Ever wonder how many of your customers read your sales mails that you send out? Wouldn’t it be great if you could get an alert when a customer downloads the proposal that you sent? How much more effective could you be at sales if you could compare what percentage of your mail is opened to how much gets replied to?
This kind of advanced functionality has been available in email marketing platforms for sending mass email for years, but now a few new applications allow you to add these features to your individual email in Gmail or Outlook.
For the past few days I’ve been test driving YesWare, a Firefox or Chrome browser plugin for Gmail that provides analytics on your email aimed at making salespeople more effective.
Yesware sends you desktop alerts each time someone opens a mail or clicks a link, shows where the reader is when they view your mail, and even let’s you know if they are using their iPhone or the desktop to open your missive.
If you are running a sales team, you can also get reports on your team’s performance, and integrate the application with your CRM. For the world’s lazy mailers, you can set up templates for your sales mail and re-use them for regular communications.
There’s a free trial version of the app, but it won’t get you far, after that it’s anywhere from US$5-$50 per user per month, depending on if you want to use the app independently, with a small team or in a large enterprise.
There are limitations on all of this high-tech goodness (of course). Both YesWare and the other option, ToutApp, work using the same technology that email marketing platforms use of inserting an invisible pixel into your mail and then tracking the views of that pixel. Where this gets tripped up is with users, particularly those in a corporate environment, whose email settings are set to prevent the downloading of images. If these users don’t opt to download images (and many users in banks or other financial institutions just plain can’t download images), then all of these analytics won’t function.
The other application, ToutApp, offers most of the same features as YesWare, but also provides a plugin for use with Microsoft Outlook. (Personally, I think that Outlook was one of the best applications of the 90’s and should have stayed there, but I know that many corporate IT departments remain intent on forcing their captive users to run everything through this bit of relicware).
ToutApp is generally more expensive than Yesware with a single subscription starting at US$30/month, but has a free version and a “lite” version that allow limited use of the app at lower rates.
Of course, to install the Outlook add-on for ToutApp on your corporate desktop, you will need to have administrative rights for your workstation, but if you buy a few Starbucks for the boys in IT you might be able to persuade them to set this one up for you.
For me, the price of the Starbucks would be a small investment for being able to know that my recipient had received the mail, without having to be as intrusive as resorting to a read-receipt. (That’s right — the recipient doesn’t see that you are tracking them).
Because Real Estate People Need Help – Serious Help!
Oh, and for those of you wondering why I’m blogging about technology today instead of providing you with real estate news, it’s because I like to think of myself these days as a provider of tech solutions to real estate companies. I hope these email apps will be useful to you, and I’ll post a few more articles on tech sales tools for real estate professionals each week.
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