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Is Outreach.io the right email outreach tool for you?

This detailed Outreach.io review will help you determine if it suits your email outreach needs or not.

I’ll cover what Outreach.io is and highlight its key features, the Outreach.io pricing plan, and its drawbacks to give you a clearer picture of this email outreach tool. Additionally, I’ll also highlight the best alternative to Outreach.io to help you reach your prospects!

Here’s what’s in this article:

(Click on a link to go to jump section of your choice)

Let’s get started with this Outreach io review:

What is Outreach.io?

Outreach.io user interface overview page

Outreach.io is an email outreach and sales engagement platform that’s based in Seattle and is headed by Manny Medina – the current CEO of Outreach.

Outreach.io helps boost communication with outbound sales prospects through email and other touchpoints like cold calling.

This email outreach and sales engagement tool helps you:

    • Reach out to sales prospects.
    • Create automated sequences for effective lead generation.
    • Use machine learning to improve sales performance.
    • Analyze sales process insights for better engagement.
    • Integrate all your sales tools and CRM activities into one platform.

Outreach.io Pricing

At the time of writing the article, the pricing was $100 per user per month. Other websites reviewing and comparing the software also mention this price and specify that there is an annual commitment.

However, the Outreach.io website does not show pricing details. You need to sign up for a demo to learn the current pricing.

Key features of Outreach.io

Here’s a closer look at the key features of Outreach.io.

1. Sales cadence for effective lead management

Outreach.io is a sales outreach tool that comes with powerful sequences to streamline your lead generation activities.

These sequences are also known as your sales cadence and are comprised of several sub-tasks. These tasks can be delegated to your marketing and sales teams, and they can follow the tasks in each sales cadence to engage in prospecting systematically.

For example, the initial step of your outbound sales process could be a cold email, followed by dozens of other steps.

Additionally, each sales cadence can include tons of sales automation to streamline your sequences in real time. For example, once a prospect signs up for your newsletter, the tool will automatically send them an email from one of their customizable email templates.

2. Efficient customer relationship management

Outreach.io is a SaaS product tool that’s built for managing thousands of contacts in a flash.

The Outreach service lets account executives add their sales contacts directly via a CSV file, which eliminates the need to insert each contact manually. This helps you spend less time organizing prospects and gives you more time to focus on communication.

Note:

While Outreach.io is a great tool for prospect management, it doesn’t have a built-in prospect finder to discover new contacts in real time like other tools, such as LinkedIn Sales Navigator.

3. Detailed email analytics for efficient campaign management

Outreach.io is an email engagement platform that gives you detailed analytics about your cold email outreach campaigns in real time.

This allows users to analyze how well their email campaigns are performing and tweak their prospecting and outreach strategies to achieve higher customer success rates.

Here are a few metrics that your sales teams can track with Outreach.io:

  • Open rate – Number of outbound emails that were opened.
  • Bounce rate – Number of emails that failed to go to the recipient.
  • Email deliverability rate – Rate of emails successfully delivered.

These metrics help you analyze your email campaigns and determine what needs to be changed to improve your results. You can even use these insights to streamline your sales process across other touchpoints!

The three drawbacks of Outreach.io

While Outreach.io is a handy tool, it has a few key drawbacks.

Here’s a look at these challenges:

1. Outreach.io pricing is expensive… we think

The biggest disadvantage of using Outreach.io for cold email outreach is their expensive subscription fee. Outreach.io doesn’t publish their pricing models for the marketing automation platform — but their prices start at $100/user/month.

And remember, $100/user is the Outreach.io pricing just for the base model — it goes up depending on your team size and needs.

And as the Outreach.io pricing model is on a per-user basis, a small content marketing team of just five members will have to churn out over $500 per month just for a sales engagement platform!

2. It has a complicated user interface

This is another key Outreach.io drawback.

Sure, you have to spend $100/month on a sales automation tool, but as long as you can get started with your sales development right away, it shouldn’t matter, right?

The problem is that Outreach.io is difficult for most salespeople to use!

Your salespeople will need to spend a considerable amount of time learning the ins and outs of the software before they can use it for prospect communication. This can leave users frustrated and reduce their likelihood of recommending Outreach.io to others.

3. Doesn’t integrate with Google Sheets

You’d expect a sales engagement platform that costs $100/month to make mail merges easy, right?

Unfortunately, Outreach.io only supports mail merge contact uploads via dated CSV files instead of connecting with modern tools like Google Sheets.

How does this become an issue?

Any sales enablement platform that integrates with Google Sheets can make your work a breeze!

Remember, most people now use Google Sheets as their primary spreadsheet tool. And since it stores everything in the cloud, your data will rarely go missing!

But since Outreach.io still uses CSV files, you’ll have to ditch the convenience of Google Sheets to support and readjust your process around Outreach.io. This can be very frustrating if you’re already used to getting your work done quickly through Google Sheets.

The perfect Outreach.io alternative: GMass

While Outreach.io has some good features, it also has some key challenges that stop it from being the perfect outreach platform.

Luckily, your sales teams won’t be forced to cope with those Outreach.io drawbacks. You can just use a tool like GMass to combat those issues instead!

What is GMass?

GMass interface

GMass is an email outreach tool that helps you send mass email campaigns straight out of your Gmail inbox.

Tech giants like Google and Uber and social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn use GMass for their email campaigns.

But GMass isn’t just a great tool for sales professionals from giant SaaS companies!

Anyone can use GMass to send emails to a targeted audience.

Startups, solopreneurs, and even institutions like churches can easily get started with GMass!

With GMass, you can:

  • Quickly send marketing and sales emails to prospects from your Gmail inbox.
  • Automatically personalize mass email campaigns.
  • Automatically track campaign engagements accurately.
  • Simplify the scheduling of email campaigns and follow-ups.
  • Set up custom tracking domains easily.

Plus, anybody can start using the GMass email automation platform in no time!

Just download the Chrome extension, sign up with your Gmail email address and you’re ready to start conversations with your prospects!

Why GMass is better than Outreach.io

Here are the features that make GMass a much better tool than Outreach.io for prospecting activities.

1. Better ROI

One of the chief issues with the Outreach.io sales enablement platform is that it is expensive.

However, unlike most other tools, GMass has super user-friendly pricing plans!

Here’s a look at them:

  • Individual:
    • Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
    • Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
    • Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
  • Team:
    • Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

This way, whatever your business size is, GMass’ affordable pricing makes it the only email outreach software you need!.

2. It’s super user-friendly

GMass is a powerful email automation platform that works inside Gmail, unlike Outreach.io.

You don’t need to download a special email automation tool or adapt to a new interface. Just add the Chrome extension, log on to Gmail, and start sending out email campaigns using GMass.

This is going to make your outreach email experience a breeze!

3. Powerful integrations with Zapier and Google Sheets

Sales enablement tools like Outreach.io only let you add your customer data via CSV files.

However, as most people use Google Sheets these days, that isn’t helpful!

Luckily, GMass is one of the few email tools that can integrate directly with Google Sheets. This way, all you need is an email finder to find the emails of your prospects and then upload all your contacts to a Google Sheet file.

Connect that file with the GMass outbound sales platform, and your sales reps can instantly create an email list out of those contacts!

GMass can even integrate with Zapier, making it a lot easier for your sales professionals to automate your processes.

That’s not all!

GMass has an automatic Build Email List feature that can streamline your email list building workflow.

Just perform a search inside Gmail using a keyword, and the app will build an email list with the resulting email IDs of your prospects and customers related to that word!

GMass interface showing build email list feature

4 Other handy GMass features

The GMass email automation tool has tons of other features that can make the email outreach process a breeze.

Here’s a look at some of these features:

1. Advanced email personalization

Your sales professionals could send out tons of cold emails every day — but if they’re not personalized, you’re not going to achieve much.

Think about it:

Would you like to engage with a generic inbound email that’s directly copied from one of those online email templates or an inbound marketing email that’s tailor-made for you?

But when your sales reps are sending emails out to hundreds of recipients at once, customizing each one manually is impossible.

Don’t worry, GMass can do all the legwork for you!

You can easily personalize mass emails in GMass to improve your customer relationship-building process.

Here are some of its features:

  • Auto First-Name Detection and Entry – GMass can automatically detect a recipient’s first name from their email address and allow you to add it to an email addressed to them.
  • Add Customized Paragraphs – GMass can personalize paragraphs of text in your email on an individual basis.
  • Add Personalized Images and Links – GMass can personalize images and links for each person in your contact list.

GMass interface showing personalized email

Click here to learn more about personalizing emails before your sales reps send them to each recipient.

2. Powerful Analytics and Campaign Reports

Whenever you send an email campaign via GMass, it generates a Campaign Report. These Campaign Reports contain several useful metrics you can use to better your email campaigns and increase customer success.

You can even use these metrics to streamline other processes like managing your customer lifecycle to increase revenue and provide a great customer experience.

Here are a few of the metrics present in a Campaign Report:

  • No. of Total Recipients:
    Number of unique email addresses to which an email campaign was sent.
  • No. of Unique Opens:
    Number of individual email addresses that opened an inbound email you sent.
    Note: GMass provides you with accurate email statistics by tracking unique opens. If a recipient opens an email more than once, GMass won’t show these new opens.
  • No. of Unique Clicks:
    Number of unique email addresses that clicked on a link in your email.
  • No. of Replies:
    Number of receivers that replied to your email.
  • No. of Unsubscribes:
    Number of recipients that unsubscribed from your email messages

GMass interface showing Campaign Report

That’s not all!

GMass puts all your Campaign Reports right inside your Gmail inbox. You can access them from the [CAMPAIGNS] label in the sidebar.

3. Automate your follow-ups

Most of your cold email recipients won’t respond to your inbound message right away.

Some might not even open your first email.

So how do you get them to engage with your sales reps?

Through follow-up emails!

But manually sending hundreds of outbound follow-ups?

Sounds like an exhausting experience, right?

That’s why GMass can help you boost email engagement by automating your follow-up email workflow.

Your sales development reps can also customize everything about your follow-ups, such as:

  • The trigger (or command) for sending the follow-up email.
    For example, GMass can send a follow-up when a recipient clicks on any link in your email message.
  • The number of follow-up emails to be sent.
  • Scheduling the time gaps between every follow-up email.
  • The content to be included in the follow-up email.

GMass interface showing email follow-ups

4. Simplified email scheduling

Timing your outbound email campaigns is essential for maximum engagement.

If you don’t send emails when people are about to check their inbox, your engagement and customer success rates will plummet!

But your marketing team can’t stay online all the time just to send emails at the correct time, right?

Don’t worry.

GMass is an engagement platform that can help you plan and schedule your email campaigns to optimize engagement rates.

Just compose your outbound email and schedule a time to send it.

GMass will handle the rest!

What if there’s a change in schedule?

Don’t worry!

You can reschedule your emails through the drafts folder anytime.

GMass interface showing scheduling window

Conclusion

While Outreach.io markets itself as an all-round outreach tool for customer-facing sales reps, this Outreach.io review shows you that it’s far from perfect.

The Outreach.io pricing plans are expensive; it lacks some key features and integrates poorly with CRMs.

Why settle for a tool like Outreach io when an app like GMass exists?

This email outreach tool has everything you need to build customer relationships and increase revenue in no time. GMass also has an attentive customer support team to help you out with anything you need!

So why not download the GMass Chrome extension today and give your sales reps an instant boost?

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?


Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.


TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
   


If you uninstall our Chrome extension, a form pops up asking you for a reason, and one of the most common reasons given is that the permissions GMass requires of your Google account are too invasive. We ask for access to your Gmail account, your Google Sheets, and partial access to your Google Drive via Google’s OAuth 2 scheme. This is all so that various email campaign functionality works.

We are verified and approved by Google, which requires going through a lengthy process and security audit. Still, the average user doesn’t know that and fears their data is at risk if they connect GMass to their Google account. One of the best practices for implementing Google’s OAuth is to use incremental authorization, which means requesting a scope only as it’s needed. For example, GMass is heavily integrated with Google Sheets, but you don’t actually need to use Google Sheets to send an email campaign since you can also just paste a bunch of addresses into the Gmail Compose window and send that way rather than connecting to a Sheet. Therefore, I recently explored the idea of not requesting Sheets permissions upon sign-up, and instead, requesting Sheets permissions only if the user clicks the Sheets connector button. This, I was hoping, would make signing up more palatable for privacy-conscious users. Further, I was hoping Google’s incremental authorization program would make this easy, but after delving into what the program offers, I was sorely disappointed.

Here’s what I thought incremental authorization would do. I thought it would allow me to request access to scope X, and assuming the scope was granted, then if I later requested access to a different scope Y, and the user consented to that additional scope, the new token provided would give me access to both scopes.

What actually happens is that when you request access to scope Y, the user is told the app is asking for permissions for scope X and scope Y. This presents an issue because it can make me, the software developer, look sloppy. If upon sign-up, we ask for the Gmail scope, and then when you click the Sheets connector button, we request the Sheets scope, the consent screen says we’re requesting permissions for Gmail and Sheets. So, we look dumb because the user knows he already granted us permission for Gmail a couple of minutes ago. The fact that Google again requests from the user all previously granted scopes makes for an awkward experience for both the user and the developer. Google’s intent is likely to remind the user just how much permission the app has, but in doing so, they risk scaring the user out of consenting, which is the problem that incremental authorization is meant to solve in the first place.

