Another great example is Contactually. At its core, Contactually is a relationship management platform for salespeople and service providers in relationship-based businesses. The combination of two killer features – an address book that updates itself and a very smart system for so-called "follow-up reminders" – allows Contactually users to stay top of mind with all of their important contacts, which can have a huge positive impact on their business.
One really really nice thing which Contactually does for us is that it continuously adds subscribers to our (in)famous newsletter – almost automatically. Here's how it works.
1) By scanning my email accounts, the software automatically adds all new people who I'm exchanging a message with as contacts. You only have to connect your email accounts once, Contactually does the rest.
2) Every two weeks or so I put the new contacts into one of my "buckets":
This takes just one click per contact (and you can also do it from your mobile).
3) Then the magic starts. If I've added a contact to a bucket which is set to be synchronized with MailChimp, the contact will be pushed to our newsletter subscription list in MailChimp.
Here's how the bucket settings look like for these buckets:
If I don't want want to add the contact to our newsletter I just use a different bucket, one which is not set up for synchronization with MailChimp.
4) As soon as the new contact is pushed to MailChimp, the contact receives this email:
This is done using MailChimp's auto-responder feature:
That's it!
When we started this experiment we were of course wondering if it's too aggressive to automatically subscribe people to our newsletter. We came to the conclusion that it's OK if we're selective (i.e. only add people who we think are interested in news from us), have a fun confirmation email (see above) and have a one-click unsubscribe link. So far, we didn't receive a single complaint and very few people have unsubscribed, so it looks like it's working.
