.
We feel your pain.
Writing a personalized email for one person, let alone one hundred people can be difficult and time-consuming. So in the end, you’ll either [choose one]:
- Stay up all night crafting personalized emails to an insane number of recipients
- Create one bulk, impersonal mailing and then bcc everyone on it
… Yeah, we weren’t a fan of these choices, either. So in our latest product release, we’ve made it super simple to email batches of people with awesomely personalized messages using mail merge.
Here’s how to send a group email in three simple steps, rather than 100:
1) Group your contacts
In order to only hit the “Send” button once, you’ll need to put all your contacts together into a Tout group.
You can do this by uploading a CSV with contact names or by shifting them from your “Everyone” list into the proper group.
2) Create one message
Once you have all your contacts in a neat group, now you can begin to draft your message. You’ll want to use a template for this. Head over to our Templates tab, create a template name you’d like to use, and then go in to edit your message.
You’ll now see a shiny, brand new button:
Click this. Use the drop-down fields to insert all sorts of custom information that Tout will auto-fill with mail merge functionality. You can reference anything from your contacts’ children names to their favorite color to a sign-up date on your website... literally anything.
Here’s what an example template might look like with this feature:
By the way, If you’ve connected your ToutApp to Salesforce, you can even pull Lead and Contact fields into your template!
3) Send
Okay, so you have your group of people, and you have a customized template. Now it’s time to send your email. Click back to your group, and, under “Group Actions,” select “Email this Group”. Select your template on the next screen and hit “Send.” All those empty fields will be filled out with the correct recipient information.
4) You did it!
Sit back, relax, and enjoy the rest of your day knowing that you saved yourself the manual task of sending tons of emails.
Coming next: We’ll teach you how to use custom fields in your templates. Stay tuned!