In fact, the documentation even states:

“To implement incremental authorization, you complete the normal flow for requesting an access token but make sure that the authorization request includes previously granted scopes.”

I’m supposed to include “previously granted scopes” in my new request? Hmm, that sounds like the work of implementing incremental authorization falls on me, not Google. How is Google helping? By the way, you can also accomplish this by setting include_granted_scopes=true in your initial OAuth request, in which case Google does dig deep into its database to determine what scopes have already been granted and re-presents those to the user so that you don’t have to include previously granted scopes in your request. I don’t know why this paragraph doesn’t mention that, but the problem is still the same. If you don’t include previously granted scopes yourself or set the include_granted_scopes flag to true, then you would get a new token with access only to that scope, and now your application has to keep track of multiple tokens. Boo. It turns out, that is the only way to accomplish what I want, which is to show the user only the additional scope that I’m requesting.

In case this isn’t clear, let’s say I’m having dinner at a restaurant. I’m finished with my appetizer and entree, and now the server is taking my dessert order. The conversation goes like this.

Me: I’m considering the chocolate cake; what do you think of the chocolate cake?

Server: The chocolate cake is a good choice, but just to remind you, you had the jalapeño poppers and nachos for your appetizer, and you had a double cheeseburger with fries and extra mayo for your entree. You sure about that chocolate cake?

If you’re a SQL Server DBA, you’ve heard of full backups and differential backups. A differential backup is a backup of everything in the database since the last full backup. An incremental backup is a backup of everything since the last incremental backup. Using this model as a framework, we can conclude that Google’s OAuth 2 implementation actually features differential authorization and not incremental authorization.

The “incremental authorization” program should take a page out of the Chrome extension developer guide, which also features an incremental authorization for extension scopes. Here, however, when you request one scope and then later request another, the user is only asked to grant that other individual scope, but behind the scenes, Google grants the extension the combined set of scopes. That’s true incremental authorization.

A better approach would be for Google to:

a. Look at the scopes that the application is requesting, and any scopes that have already been granted need not show up on the consent screen. So, if the app has already been granted access to Gmail, and now the app requests access to Gmail and Sheets, the user would be shown a consent screen asking to authorize access just to Sheets. Or,

b. If solution “a” isn’t satisfactory, then Google could present a screen that shows which scopes have already been granted and which new scopes are currently being requested. In the above example, the consent screen could say, “This app is requesting access to your Sheets,” with a section underneath that says, “This app ALREADY has access to your Gmail account.”

Will Google make this change? Perhaps incrementally.

Ready to transform Gmail into an email marketing/cold email/mail merge tool?


Only GMass packs every email app into one tool — and brings it all into Gmail for you. Better emails. Tons of power. Easy to use.


TRY GMASS FOR FREE

Download Chrome extension - 30 second install!
No credit card required
Love what you're reading? Get the latest email strategy and tips & stay in touch.
   


Looking for the perfect outreach tools to make more connections?

Effective outreach campaigns are the backbone of any successful business.

After all, you need to reach out to your prospects to get the word out, right?

In this article, I’ll highlight what goes into an effective outreach campaign and highlight the outreach tools that all marketers need for each step of the process.

Here’s what this article contains:

Let’s get started.

What does outreach mean in business?

Outreach is the process of proactively contacting prospects, leads, influential people, or anyone in your target audience in an effort to move your business forward.

Outreach in business is generally cold — that is, you’re reaching out to someone who is unfamiliar with you. Ideally, the offer you’re pitching is mutually beneficial: There’s something in it for both you and the person or group you’ve contacted, which then makes it far more likely that things will move forward.

Outreach is sometimes referred to as “outreach marketing,” though outreach is really more sales than marketing. The most common forms of outreach are cold email, cold calling, and direct messaging on platforms like LinkedIn.

What goes into an effective outreach campaign?

How do you know which outreach tools you need?

First, by understanding how to run killer outreach campaigns!

Businesses use outreach campaigns to attract a target audience or connect with prospective partners.

What’s the chief goal of these campaigns?

Outreach campaigns help you expand your network and connect with influential figures in your industry. By expanding your network, you can also increase your revenue.

How?

The people you reach out to can:

  1. Become your clients or customers, directly contributing to your revenue.
  1. Become your partners so that you can leverage their social network and target audience to get more customers. For example, influencer marketing is a popular type of marketing campaign where you reach out to social media influencers to promote your product.
  1. Form content partnerships to connect with influential bloggers and to get valuable backlinks to your company website. Additionally, you could approach them for guest post opportunities to leverage their site and audience to get your message across to their audience. Alternatively, you can approach these influencers to get them to write guest posts on your site to drive traffic in your direction.
  1. Write about you. You could also run PR outreach campaigns to connect with journalists and top bloggers to cover your company news, product launches, and so on.

But you can’t start an outreach campaign out of nowhere!

There are three key phases you need to organize.

Let’s take a look:

1. Prospecting

Before you reach out to anyone, you have to know who to reach, right?

The prospecting phase is where businesses identify the people they want to reach. Remember, you only need to reach out to people who can help your business grow.

For example, in influencer marketing campaigns, you have to identify the right influencers whose followers are part of your business’ target audience.

After you’ve pinpointed who you need to reach, obtain their contact information and data about their social connections. Go through as many resources as you can to build a comprehensive database about each prospect to make reaching out to them easier.

2. Outreach

Once you have built up a list of contacts, you can reach out to them.

This phase includes making the initial contact and trying to build a connection with them. Most companies use email to do this as it’s convenient and simple. Some people even use social media platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and LinkedIn to contact prospects. But that’s a bad idea because it’s difficult to execute and track at scale.

3. Managing Relationships

After you’ve contacted your prospects, you need to continue to build your relationship with them to achieve your marketing targets.

For example, if you’re conducting influencer marketing campaigns, your influencers have to promote your products and services for you to benefit from the relationship.

This stage involves managing influencer replies, projects, and any other information that can help you carry the relationship forward.

Outreach tools you need for effective marketing campaigns

If you want to conduct an effective outreach campaign, you’re going to need the right influencer outreach tools.

Think about it.

Would it be efficient to scribble down the email addresses of all your prospects on paper when you start your email outreach campaign?

Nope!

It’s super inconvenient, and your team could always lose that list!

That’s why using the right outreach tools is essential to conducting an efficient influencer outreach campaign.

Here’s a quick look at the outreach tools your marketing team should be using today:

Stage 1: Finding your prospects

The first step in any outreach campaign is to figure out who you’ll reach.

However, manually looking for influential social figures in your industry and going through LinkedIn and Twitter for their contact information would take forever!

You need influencer outreach tools that will help your marketing team identify hundreds of social influencers in one click to boost your outreach efforts.

Here are two outreach tools that can help you find prospects:

1. BuzzSumo

BuzzSumo homepage

Image source: BuzzSumo Website

BuzzSumo is a powerful influencer marketing and outreach platform.

BuzzSumo uses content analysis to boost your outreach efforts by finding out which influencers are talking about topics you’re interested in, or which bloggers are publishing articles that might be linked back to your article. Like other blogger outreach apps, such as Ninja Outreach, BuzzSumo makes finding the right people a piece of cake!

How does it help you?

BuzzSumo can help you find and connect with blogger prospects and influencers who are writing about topics related to your business. You can even check what they’re doing on Instagram and Twitter to see if they’re a good fit.

A. Find influencers by industry

Your prospects should be interested in the work you do.

Think about it.

If your business is built around travel, an influencer focusing on beauty isn’t going to be of much help, right?

With BuzzSumo blogger outreach software, you can filter out topics and look for the people talking about them on social platforms.

This way, you can easily find out which influencers, bloggers, or journalists are writing about your niche and get in touch with them for link building, content marketing, and other influencer marketing ideas.

B. Follow influencers within the app

The tool’s search feature is going to find several influencers, journalists, or blogger prospects who can help you promote your business.

But your team can’t immediately reach out to them.

First, they need to follow them for a while on apps like Instagram and Twitter to find out if they’re a good fit or not.

However, individually tracking each prospect’s work is something for which your marketers don’t have timer.

Don’t worry!

BuzzSumo has a feature that lets you track influencers within the app based on social KPIs like follower counts and engagement rates.

This feature can even update you on new content put out by these influencers, which can help you make the right decision before you reach out to a potential partner.

Pricing

The BuzzSumo influencer and blogger outreach app has four pricing plans:

  • Pro: $99/month – Unlimited searches + 5 Alerts and 5,000 mentions + 1 year of data + 1 to 5 users + 5 projects + 1,000 URLs.
  • Plus: $179/month – Everything in “Pro” + Content analysis reports.
  • Large: $299/month – Everything in “Plus” + 15 users + 200 exports + 50 trending feeds + Advanced trending filters.
  • Enterprise: Custom plans offered at $499+ per month.

2. Klear

Klear interface

Image source: Klear Website

Klear is another outreach platform that helps you connect easily with the blogger and influencer community.

Unlike other outreach tools, Klear offers detailed analytics to track the performance of prospects you’re interested in, boosting the efficiency of your outreach efforts.

How does it help you?

Klear is an easy-to-use tool that focuses on getting you relevant influencer and blogger information quickly.

Since Klear streamlines the “finding your contacts” phase, you can spend more time writing outreach emails and communicating with your prospects to facilitate your marketing activities.

Here are some Klear features that can help you:

A. Use “monitors” to get better information

Sure, Klear can help you with influencer and blogger outreach, but it can also do much more!

Klear offers “AI-powered monitors” to keep track of topics in which you’re interested.

For example, if you want to compare influencers with each other, just add their accounts to the app. You can see how they compare in terms of engagement, follower growth, and external mentions.

Klear even has graphs that visualize all this data for you. That can help you make a quick decision about which prospect is a better fit for your blogger outreach process. This way, you can approach the right people for guest posting and link building opportunities.

B. Spot fake numbers easily

When you spend your money on influencer and blogger outreach, you want to see real results, right?

Unfortunately, some influencers have followings full of bots that ramp up their follower numbers. This means that a significant percentage of an influencer’s following could be fake profiles powered by auto-bots.

Partnering with such influencers is a waste of your time and resources.

Fortunately, Klear has an AI-driven Fakespot technology that separates real Instagram and Twitter followers from bots so that you can see which influencers are worth your time and marketing budget!

Pricing

Klear offers primarily custom pricing plans for all customers.

Stage 2: Contacting your prospects

Once you have a list of suitable influencers, journalists, or bloggers to partner with, it’s time to reach out to them.

However, as you could be contacting dozens or hundreds of influencers, you can’t manually address each of them, right?

But at the same time, you can’t send Facebook or Instagram influencers a generic message. That’s a sure-fire way for them to ignore your outreach campaign!

But don’t worry, there’s a solution.

Just use a cold email campaign management tool!

It will help you reach your target audience and carry out your outreach strategy effectively.

Here’s the best email outreach tool for 2020:

GMass

GMass homepage

GMass is an email outreach tool that’s used by the likes of Google, Uber, and social media platforms like Twitter and LinkedIn for their email tracking needs.

GMass can help you run cold email campaigns straight out of your Gmail inbox and is used by marketing teams worldwide.

But GMass isn’t only for large marketing and sales teams!

Even individuals or small businesses can use GMass to manage all of their email campaigns.

How does it help you?

With GMass, you can:

  • Use mail merge to send sales or marketing outreach emails to tons of influencers from your Gmail inbox.
  • Personalize your outgoing email campaigns
  • Use multiple email templates to send out tons of blogger outreach emails quickly.
  • Automatically track your email outreach campaign accurately.
  • Easily schedule and manage your email outreach campaign.

Anybody can start with GMass quickly – just download the Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail address. Then, you’re all set and can start your cold email outreach campaign.

Key Features

Here are some GMass features that can streamline your outreach process.

A. Quickly create large email lists for your influencer and blogger contacts

Putting together email lists manually can be a tiring and time-consuming task.

Imagine putting hundreds of influencers’ emails together into one list?

It could take forever!

Fortunately, GMass can automate email list building for you.

Just input your contact data in a spreadsheet, and GMass will automatically generate email lists from the data in the sheet!

But that’s not all.

Sure, you can use an Excel file or a CSV file to import your contacts for a cold email outreach campaign, but GMass works directly with Google Sheets, too!

This way, if you save all your influencer outreach details on Google Sheets (like most people), you can connect it directly to GMass!

B. Automatically personalize every email you send to an influencer or blogger

You can’t send the same generic marketing email to all the Instagram influencers and bloggers on your list, right?

And sending generic emails to journalists is a sure-fire way to get blacklisted.

When you reach out to influencers for the first time, your message has to sound personalized and tailor-made for them.

Why?

It will make the blogger or influencer feel like you’re reaching out only to them. They won’t feel like they’re part of some mass cold email campaign!

But personalizing hundreds of outreach emails?

That will take ages!

Unless you use GMass. 

It helps you automatically personalize your blogger outreach email campaigns.

