4 Sites That Save Me 364 Hours/yr and Increase Sales! See How I Did it by Simplifying My Inbox and Contacts!
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Below are products and services that I use in my daily life that have improved my productivity and saved me an incredible amount of time. I picked these after testing numerous similar services and have found these to be the best solutions. If you are like me, you have contacts stored in multiple locations such as; LinkedIn, your smartphone, email accounts & more. Keeping up with all of these contacts in so many locations can be difficult. From duplicates to contacts with outdated or incomplete information, below are several services that can fix these issues, while saving you huge amounts of time! I cannot imagine how I survived email before I implemented these services!
Unroll.me has been a lifesaver for my inbox! After years of using the same email address I had untold numbers of emails flooding my inbox every day, from outright spam that had slipped past the filters to things that I may have signed up for 10 years ago which are no longer relevant to my current life. Unroll.me allows you to connect to your email account through their site in a very simple process. Once you have signed up and connected your account it will do a full scan of your email account for subscriptions and spam. You will be shocked when you realize how many subscriptions you have accrued over time. When I ran the service on my email account it quickly found 743 subscriptions that I no longer needed and allowed me to unsubscribe from them with a few mouse clicks! Imagine the amount of time you can save by decluttering your inbox with this service. Go ahead and signup and see how many subscriptions you have that you did not realize were taking up space in your inbox every week. This will be the single best thing you do all day. This service also has a feature to allow you to add subscriptions to “Your Rollup,” which will combine groups of emails (newsletters, etc) into one large email that can be scanned through periodically at your convenience. I currently do not use this feature as I use one of the following services that offers a similar feature. Before using any of the services below, I highly recommend sweeping your inbox with unroll.me first to remove the first level of clutter from your email.
SaneBox is what you might imagine Gmail Filters are supposed to do. It has detailed algorithms that scan your emails as they arrive and determines their content type and places them in the corresponding folder. Even after using unroll.me to reduce your email subscriptions, you will still have a lot of emails that will arrive in your inbox and clutter your truly important personal and business emails. SaneBox removes this clutter with folders such as SaneArchive, SaneNews, and SaneBulk. SaneArchive is great for things like emailed receipts, order confirmations and other emails that you don’t necessary need to read now but need to file away for future reference. SaneNews filters out emails I may want to read later but don’t need to be filling up my inbox and distracting me from important client emails. SaneBulk will collect all mass distributed emails I may or may not want to read through at a later time. If you are like me, you will find out that you don’t miss anything important and rarely will ever read any of the messages that are stored in this folder. The amount of time saved by using SaneBox cannot be stressed enough. I tell everyone I know who has email overload about this service and the amount of time it saves me. It will be the best $7 you spend all month. If you aren’t convinced, start the FREE 14-day trial. After using it for 2 weeks you will wonder how you ever survived without it. I was hooked after the first week when I looked back over the SaneFolders and realized how much time I saved. You can use this promotional link to sign up and save $5 from your first month.
Yesware is particularly useful for anyone handling any type of sales. Yesware offers the ability to track emails that you send and know when or if they are opened. This might sound mundane, but imagine if you could pick up the phone and call a potential client 5 minutes after you see that they have opened your emailed proposal? Not only do you have the peace of mind knowing that your proposal was sent, you also have the ability to follow up with your potential client when you know they are actively considering your product or service. Any sales individual can see the power in this. The free version comes with the ability to only track 100 emails. For most of the other features you need to sign up for the Pro account ($12/month). Another feature that I love about Yesware is the ability to schedule emails to be sent at a specific time. Say you are writing a response to a client on a Sunday afternoon but don’t want to hit send until Monday when you know they are back in the office. With Yesware you can simply select the day and time that you wish for the email to be sent and the email will be scheduled and automatically sent at that time. I cannot overstate how useful this feature is for me. Another great feature is the ability to set reminders when you send an email. Put simply, when you send an email you can set a reminder to notify you to try to follow up with a recipient if they have not responded in a certain amount of time or if the email has not been opened a given period of time. Other features include the ability to know if the recipient has opened an attachment in your email (contracts, etc) and the ability to save client emails to most major CRM’s. Lastly, the iOS app has been great for me. Being on the road so often and in and out of meetings, I might not always be at my computer checking my email. With the Yesware iPhone app I am able to receive notifications whenever someone opens one of the emails I am currently tracking. This allows me to pick up the phone to discuss the email with the recipient in real time. If you want to sign up for the free version, do so using this link and we’ll both get an additional 100 free tracked emails using my referral link.
If you are like I was, you have contacts spread all over the place: contacts in your phone (often filled with duplicates), your Google email account, LinkedIn, Outlook, and maybe an old Excel contact file. What can be so frustrating is not being able to get the full use out of these contacts due to them being spread out and many incomplete. FullContact is the hero I have been searching for. What started out as a search to remove duplicates from my iPhone contacts turned into finding the ultimate personal contact manager! FullContact allows you to connect all of your contact files to their system. It takes all of these sources and combines them while removing duplicates. The end result is a tidy file with all of your contacts from multiple sources placed in one location. Not only that, any new contacts added to any of your connected profiles will be automatically added to the FullContact list. This is great when you get an email from a new person or add someone to your phone. You don’t have to worry about entering them in each location, FullContact does it for you. Another great feature is the ability to take a photo of any new business cards you receive, using your iPhone app and it will automatically added to your FullContact file. This is not one of the many “card scan” apps out there that never gets the business card information correct which results in incomplete or incorrect card entries. Each card you snap a photo of is reviewed and manually entered into your account by a human. I have been using this and the results have been flawless! I have not yet caught one entry error. The free plan comes with 10 free business card entries per month. The Premium plan comes with 50. For anyone fearing they could somehow delete or lose their contacts through this process please know you can have comfort in knowing that your original contact files will remain as they are. Each contact will be pulled from your files and entered into your FullContact file leaving you with your originals. You can also export your FullContact file at anytime by logging into their website. Conclusion I’ll be sharing more useful tips like these in the future and look forward to hearing your success stories. If there are any areas that you are interested in learning more about in upcoming posts please let me know by sending me an email to: sethw@weatherscorp.com or leave a note in the comments below.
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