It's an amazing experience when you realize your CRM already has everything logged and pushes useful info to your inbox, where you're already working. They just added followup mail merges which is ideal for cold outreach that founders do all the time for sales, hiring or fundraising.
@garrytan Completely agree. I've been spreading the news of Streak to everyone who's willing to listen. We already live inside of our emails, might as well place our CRM there as well.
Founders must check out Streak CRM for managing your fundraising pipeline right in your Gmail.
Thanks for shipping this new feature - love it.
Good luck Aleem & team!!
Thanks for the hunt @garrytan and π hi there PH!
Super excited to be back on here to share what we're launching today. Today we're launching literally the most requested feature we've ever had: mail merge with automatic follow-up sequences.
Streak mail merge lets you send a personalized email to a list of recipients to help with outreach, customer education or hiring. What we're launching today lets you:
β¨ Send automatic followups β automatically sends followups with recipients who didn't reply. You can specify the delay in any time unit but we recommend business days so that your followups skip sending on holidays and weekends.
π Have personal looking outreach β each message is sent from your account and you can customize it with variables from a CSV file you upload or any Streak pipelines you have
β οΈ Skip the faux pas β alerts you when you're about to email someone who you or your team have already emailed with
π Optimize for response rates β built in email tracking, scheduling, A/B testing, and message previews lets you finely tune your mail merges
π Do everything inside Gmail β you compose your mail merges using standard Gmail compose windows, all the messages show up in your sent folder, all your mail merges and stats are in Gmail and you can easily see which threads and contacts were part of a mail merge.
A little on backstory on why we built this new product: for the longest time automated sequences has been a #1 feature request of Streak users. We always hesitated to build it because we figured there were specialized tools that could do it better and that users should use those in conjunction with Streak. Two things changed our mind and made us build it ourselves:
1. Most of the sequence products out there kind of sucked for small agile teams β they were (rightfully for them) built for fortune 500 companies and had a pretty awful UX for both the sender AND recipient. I tried all the products out there and literally could not send an email with any of them within the first 30 minutes of using it
2. We realized that we were asking too much of users when we told them to integrate Streak with some of these other tools. It's not just trying to send an email with another tool and then use Streak to track the conversation when they reply. Users wanted a deeper automation (like changing the stage in the CRM when a recipient replied) and asking them to piece that together with Zapier or our API was just too painful.
We also developed this product a little differently than usual. We knew this would be a big undertaking but we wanted to nail the experience on our first launch. We started with some basic customer interviews asking about the problems customers were facing and how this product might help their business. Then we showed them a high fidelity Figma prototype of the product to see if it would really solve their problem. Understanding their business problem AND seeing if the product solved their need in the same session made a super tight feedback loop. Between each interview we'd iterate on our high fidelity mocks. We knew to stop with the interviews as soon as we got "hey, can I use this right now?!?!?" type feedback in our sessions.
Then we started building: https://twitter.com/aloo/status/....
We've had huge death march product releases in the past and we wanted to avoid that. So we set a goal of having something that at least 1 user (me) could use in 6 weeks. It was barely functional, but again, we built a fast iteration loop. We'd add users to the beta, see what was missing and most important to them then built it out in 3 weeks. We just kept doing that over and over β add users, respond to feedback. Deciding what to work on next was so easy, the feedback was overwhelmingly obvious. This kept our momentum and morale high - every time we launched something we had users use it right away.
We're launching now because the product is just so π₯. It's a leap beyond our previous mail merge functionality, it's more stable and we have the guard rails in place to make sure users don't exceed Gmail's tricky quota limitations.
We hope you find Streak Mail merge useful, and we're happy to answer any questions about the product and how we built it.
@garrytan@aleem_mawani2 Salam Aleem! I'm such a huge fan of Streak, been using it for a long time, really happy with the new update. This new feature really hits the spot. Question: any chance you'll include more than one user in one of your plans? Instead of getting 5 paid accounts, we currently just use one, but if there was a plan that included 5 paid accounts that was less costly than buying 5 individual accounts, we would switch to that.
@avidnote we have a pretty generous free tier for our mail merge product and a cheaper paid plan if you're looking to be able to send more message, check out our pricing page here: www.streak.com/pricing
Love the Streak and have been using it mainly for tracking my emails so far.
I have used many MailMerge tools and got curious about yours as well.
I do have a question about email getting stuck in Spam filters. I mean 1)getting a spam tag by Google and 2) messages getting stuck in Spam filters of a receiver.
How does Streak minimise these risks? Does it send MailMerge emails every so many seconds.. or all at once? I'm talking about MailMerges up to 50x addresses each, not more.
Would love to hear what @aleem_mawani2 has to say about it.
Thanks a lot,
Alex
With spending so much time in gmail it really has simplified my business. It allows me to work from one location, keep organized, keep me on point financially and most important stay in contact with my prospects, clients and vendors.
Love using Streak :) The new update solves outstanding issues in current workflows. Yay! One question, it looks like you also removed some features. Eg, currently missing the option to split messages from a mail merge once the CSV import is complete to customize individual email bodies. Any chance that will come back? Or have I just missed it in the workflow? Thank you in advance!
Streak was the first CRM I ever used and now it's my favourite.
I started using Streak to manage sponsorships for university clubs a few years ago and boy they've come a long way.
Now I'm using it to manage sales pipelines/affiliate outreach and the latest update blew me away. It's like they solved every issue I had with the previous version and the auto follow-ups are just awesome.