ClearSlide is a partner of the Salesman Podcast and I rely on them to track every one of my emails.
For sales reps, tracking who, what, where and when your emails are opened should be a no brainer.
There is zero friction to leveraging the technology once you have signed up to and installed a plugin from a service like ClearSlide and the data it gives you is invaluable.
How many times have you asked yourself one of the following questions –
“I wonder if I should call them now or wait a few days to make sure they’ve read the literature I sent?”
“How can I tell if the prospect is in the office, at home or on the toilet when they’re messaging me? Is now a good time to engage?”
“It’s been a month. How do I know if they were interested in the first place?”
Then email tracking is for you.
I use email tracking data to achieve the following (even when one of you guys gets in touch) –
Prompt follow ups
When you know when a prospect has opened your email, it gives you the green light to follow up with them.
They wouldn’t have opened it multiple times in the past hour if they weren’t interested in what you had to say right?
Polite reminders
Similarly when you know your prospect has opened your emails, clicked the literature you shared with them and then forwarded your email to other people within the company but never replied, you know it’s fine to re-engage.
Something else has grabbed their attention and you need to grab it back.
The alternative is you send over the details and have no clue if they’re interested or not.
Infact you might even shoot yourself in the foot by trying to reconnect with a price discount or some other way of grabbing their attention when all they needed was “hello”.
Manage sales pipeline
Using the DATA I pull from ClearSlide I add accuracy to my sales pipeline.
It’s a boring process but each week I measure the levels of engagement of my prospects and update the probability of closing the deals in my CRM.
Generally there is an initial spate of email opens, it tapers off and then when they’re ready to close the deal I can see the analytics ignite!
In that final stage I know I can start to push harder to close the deal.
Know where it was opened
Last month I was trying to close a deal with one of the world’s leading CRM companies. The CEO himself told me he was ready to move forward and so I got excited.
I started allocating where my commissions where going to go in my mind –
- A new hoop spoiler for the RX8
- A Blendtec or Vitamix blender
- All my Christmas presents sorted for my family
Then he went quiet. Not a word for 2 weeks.
Was I worried? Nope.
I could clearly see that the physical location of where he had opened previous emails in San Francisco (where his offices were based) had now shifted to a beach in Florida.
He was on his holidays!
I called his office, told them he was ready to close the deal before he left and ended up wrapping up the details and sending our invoice to the VP of marketing.
Deal closed.
Level of engagement
Whilst knowing that your content is being read is great, the big leverage point comes when you know what information is being read and when.
You can use email tracking services to work out if potential buyers are reading your literature or your invoice.
Your introduction email or your closing pitch.
Your “please… please reply email” or the ‘How To Order’ document that you’d forgotten you’d sent them.
This DATA allows you to send context specific emails which are powerful at driving the next action.
Which additionally it allows you too…
Interrupt and close when they are smoking hot
All of the above points lead to this moment.
You know the prospect is engaged, you know they’ve read everything you’ve sent then, you know they’re in the office, you know they’ve read over your invoice 12x times this morning.
You can be 100% confident that they are smoking hot and ready to buy.
You can make that final call. The only one that matters.
The one that you close the deal and ask when they will be paying the invoice as you “want to get their products shipped before the end of the month”.
That is why email tracking is so powerful and that is why if you’re a sales hustler you’re crazy if you’re not doing it.
BONUS: How to avoid having your emails tracked
All tracking services work the same way and most corporates use them (even if they’re not sharing the DATA with their sales teams?!).
They work by showing a tiny, tiny image, 1 pixel across in your email.
It’s so small that you don’t even notice it, but it notices you.
The image is hosted at a location outside of your email browser and when you open the email and access the image the external service can track where, when and how the image is being accessed.
Honestly, it doesn’t bother me. Google, the company you work for and other third parties are all tracking your emails anyway. If it gives a salesperson the opportunity to better service me than I’ll happily take a small intrusion of my privacy.
However if you would like to top individuals tracking when you open emails, the process is super simple –
Do not click the “display images below” (Outlook asks something similar) and there is no way you can be tracked.
This particular email is some random spam that was sent to my work email address but this will work for all incoming mail.