Here are some of the personalization features GMass offers you:

  • Auto First-Name Detection and Entry – GMass automatically detects your recipient’s first name from the email address, allowing you to add it to the email.
  • Add Customized Paragraphs – You can customize large blocks of text in your cold email outreach campaign on a recipient-by-recipient basis.
  • Add Personalized Images and Links – Add personalized images to your marketing email on a recipient-by-recipient basis.

GMass interface showing personalized images

Click here to learn more about personalizing each email before you send emails to recipients.

C. Detailed outreach campaign reports track your performance

When you send an email campaign to your blogger prospects or any of your Instagram influencers, GMass generates a comprehensive Campaign Report.

This report details the core email metrics that are used to analyze your email engagement rates.

Here are some of the metrics present in a GMass Campaign Report:

  • Recipients:

The total number of unique email addresses to which a mail merge campaign was sent.

  • Number of Unique Opens:

The total number of unique email addresses that opened the marketing email you sent.

Note: The GMass email outreach app gives you accurate email statistics by only tracking unique opens. If a blogger opens an email more than once, the report won’t show these new, non-unique opens.

  • Number of Unique Clicks:

The total number of unique email addresses that clicked on a link in your email.

  • Number of Replies:

The total number of prospects that replied to your email.

  • Number of Unsubscribers:

The total number of email recipients that unsubscribed from your emails.

GMass interface showing campaign report

But it doesn’t end there!

Most email outreach tools require you to open a separate tab to manage your email campaigns. This can make these email outreach tools complicated and frustrating to use.

However, GMass puts all your email campaigns inside the Gmail inbox for added convenience!

You can access these mail merge campaigns from the [CAMPAIGNS] label in the sidebar.

D. Schedule your emails to reach your prospects at the right time

Influencers and bloggers are busy people. They receive outreach campaigns all the time!

So how do you stand out?

Sure, sending them a personalized message helps, but it’s not enough.

To make sure your emails get noticed by influencers, you have to send them at the right time. You have to send your message when they’re most likely to check their inbox.

But you can’t stay online all the time to send emails, right?

Don’t worry, GMass has you covered.

GMass lets you schedule email campaigns in advance to maximize email engagement.

Just write your email and set a time to send it. GMass will handle the rest.

How does this feature help you?

  • You don’t have to be online to send emails.
  • You can plan an email outreach campaign in advance.
  • You can set your email campaigns to reach influencers when they’re most likely to check their inbox.

And if there’s a change in schedule, just head to the Drafts folder and reschedule your campaign!

Gmass interface showing scheduling window

E. Automate follow-up emails to stay in touch with influencers easily

Since influencers and journalists get tons of messages every day, they might not get a chance to open or reply to your first email.

So, what do you do?

You send a follow-up email!

But manually sending follow up emails to hundreds of prospects can be exhausting.

Instead, use GMass!

GMass automates the follow-up email process to boost response rates.

You can even customize aspects of these follow-up emails like:

  • The follow-up email trigger.

For example, GMass can send the follow-up email when an influencer clicks on a link in the email.

  • The number of follow-up emails to be sent.
  • Time gaps between each of the follow-up emails.
  • The message included in the follow-up marketing email.

Gmass interface showing follow-up emails

 

Pricing

GMass has three pricing plans:

  • Individual:
    • Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
    • Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
    • Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
  • Team:
    • Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

Stage 3: Managing your contacts

You’ve reached out to prospects, and they’ve replied with interest.

So, what do you do now?

It’s time to start building and managing relationships with them!

But you can’t manage tons of relationships on your own, right?

You won’t have any time to focus on your other business activities!

That’s why you need a little help to manage your influencers.

Here are the best outreach tools for that:

1. Upfluence

Upfluence interface

Image Source: Upfluence Website

Upfluence is a powerful IRM (Influencer Relationship Management) and outreach platform. It’s designed to help you keep track of all the influencers you work with and enables you to manage your projects with different influencers.

How does it help you?

Upfluence can help you manage your relationships with influencers and bloggers.

You can use it to view all the prospects you’re currently in contact with and quickly filter them by name, campaign, and location. You can also track your performance on Facebook, Instagram, and other platforms within the app.

Here are some of Upfluence software’s best features:

A. Powerful dashboard

Users can easily use the Upfluence dashboard to sort out influencers and blogger prospects and see the projects on which they’re currently working. You can even identify influencers that are producing the best results for you to focus on creating lasting relationships with them.

B. Detailed analytics

Upfluence gives its users detailed reports and stats to monitor your influencer outreach and measure your ROI. And unlike other outreach tools like Buzzstream and Hubspot Sales, Upfluence focuses on the stats that matter most.

Users can use the tool to track mentions of your brand and your influencer’s brands across social media. It also provides all of the data in real-time, so you’re updated as soon as anything happens.

Keep in mind that everyone who mentions you might not give you a backlink, and that might slip under the radar of your backlink tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush. So, tracking mentions is an effective way to keep track of your ROI.

Pricing

Upfluence offers custom pricing for all of its clients. However, you can try out their services through a free demo.

2. Traackr

Traackr homepage

Image source: Traackr Website

Traackr is one of the best influencer outreach tools available. With Traackr, you can easily monitor your influencers and see how much impact each one has on your business.

How does it help you?

Traackr offers a host of features that can help you manage your relationship with influencers effectively. It even shows you your top influencers based on their reach and relevance on sites like Facebook.

Here are some of Traackr’s best features:

A. Comprehensive influencer analytics

Traackr offers you detailed tracking metrics about your influencers. You can use these metrics to measure the impact of your influencer outreach relationships, track your ROI, and gain insight into how your business can grow.

B. Advanced campaign scheduling

Traackr has a campaign schedule feature that helps you plan a marketing campaign with multiple influencers. If you have dozens of influencers or blogger partners, this is an easy way to stay on top of everything so that you can make the most of your influencer marketing campaigns.

Pricing

Traackr offers custom pricing plans for each of their customers.

Conclusion

Outreach campaigns are one of the best ways to promote your business and connect with prospects in 2024. But manually searching, contacting, and managing your influencer and blogger prospects is impossible!

Make sure to use the blogger outreach tools we’ve mentioned here to connect with your influencer prospects.

In no time, these outreach tools are going to help you conduct an effective influencer marketing campaign every step of the way!

And since email outreach tools like GMass play a key role here, why not download the Chrome extension today and give GMass a try?

Ready to send better emails and save a ton of time?


GMass is the only tool for marketing emails, cold emails, and mail merge — all inside Gmail. Tons of power but easy to learn and use.


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Looking for the best SalesHandy alternatives?

While many businesses use SalesHandy as their go-to email tracking software, it has several drawbacks. It offers limited features in the base plans, has minimal campaign functionality, and offers limited mail merge capabilities.

In this article, I’ll highlight three great email tracking tools you can use instead of SalesHandy.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

Let’s get started.

What is SalesHandy?

Saleshandy homepage

Source: SalesHandy Website

SalesHandy is email automation and tracking software that helps you send cold email campaigns to a target audience. SalesHandy is mostly used by sales reps and SaaS email marketers to streamline their sales processes and lead generation activities.

Key Features

  • It helps you analyze email engagement with detailed email tracking.
  • Supports campaign personalization with mail merge to boost your engagement and click-through rate.
  • Help you easily create automated email follow up sequences.
  • Supports HTML templates in Gmail and Outlook email.

The Three Key Drawbacks of SalesHandy

While you can use SalesHandy for your e-mail marketing activities, it isn’t the perfect email tracking tool.

Here are SalesHandy’s three most prominent drawbacks:

1. The Base Plans Offer Limited Features

SalesHandy has four different pricing plans, ranging in price from $36/month to $299+/month.

The base plans lack essential features like advanced mail merge and automated email follow-ups. They also have very low email message sending limits and limit the number of total prospects.

If you’re planning on sending high volume email campaigns and require mass email tracking, you’ll have to go for the expensive Outreach Scale Plus plan.

Priced at $299 per user, this plan can be too much for most small businesses to handle. And if your marketing and sales teams have several members, you can quickly rack up a monthly bill of more than $3000 — just for an email tool!

2. It Has Limited Campaign Functionality

Even the expensive Outreach Scale plan only lets you send 6,600 emails per day! This can limit your marketing campaigns as you won’t get to email your whole mailing list at once.

But that’s not the worst part.

SalesHandy doesn’t even integrate with bulk email services like SendGrid to bypass Gmail or Outlook email message sending limits.

How does this affect you?

A Gmail account has a sending limit of 500 emails/day while a Google Workspace email account user can send up to 2,000 emails/day. Even if you opt for SalesHandy’s Enterprise plan, you won’t be able to send more than 2,000 emails a day!

Tip: If you use Microsoft Outlook or another email client, make sure to check the sending limits of your email provider. Whatever the boundaries of the email client, that’s also the limit for this sales engagement platform. 

3. Limited Mail Merge Capability

Why spend so much on a sales engagement platform if it makes things inconvenient for you, right?

Here’s an example of this:

SalesHandy doesn’t provide native support for Google Sheets.

So if your contacts are saved in Google Sheets, you’ll have to:

  • Convert each list into a CSV file before you upload it to SalesHandy.
  • Use a third-party app like Zapier CRM to integrate with Google Sheets.

Sounds tedious, right?

But that isn’t the only issue.

Even if you use CSV files, this tracking app has a limit of 2,000 contacts per file. So if you have an extensive contact database, you’ll have to split it into several CSV files.

This can take up even more of your sales teams’ time and cause their productivity to drop!

The Top Three SalesHandy Alternatives

Here are the three best email automation software programs you can use instead of SalesHandy.

1. GMass

Gmass homepage

GMass is great email marketing software that runs right from your Gmail inbox.

GMass is used by startups as well as tech giants like Google, Uber, and social media platforms like LinkedIn and Twitter for their email tracking needs. With GMass’ powerful outreach features, it can increase your team’s productivity in no time!

But GMass isn’t only for sales reps or marketing teams working from huge businesses.

Small businesses and individuals can use GMass to send emails to target audiences, too.

With GMass, you can:

  • Quickly send marketing or sales emails to tons of prospects from your Google inbox.
  • Personalize email marketing campaigns on a recipient-by-recipient basis.
  • Track emails and sales engagement accurately.
  • Simplify scheduling email campaigns and follow-up emails.
  • Easily set up custom tracking domains.

What’s more …

Anyone can instantly get started with GMass — just download the Chrome extension and enter your email address to sign up!

Key Features

Here’s why the GMass tracking app is one of the best SalesHandy alternatives out there.

A. Advanced Email Personalization

If you’re looking to boost sales engagement, you have to personalize your emails.

Think about it.

Would you rather engage with generic email campaigns or emails that are tailor-made just for you?

But what if you have thousands of contacts in your recipient list?

Manually creating personalized emails can take forever!

Thankfully, GMass can help personalize your email marketing campaigns with advanced email automation.

You can quickly create personalized emails in GMass with these features:

  • Automatic First-Name Detection and Entry – GMass automatically finds your recipient’s name from their email address and allows you to add it to an email message addressed to them.
  • Add Customized Paragraphs – Personalize big blocks of text in your email message based on your recipient.
  • Personalize Images and Links – Add custom images and links for each contact in your email list.

Gmass interface with personalized images

Click here to learn more about personalized emails.

B. Powerful Email Analytics and Campaign Reports

When you send an email campaign through GMass, it generates a Campaign Report. This report highlights several email tracking metrics that your sales reps can use to track emails and measure campaign performance.

Here’s an overview of some of the tracking metrics in a Campaign Report:

  • Total Recipients:

Highlights the number of email IDs to which a campaign was sent.

  • Unique Opens:

Shows the number of unique email IDs that opened your email message.

Note: GMass gives you accurate email statistics by tracking only unique opens. If a receiver opens an email more than once, the report won’t show these additional opens because that would inflate the result.

  • Number of Unique Clicks:

The total number of unique IDs that clicked on at least one URL in your email.

  • Total Replies:

The number of recipients that replied to your email message.

  • Number of Unsubscribers:

The number of email recipients that unsubscribed from your emails.

Gmass interface showing campaign reports

That’s not all!

Most cold email tracking software (like MailChimp and Bananatag) require you to open a separate tab to manage email campaigns.

However, GMass puts all of your Campaign Reports inside the Gmail inbox. You can access all of them from the [CAMPAIGNS] label in your sidebar.

And with the Gmail mobile add-on, you can even manage and track emails on your Android device!

C. Create Large Email Lists Easily

There’s no way you can manually send out thousands of emails every day, right?

Fortunately, GMass can automate all of that for you!

Sure, you can use a CSV or Excel file to create a mail merge in GMass, but that’s not all.

GMass works with Google Sheets too.

So, if your contact data is saved in Google Sheets (like most people), you can directly connect it to GMass in seconds!

GMass also offers a Build Email List feature that makes your list building experience easy.

Just perform a Gmail search with the keyword, and the app will build a list with the resulting email IDs.

GMass interface showing email lists

D. Automated Email Follow-Ups

Every email marketer needs to send follow-up emails at some point, right?

But sending thousands of follow-up emails manually is practically impossible.

Don’t worry, though.

Just use GMass instead!

Unlike some other cold email apps, the GMass email tracking tool automates your follow-up email process. 

