4 Time-Saving Ways to Generate More Online Sales via Email

If you’re a freelancer or if you sell a product online, you probably use email to find new prospects. Even in the age of Twitter, Facebook and Pinterest, email remains an excellent way to generate serious sales online. You’re probably fully leveraging your copywriting skills already to write great emails.

Here are four tips to make cold-calling via email more efficient:

Find Email Adresses with Rapportive

Find the email address of anyone using Rapportive — even that elusive CEO.

Many a time, you’d want to pitch the person occupying the highest position in an organization’s hierarchy. but the problem is you know only his name and not his email address. You might try Googling, but that doesn’t always work. Some websites even ask for money to reveal email addresses of CEOs and the like.

Here’s a quick tip to guess and verify anyone’s email address using Rapportive. Rapportive is like the Gmail People Widget on steroids. Once you type an email address in the ‘To’ field of the compose window, Rapportive immediately fetches information about that person from LinkedIn, Twitter and Facebook, then puts those details in Gmail’s sidebar.

If you find someone by the name Steve Cook but you don’t know his email address, you can guess it by trying these first name + last name combinations: steve@domain.com, cook@domain.com, stevec@domain.com, scook@domain.com, sc@domain.com. Type these in the ‘To’ field, and Rapportive will display appropriate details for only one of these email addresses and for the rest, only a gray avatar will be shown.

You can then conclude that the address for which relevant information was fetched is the right address, and discard the rest. The email you should be pitching to is this email address.

Pretty cool, isn’t it? Let’s say you’re pitching some startup founders from AngelList. You’ll find names of the founders there, but not their email addresses. In that case, you can use Rapportive to verify their email addresses.

Canned Responses and Text Expanders

Save time and send more pitches using Canned Responses and Text Expanders.

If your primary way to generate sales is via email, chances are you’re sending dozens of them everyday. Typing them out is going to suck a lot of time and is only going to cause a lot of pain. Why not save those pitches and place them in your email using just a few mouse clicks instead? That’s where Canned Responses by Gmail comes to the rescue.

Go to Gmail Labs from the Settings, and enable ‘Canned Responses’. Use the new compose window to type out your pitch and click on Canned Responses under the subject field, and hit ‘New Canned Response’ in the menu that appears. Give it a name and save it!

The next time you’re pitching someone, just hit the appropriate name for the Canned Response from the pull down menu and voila – the text fills the email body instantly. All you have to do is hit send. Setting this up doesn’t take more than a few seconds of your time but it could save you hours every week.

You can also save more time by saving frequently typed replies as canned responses. If you advocate keyboard purity, then try an automatic text expander like Lifehacker’s Texter or PhraseExpress. Instead of typing the same paragraph all over again every time you have to, all you have to do is type a few keystrokes and the entire message will expand automatically.

Time Your Email Pitches Using Boomerang

You don’t want your pitch to be seen right when your lead is sleeping, right? Your leads might be living in time zones different from yours, and you might want to time your email pitches appropriately so that the chances of them being seen are higher. You may not be awake when there is day time elsewhere, so Boomerang comes to the rescue by letting you schedule messages in Gmail.

After installing Boomerang in your browser, you’ll notice a new ‘Send Later’ option next to the Send button. You can use it to schedule messages for later. You can either choose between a few hours, a few days, a week or even schedule them to be delivered accurately at a specific time. A new label ‘Boomerang Outbox’ stores these messages until they get sent.

Use this feature to schedule messages for higher opening rates and conversions. You can buy Boomerang Pro to schedule an unlimited number of messages.

Ditch Clunky, Standalone CRMs for Streak + WriteThat Inside Gmail

If you’re doing sales, you probably fight with a CRM tool everyday to add and update appropriate contact details and additional information pertaining to new leads, potentials and deals. This consumes a lot of time, and you often have to switch tabs to feed tons of information into your CRM.

Enter Streak, a nifty little CRM that integrates directly into Gmail. You can track any customer via Streak by grouping emails together inside a ‘Box’. You can then watch the deal flow through the sales pipeline and track all your deals in a spreadsheet inside Gmail.

In addition to this, you can do a few more things with Streak: schedule messages, send reminders to yourself about a deal, and even expand text inside the compose window by typing phrases.

WriteThat takes the pain out of contact management by updating contact details automatically by reading email signatures. It’s another add-on that you have to install for Gmail but it’s worth it.