Apol Massebieau

How to write emails that get great response rates

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You have to get your emails done right. It is, after all, your first step to getting those deals done and your sales quotas met. G Merge user Enrico Magnani is doing a great job with higher-than-average response rates to his emails with our Google Sheets add-on. Replicate his success with tips that we culled from his process, and from those of our other successful clients.

1. Send from your Gmail address. The tests we have done, and the experiences of the marketing professionals we talk to, point to the same thing: Using a real email address will get you more replies than using a marketing service.

If you are writing to contacts who have Gmail accounts, remember that Gmail organizes received emails into tabs. As soon as Google detects the unsubscribe links that you will inevitably have if you use a service like Mailchimp, then your email will end up in the Promotions or Updates tabs, otherwise known as Gmail Siberia. Your contacts rarely go there!

Use G Merge to send emails straight from your Gmail account. Your email is detected as a message coming from a real person, so it lands in the Primary tab, exactly where you want to be.

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2. Design it simple. We may live in an increasingly visual world, but when it comes to email, the plain text varieties get the best results. Two reasons why: (1.) Email filters mean that there’s a greater chance that your image-heavy email will land in the spam folder or the Promotions tab. (2.) The recipient sees an image-heavy email and he thinks that it is a piece of marketing. He opens a simple text email and gets the feeling that he is talking to a real person. With G Merge, you can create emails that you save as templates so that you can use them over and over again.

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3. Do your research. Part of what makes Enrico’s emails so effective are the hours he spends doing research on his prospects. Your messages have to make your contact feel like this is a real conversation. For that to happen, it is essential to have the correct information about the person you are writing to. Get his name and his position right, cite news about his work or his company, then make the job of putting all these details into your emails easy by using G Merge’s dynamic fields.

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4. Don’t be shy. Follow up! No, it isn’t being annoying, it shows the person you are reaching out to that you are passionate about what you want to do. And it gets results. G Merge will track your emails, so you know when they have been opened. That means that it’s time to send a follow-up email.

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team-imgWizy.io’s customer success director Apol Massebieau has been a newspaper journalist, magazine editor, TV show host/producer, essay and fiction writer, and toy designer. She was an early adopter of Etsy and continues being fascinated by how small businesses thrive online.

Apol MassebieauHow to write emails that get great response rates
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How G Merge gets higher response rates with personalized letters for Magnum Capital Partners

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From the 100 to 200 business letters he sends out to prospects weekly, Enrico Magnani of Canada’s Magnum Capital Partners should expect an average of just one or two​ meaningful exchanges. That’s what studies done on search funds say. Fortunately, Enrico discovered G Merge early on, and he is getting better response rates. He says, “We feel that your tool is helping out a lot.”

Enrico and Patricia Riopel, his wife and business partner, are in the second phase of the search fund process. Enrico explains, “It is entrepreneurship through acquisition. We are two entrepreneurs looking to buy a business that we will operate and grow.” Having successfully raised capital, they have been looking for this enterprise since September of 2015. This is said to be the hardest part of the search. “It is difficult to find a person with a business of the right type, of the right size, and who wants to sell,” Says Enrico,

They regularly go through the painstaking steps of putting together a spreadsheet with a list of businesses, contact details for each one, as well as relevant information unique to the business and its owner. From this is sent their 100 to 200 weekly letters.

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Sample spreadsheet

That is a lot of work, and much of it can go unnoticed. “There are lots of statistics on what we do,” says Enrico, “and they say that you will have a conversation with a business owner who wants to sell and has a business that fits the criteria with only ​two percent of all the people that you solicit.”

To make his life easier, Enrico uses G Merge to get the details listed in the spreadsheet linked to a letter template.

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Sample template

The add-on then lets him create letters unique to each business owner in just a few minutes. The email is sent directly through the application, and he even gets tracking.

Because the letters are personalized and make it clear that the communication is coming from two real people, not a business machine, Enrico says, “We see that we have a higher response rate than average. We have gotten feedback saying, ‘I really like your letter and your approach.’”

We created G Merge so that our users can stay relevant in their communication while saving a huge amount of time.

Available in the G Suite Marketplace, you can start using it now. Enjoy a free 50 document merges a day or get the unlimited plan for only $4/month.

team-imgWizy.io’s customer success director Apol Massebieau has been a newspaper journalist, magazine editor, TV show host/producer, essay and fiction writer, and toy designer. She was an early adopter of Etsy and continues being fascinated by how small businesses thrive online.

Apol MassebieauHow G Merge gets higher response rates with personalized letters for Magnum Capital Partners
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How wizy.io makes issuing receipts faster and easier with Google Sheets – Robert Ransley, The Anglo House Academy

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Robert Ransley is the founder of The Anglo House Academy, in Extremadura, Spain. An English-language learning center that employs modern education methods such as Project Based Learning and Flip It, the academy has a broad client base, ranging from schoolchildren interested in a second language to professionals relocating to the UK and needing to improve their English.

Business is thriving. “I’ve lived in this area for almost 20 years so I’m well-known,” says Robert. “Once word got out that I was opening an academy, word of mouth took over.”

Organizational efficiency is important for any entrepreneur, and Robert knew that one area that needed improvement was how The Anglo House issued receipts. In the beginning, they would do it the old-fashioned way. “I’d write them out by hand,” he says.

He started keeping their clients’ data in Google Sheets and, looking for a productivity tool, he went into the Add-ons marketplace, where he discovered G Merge from wizy.io. The add-on has two parts, Document Merge and Mail Merge.

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Document Merge takes data entered into a spreadsheet, enters it into a document or spreadsheet template, and from these it automatically creates a document or a PDF file. This is how The Anglo House issues their receipts now. Robert uses the add-on regularly. “Especially at the beginning of the month,” he adds.

He says that he has not seen the need to try other solutions since discovering Data Merge. “This one is quite user-friendly and does everything I need it to do.”

“I keep my clients by delivering quality,” says the language coach. With Data Merge making sure that administrative tasks are handled better, Robert can now devote more of his energies to delivering the academy’s core service of providing English education to non-native speakers. “I go a lot faster with Data Merge,” he says. “It helps me save a lot of time.”

You can try G Merge by clicking here.

Apol MassebieauHow wizy.io makes issuing receipts faster and easier with Google Sheets – Robert Ransley, The Anglo House Academy
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