Link Building e-Mails
I've got a full time team working on link development, but I feel as though they aren't properly optimizing their workflows, especially with e-mailing. I'm curious if anyone has some tips on how to improve what we are doing....
Background:
I've fully optimized the procedure for finding link candidates. I've created a set of tools that give very high throughput on finding candidate web pages. Once we have the websites and a contact list though, things start to break down... Some reasons...
1) We are using a gmail shared account that sends out e-mails through a corporate server. We are using yesware to track open rates. There is no automation...
2) We are using a Google Spreadsheet to track interactions. <- I think this is a big problem. The spreadsheet is getting huge and I have a hard time getting my workers to keep the status up-to-date to prevent spamming promising candidates with useless follow up e-mails.
3) It takes a large amount of time to prepare the first contact e-mail, as we are putting a personal touch on the e-mails to make it less spammy.
4) Follow-up e-mails take a long, long time to send out <--- This is an issue, if you have 1,000+ follow up e-mails, you have to check spreadsheet status, craft an addendum to your previous e-mail, etc. It is very inefficient....
5) Our success rate is currently 1.5%... Is this low?
I'm thinking there should be a set of tools that takes care of most of the above work flow for us? What do you all use? I need to get a higher throughput on e-mails while still retaining the quality of the e-mails.
Background:
I've fully optimized the procedure for finding link candidates. I've created a set of tools that give very high throughput on finding candidate web pages. Once we have the websites and a contact list though, things start to break down... Some reasons...
1) We are using a gmail shared account that sends out e-mails through a corporate server. We are using yesware to track open rates. There is no automation...
2) We are using a Google Spreadsheet to track interactions. <- I think this is a big problem. The spreadsheet is getting huge and I have a hard time getting my workers to keep the status up-to-date to prevent spamming promising candidates with useless follow up e-mails.
3) It takes a large amount of time to prepare the first contact e-mail, as we are putting a personal touch on the e-mails to make it less spammy.
4) Follow-up e-mails take a long, long time to send out <--- This is an issue, if you have 1,000+ follow up e-mails, you have to check spreadsheet status, craft an addendum to your previous e-mail, etc. It is very inefficient....
5) Our success rate is currently 1.5%... Is this low?
I'm thinking there should be a set of tools that takes care of most of the above work flow for us? What do you all use? I need to get a higher throughput on e-mails while still retaining the quality of the e-mails.