You can even customize these follow-up emails; here’s how:

  • The trigger to send the follow-up email.
    For example, you can choose to let GMass send a follow-up when a recipient clicks on a URL embedded in your email.
  • The number of follow-ups to be sent.
  • Scheduling time gaps between each follow-up email.
  • The follow-up messages or email templates.

Gmass interface showing follow-up emails

E. Simplify Email Scheduling

Timing your email campaigns is essential to increase sales engagement.

Your emails should reach people when they’re most likely to check their inbox.

But your employees can’t stay online 24/7 to send e-mail marketing campaigns, right?

Thankfully, GMass allows you to schedule email campaigns in advance to maximize your click-through rate and conversions.

Just compose your email and schedule a time to send it.

GMass will handle the rest.

How can this help you?

  • You don’t have to worry about staying up to send your email campaigns and follow-up emails to prospects.
  • You can plan email outreach campaigns.
  • You can choose to set your e-mail marketing campaigns to reach prospects when they are most likely to check their inbox.

But what if you need to edit the send time of your email?

Simple! Just head to the Drafts folder and reschedule your email.

Gmass interface showing scheduling window

Pros

  • Simple interface for increased ease of use.
  • Works inside the Gmail platform.
  • Quickly builds email lists using any search criteria in your Google email account.
  • Can easily import contact data from a Google Sheets file.
  • Emails are auto-saved to be reused as templates for future campaigns.
  • Can send an email with attachments in mass emails.
  • The platform has a Zapier integration for email automation.
  • Offers a powerful Gmail add-on app for Android devices.
  • Can optimize email deliverability for emails.
  • Works with Salesforce CRM.
  • Attentive customer support team.

Cons

  • GMass can only be used with a Gmail or Google Workspace email account.
  • The desktop version only works with Google Chrome.

Pricing

GMass comes in three pricing plans:

  • Individual:
    • Standard: $25 per month or $225 annually. Includes unlimited emails, contacts, and campaigns. Plus mail merge personalization, Spam Solver, and dozens of other features.
    • Premium: $35 per month or $325 annually. All Standard plan features, plus auto follow-up sequences, API access and Zapier, and triggered emails.
    • Professional: $55 per month or $525 annually. All Premium features plus GMass MultiSend for inbox rotation and high-priority support.
  • Team:
    • Professional: starts at $145 per month for a team of five – supports all features.

Customer Ratings

  • Capterra – 4.9/5 (300+ reviews)
  • G2 Crowd – 4.8/5 (300+ reviews)

2. Woodpecker

Woodpecker interface

Source: woodpecker.co

 

Woodpecker is an email tracking app used mainly by Gmail and Microsoft Outlook users. It’s a useful tool to send email campaigns and manage lead generation activities.

The Woodpecker tracking tool can also be connected to an SMTP server like the Microsoft Exchange server for added flexibility.

Key Features

  • Can send automated follow-up emails.
  • Helps to personalize your bulk email campaigns with custom fields.
  • Can access detailed reports that track email opens, click-through rate, etc.
  • Supports automated campaign replies.
  • Works with an email client like Microsoft Outlook and Gmail.

Pros

  • Offers custom lead generation features for businesses.
  • Helps identify duplicate IDs in campaign emails.
  • Has a Google Chrome extension.

Cons

  • Doesn’t support email attachments.
  • Doesn’t work inside the Gmail inbox.
  • The base plan is relatively expensive.
  • No native software for iPhone and iPad.
  • No free email tracking plan available.

Pricing

Woodpecker email automation software starts at $29/month for very limited contacts.

Customer Ratings

  • Capterra – 4.8/5 (10+ reviews)
  • G2 Crowd – 4.5/5 (20+ reviews)

Click here for a detailed review of Woodpecker Email.

3. Hubspot Sales

Hubspot sales interface

Source: hubspot.com

HubSpot Sales is email tracking software that can help streamline your email marketing campaigns. It’s not the best email tracking app for cold email purposes, but it’s still a very powerful sales enablement platform.

Key Features

  • Can send automated follow-up emails.
  • Offers you a built-in activity stream that auto-logs each lead’s activity history.
  • Helps you streamline prospecting through lead-scoring for added email productivity.
  • Can access customizable reports for tracking campaign engagement.
  • Can link to HubSpot CRM to manage contacts easily.
  • Has an attentive customer support team.

Pros

  • Use customized email templates and share them with sales teams in one click.
  • Offers a drag-and-drop sales pipeline editor for added sales productivity.
  • Integrates with HubSpot CRM, Salesforce, and other personalization tools.
  • Offers an Android app and an iOS app.

Cons

  • Time-consuming to configure workflows of sales.
  • Not ideal for cold email purposes because it goes against HubSpot user policies.
  • The basic starter plan lacks several features.

Pricing

HubSpot Sales tracking software offers four pricing plans:

  • Professional: $450/month
  • Enterprise: $1500/month – includes “Professional” features + team management and lead scoring.

Customer Ratings

  • Capterra – 4.5/5 (2000+ reviews)
  • G2 Crowd – 4.3 /5 (600+ reviews)

Conclusion

While SalesHandy is a useful tracking app, it’s not perfect.

Why choose SalesHandy when you have so many alternative software programs from which to choose?

While all of the email tracking software tools I’ve covered here are great, GMass is the best.

With powerful email tracking, attractive pricing, and attentive customer support, GMass is the perfect sales engagement platform for you!

Why not download the Chrome extension today and give it a try?

See why GMass has 300k+ users and 7,500+ 5-star reviews


Email marketing. Cold email. Mail merge. Avoid the spam folder. Easy to learn and use. All inside Gmail.


TRY GMASS FOR FREE

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When you insert an image in the Gmail Compose window, the image is commonly inserted as an embedded image, meaning the full content of the image becomes a part of the message body. Then when the recipient receives your email, no Internet connection is needed to view the images because all of the image data is part of the message and doesn’t need to be downloaded from a web server. Most popular email marketing systems like MailChimp and Constant Contact only allow you to use hosted images in campaigns, where the image is served with a URL and downloaded when the recipient opens the email.

Let’s discuss the differences between embedded images and hosted images (also sometimes incorrectly called “linked images”).

Gmail’s “Insert photo” feature and how it behaves

Gmails insert photo feature
Notice that “Insert” is being clicked. and then that launches the Insert Photo screen. the user has already clicked the “Insert Image” icon (the mountains) in the Compose toolbar.

Using Gmail’s “Insert photo” button, if you select an image from Photos, Albums, or you Upload your own picture, and then insert it “inline,” it gets inserted as an embedded image. The only case where the image is inserted as a hosted image is if you specify a URL for the image, in which case the image remains hosted, but the URL is converted to a Google-based image URL. For example, if I use a URL from my website for an image:

image from URL

Then when I actually insert this image and send the email, the URL gets converted to:

converted image URL

So, when using a Gmail extension to send email campaigns, if the extension uses the Gmail Compose window, images are handled the same way. In GMass’s case, if you launch a Compose window, fill in the Subject, Message, and include at least one image, and then hit the GMass button to send to your email list, the emails go out with the images embedded. If, however, you use the Load Campaign feature to set the Subject and Message in the Compose, then the images are loaded as hosted images, because it’s impossible to set the Gmail Compose window programmatically to include embedded images. The Gmail Compose window can contain natively-embedded images only if you insert them using the “Insert photo” feature using the Photos, Albums, or Upload tabs.

So if the campaign you select originally had embedded images, those images are saved to a server on-the-fly, and the “img” tag “src” attribute is changed to our server using your account’s tracking domain.

Load campaign

This presents an inconsistency with how images are handled, since if you insert images and then send right away, they send as embedded images, but if you load a saved campaign and then send, the images are sent as hosted.

We’ve now added a setting so that you can force images to either be hosted or embedded. You can also choose “default,” which will leave the images however they naturally exist in the Compose window. The default option is what we expect most users to use, so they don’t have to worry about it.

How to set your images to be hosted or embedded

set images to be hosted or embedded

Default: Images will be sent exactly how they are already set in the Compose, whether that be hosted or embedded.

Hosted: Will force any embedded images to now be hosted.

Embedded: Will force any hosted images to now be embedded.

Deliverability Advantage with Embedded Images

It is our working theory that there’s an email deliverability advantage with embedded images compared to hosted images.

Why?

Because this mimics the most common behavior of any standard email client, like Gmail, Outlook, Thunderbird, and Apple Mail. When you insert an image using a standard email client, the image isn’t hosted anywhere — the image is embedded into the body of the email. With this new setting, you can force hosted images to be embedded, and you can force embedded images to be hosted.

embedded option

We’ve also now added an “Embed images” option to the Spam Solver, which sends variations of your emails to seed accounts to see which variation results in the highest Inbox placement. Of course, the “Embed images” variation changes your email only if the images are hosted to begin with. Also, if there are no images, then this option won’t do anything.

Over time, we’ll accumulate data when people use this option, so we’ll be able to determine more conclusively if embedding images offer an email deliverability advantage.

How do you know if your images are hosted or embedded?

To verify how your images are being included in your email campaigns, just look at an email in your Sent Mail folder. Open up the email, and use Gmail’s Show Original function to see the code behind the email message.

show original gmail code

If you see your image references looking like this:

Original Gmail code
Notice the first img src attribute is set to download the image from amazonaws.com.

… then you’ll know your images are hosted. But if you see your image references looking like this:

embedded Gmail code
Notice the first img src attribute starts with “cid” and has an identifier instead of a URL.

… then you’ll know they’re embedded. Embedded images always have the “img” src attribute start with “cid.” Note, however, that the entire email source isn’t displayed when it contains embedded images or attachments. That’s because Gmail doesn’t want to flood your browser with information for which you probably don’t want wait or see. If you want to see the entire email source that shows the image content MIME encoded and embedded into the message, click the “Download Original” option at the top.

How do you decide whether to use hosted or embedded images?

Use hosted images if your priority is:

  1. The smallest email size (embedded images take up lots of space)
  2. The fastest email sending (the larger the email message, the slower we can send them)

Use embedded images if:

  1. You want the maximum visibility of the images (embedded images will usually still display even if the email client doesn’t normally download images without user consent).
  2. You want the best possible email deliverability to the Inbox
  3. You don’t mind a larger email size and slower email sending

How does embedding images affect open tracking?

Regardless of whether you use hosted or embedded images, the open tracking pixel that tells you who opened and didn’t open your email campaign isn’t affected. The open tracking pixel has to be a hosted image in order for any email tracking system to work.

Use this technique for campaigns or person-to-person emails

The GMass button can be used for both cold email campaigns and as a replacement for the blue Send button for even person-to-person emails. The GMass button is present on both new Compose windows and the Compose window when you reply to an email, so that you can take advantage of scheduling and tracking. For now, however, the embedded vs. hosted image setting is only available on an original email that you’re composing, not a reply.

Other Resources

If you read other articles about images in Gmail, be careful of the confusing terminology used. Other articles like this use the phrase “embedded images” to cover the general process of inserting a picture into an email, without regard to whether the image is hosted or truly “embedded.”

Still, other articles from popular email services like SendGrid, contain misinformation. In this case, the article states that Gmail won’t display embedded images properly, and that’s just not true.

This Mailtrap article goes into depth about the various options for including images in emails, but be wary of their terminology. They use the word “embedded” to include any image that’s part of the body of the email, as opposed to being attached to the email.

Want to turn your image into a link?

Now that you know everything there is to know about inserting images into your email campaigns, you might also want to know how to make your images clickable inside the Gmail Compose window. See my guide and video about linking images in Gmail. Here’s where it can get confusing, though. This guide is about linking an image, not linked images. “Linked images” are what some people refer to as what I’m calling “hosted images,” which are the opposite of “embedded images.” If this is still confusing, let me know in the Comments below.

See why GMass has 300k+ users and 7,500+ 5-star reviews


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Looking for ways to reach your congregation effectively and bring them closer together? 

While your congregation might not be able to make it to church during the spread of COVID-19, you can still bring God’s Word to them!

All you need is an effective church email campaign.

With email marketing tools, sharing what’s important to your congregation and keeping in constant contact with your members has never been easier!

In this article, I’ll highlight why your church needs an email marketing solution, the challenges you may face during the process, and the best practices to follow to overcome those challenges, whatever denomination of Christian church you may be serving.

Here’s what I’ll cover:

Let’s get started.

5 Reasons your church needs an email marketing strategy

So why does your church need an email marketing strategy?

Email is one of the easiest ways to keep in touch with new and existing members of your congregation.

Why?

Nearly every member of your church will have an email account, and it’s a super-simple and inexpensive way to reach them!

Here’s why your church needs a proper email marketing solution:

1. It’s easy and inexpensive

Email is a secure communication channel that you can use to communicate with your church members quickly. It’ll save you time and money that you’d otherwise spend on other, less effective methods like printing flyers or addressing and stuffing letters.

2. Emails ensure that everyone gets your message

Why not just reach out to your church members through social media?

Here’s the problem with sharing your church content on social media platforms like Facebook and Instagram:

As social media posts are dependent on the algorithms controlled by Facebook and Instagram, not everyone will see your post. In fact, only a handful of people may get to see your post before the platforms push other messages ahead of yours for them to see.

Email services solve this issue.

If you send a church email newsletter, each of your church members will receive the message. There’s no algorithm controlling their inbox that’s deciding what they can and can’t see.

