For most companies, having a large network of contacts is extremely important to expand and grow. Gaining new contacts allows you to pursue prospective clients and opportunities for your company. But it is not always easy to reach out to new contacts. Sometimes emails go missing, some emails were recorded incorrectly or your email list is out-of-date. It can be difficult to keep track of which contacts have responded to your most recent email when you are reaching out to 100 possible contacts simultaneously, and you can lose track of how many emails have been sent to specific contacts.
Here are 7 free tools that can help organize your networking and keep your communications consistent.
- Emails4corporation.com – Emails4corporation.com allows you to look up multiple info points on a specific company. Let’s say you wanted to contact Jane Doe, the marketing director at Coca-Cola. Emails4corporation allows you to find the company by searching their industry type and location. Emails4Corporation then provides you with a list including the Company Name, HQ Metro Area, HQ State, Email Convention, Email Domain, Name, Notes, and Main Phone Number, making it easy to get in touch with Jane Doe.
- Rapportive – Rapportive is a free add-on for gmail that works for web browsers like Firefox, Safari, and Chrome (not Internet Explorer). When you type an email address into a new message, Rapportive opens up a sidebar that gives you the LinkedIn information of that contact. It allows you to go to their LinkedIn profile and provides a list of other social media sites that person is connected to. Rapportive is a great tool to find the validity of emails when reaching out to new contacts.
- Mailtester.com – Mailtester is good option if your organization does not want to run an Email Change of Address (ECOA). Mailtester.com allows a user to quickly test the validity of an email address, but it has some limitations. Some servers don’t allow email verification, and will be highlighted in yellow. While this is a great source for last minute testing, it should not be used as a long-term solution to email validity testing.
- Boomerang – Boomerang, like Rapportive, is a free add-on for Gmail and allows you to schedule your emails to be sent at a later date, be sent out on a cycle, or to send the email back to you if you don’t get a response after a certain period of time which acts as a reminder to follow up.
- Followup – Speaking of following up, Followup is another add-on for Gmail that allows you to have an email sent back to you at any time or date you choose. You type into the CC or BC area of the email 2dfollowup.cc if you want it sent back to you in 2 days, or 3mo for three months. Some people prefer this to Boomerang’s follow up function as it allows you to say when exactly you want an email sent back to you.
- Taskforce – Taskforce is a Gmail tool as well, which allows you to turn your emails into tasks. Let’s say you get an email from a co-worker asking you to do a large project by a certain date. When you click on that email, you can turn it into a task with a due date and a title.
- Cardmunch – Cardmunch is App on iOS or android that allows you take pictures of business cards and automatically create contacts on your apple device. It also locates that contact on LinkedIn so you can connect via social media. It’s faster than having to manually input contact information into your phone and allows you to upload that contact info onto the “iCloud,” making it accessible from anywhere.