Evan Carmichael skips dedicated CRM software entirely, using Gmail with Rapportive, AWeber for newsletters, and a quarterly Excel spreadsheet of key contacts instead. He sends occasional personalized outreach like fake press releases, betting that great content attracts business without systematic follow-up.
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So I got a question on Facebook recently from one of my followers, Andrew Leong, who wrote in to say, hi Evan, I follow your videos, I love them. I'm just wondering what you use or recommend for an email platform, CRM, and email marketing, and asked if I could do a video on it. Uh, so you just won't learn this stuff in school or university. I'm hooked. Well, thank you Andrew, welcome aboard to the channel. So in this video, I wanted to quickly show you the tools that I use and hopefully you can learn from it. So for our email point of view, I I use Gmail. I love Gmail. I was on Outlook for the longest time and I left Outlook because at the time my Outlook file was just too big with the attachments. It took too long to load Outlook and it was slowing down my computer so much that it became a big hassle. And I like the convenience of Gmail, being able to log in from my home, from the office, when I'm away, easy to get access to everything. I think Outlook now you can get online and all that, but I haven't used Outlook for so many years and I'm so comfortable with Gmail that This is what I like. So one thing I'll do is I'll email myself these videos, so that's why you see the message again here twice. But one of my favorite tools, if you guys are using Gmail, is to get a tool called Rapportive. And if I click on— let me click on Bailey. If I click on somebody's face, their email, what will happen is it will show me their information here. So if I get an email from Bailey, now I know Bailey well, but if I didn't, I could see who she is, I could see how I can find her. I can find her Twitter or LinkedIn if we're connected or not, what her Google+ page is, recent emails and all that. So a really convenient tool to keep track of, of who's sending you emails that I really like within Gmail. So it's called Reportive. It's a free plugin and you can go check it out. For email newsletters, I use AWeber. This is my AWeber page. I've been on AWeber for years. Like it. Pretty simple, pretty easy to use. There's a lot of solutions out there. One of my favorite things with AWeber is it'll tell you for emails that go out, what the spam score is on it. So if you're creating an email blast and it's going out to your audience, it'll tell you what might cause people not to receive the emails, which is great because you don't want, you know, all that hard work you do in creating your list and in creating the content to just have it stuck in somebody's spam folder. So that was one of my favorite features. I think a lot of them have it though. I don't know that there's that much difference between the email clients. But this is the one that I use. And then for CRM, this is probably my most drastic one of all. I don't do CRM. I don't follow up with people, so I don't need a CRM system. It may be a radical approach, but I believe more in spending my time on creating amazing content for my audience and being seen as the expert in my field. And if I do that enough, then I get tons of deals and people come to me. And so I've landed huge deals with major corporations, from banks and telcos and software and technology companies, and I've never reached out to them, and I don't do any follow-up. So I don't need a fancy CRM program to help me. Instead, I just focus my time on creating amazing stuff that my audience cares about, and as a result, get tons of business coming to me. So it's a better use of my time The only thing that I do do is I've created a list of people who I once a quarter try to do something special for. So I have personal, TDS is a business that I've invested in, business would be more of my team, and then clients from the past quarter, and I've kind of blocked those out just for the purpose of this video. But basically what I'll try to do is once a quarter find something fun to do for them Just as a way to stay in touch and say thank you, recently I hired a guy on Fiverr to create these fake news press releases saying that— I might pick GT here who's on my team, manages my forums— and say GT has won the Forum Administrator of the Year and he beat out millions of people worldwide and the celebrity judge panel of Jay-Z and President Obama all agreed that he was the hands-down candidate. So just like a fun, fun video or fun message, not, not following up on any kind of business opportunities. And I'll do that with people in my life, and then the two businesses I've invested in, my own and Toronto Dance Salsa, and then my top clients. So I just keep this list, a pretty simple Excel list that I'll look at once a quarter and send off something fun to. That's the only, only way that I keep in touch with my key contacts because the rest of it is producing amazing content that drives traffic and drives customers to my business. So thanks for the great question. Hopefully I answered it. And Andrew, if you have any more questions, everybody else watching it, you know, please give it a thumbs up below. Let me know what you think. Leave a comment, ask a question, click on my face, subscribe to the channel, and I'll see you guys soon. Thank you so much for watching.
