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Reply — Send cold emails that feel warm
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@maxogles Yes, we are in the same niche. We actually started working on Reply in August 2014 and then one or two months later Salesloft launched Cadence.
I totally get the benefits from a sender's perspective, but I'm often on the receiving end of these type of consistent follow up emails and it's very annoying and feels really spammy. If I didn't respond to your first email, it's safe to assume I'm not interested.
Curious to hear from the makers what their thoughts are on this, and if there's anything in the product that will make the receivers' lives easier too? Maybe an unsubscribe link at the bottom of every email, or better yet a service-wide opt-out option for any follow up emails. If you'd add the latter, then even people who are annoyed by follow up emails might become evangelists as they'd prefer everyone to use your product over your competitors.
@marckohlbrugge Marc, thank you for your comment. Really-really good point. Service-wide opt-out this is something I will think about more, high level - I like the idea. We have account wide opt-out link that goes at the bottom of email and we ask our users to use it for cold campaigns. You could even customize the text of this section to sound more informal. For example: Don't want to hear from me? Please just click here, no hard feelings.
Regarding follow-ups that annoy people, agree as well. I often use Reply just to send one initial email with no follow-ups. Or just one short (one-two sentences) follow up. Recently I was reaching out to sales influencers and because of good sales copy I was able to get 39% reply rate from single email and one follow up. I will be sharing article on this. So, really it may be not need to send more than one follow-up to cold contact to politely remind about your initial email.
I think if this is a cold contact - maximum 2-3 follow ups is OK to send. And if this is warm contact (inbound leads) - 3-4 could be fine.
@olegcl Thanks for your reply. (no pun intended ;) – Glad to hear there's an opt out link. I'd be curious to hear at which point additional follow ups become useless. I've seen people sending 10+ follow ups which is just ridiculous and I can't imagine this this have any effect. Would be nice if you could educate your users about what's (socially) acceptable, what's effective, etc.
@marckohlbrugge I was reading an article today saying that people should send at least 8 follow-up emails and only stop before that if someone asks you to. Sending more than 2 or 3 follow-up emails would help sales people to maximize the response rate.
I find quite annoying when someone keeps contacting me when I don't show interest (and I don't think I should be the one saying "c'mon just move on to your next prospect"), but it seems there are a lot of people that doesn't care and end up making business with the sales person sending them emails.
@olegcl @marckohlbrugge Hi Marc, I have seen lot of people replying on my third or fourth email and those people were genuinely interested in my offering but did not get time to reply to my first few mails.
@olegcl @marckohlbrugge @shreyaa_ratra same to me. the email overload is so high now that, I sometimes forget to react, sometimes I do not have the answer on the first contact. Think on background, and have feedback on the 2nd-3rd contact.
@collinmathilde To be honest, we are very similar, since the end goal of both tools - automate outreach. High level, I would say that we have more possibilities to customize and as well working right now on some unique features. But don't want to sound self-promotional here. PersistIQ is a great tool. I would suggest you to try both and see what work better for you.
Will try it out on @Cloudways as we are looking to improve sales processing and business development.
@invinciblesaad Great. We've found it works best when we do a quick 15 minute orientation to help our customers get up and running. Feel free to reach out at oleg@replyapp.io if you have any questions or schedule an orientation call.
I've been using outreach.io for a while. This is very similar. In fact the report looks exactly like their report including the colors :-)
@olegci Do you offer an API ?
@digitalbase we are working on new dashboard and reports right now. Yes, we do offer API and you can find the documentation by following link: http://support.replyapp.io/categ...
@olegcl Hey Oleg, I received your random mass e-mail reg. 'hustling is the name of the game,' that also mentions Product Hunt (which just brought me back here now, trying to figure out why you're sending out e-mails to Product Hunt users), and quite frankly, I think this isn't the right approach you're picking. The e-mail I received from you just now had no unsubscribe link, it didn't have any information on where you got my e-mail from (or where I signed up) and that violates the spam regulations (and makes your company liable to severe fines should anyone decide to step up and do something about it — I know this sounds ridiculous, but trust me, this e-mail you just sent out, that's all someone needs to sue you, and win).
I don't know anything about your product, or how many others you've contacted to promote sales for REPLY and with regards to your upcoming YC interview, but I don't think YC values spamming random people as 'the right kind of hustle.' — Didn't mean to be offensive here, but it's important to know the facts. Especially if your company focuses on email-sales, this is the 101. This is partly my personal opinion, and partly a warning that you may run into your first lawsuit before you've had a chance to get that YC response.
Technical feedback: your site looks great, pricing looks fair, you have all you need to make great things.
@sapphli We don't have that feature in place, since this is not something what real people (not automation) will do, if someone didn't get back on email.
But I am curious to learn more why do you need this feature. Please let me know.
