Mod Note (Andy): Best of Eddie, this was originally published May, 2013
I try to let you guys know about it when I find something cool or useful, and today I've got something that can make a huge difference in increasing the hit rate on your cold emails.
One of the things that can make cold emailing especially difficult is not knowing when to follow up after you've sent a cold email. Follow up too soon or too often and you look like a desperate stalker; follow up too late or not at all and your prospect thinks you're a flake or that you don't care. The key is to follow up at the exact right time when you know your prospect is interested in hearing from you again. But how could you possibly know that?
Allow me to introduce Yesware, a brilliant Gmail extension that will change your life if you use it properly. Intended as a sales productivity tool, Yesware provides you a wealth of data on the emails you've sent out - and it does it all for FREE.
How does it work? When you send an email to a prospect and you mark it to be tracked, Yesware embeds an HTML pixel into the body of your email that is invisible to your email recipient. What that pixel allows Yesware to do is tell you exactly when your prospect first opens your email, and how many times he or she has since read your email. And it works even if they've disabled read receipts. So how does that help you?
Presumably you're reaching out to busy people. People who don't always have the time to respond to you immediately. People like me who, despite their best intentions, sometimes go weeks before responding to you if ever at all. But that doesn't mean they don't look at your email every now and then and say, "Man, I need to get back to that guy."
Well, now you'll know when they do that and that's your cue to hit them again - while you're still fresh in their mind. Imagine their surprise when they take a look at your email for the third or fourth time and then all of a sudden there's a follow-up email in their inbox from you. Boom; better respond to this guy now before I forget.
On top of that, Yesware also let's you build custom email templates. If you're reaching out to several dozen people at once, odds are you're saying essentially the same thing to each of them. So you write the best cold email you can and then save it as a template. Then you just go in and change the name and email address for each person you're sending it out to and voila - you've saved yourself a ton of time.
Yesware also integrates with Salesforce.com if you happen to use that, but that's more for managing a sales pipeling. It reminded me of my days as a yacht broker, however, because I was an early adopter of Salesforce and the HTML embed in their emailing platform was clutch for closing at least a couple million in sales per year for me. How? When I sent out a blast email with details about a new yacht for sale, I could watch as certain customers opened the email 10, 20, 30 times and I knew which ones were hot for that boat.
It really is great technology but I'm going to give you the same warning I give you every time I bring you something like this - Don't Be Creepy. Some of you remember my post on Rapportive. The two of these tools leveraged together are seriously powerful.
And let me know if you guys are interested in a post about all the productivity hacks I use.
It's a technique that's been used for many, many years by spammers (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Web_bug#Email_web_bugs) so I'm surprised it still works (I know I've disabled it, but I don't use a typical mail setup).
Yes, interested in a post about all productivity hacks you use. Thanks for this one, not much use now but bookmarked for later
Pretty clever trick and I'm sure most people don't have images disabled by default, I know my outlook does not.
Really? Mine does so I don't think this will work.
Yeah, I don't think ours does. I'll get an email from someone every once in a while who has pictures in their signature and/or their entire signature is a picture file. It may depend on if I have them added as a contact whether or not it allows it though, I have no idea -- don't really mess with any outlook settings.
I think most email platforms do this automatically
handy tool, have used it before
This is brilliant. Definitely a silver banana if I had any to give.
I would love to see a post about all the productivity tools that you are using! The community at large would appreciate and I'm sure many users would greatly benefit.
Interested in ALL of the productitivy hacks you use. Please and thank you!
Cool trick, but would probably work better with smaller shops. My bank"s outlook automatically blocks images in any outlook message, pretty sure I cant change it either. Evil IT people.
This is what I was wondering about, if many banks automatically detect / block this kind of stuff
I believe gmail allows a linking path to business email addresses. I don't know about you ... but from a sales perspective ... I don't know if I would sell much if I emailed Goldman Sachs from my gmail account. No matter how many times I "track" my hard work :p
Just my $.02
Interested in ALL your productivity hacks. Thank you!
Interested as well!!
Interested in a post on all the productitivy hacks you use.
Good stuff!
I am definitely interested in more productivity hacks ... who wouldn't be?
I'm wondering if there's this kind of app:I've got the e-mail format for firms, say GS, then I just have to type in the person's name, and all will be automatically done.
Any thoughts?
