User of the Week: Creighton Green
I co-founded a startup company called Aptivada. We work closely with TV stations, radio stations, and other media outlets to help them quickly grow their social presence. Our apps, tools, and media-specific consulting drives exciting results.
We send a LOT of the same e-mails every day for customer service, sales, and marketing.
ToutApp helps us work smarter, and much faster by providing a suite of tools and features to make sending e-mails better.
We use ToutApp's templates to save time on the daily hours that we were using to write the same type of email over and over again. One of our favorite features is being able to track opens and clicks. This helps us know who we need to follow up with or send another email to. ToutApp is also very simple and easy to implement. Everything ties in easily to Gmail and Outlook. If you're not using ToutApp for your startup or business, you should check them out.
You can get in touch with Creighton through Twitter: @creightongreen
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.
ToutApp User of the Week: Kenneth Morgan
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.
Hey there, I'm Kenneth, and I'm the Marketing Director for Big Folio. We build websites for photographers and other art types. My main function is to build and implement sales strategies to our existing and potential client base.
I found ToutApp about 6 months ago and immediately fell in love with it. Besides Tout being very intuitive and easy to use, I found immediate results as I began to email potential clients.
I'm able to send a personal email template to a prospect, track their use, and follow up with a phone call or another email.
While other email campaign companies offer a shotgun blast approach, Tout offers me the tools to approach my pinpoint target audience in a personal and friendly way.
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.
ToutApp selected as a contestant for CRM Idol Competition
We’ve been on the edge of our seats waiting to announce this...
ToutApp is a contestant in this year’s CRM Idol competition!
We’re so honored to have been selected as a contestant and to be included along with the likes of products we respect including Nimble, PipeDrive and select others.
Because we consider ourselves to be at the intersection of CRM and email, being selected as a nominee for CRM Idol marks a huge stride for us over here at ToutApp.
Over the past 2 years, and at nearly 30,000 users, we’ve taken a very principled approach into understanding and solving the pain points salespeople have to deal as they switch back and forth between their CRM, email clients and mobile phones. We’re super excited to show the CRM Idol judges how our product is leading the evolution of CRM and email.
We’ll be blogging along the way so you can share in the excitement, talk about our preparations, and hopefully even announce a unique integration with another contestant. Wish us luck!
Learn more about CRM Idol:
Should You Send Those Sales Emails on the 4th of July?
First of all, Happy 4th of July. Although we have users using Tout all over the world, we are based in San Francisco, so we decided to take the day off and spend time with our families and friends and appreciate all that this country has to offer.
Nevertheless, for a small upstart like us, there's never enough downtime. So naturally, I woke up this morning and decided to check up on how our systems were performing and how the emails were being delivered.
The first thing I look at is our Tout Happiness Command Center. It aggregates all pertinent details about our business and puts the most important thing up-front -- the number of emails being touted over the past 72 hours across our different integrations (which includes Gmail, Outlook, iOS, CRMs and our own web-based app).
Although we saw a bit of a spike early Wednesday morning (our customers outside of the United States ), you'll see that email creation dropped down to near weekend levels as the day progressed.
This got me thinking...
Is the 4th of July pretty much a dead period of Sales Emails?
So, I decided to dig into the data. Writing emails was one thing, but with ToutApp, you're also able to see and track whether people are engaging with the emails you've sent (we track views and clicks in real time).
The first thing I looked into was the number of "Email Open" events we were detecting across our system and across all of our users. I first looked at Tuesday to see if people started to engage less with your emails when leading into a holiday.
As the graph shows, No! People were opening just as many emails the day before 4th of July (by and large) as the past 16 or so Tuesdays before it.
Then, I decided to take a look at Wednesday. Since its still about Noon PST over here, I decided to compare to the past 16 or so Wednesdays but only looking at data for the number of hours that has passed into today.
Surprisingly enough, while there has been slightly less views today than previous Wednesdays, its not wildly off. More importantly, the engagement stats don't represent nearly as high of a drop off for the 4th of July holidays that the send stats do.
So, Are Sales People lazy? Are they missing out on an opportunity to get their message across during 4th of July?
Seeing that people were clearly viewing emails, it bugged me that our customers weren't logged into Tout and sending out emails to their prospects. Were our customers missing out on a great opportunity to get up top on the Inbox?
So I decided to take a closer look at the Email Send traffic going through Tout adjusted for user growth to get a relative measure:
Now if you've been paying attention, you'll know why I got confused here. It looked like very few people were logged in, but we were infact sending a ton of emails out! So then, I ran one more query -- which made me one incredibly proud Founder:
Turns out, both were correct.There were very few people "actually working on Tout" but a significant number of our customers were smart enough to make sure Tout continued to work for them even though they were out of the office. Tout customers went in and scheduled a number of emails to be sent throughout 4th of July.
So there you have your answer, you should send sales emails during 4th of July -- here are the conclusions:
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While people may be at barbecues, fireworks, etc at 4th of July, righ talong with posting their Twitter and Facebook updates, they are continually engaging with their Inbox.
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4th of July is still a great time to continue to move your sales process forward. You may not close deals, but you can most certainly make first contact, grow awareness or move forward in the process.
- And lastly, you yourself don't have to be stuck in the office to keep things moving forward. Put automation into place, schedule your emails with Tout.
Are you using ToutApp for your sales, business development and business emails yet?