User of the Week: Gavin Pereira from Check-in-London.com

Hi, I'm Gavin, the director of Check-in-London.com. We specialise in serviced accommodation in London and offer the best selection of Serviced Apartments and Short Stay Apartments for holidays, business trips and relocation. 

We love ToutApp. It's easy to use, and it has significantly helped us increase our email efficiency and effectiveness.

Being able to see how our customers are responding to our emails is extremely useful for our team - and ToutApp makes this possible.

It gives us the tools to improve our email communication and enables us to give a better service to all our customers. We couldn't manage a day without it!

Bringing ToutApp Analytics and Scheduling to the new Gmail

In our last blog entry, I think we established that Email is not going to die and in fact its only going to get better from here.

Email is evolving faster than you can imagine.  And if you're going to play in this Email space, you better be able to keep up.

Just as quickly as Gmail released their new Compose screen, the ToutApp hackers quickly adapted and designed a user-interface that can be used with the new compose screen. 

This format makes it easy for users to compose a message without having to draft it and search for another message. You can still write emails faster with Tout in the fresh new compose. To use the latest version of the ToutApp plugin just refresh your Gmail page.

ToutApp: Managing your Email, saving your time, allowing you to get back to doing what you love. Start your free trial today.

User of the Week: Max Altschuler from Udemy

I'm Max Altschuler and I've been doing Business Development and VIP Outreach as part of the content team for Udemy for over a year now. Udemy helps students make moves and learn new skills online. Whether you want to get promoted, break into a new industry, start a company, further a passion, or just accelerate your life, Udemy helps you learn from the amazing instructors in the world, so that you can get there and get there faster. Our expert instructors have taught over 400,000 students on Udemy, helping them learn everything from programming to yoga to design to salsa and more. 

We've been using Toutapp since the beginning of my tenure and couldn't be happier with the product and service it provides. We are able to track our emails and tailor them to convert better every time.

With ToutApp's analytics, we can usually pinpoint whether we need to change the subject line, parts of the body, or the email recipient list in general. We can email a group of recipients in minutes, even with slightly different copy using mail merge dynamic fields. With an emphasis on user data, Toutapp's tracking allows us to analyze data and react quickly and properly.

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.

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.