Please post any additioanl hacks you have. I just set this up with my Gmail account and it's pretty interesting and I'll definitely be putting it to use.
I think we're all interested. If I had an SB to throw at you I would...that's how I roll, I throw bananas at people.
wow, this is brilliant.
I am not interested in all your productivity hacks in the least bit, please do not post about them in vivid detail.
On the one hand, this is amazing, on the other it's frightening.
pretty cool. thanks
i once had to pretend we were considering a crazy expensive data provider for an industry outside of our focus area to get a key piece of information out of a salesman. I got followups for the next 8 months until I figured out they were using this service (or the equivalent) and blocked pictures in messages from them (can't block everyone, several people I email regularly have the stupid embedded picture signatures).
I believe most places don't load external images (contrast external vs. embedded images), and surveillance would probably catch it later on if the recipient didn't.
Either way, I don't think you'll ever be getting hired / business at the place if someone escalates it. I don't think it reflects well on you to be sneaky, and particularly to interfere with the expected way people interact with their mail.
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't think that whether or not your company e-mails have images in them or not would raise any flags. I highly doubt that anyone would care, or even know unless you told them, that you used a tool like Yesware (This is speculation on my part). I think awawgoian is blowing this way out of proportion.
It's not whether or not the e-mails have images, but rather the source of the images. Embedded images are sent along with the e-mail, so the e-mail is entirely self-contained. External images are loaded from a remote server upon the reading of the mail (or maybe cached after the first load, depending on configuration, in which case it wouldn't work for subsequent reads after the first).
There are plenty of reasons to disable loading of external images, aside from this (consider that even consumer e-mail providers such as Gmail do this by default). One is that the content of the images can change at any time. There are several reasons why compliance would (or should) care about this. If you're supposed to archive everything for regulatory purposes, how are you supposed to do that when the actual content of the e-mail is loaded externally? (for the devil's advocate response, yes, they could save a copy of the message every time it's read, but come on, who would do that when you could just avoid the issue in the first place)
As a few people have already mentioned, I don't think that this tool would be particularly effective with many banks. Not that I don't love the idea of it, as it would be very useful for me in my current situation (I'm a junior and intend to start cold-emailing people soon).
From a brief reading of the tool ("Yesware") and how it works, they essentially embed a non-intrusive image into the email, and when that image is downloaded (i.e. when the email is opened, which results in all text/images/other content from the email being downloaded), that then tells Yesware that your email was opened.
But downloading images from an email by default is actually disabled for most of the e-mail programs in today's day and age. For example, anyone who uses GMail knows that when you open an email from an unknown sender, they display a notification at the top telling you that the images were blocked, and it then asks you if you would like to download the images or not. Similar image-blocking occurs in other popular third-party email apps like MS Outlook. So unless the party decides to click the link and download any images in the e-mail, Yesware's tracking tool doesn't work.
Again, a few people have noted this possibility already in the thread, but it seems far more people are excited about the possibilities that this tool offers (myself included, prior to reading more about how Yesware works) so I just thought I'd make sure people know the limits of this tool.
For what it's worth, Yesware works if you email SocGen.
Hey Edmundo,
Thanks for the app recommendation.
Tried it, and it works for some emails. That I know who reads my email, where, when and on what device, has led me to obsessively check the app though. I feel like a stalker.
Nevertheless, very good app to have! especially if you're cold-emailing, and want to know whether the HR ignored your email or passed it on to relevant people.
Cheers, J
I think this software can be used legally in some area, I will check if it works in UK lol. But thanks. It is for the lazy candidates (like me)!
Also very interested in all of your productivity tools! Thanks in advance.
I'm torn about this. On the one hand it feels like it would be incredibly useful. On the other hand it feels sneaky and like I'm cheating.
I'd be interested to hear someone's success story in using this.
Does this only work for gmail?
This sounds like it could backfire, really really bad. I know all the corporate emails I've had that images were not shown by default. If I saw an email and that message popped up and I clicked allow and saw no real images show up I'd really be suspicious of the person. It would not only make me weary of the other emails this person sends but the actual person themselves. For example if this person is trying to sneakily hide something like this in an email, he could potentially try to screw me over in long run somewhere.
TL;DR if someone tried this on me I'd lose trust for the person. But that's just me; anyone else feel the same?
I completely agree
Besides the image issue. I don't think I've ever met the senior professional who reads e-mails from random kids for the third or fourth time.
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