3. Easier to obtain email addresses

Email addresses are easy to collect since members are more willing to give out their email address rather than their phone number, home address, or social media account!

This is because emails are seen as less invasive among the many forms of communication we use today. And yet, they’re frequently checked, which is helpful for you.

4. Know how many people have opened your email

With effective email marketing campaigns, you can easily see how people are interacting with your email.

There are marketing tools specially designed to help you see how many people have read your email, replied to it, and interacted with any links or documents in your email.

Why is this important?

It helps you gauge how your emails are impacting people and will help you fine-tune things to create more effective strategies to spread your message.

Some email tools in the Google Apps store even allow you to track your church email marketing performance on your mobile device!

This makes managing your emails 24×7 a piece of cake!

5. You can reach different church groups effectively

Email lists help you send specific emails to specific groups of people. When members join your email list, they’ll only receive emails that are relevant to them.

For example, you can send one set of emails to new church members, a different set to the church’s teen Bible Study group, and a third set to members of the congregation who are learning to homeschool their kids.

This way, you can effectively reach the right people with the right messages!

3 Challenges faced by churches when sending email

While church email marketing is an excellent way for church leaders to reach their members, there are a few challenges to face.

Here are several of the most common problems. (We will discuss solutions to these challenges as well.)

1. Managing church email lists is difficult

After collecting email addresses from their members, most church leaders add them to their church email lists.

However, that’s where the process usually stops.

Since a minister or senior pastor doesn’t usually monitor these lists, your church email lists might be old, inaccurate, or incomplete.

How?

  • People may have changed their email addresses over time.
  • People might have opted-out of your emails (that is, they don’t want to receive emails anymore).

But as these lists aren’t monitored carefully, your emails will still be sent to those members. So, the staff or volunteers will be emailing an address that doesn’t exist anymore or bothering someone who doesn’t want to see your emails because, for instance, they’ve moved to another state and joined another church.

2. You can be blacklisted for bulk email

A church website that regularly sends out bulk emails to dozens of people might get blacklisted by email services like Yahoo, Outlook, or Gmail.

This is because most pastors don’t use a bulk email sending service.

They just use their regular email accounts without realizing this can be a huge problem!

Once a domain name or web hosting server is blacklisted, the emails you send out through your pastor’s email address will go directly to your members’ spam folders. They’ll never see the message you spent all that time putting together.

3. It’s hard to track your email’s success and results

Since most churches and church leaders don’t utilize email marketing software, they don’t know if their church email marketing campaigns are doing well.

They won’t know:

  • if the emails were opened
  • who clicked on your email links
  • how many emails bounced
  • how many email addresses are invalid
  • who unsubscribed

That means you’ll have no idea if your campaigns are successful and if your members are interacting with your spiritual guidance or community messages.

However, that isn’t all.

Most churches also lack facilities for the pastor and church leaders to understand and oversee this information efficiently. So, even if they have a marketing tool, they can’t easily grasp how to use it and analyze what each ministry is doing.

7 Best practices to keep in mind for church email

While there are challenges to using church email, you can easily overcome all of them!

Here are some best practices to remember when emailing members of your church.

These practices will ensure that your emails are effective, irrespective of whether your newsletter is a missionary message, a celebration of good news, or an in-depth reflection about God, Jesus, a Psalm, or how to face uncertain times, etc.

1. Create a welcome series for new church members

When someone new joins your church, don’t rush to send them the same newsletter that you send to your existing church members.

Instead, create a new series of emails that focus on thanking these new congregants and welcoming them into your community. Use your emails to help them familiarize themselves with your church, its leaders, its ministries, its activities, and to draw them into a closer relationship with the congregation and their own faith.

Next, invite your new members to join your community at a small group for Bible study, community outreach, or your next worship service. Alternatively, simply ask them to check out your church website and schedule a time to meet the pastor − even if that has to be a virtual meeting.

A strong welcome series can help your newcomers feel drawn into the heart of your church sooner, make it easier for them to introduce themselves to the community, and even enhance their faith.

2. Sort your mailing lists

Nobody likes to receive emails that aren’t meant for them, right?

That’s why you need to sort your email lists!

Sorting your email lists means creating separate email groups for different sets of people.

For example, if a pastor has to send an email that’s only for the youth of the church, your older members won’t be interested in the same email, right?

That’s why it’s essential to create separate lists for different big and small church member groups. For example, create separate lists for the music ministry and the hospital ministry so that the pastor can send a complete and specific message to each relevant group. That saves time for everyone, eliminates misunderstandings, and makes it easy for church members to reply in case their plans change.

It’s really that simple!

3. Set clear expectations

You don’t like to be flooded with tons of emails every day, right?

Neither do your church members!

Letting your members know how frequently the church will reach out to them via email makes your email campaigns more predictable.

And that’s a good thing!

Not only does it allow you to set a regular schedule, but this practice will also make your members feel more comfortable with what to expect, and they will look forward to your email newsletters and messages!

Make sure to limit your all-congregation emails to weekly or monthly timing. Otherwise, your members might feel overwhelmed and stop interacting with your emails.

You can also let your members have more control over what emails they receive by allowing them to be able to choose to be part of specific email lists.

4. Personalize every email

Running a church means connecting with people as the first step in connecting them with God.

And for your congregation to connect with you, your emails must show them that you genuinely care for them, just a Christ did. Although it’s an email, you want your members to feel you are looking them in the eye and speaking directly to them.

A good way to do this is to include your recipient’s name in the email.

Why?

Because it makes them feel like you’ve carefully tailored this email just for them.

Also, be sure to respond to all email replies you receive.

Staying in constant contact with your members will go a long way in showing them that you care and have their interests at heart.

5. Give more, ask less

It’s fine for an email newsletter to request your congregation to attend an event or make a donation, but that shouldn’t be the only thing for which you email them.

To give your followers the best possible experience, make sure you share guidance and encouragement, provide useful news, and bolster their faith, more than merely asking for donations, etc.

Make them feel appreciated and valued – whether it’s helping them get involved in the church bake sale or finding a deeper relationship with Jesus Christ and each other.

Your monthly email newsletter can be a great place to share spiritual advice and stories about how your ministry is creating a positive impact in your community. You can even ask members to send in prayer requests so you can pray together for those in need.

If you can, provide links to Facebook and Instagram pictures of all the good work your church is carrying out in the name of Christ in your community. When your members see more value-adding content, they will naturally respond to your event and donation requests positively.

6. Track how your emails are doing

Not all of your recipients will open your email newsletter. Some of them might open them, but very few will interact with all the links and graphics you include.

There are many things you can do to make your emails more effective, but you need to know how people are interacting with your emails in the first place!

Use a good email marketing tool to do this.

Once you identify what people are clicking on and what they like, you can craft more effective campaigns to reach your congregation!

7. Use email marketing tools like GMass for all your church email needs

Gmass homepage

GMass is great email software used by some of the world’s biggest companies. However, it’s super simple and easy to use — making it perfect for pastors sending a monthly church email newsletter!

GMass can help you send personalized mass emails and check your email performance.

With GMass, you can:

  • Quickly send a church email newsletter to all of your church members right from your Google inbox.
  • Personalize your emails based on each recipient.
  • Track email engagement.
  • Easily schedule emails and follow-ups to stay in constant contact with members.

But that’s not the best part.

You don’t need to get used to some confusing new software interface.

GMass operates right inside your GMail inbox!

Just download the GMass Chrome extension and enter your email address to get to work.

If you don’t have a Gmail account yet, you can open one for free in just a couple of minutes! Here’s a link to the Gmail account-opening page.

How GMass helps your church email activities

Here are the features that make GMass the best companion for your church email purposes:

A. Create large email lists easily to reach different church groups

You need to build a list of email addresses before you can email anyone, right?

But putting together hundreds of email addresses can be tiring and time-consuming.

Don’t worry, GMass can automate all of that for you!

You can add all your contacts to an Excel or Google Sheets file and directly import them to GMass.

The tool will then build the address list for you!

But that isn’t the only way you can create email lists.

GMass also has a Build Email List feature that makes list building super easy.

Perform a Gmail search with a specific keyword, and the app will build a mailing list for you from all the past emails where people wrote about that topic.

Here’s how it works.

Imagine you have to create a list of your contacts from a certain theological seminary. Type in the keyword “theological seminary” in the search bar, and GMass will return a list of all the matching email addresses.

(In this example, we use “Ted’s Tadpole Website” as an example, but imagine using “Jesus Christ” or “Elders” as your keywords, and you’ll see how easily it can work for you.)

Gmass interface showing email lists

You can then create a list from these contacts and start emailing them directly.

Building tons of different email lists has never been easier!

B. Advanced email personalization to make your members feel special

If you want more members to interact with your emails, you have to personalize the emails you send to them.

Think about it.

Would your congregation members rather interact with a generic mass email or one that’s tailor-made for them?

Personalizing emails can be great to make members feel special, but what if you have to personalize emails for hundreds of members in your community?

Don’t worry — you won’t have to spend hours manually adding their names to each email.

GMass can automate all the personalization for you!

Here are some automation features that GMass offers:

  • It automatically detects your recipient’s first name from their email address and adds it to the email. This way, you won’t have to add each person’s name to your emails manually.
  • You can customize whole paragraphs in your emails based on recipients. Also, GMass can automatically add a member’s name or other data in the email without you having to add a thing!
  • Add customized images for everyone on your email list.

Click here to learn more about sending personalized emails to each of your members.

C. Powerful reports to help you understand how your congregation interacts with your emails

When you send a mass email through GMass, it generates a Campaign Report for you. This report shows you essential details about the performance of your church email.

Here are some of the details you can check on a Campaign Report:

  • Total Recipients: The number of email addresses to which a campaign was sent.
  • Unique Opens: The number of unique email addresses that opened your email.
    Note: GMass gives you accurate open rates by only tracking unique opens. That means, if the same recipient opens an email more than once, it won’t show up in the report.
  • Unique Clicks: The number of individual email accounts that clicked at least one link in your email.
  • Replies: The number of recipients that replied to your email.
  • Unsubscribes: The number of recipients that unsubscribed from your emails.

Gmass email list showing campaign reports

 

Use these stats to analyze how your church emails are doing and find out even better ways to reach your congregation!

D Automated email follow-ups to help you always connect with your congregation

Sometimes, your members might forget to open or reply to your emails.

So, what can you do to get them to notice your emails?

Send follow-up emails!

But checking out who hasn’t replied and composing a follow-up email for each member is impossible, right?

Not if you use GMass!

Unlike most email tracking tools, GMass automates the follow-up email process. 

You can customize these follow-up emails, such as:

  • The trigger for sending the follow-up email.
    For example, GMass can send a follow-up when a congregation member clicks on a link in your email.
  • The number of follow-ups
    You can customize the number of follow-ups each member receives before GMass stops sending them follow-up emails and bothering them.
  • Setting the time gaps between each follow-up email.
    For example, your first follow-up can be sent after three days of no response, and a second one can be sent after five days.
  • The follow-up message that you send.
    Here’s an example of two follow-up messages:

Stages of follow-up emails

E. Simplified email scheduling to reach your members at the right time

The best way to increase email engagement is to send emails when the members of your congregation are most likely to check their email accounts.

Fortunately, GMass allows you to schedule email campaigns in advance, which can help you send your emails at the perfect time!

Just type your email and schedule when it should be sent.

GMass will then automatically send it to all the members on your list at the scheduled time.

But what if you need to change the sending time of your mass email?

Simple!

Just head to the Drafts folder in your inbox and reschedule.

Gmass interface showing scheduling features

Conclusion

Bringing people closer together can be a gratifying experience for any pastor.

With emails, it’s easier than ever to keep your church community unified and focused!

And since you need an email tool to help you send all these emails, why not try out GMass?

Using a tool like GMass can help you efficiently manage your church email campaigns.

Why not download the Chrome extension and give GMass a try today?

Email marketing, cold email, and mail merge inside Gmail


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Saleshandy is an email outreach platform with sales enablement capabilities.

You can use the tool to send mail merge campaigns, track email performance metrics, use email templates, and more.

However, is Saleshandy the right tool for you?

This Saleshandy review will answer that question as we explore Saleshandy’s four key features, pricing plans, and three main drawbacks. I’ll also mention a powerful Saleshandy alternative you can start using for free today!

This Saleshandy Review Contains:

(Click on links to jump to specific sections)

Let’s get started.

What Is Saleshandy?

Saleshandy
                                                                     Source: www.saleshandy.com

Saleshandy is a cold email outreach and sales enablement software that lets you send personalized email campaigns from your Gmail and Microsoft Outlook accounts.

The tool also lets you track email metrics and use auto follow-ups to improve engagement.

Go back to Contents

Now, let’s explore how Saleshandy can be useful for digital marketing and sales professionals.

4 Key Features of Saleshandy

Here’s a closer look at four key Saleshandy features:

1. Detailed Email Tracking

Saleshandy allows you to track emails sent via Gmail or Microsoft Outlook.

With the Saleshandy plugin, you can track your:

  • Email Open Rate: Discover how many times a recipient opened your email.
  • Email Click-Through Rate: Use individual link tracking to know how many times the recipient clicked each link in your email.
  • Email Reply Rate: Know how many recipients replied to your emails and quickly narrow down to important responses.
  • Email Bounce rate: See how many emails failed to reach the recipients’ inboxes.

