Email is one of your most powerful networking tools. It can net you new clients, cultivate key professional relationships, and heighten your overall productivity.
It can also be really, really annoying.
Think about how frustrated you get when a pitch email goes unanswered, your e-missives feel unorganized and pile up haphazardly, or you forget to follow up with a business prospect and risk losing the deal.
If you’re looking for a way to make sure your emails get read—and acted upon—check out HubSpot’s email tracking tool Signals.
The Google Chrome extension, available for Gmail, Apple Mail, and Outlook, live tracks your sent emails to notify you when someone opens or clicks on one. You can learn when, how often, and from what device the important folks you’re emailing engaged with the email you sent. You can also opt into pop-up notifications that ping you when someone opens an email you sent. If you work in sales, you can integrate the app with your Salesforce data so you can input email templates you’ve created straight into your inbox and easily select one to send to a particular contact. Plus, Signals lets you determine on an email-by-email basis whether or not you’d like to set up tracking, in case you feel weird about keeping tabs on emails sent to your mom.
Best of all, Signals takes all this data and populates a special personalized Activity Stream page, collecting reports on who’s opened and clicked on your emails so you can draw quick conclusions on what’s working best (e.g., it works best to send new business pitches on a Wednesday or follow up no fewer than five days after your first communication).
No more setting calendar reminders to check in on that pitch you sent last week. No more frustrated confusion about why some of your emails have led to a sale or new business, and others haven’t. Just way, way more effective emails.