Thank you! We have awesome designer in our team. Will pass your praise to him :)
**epic movie trailer voice** From the creators of last weeks hunted Name2Email, there is a much more world changing tool. It’s Reply, ordinary sounding but game changing in it’s ways! WooooOOoooT **end epic movie trailer voice**
Ok ok ok automate your email outreach, with keeping it personal! I have been using this now for 2 weeks I must say it’s a hidden gem. For me as a dealmaker in my company Wildcard, Im outreaching to lots and lots of people. It would be nice if I could automate this more while keeping your language swag. Reply does just that!
Next to that, I think the stuff Oleg writes is nice, future talk of sales, that we don’t need suits any more 😉 leveraging technology to do sales as if you’re a dealer (pun intended).
AU-TO-MA-TION wiiiih 😁
@milann Milan, thank you for submitting our product. We built Reply to help sales, recruiting, business development professionals to perform their best way by automating their outreach process. Doing this while keeping 100% ability to customize every message and make emails sound truly personal. One of the core features is ability to send personal follow-up messages automatically, if no reply received after certain number of days.
Couple of main use cases are:
* Outbound Sales - reaching out to potential customers
* Inbound Sales - engaging in communication with trial users or customers
* Recruiting - reaching out to potential job candidates
* Business Development - reaching out to potential partners
* Fund Raising - reaching out to potential investors
* Journalists Outreach - pitching journalist and reporters with your idea
We appreciate all your feedback. Especially we would be interested to learn more how you think you can use Reply and what kind of automation we could add in future. THANKS!
@milann Hey Milan, I think you forgot to put URLs inside of your links. I suspect they should be following:
http://www.producthunt.com/tech/...
http://replyapp.io/blog/
Beautifully done, looks very helpful, but I absolutely hate this kind of product. I like a few commenters am on the receiving end of these all the time. One e-mail, I usually ignore it, but these persistent "I hate to bother you but I've contacted you three times and you haven't replied" autobots piss me off. I'm sad that you are using your talents for evil not for good. Helping ruin e-mail even more is a bad thing for an already struggling medium.
@arlogilbert Hi Arlo, thank you for you comment. Could you please suggest any better way of doing outbound sales or business developments to help hackers grow their product (apart from inbound, everyone do that)? I have some idea in regards this case and we will work on it in future.
But right now this is the best approach available over there (and it is less annoying than cold calls). We thought LinkedIn become place for B2B sales and BD, but it didn't ; not the greatest peace of software out there. In future, I sure, we will have something better built.
@arlogilbert Or worse, the person's sequence of emails sends you another message less than 24 hours after you have a live conversation with them. Having said that, I think these tools are valuable -- they're just poorly used by most people currently. Like PowerPoint.
Probably a really amateur question here, but cold emails tend to run into a lot of spam filters. How do you make sure that the emails actually show up in the inbox? Or is that more on the user's end to take care of.
@sydney_liu_sl Great question. We connect directly to user email account and our tool act similar to regular email client. All sent emails even will appear in your sent folder and replies goes straight to your inbox.
We have daily sending limits to prevent using Reply for spamming. And usually our custumers doesn't have volume larger then 300-400 emails per day. This is preatty low volume to consider your emails as spam.
As well since our customers getting usually at least 20-30% reply rate, this is good sign for spam filters to not clasify your emails as spam.
Moreover, since emails sent from user email account, all emails end up in Primary tab of GMail inbox, not Updates or Promotions one.
As well we put a randomized delay beetween sending each email, so the replies will be coming in more graduate way and as well for emails serveres emails will not look like sent in a bulk.
@getbrandflakes do you know import.io by any chance? Have fun with that :D http://www.producthunt.com/tech/...
@getbrandflakes Yes, right now we support integration with Salesforce and will be adding more CRMs and marketing automation system in future.
As well we integrate with Zapier that gives us access to 300+ apps for integration.
Recently one of our customer has created a nice set up, where contacts from Mailchimp list were pulling and adding to Reply campaign automatically.
We are going to write a blog post on this, by the way.
@olegcl nice product! Right to the spot. What concerns me with this is that this kind of service actually will have full access to my mailbox and this is too risky from my perspective. What kind of warranties do you provide? Have you though of offering this as a self hosted option?
BTW it would be good to get at least EV Certificate for this kind of service to build the trust.
Great product but i had some problem to understand your pricing page (at first i didn't understand that i had to click).
@olegcl you know that as a fellow start-up I like this and see the benefit - I also sympathise with commenters saying they are on the receiving end of this and are worried by that.
Whilst it may not eliminate the problem of email recipients choosing to ignore emails they have opened already, perhaps a feature like Sidekick may help the problem to an extent - it notifies the sender when the recipient has opened the email. This could eliminate the issue of spamming a recipient with follow-up emails when they haven't even opened the initial one.
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