Like most tracking software, you can connect Saleshandy with Zapier and copy your email data analytics to your Salesforce or HubSpot CRM. This helps you segment customers better, view customer relationships more holistically, and trigger sales actions based on email engagement.

However, this feature is only available in Saleshandy’s paid plans.

Note: Saleshandy provided a document tracking (or attachment tracking) feature, which allowed users to track the total number of document downloads and other engagement metrics. But this feature isn’t available for Saleshandy accounts created after June 2020.

2. Personalize Email Campaigns with Mail Merge

Like Yesware, another sales enablement software, Saleshandy lets you send personalized email campaigns using mail merge.

Why do personalized emails matter?
Personalized emails can boost your email open rates, regardless of your email client.

Unlike a generic marketing email, a personalized email is tailor-made to a recipient. It usually includes elements like the recipient’s name, company name, industry, alma mater, affiliations, interests, and more.

Essentially, a personalized email shows that you’ve researched the recipient.

And since you took the effort to learn more about them, the recipient will be more likely to respond, improving your sales conversion chances.

In Saleshandy, you can send personalized emails using its mail merge feature.

How does that work?

Here’s an overview of the steps involved in creating a mail merge campaign inside Saleshandy:

  1. Upload a CSV file containing recipients’ data, such as their names, company names, email addresses, etc.
  2. Craft your email message and customize it using the column headings of your data fields as variables.
  3. Configure your email outreach campaign — by scheduling the campaign, setting the intervals between multiple emails, adding CC/BCC fields, etc.

Once done, Saleshandy will automatically send your personalized campaign at the scheduled time.

3. Automated Follow-Up Emails

One effective strategy to improve your open rate or response rate is sending effective follow-up emails. A study shows that sending a single follow-up email can boost your response rate by 21%.

However, sending follow-ups to an extensive email list can be tedious and time-consuming.

That’s where Saleshandy’s email sequence feature becomes useful.

Your sales professionals can quickly create a personalized email sequence to send automated follow-ups.

Additionally, they can:

  • Create workflows to send multi-stage follow-ups based on different trigger conditions —  “Not Replied”, “Not Opened”, etc.
  • Configure the SMTP settings to send automated follow up emails from non-Gmail and non-Outlook servers.
  • Include an unsubscribe link as a mail merge tag so prospects can easily opt-out if they want to.

You can also send automated follow up emails in the same thread to help recipients see a new email message in the context of previous emails. This can increase your email open rates, which then helps improve your team’s sales performance.

4. Load Email Templates into Gmail and Outlook Mail

Crafting emails is time-consuming.

And if you have tons of recipients, creating a unique email for each person may not be feasible.

What can you do instead?
Use email templates to save time.

In Saleshandy, you can create an email template and load it to your Gmail or Microsoft Outlook compose window to craft a new email message quickly.

Now, if you’ve made several email templates, you can use folders to organize them.

Saleshandy’s email template feature also offers other benefits, like the ability to:

  • Add mail merge tags, enabling you to send personalized emails that boost outreach and engagement.
  • Create shortcuts to load templates to your compose window quickly.
  • Track template performance to get an overview of the effectiveness of your email templates.

Go back to Contents

Now that we have had a good look at Saleshandy’s key features, let’s go over its pricing plans.

Saleshandy Pricing

Saleshandy offers four pricing plans to meet the requirements of different customer segments:

  • Starter ($36/month per user):
    • Up to 6000 emails per month and 2000 prospects
  • Pro ($99/month per user):
    • Up to 100000 emails per month and 30000 prospects
  • Scale ($199/month per user):
    • Up to 200000 emails per month and 60000 prospects
  • Scale Plus ($299+/month per user):
    • Up to 300000 emails per month and 100000 prospects

Go back to Contents

Next, we’ll look at some of the potential disadvantages of using Saleshandy.

3 Drawbacks of Saleshandy

While Saleshandy is a good sales engagement tool, it’s far from perfect.

Here are its three main disadvantages:

1. Base Plans Lack Essential Campaign Features

Sure, not many email outreach tools support advanced capabilities in their free plan.

But with Saleshandy, you can’t even access essential features like auto follow-ups and advanced mail merge even when you’re on the paid “Regular” plan.

In other words, when you spend $12/ month for each user, you only get to use very basic mail merge and email tracking capabilities. Moreover, the “Regular” plan lets you send just 200 emails per day — which severely restricts your reach.

While you can upgrade to more expensive plans to increase your sending limit, those plans may not be affordable for most freelancers and small business owners.

2. Limited Campaign Functionality in Gmail

Saleshandy has extremely low email sending limits for a SaaS sales enablement platform — even the “Enterprise” plan only lets you send only 5000 emails per day!

Why should low sending limits matter to you?
A low email sending limit can handicap your cold emailing and lead generation efforts since you can’t email your entire recipient list at once.

That’s not all.

The Saleshandy software doesn’t integrate with bulk mail services like SendGrid to let you bypass Gmail’s sending limits.

What are these limits?
A regular Gmail account has a sending limit of 500 emails per day, whereas a Google Workspace (formerly G Suite) account allows you to send up to 2000 emails per day.

As a result, even if you opt for Saleshandy’s “Enterprise” plan, you can’t send over 500 emails (with a regular Gmail account) or 2000 emails (with a Google Workspace account) per day without hurting your email deliverability.

Tip: If you use Microsoft Outlook or another mail provider, make sure to check the sending limits of your email client. Whatever the limit is, that becomes the default sending limit for your Saleshandy sales engagement platform.

3. Limited Mail Merge Capabilities

A native Saleshandy integration isn’t available for Google Sheets.

What does that mean for you?

If your contact list is saved inside a Google Sheet, you’ll have to either:

  1. Convert each list to a CSV file before you upload it to Saleshandy.
  2. Use a third-party app like Zapier or Integrately to integrate with your Google Sheet.

Both methods are tedious and take up the valuable time of sales and digital marketing professionals!

Even if you use CSV files, Saleshandy imposes a limit of 2,000 contacts per file.

As a result, if you’ve got an extensive email list, you’ll have to split it into multiple marketing campaigns every time. Not only does it make managing campaigns harder, but it also decreases the email productivity of your marketing and sales teams.

Go back to Contents

If only there were a way to overcome these drawbacks, right?
There is — meet GMass!

The Best Saleshandy Alternative: GMass

While Saleshandy can be a helpful email tracking app, it has several disadvantages.

Fortunately, when using a tool like GMass, you’ll never have to worry about any of these drawbacks.

What Is GMass?

Gmass

GMass is a robust email outreach and email marketing automation platform that works right inside your Gmail inbox. Its powerful mail merge capabilities have made it a popular software used by employees in tech giants like Uber, Google, LinkedIn, and Twitter.

The software is also perfect for small businesses, SaaS startups, institutions, marketing and sales teams, customer support teams, and even regular email senders.

And the best part?

You can get started with GMass instantlydownload the GMass Chrome extension and sign up for free (no credit card needed) with your Gmail or Google Workspace account!

Why GMass Is Better Than Saleshandy

Let’s take a closer look at what makes GMass a superior alternative to Saleshandy:

1. Easily Bypass Gmail Sending Limits

GMass doesn’t limit the number of campaign recipients, allowing you to send unlimited email campaigns every day.

How?
You can integrate GMass with third-party services like SendGrid to bypass Gmail sending limits. When you’ve reached the sending limit, GMass will automatically route the rest of your emails via SendGrid.

The GMass team sends mass emails to 400,000+ recipients with this integration!

2. Native Google Sheets Integration for Convenient Mail Merge Personalization

Thanks to GMass’ native integration with Google Sheets, creating a personalized mail merge campaign is a piece of cake.

GMass lets you directly connect your email lists from a Google Sheet instead of converting them to a CSV file. The integration also helps you add placeholder tags to mass emails with just a single click.

Additionally, the tool lets you create mass personalized emails with advanced personalization features such as:

But that’s not all!

GMass provides several other easy-to-use features, some of which we’ll take a look at next.

Other Useful GMass Features

With GMass, you can leverage:

  • Email Scheduling: Schedule emails to reach the recipient’s inbox at optimal times — when they’re most likely to engage with your messages.
  • Automated Email Follow-Ups: Send multiple emails as automated follow-ups to recipients to boost engagement — you can set the number of automated follow up emails to send, the time interval between them, and more.
  • Email Templates: Every email you send is automatically saved as a template, making it easy for you to reuse older emails in the future.
  • Detailed Reports: GMass helps you track emails to analyze metrics like the open rate, reply rate, etc. — unlike with other email tools in the sales management tools market, with GMass, you can access these behavioral insight reports inside your Gmail inbox.
  • Behavior-based Campaigns: Create workflows to send customized email campaigns based on how recipients engaged with your previous emails.
  • A/B Testing: Compare email variations with different subject lines and content to identify emails that bring you the best results.
  • Email List Builder: Search for keywords related to your target audience in the Gmail search box and build an email list out of the search results.
  • Mobile Add-On: Access powerful email outreach capabilities from your smartphone with the GMass add-on for the Android Gmail app.

Go back to Contents

Final Thoughts

While Saleshandy is a useful sales tool, it has several glaring drawbacks.

Its email outreach features like campaigns and mail merge are expensive and have limited functionality.

Why settle for that when there’s a far better Saleshandy alternative like GMass?

GMass has tons of powerful features for all your email marketing needs. You can send automated follow up emails, schedule emails to go out at the best times, perform mail merge campaigns, leverage behavior-based campaigns, and do so much more.

Why not download the GMass Chrome extension to take your email outreach to the next level?

See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass


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This week I launched the GMass YouTube channel with an entertaining video (I laughed anyway) about myself and GMass. If you haven’t seen the video yet, please watch it, like it, and subscribe on YouTube. Why should you? Read on.

This year, we’re taking a more data-driven approach to cold email and email marketing. After serving more than 500,000 users sending emails directly from their own Gmail and G Suite accounts, we’ve complied a treasure trove of data on sending limits, email deliverability, and response rates. We’re soon going to be making all of this data available and searchable, and I’ll be making videos analyzing the data to help you make better decisions for your organizations. My next video will be a detailed look at the state of Gmail’s sending limits.

Now I won’t bore you with content just about email. I’ve also learned a lot of business lessons from running GMass, so I’ll also be talking about:

  • growth strategies
  • negotiation
  • marketing
  • Chrome extensions
  • software development
  • recruiting

I promise you this — the content in my videos will be atypical. If I make a video on growth strategies, it will cover unique strategies that I’ve discovered or created — not the usual ho-hum “here’s how to make a Facebook ad campaign” or “here’s how to get started with cold email”.

So go ahead and SMASH…ahem…I mean, SHRED that Subscribe button. Here’s that video link again.

See why GMass has 300k+ users and 7,500+ 5-star reviews


Email marketing. Cold email. Mail merge. Avoid the spam folder. Easy to learn and use. All inside Gmail.


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Is Mixmax the right email outreach tool for you?

This Mixmax Review and Mixmax pricing guide will help you decide if it’s a good fit for your email campaigns.

I’ll go over its features, drawbacks, and pricing to give a better picture of what it can do for you. I’ll also cover the best Mixmax alternative to handle all your email outreach needs.

Here’s what this article contains:

(Click on the links to jump to a specific section)

Let’s get started.

What Is Mixmax?

The Mixmax website homepageSource: mixmax.com

Mixmax is an email tracking and marketing automation tool that was developed in San Francisco. It helps you send emails from your Gmail and G Suite accounts.

It’s mainly used by SaaS business owners and sales teams to schedule email campaigns and monitor tracked emails to gauge prospect engagement.

The 4 Key Mixmax Features

Here’s a look at some of the tool’s main features:

1. Email Tracking and Analytics

Email tracking tools help business owners and sales reps analyze which emails work best for their sales and marketing campaigns. The stats from these tracking tools give you powerful insights about your recipient engagement.

Like most email tracking tools, Mixmax tracks various metrics after you send an email. It lets you analyze your tracked emails with metrics like:

  • Email Open Rates: The number of email accounts that opened your email.
  • Clicks: The number of recipients that clicked on a link in your email.
  • Per Recipient Tracking: Data about specific clients or customers who opened your email.
  • Download Tracking: The number of recipients that downloaded a tracked attachment.

Note: Mixmax can also send you real time notifications for these events. For maximum ease of use, these notifications can be disabled if they start to clutter your Google inbox.  

The tool also offers a few handy integrations to streamline email tracking:

  • Can auto bcc emails to a CRM like Pipedrive.
  • Integrates notifications into Slack.
  • Can directly connect to your CRM through its API integration.

2. Email Scheduling

Mixmax lets you schedule emails by simply entering a date and time, like most other scheduling tools. It will then automatically send emails to your customers when the specified time arrives.

What are the benefits of instant scheduling?

  • You don’t need to be online at a particular time to send an email.
  • Sales professionals can use this to boost email communication effectiveness.

How does it boost email communication effectiveness?
You can schedule emails to reach potential clients when they’re most likely to check their inbox — thereby increasing engagement. Scheduling can be further streamlined with Mixmax’s workflow automation features.

Besides emails, Mixmax can also be used for scheduling meetings. And with its integrated notifications, you can free your Google Calendar app of meeting reminders!

3. Email Personalization to Boost Engagement

Mixmax is automation software that helps you personalize emails to boost your outreach and sales campaign engagements.

You can send emails with personalization fields populated by data from sources like:

  • Salesforce leads
  • Pipedrive, HubSpot, and other CRM integrations
  • Google directory contacts

What’s the benefit of this?
Instead of receiving another generic email in their inbox, your recipients will receive one that’s geared towards their needs.

4. Save Custom Templates

Composed the perfect email?
You can reuse it as a template for your upcoming Mixmax drip campaigns in just one click!

How does this help?
As you can reuse these email templates, you won’t have to write a new email for every campaign. This way, business owners and account managers can save a lot of time in creating outreach campaigns.

However, when using email templates, make sure you still have personalization on your to-do lists.

Why?
If your email always contains the same generic text, clients are less likely to engage with it.

By tailoring each campaign to your customer’s needs, you can improve your outreach and the credibility of your business.

Note: Mixmax also lets you attach files from Dropbox and Box to personalize each email further.

Mixmax Pricing

Mixmax pricing includes four plans:

  • SMB: $34/month per user
  • Growth: $65/month per user
  • Growth + Salesforce: $69/month per user
  • Enterprise: custom pricing

The 4 Main Drawbacks of Mixmax

While Mixmax is a useful email marketing and automation software, it’s not perfect.
Here are its main disadvantages:

1. Mixmax.com Essential Features Are Available Only in Higher-Priced Plans

The Mixmax.com SMB plan doesn’t include the essential features for sending mass email campaigns. So, the tool can be rather expensive.

Here’s a closer look at this problem:

A) Basic Plan Lacks Automated Sequences

To boost your email productivity, you should be able to automate email sequences, right? 

However, the Mixmax pricing model does not offer email automation in its Starter plan that’s billed at $12/month per user.

If you want to automate follow-ups or track sequence stats, you have to go for costlier Mixmax pricing plans such as Small Biz, Growth, or Enterprise.

While this could be too costly for small business owners, it’s also very expensive for large customer support and sales teams with several users. As it’s billed on a user basis, prices can skyrocket quickly for large teams!

B) Basic Plans Lack Email Personalization

Mail merge is an essential feature offered by most email automation tools. It lets you personalize your emails by inserting recipient data like their name and address from:

  • a database like your CRM (Salesforce, CRM Zendesk)
  • via social media

Unfortunately, Mixmax doesn’t include mail merge in the basic plan.

Additionally, users must opt for premium plans for next level personalization features, like custom branding with Mixmax’s CRM integration.

2. Limited Campaign Functionality

Mixmax.com lacks third-party integrations to bypass Gmail sending limits.

You can only add 2,000 recipients per sequence and only deliver 500 emails per day.
For a tool centered around mass emails, this is rather low!

As you can only send a limited number of emails, your email marketing outreach will be quite limited — even if you’re just a small business or startup.

3. No Mobile Support

As Mixmax doesn’t have mobile app support, you can’t track email campaigns on the go.

Why is this a problem?
Mobile accessibility is an essential feature of any email tool. As you get 24/7 access to your email tracking tools, you can manage your email campaigns no matter where you are.

4. Interface Can Slow Your Browser

The Mixmax extension uses the Gmail user interface.

However, its Compose window is an embedded iframe in the Chrome tab.

What does this mean?
An embedded iframe is an HTML document set in another HTML document on a site. It’s almost like a Chrome tab within another Chrome tab.

This can cause the Mixmax extension to overload your browser and slow it down significantly. It also makes Mixmax likely to conflict with other Gmail extensions or tools you use.

Note: Many users leave a Mixmax review saying the embedded iframe can make working with Mixmax impossible.

The Best Mixmax Alternative: GMass

Although Mixmax is a handy tool, it has some disadvantages.

Luckily, GMass is an email marketing software that can tackle all those drawbacks!

What is GMass?

The GMass website homepage

GMass is a powerful email outreach software that lets you send and manage email campaigns within your Gmail inbox. Its powerful mail merge features have made it the ideal outreach platform used by employees from Google, Uber, and even social media giants like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

GMass can be used by marketers to send emails to multiple clients and customers.

However, GMass isn’t just for email marketing automation or sales activities!
It can also be used by individuals, institutions, and clubs to send emails to a target audience.

GMass helps you:

  • Automatically track email stats.
  • Quickly send unlimited emails and campaigns to tons of prospects.
  • Automate email personalization for each client and customer.
  • Easily schedule emails in advance.

The best part?
All you need to do to get started is download the GMass Chrome extension and sign up with your Gmail account!

The easy installation massively reduces onboarding time — one of the reasons why GMass has an extremely positive overall rating from its customers.

3 Reasons GMass Is Better than Mixmax

Here’s a closer look at what makes GMass the perfect Mixmax alternative:

1. Fully-Featured Affordable Plans

GMass offers more user-friendly paid plans than almost every other outreach platform, including Mixmax.

The software has three pricing plans:

  • Individual Plans:
    • Standard: $25/month
    • Premium: $35/month
    • Professional: $55/month
  • Team Plan:
    • Professional: starts at $145/month for a group of 5 and includes all features.

Unlike Mixmax, you get mail merge and personalization features in all GMass pricing plans, including the free tier. 

Note: While you can pay using your credit card, GMass also accepts PayPal.

2. Unlimited Email Campaigns

GMass offers campaigns and mail merge features in all its plans, including the free version. With it, you can create powerful email marketing campaigns for any budget or company size!

Additionally, as GMass doesn’t place a limit on the number of campaign recipients, you can send unlimited emails!

How?
Unlike Mixmax, GMass integrates with third-party services like SendGrid to bypass Gmail sending limits entirely. The GMass team uses this integration to send newsletters to more than 400,000 recipients!

3. Gmail Add-On for Mobile Support

Thanks to its Gmail add-on, GMass is instantly available on any device you use!

How does this help?
Once you’ve installed the add-on, you can use GMass on your Android device.

You don’t need another mobile app to manage your email marketing automation.

Just log in to your Gmail account to access all your email campaigns.

Note: The GMass add-on isn’t available on iOS devices due to a lack of Google support. When Google adds Gmail add-ons to iOS, GMass will be available there as well.

Other Useful GMass Features

GMass offers tons of other email features that make email marketing automation a piece of cake. Here’s a closer look at some of them:

1. Advanced Email Analytics

GMass’s email tracker auto-generates a Campaign Report after sending each email campaign. This gives you real time marketing stats to analyze your tracked emails quickly. The GMass Campaign Report includes:

  1. Total Recipients: The number of email addresses to which you sent your email campaign.
  2. Unique Opens: The number of unique email IDs that opened your email. Note: GMass tracks unique email opens to give accurate email metrics. If the recipient opens the same email twice, the report won’t show this as an extra “open” to inflate your results.
  3. Didn’t Open: The number of recipients who didn’t open your email.
  4. Unique Clicks: The number of unique email addresses that clicked on at least one link in your email.
  5. Replies: The total number of recipients who replied to your email.
  6. Unsubscribes: The number of recipients who unsubscribed from your emails.
  7. Bounces: The number of emails undelivered as they were addressed to invalid email IDs.
  8. Rejections because your Gmail account is over-limit: The number of emails that weren’t delivered as the email sending limit of your account was reached.
  9. Blocks: The number of undelivered emails as the email ID marked your account as spam.

The GMass Campaign Report and the metrics it tracks

What’s more…
Unlike most tracking tools, GMass displays the Campaign Report right inside your Google inbox. Instead of opening a second interface to check your email tracker, you can access all the data you need from the Gmail sidebar!

2. Auto Follow-Ups

Sometimes you need to send reminders and follow-ups to boost your campaign engagement.

However, this isn’t practical for mass email marketing.
Imagine manually following up on thousands of recipients!

Luckily, GMass supports follow-up email automation to help you engage tons of prospects. Instead of manually sending each email, you can automate follow-ups with customizations like:

  • The trigger for sending a follow-up email.
    For example, when customers leave a review on your website, you can send them an email instantly.
  • The number of follow-up emails sent to each person.
  • The period between each follow-up email.
  • The content of the follow-up email.

The GMass follow-up stages

3. Powerful Personalization

Personalization can dramatically boost your email engagement.

After all, what would you rather click on:
A generic mass marketing email?
Or one personally addressing your needs?

However, manually personalizing hundreds of emails for your customers or clients will take forever.

Luckily, GMass can automate this process for you.

Just add your prospects’ email IDs to a Google Sheets file. You can then personalize your emails with advanced features like:

  • Automatic First-Name Detection and Entry: GMass automatically detects each recipient’s first name from their email address.
  • Personalized blocks of text: It lets you customize entire blocks of text for individual clients or customers.
  • Customized images and links: Add custom email images and URLs for all email recipients.

Email personalization in GMass

4. Automated Email Scheduling

To maximize your outreach, sending emails at the right time is essential.

Ideally, prospects should receive emails when they are most likely to check their inbox.

But how do you ensure that you’re sending emails at the right time?
By scheduling them in advance!

GMass supports instant scheduling for all your email marketing campaigns.
Just type the email, set the send time, and GMass will send it when the time comes.

It’s like running your email marketing tool on autopilot!

If there’s any change in schedule, you can reschedule it from your Gmail Drafts folder in seconds.

Email scheduling in GMass

5. Custom Tracking Domains

Custom tracking domains are only available in the Enterprise plan of Mixmax pricing.

However, GMass lets you easily create custom tracking domains in any plan!

How does this help?
Many spam filters automatically categorize certain domains as spam. If your email is sent from such a domain, they’re going to end up in your prospect’s spam folder.

This will significantly harm your email deliverability!

That’s why your business needs a custom domain to grow your email outreach. With GMass’ custom tracking domains, your chances of reaching more customers increase exponentially.

Conclusion

If there’s one thing that’s clear from this Mixmax review, it’s that the Mixmax email marketing platform is far from perfect.

Essential email features are costly, campaigns are limited, and there is no mobile app support.

Why settle for this when a better tool like GMass is available?
The GMass email marketing platform has all the features you need to manage your email campaigns!

So why not download the GMass Chrome extension today and try it out yourself?

See why GMass has 300k+ users and 7,500+ 5-star reviews


Email marketing. Cold email. Mail merge. Avoid the spam folder. Easy to learn and use. All inside Gmail.


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Is Lemlist the right email outreach software for you?

This Lemlist review will help you determine if it’s a good fit for your email marketing needs.

I’ll go over its features, drawbacks, and pricing to give you a better idea of this email outreach tool. I’ll also cover the perfect Lemlist alternative for all your email outreach campaigns.

Here’s what this Lemlist review contains:

(Click on the links to jump to a specific section)

Let’s get started.

What is Lemlist?

The Lemlist website homepageSource: Lemlist Website

Lemlist is email automation and cold outreach software that lets you send cold emails to a target audience. It’s usually used by SaaS companies and small businesses to streamline their lead generation activities.

4 Key Features of Lemlist

Here’s a closer look at some of Lemlist’s main features:

1. Easy Email Personalization

Lemlist has powerful email personalization features that let you send customized emails via mail merge to boost your cold email outreach.

Like most cold email tools, Lemlist helps you create personalized emails by adding recipient data from a CSV file to an email template.

You can add custom variables like:

  • First name
  • Company name
  • Recipient address

You can also add personalized images to premade templates when cold emailing your target audience.

How does this help?
Image personalization adds an extra level of customization to your email campaigns.

While it might not suit all brands, image templates can make generic cold emails more engaging and fun.

2. Automated Email Sequences

Like Mailshake and other marketing automation tools, Lemlist lets you automate follow-ups and create personalized email sequences for your marketing campaigns.

How does this help?
As follow-ups are part of the same email thread, recipients will have the context of previous emails.

Its marketing automation features also let you automate responses based on customer actions. For example, if someone replies to your email, the tool can pause the automation sequence or send them a response from premade templates.

You can also use its A/B testing feature to test email sequences for different subject lines. This way, you can perfect your sales automation campaigns for maximum email deliverability!

3. Custom Tracking Domains

Lemlist makes it easy for you to use custom tracking domains for your email campaigns.

Why is this important?
Most spam filters automatically filter out certain domains as spam. If you send cold emails from these domains, they go straight to your prospects’ spam folder.

By using a custom domain that isn’t automatically marked as spam, you can boost your bulk email deliverability!

4. Handy Integrations

Lemlist lets you integrate with:

  • CRMs like Salesforce and HubSpot
  • growth hacking tools like Phantombuster
  • other marketing tools via its Zapier integration

The benefit?
You don’t have to manage your prospect data across multiple apps.

Additionally, Lemlist’s sales automation features help streamline the data transfer between these platforms.

4 Main Drawbacks of Lemlist

Although Lemlist is a great tool for email marketing and automation, it’s not perfect. Here are its biggest drawbacks:

1. Doesn’t Support Email Attachments

Unlike most cold email tools, Lemlist doesn’t let you add email attachments, like presentations or reports, to your emails.

Why is this a problem?
It severely limits engagement with your prospects!

If you want to send any document, you’ll have to upload it to the cloud and then create personalized links to add to your email.

Additionally, you won’t be able to know:

  • The time prospects spend on your attachments.
  • The document sections in which they’re interested.
  • What they do with the attachment, like forwarding or downloading it.

2. Expensive Pricing Plans

While Lemlist used to be available on AppSumo with a lifetime deal, that’s no longer the case!

Today, there are two Lemlist pricing plans available:

  • Standard: $59/month per user
  • Pro: $99/month per user

3. Works As a Separate Interface from Gmail

Like many marketing tools, Lemlist works outside Gmail in a separate interface. This makes it time-consuming and tedious to manage your campaigns.

How?
New users will have to get familiarized with its interface before they can work on their marketing campaigns. Additionally, you constantly have to switch between your Gmail account and Lemlist to manage your emails — severely limiting the tool’s ease of use.

4. Daily Limits on Email Sending

Lemlist can only send outreach campaigns to some of the contacts you find via prospecting.

Why?

  • Unless you go for their super costly Platinum plan, you can only send a limited number of emails per day.
  • It also doesn’t integrate with bulk email tools like SendGrid that can help bypass the Gmail sending limit.

This severely limits your sales outreach.

Think about it.

Even small businesses like startups have a massive target audience. However, with Lemlist’s email automation, you can only reach a fraction of them!

The Perfect Lemlist Alternative: GMass

While Lemlist is a good sales automation and email outreach tool, it has some major drawbacks.

Luckily, GMass is an email marketing platform that can overcome all these issues!

What is GMass?

The GMass website homepage

GMass is a powerful email marketing software that helps you send and manage email campaigns right inside your Gmail inbox. Its powerful cold email outreach features have made it a popular platform that’s used by Google, Uber, and even social media giants like LinkedIn, Twitter, and Facebook.

GMass lets you:

  • Accurately track your outreach campaigns.
  • Quickly send emails to tons of prospects.
  • Personalize your campaigns using mail merge.
  • Implement email automation at scale.
  • Save any email as a custom email template.

What’s more…
You can get started with GMass in no time — just download the Chrome extension, sign up with your Google account, and you’re all set!

4 Reasons GMass is Better than Lemlist

Here’s why GMass is a better cold emailing tool than Lemlist:

1. Integrated Inside Gmail

Unlike other marketing tools such as Lemlist, Mailshake, and MailChimp, GMass works within your Google inbox for maximum ease of use.

How does this help?

  • You won’t have to switch between multiple tabs to manage your email campaigns.
  • Reduced onboarding time as you’re using the familiar Gmail interface.

This also extends to the Gmail Android app, where GMass functions as a handy Gmail add-on.

2. You Can Send Email Attachments of Any Size

Attachments can boost the engagement of your outreach emails, right?

As GMass works inside your Gmail account, you can use any Gmail feature with GMass — including attachments. You can attach almost any kind of document to your emails — reports, presentations, case studies, you name it!

Additionally, GMass’ auto follow-ups always contain attachments from the original email! This helps maintain the context for your future outreach emails.

3. Send Unlimited Emails

GMass doesn’t place any limit on the number of emails you can send per day.

It lets you send unlimited personalized emails for each campaign!

But what about Gmail’s sending limits?
Unlike most cold email tools such as Yesware and Mailshake, you can integrate GMass with bulk email software like SendGrid to bypass Gmail sending limits entirely!

Even the GMass team uses this integration to send emails to over 400,000+ people at a time.

4. User-Friendly Pricing and Powerful Free Plan

GMass also offers some of the most user-friendly pricing plans in the email outreach space.

The software offers several pricing plans to suit your needs:

  • Individual:
    • Standard: $25/month
    • Premium: $35/month
    • Professional: $55/month
  • Team:
    • Professional: from $145/month for a group of 5 + all features.

Whatever your company size, GMass is the most user-friendly and affordable email tool for your cold emailing needs!

Other Useful GMass Features

GMass also offers tons of other features to boost your email marketing campaigns. Here’s a closer look at them:

1. Powerful Email Analytics

GMass auto-generates a Campaign Report after every email campaign that gives you accurate tracking stats. As it tracks stats in real-time, you can keep up with your prospects’ activity to improve your lead generation strategies!

The tool tracks several core metrics like:

  1. Total Recipients: Number of email addresses that received your campaign.
  2. Unique Opens: Number of unique recipients that opened your email.
    Note: GMass tracks unique email opens to give you accurate stats. If the same recipient opens your email twice, it won’t show up here to inflate your results.
  3. Didn’t Open: Number of email IDs that didn’t open your email.
  4. Unique Clicks: Number of unique IDs that clicked on at least one link in your email.
  5. Replies: Number of email IDs that replied to your email.
  6. Unsubscribes: Number of recipients that clicked “unsubscribe” in your email.
  7. Bounces: Number of emails that weren’t delivered due to invalid email IDs.
  8. Rejections because your Gmail account is over-limit: Number of emails that were undelivered as you reached your Gmail sending limit.
  9. Blocks: Number of emails undelivered because the recipient marked your email address as spam.

The GMass Campaign Report and the metrics it tracks.

And the best part?
Unlike other email platforms such as Lemlist, GMass places all Campaign Reports within your Gmail inbox! You can easily access them from the [CAMPAIGNS] label in the Gmail sidebar.

2. Convenient Email Scheduling

Cold emailing at the right time is essential to maximize engagement.

Why?
If your cold email reaches prospects when they’re likely to check their inbox, they’re more likely to open your email!

But you can’t time and send hundreds of cold emails manually, right?

Luckily, GMass lets you schedule all your email marketing campaigns for maximum ease of use.
Just write a new email (or use an email template), set the time, and GMass will send emails automatically at that time.

You don’t have to be online when your cold emails go out!

Email scheduling in GMass

Change in plans? Not an issue.
You can reschedule emails at any time through your Gmail Drafts folder!

 3. Automated Follow-Ups

Sending follow-up emails is crucial for lead generation activities.

However, you can’t follow up on each prospect manually, right?

Luckily, GMass can automate the entire follow-up process for you! You can even customize all follow-up emails, with settings like:

  • The trigger to send a follow-up email.
    For example, every time someone replies to your campaign, they’re automatically sent a follow-up email.
  • The number of follow-up emails sent to each prospect.
  • The time between each follow-up email.
  • The follow-up messages or templates.

The GMass follow-up stages

Note: For advanced email automation features, you can also use our Google Sheets Zapier integration.

4. Advanced Email Personalization

To improve prospect engagement, you need to personalize your cold emails.

Why?
Prospects rarely engage with a generic marketing email.

But customized emails that are personalized for them and their needs?
They love interacting with those!

However, creating personalized cold emails for each prospect would take an eternity!

Fortunately, GMass supports mail merge automation to help you quickly create personalized emails. It gives you advanced personalization features like:

  • First Name Detection and Entry – GMass automatically detects and enters each prospect’s first name from their email address.
  • Personalized Blocks of Text – Personalize entire paragraphs for each prospect.
  • Customizable Images and Links – Send custom images and links for each recipient.

Email personalization in GMass.

What’s more…
Thanks to GMass’ Google Sheets integration, you don’t have to create a CSV file for the mail merge! It can automatically plug-in prospect details from a Google Sheets file into your customized emails.

5. Custom Tracking Domains

With GMass, setting up your own custom tracking domains is a piece of cake!

How does this help?
Custom tracking domains are essential for your email deliverability. They let you bypass spam filters that categorize emails by domain.

This way, your drip campaigns won’t end up as spam even before reaching your client!

Conclusion

While Lemlist is a good cold email outreach platform, it has too many drawbacks.

As seen in this Lemlist review, you can’t send emails with attachments, the pricing is costly, and its email sending capability is limited.

Why settle for less when a tool like GMass can solve all these issues?
This email marketing platform has everything you need for your email sending needs!

So why not download the GMass Google Chrome extension today and experience it yourself?

See why 99% of users say they’ve had their best deliverability ever with GMass


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If you’ve deployed sites to IIS, at some point, you probably Googled how to make your site redirect from the non-www to the www version and from the insecure http version to the more secure https version — meaning, if someone types http://yourdomain.com, you want them to be redirected to https://www.yourdomain.com.

In wanting this for my website, I read every article I could, but I didn’t find a technique that accomplished everything I wanted. This is how I did it.

Why care about redirecting to www and https?

Because you want to avoid having “duplicate content” on two or more technically different URLs for the benefit of SEO. If you have http://domain.com and https://www.mydomain.com serve up the same page, you will be penalized by Google because it’s now considered “duplicate content.” If, however, https://domain.com does a permanent 301 redirect to https://www.mydomain.com, then you’re following the best practice for SEO.

What’s wrong with other people’s solutions?

If you Google for this topic, you’ll find a few articles, like this Namecheap article. However, it only covers redirecting to https and not to www.

This Stack Overflow article has the right idea, but its recommended solution is to combine the forcing of www and SSL into one rule. I disagree with that because it doesn’t allow for the ease of setting up a development server at dev.domain.com, where www and SSL aren’t desired.

This ServerFault article only addresses the https redirection without taking into account the www issue.

This dinbror article does a great job, but it teaches you how to convert the www version to non-www, which is a rarer scenario than wanting to redirect the other way around.

My better way

Here’s what the URL Rewrite rules in my web.config look like. I have two separate rules, one for redirecting the non-www version to www, and one for redirecting the http version to https.

 
<rule name="https fixer" stopProcessing="true">
 <match url=".*$" />
  <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
   <add input="{HTTPS}" pattern="^OFF$" />
   <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="dev" negate="true" />					
  </conditions>				
  <action type="Redirect" url="https://www.gmass.co{REQUEST_URI}" appendQueryString="false" redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>
				
<rule name="www fixer" stopProcessing="true">
 <match url=".*$" />
  <conditions logicalGrouping="MatchAll">
   <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="www" negate="true" />
   <add input="{HTTP_HOST}" pattern="dev" negate="true" />
  </conditions>
  <action type="Redirect" url="https://www.gmass.co{REQUEST_URI}" appendQueryString="false" redirectType="Permanent" />
</rule>	

Why not put all this into one rule, as other articles have suggested? Because then, if you have a development server, like dev.domain.com, and you use the same web.config file, then it will attempt to redirect to https://www.dev.domain.com and you likely don’t want that. Instead, you want it so that if you’re on dev.domain.com, then no redirects occur, because you probably don’t want to purchase an SSL certificate for your development server. Of course, you could purchase a wildcard SSL cert that covers all sub-domains, but those are expensive.

By breaking the redirects into two different URL Rewrite rules, you can:

  1. Still ensure that non-www is redirected to www
  2. Still ensure that http is redirected to https
  3. Use the same web.config with your production and your development server, making it so that you don’t have to keep track of two config files.

Additionally, note that the domain, gmass.co is hard-coded into the redirect destination URL. That is intentional so that you only ever need one redirect instead of two to fix both the www and https issues. You might be tempted to use {HTTP_HOST} in its place, but if you do that, your results will be wonky, and in some cases, two redirects will be needed instead of one. The “https fixer” rule won’t redirect to the www version of the site, and the “www fixer” rule won’t direct to the https version of the site.

If you use “https://www.{HTTP_HOST}” in the “www fixer” rule, then that would work, but if you did that in the “https fixer” rule, then if the user went to http://www.domain.com, the user would get redirected to https://www.www.domain.com, and you don’t want two sets of wwws. Finally, if you use just {HTTP_HOST} in the “https fixer” rule, then if the user went to http://domain.com, the “https fixer” rule would trigger and redirect the user to https://domain.com, and then the “www fixer” rule would kick in to redirect the user to https://www.domain.com. That accomplishes the objective, but now you’ve sent the user through two redirects rather than just one. Hard coding your domain into the rule avoids these hassles.

Essentially the logic that you desire, in boolean English, is:

(non-www OR http) AND (not “dev”) THEN REDIRECT (https://www.gmass.co/{QUERYSTRING})

Of course, with URL Rewrite rules, you can’t use parentheses in your boolean logic. You’re restricted to using a match type of MatchAny or MatchAll. If you were to combine everything into one rule using MatchAll, that comes close to working, but it fails in the case of one condition already being true (www or https) but the other being false. Meaning, if the user goes to http://mydomain.com, the user will then be redirected to https://www.mydomain.com as you desire, BUT if the user goes to https://mydomain.com, the user will NOT be redirected to https://www.mydomain.com. Similarly, if the user goes to http://www.mydomain.com, the user will NOT be redirected to https://www.mydomain.com.

By using two individual rules, however, you can achieve the logic you want, which, in boolean English, is:

(non-www AND not “dev”)
redirect to www

(http and NOT “dev”)
redirect to https

See it in action

You can test this using various gmass.co URLs. If you go to http://gmass.co, you’ll be redirected to https://www.gmass.co. Be sure to turn on Chrome’s Developer Tools to see the Network tab so you can see where you’re actually being redirected. The latest versions of Chrome hide the “www” in the address bar, so you can’t always decipher the exact URL you’re visiting.

If you go to https://gmass.co, you’ll be directed to https://www.gmass.co. If you go to http://www.gmass.co, you’ll be redirected to https://www.gmass.co.

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