Full Width [alt+shift+f] Shortcuts [alt+shift+k]
Sign Up [alt+shift+s] Log In [alt+shift+l]
17
You’ve seen the same boilerplate emails come into your inbox which you immediately archive for being wrong, out-of-date, or simply forgetting the merge tag (F you people that leave $FNAME). When it came to my first time sending out a batch email, it was only to a dozen or so people about booking user research time. However, I had a major sticking point thinking I was sending out a spammy email. Luckily I had met the team behind Streak and knew the power of mail merge to make something a little more individual and helpful. We’re going to continue using my real life example email, a sponsorship request for Hack Design. Here’s the actual email template I sent out: Hey there $FNAME, Wanted to reach out about $COMPANY becoming a Hack Design partner. Since 2012, we've helped hundreds of thousands take their first steps in learning design. We're looking to partner with a handful of companies in order to offset server costs and support producing new lessons in 2018. Partnership perks: *...
over a year ago

Improve your reading experience

Logged in users get linked directly to articles resulting in a better reading experience. Please login for free, it takes less than 1 minute.

More from Alex Baldwin

Artisanal outbound with Clearbit Connect

For press releases, advertiser requests, or similar sales campaigns you’re sending a small batch of, usually cold, emails out with a specific ask. Finding potential recipients, writing an email that’s helpful, and tracking the results doesn’t need to take all day or be painful. I’ve watched my fellow product people struggle with the pitfalls of outbound; spend all day trying to find emails, copy and pasting boring boilerplate copy, and then never following up. By stringing together Clearbit Connect, Google Sheets, and Streak, you can knock out these outbound projects super quickly, personalize them, and track progress through a funnel. I’ll walk you through exactly how it works using my most recent campaign, a sponsorship request for Hack Design. Researching for the right audience First up, you’re looking for the most likely people to be interested. For a press launch, that may be who frequently cover products in that space. In our example, Hack Design’s sponsor list, I was quickly able to look at who else was sponsoring comparable websites. For me, that meant researching the advertisers on Offscreen, Sidebar, Dribbble, recent design conferences and podcasts. It’s super simple to save your research and move on to finding the right people at those companies. Add companies to your list Start a Google Sheet with the column name Company. Research the companies most relevant to your outbound campaign. Great places to look are Angel List, Product Hunt, job boards (to see who is hiring in a space), Crunchbase, etc. Anywhere that let’s your group and filter through relevant companies. Add the company name to your list. Finding anyone’s email in seconds Now that you have a list of potential companies, let’s find the emails for the best people to talk to there. For my Hack Design list, I was lucky and had about a dozen sponsors from previous years. However, since we haven’t accepted sponsorship in over a year, a lot of my contacts at those companies were out of date. This process made it trivial to find the new people in those roles and be able to reach out. Get the right contacts from Clearbit Connect Add the column names Email and Full Name to your Google Sheet. Install Clearbit Connect if you haven’t already. This is the secret sauce that will allow you to find anyone’s email, for free. Connect does have a limit but for small batches, you shouldn’t have any problems. Disclosure: I’m a small-time investor in Clearbit. In Gmail, hit the Clearbit button in the top nav and then press Find email. Yep, it’s really that easy. You must start with the company and then narrow down by name or title. Copy and paste that into your Google Sheet. More coming soon Next up we’ll write our email and learn how to quickly customize every single one of them. This article is part one of a three part series, released weekly. Subscribe to get access first.

over a year ago 18 votes
One line of CSS to add hanging quotes

The hanging-punctuation property aims at giving web web designers a finer grained control over typography on the web. The idea behind hanging punctuation is to put some punctuation characters from start (or to a lesser extend at the end) of text elements “outside” of the box in order to preserve the reading flow. blockquote p { hanging-punctuation: first; } Since it only applies to quote marks, you can avoid single purpose classes and trust that your quotes will hang everywhere. Chrome hasn’t yet implemented the hanging-punctuation property, but it works perfectly in Safari. Typeset.js is an HTML pre-processor that adds a lot more functionality and will allow you to get cross browser compatibility.

over a year ago 17 votes
Taco Week

Live every week like it’s Taco Week. Last year’s articles are now up on Medium.

over a year ago 16 votes
Rave Robot

Full-screen gif mayhem. Worked on this one day last year with CH Albach in order to show it off for a Halloween party. Since the domain is expiring, I’d prefer it live on in the lab. It was truly ahead of it’s time, but now Cochlea and Giphy GJ have surpassed it’s meager feature list. Let me know if you have any feature requests.

over a year ago 19 votes

More in design

All in One by Antonia Skaraki

A nourishing and convenient meal solution designed for today’s health-conscious, eco-aware consumers. Two freeze-dried velouté soups—Lentils & Vegetables and White...

3 days ago 5 votes
A case for slow growth

Weekly curated resources for designers — thinkers and makers.

6 days ago 10 votes
Morokanella Fermented in Concrete Egg by Marios Karystios

Makarounas Vineyards Unveils Exclusive Release of Morokanella Fermented in a Concrete Egg. Makarounas Winery presents its latest limited release—an exceptional...

a week ago 7 votes
Developing Digital Disgust

Our world treats information like it’s always good. More data, more content, more inputs — we want it all without thinking twice. To say that the last twenty-five years of culture have centered around info-maximalism wouldn’t be an exaggeration. I hope we’re coming to the end of that phase. More than ever before, it feels like we have to — that we just can’t go on like this. But the solution cannot come from within; it won’t be a better tool or even better information to get us out of this mess. It will be us, feeling and acting differently. Think about this comparison: Information is to wisdom what pornography is to real intimacy. I’m not here to moralize, so I compare to pornography with all the necessary trepidation. Without judgement, it’s my observation that pornography depicts physical connection while creating emotional distance. I think information is like that. There’s a difference between information and wisdom that hinges on volume. More information promises to show us more of reality, but too much of it can easily hide the truth. Information can be pornography — a simulation that, when consumed without limits, can weaken our ability to experience the real thing. When we feel overwhelmed by information — anxious and unable to process what we’ve already taken in — we’re realizing that “more” doesn’t help us find truth. But because we have also established information as a fundamental good in our society, failure to keep up with it, make sense of it, and even profit from it feels like a personal moral failure. There is only one way out of that. We don’t need another filter. We need a different emotional response to information. We should not only question why our accepted spectrum of emotional response to information — in the general sense — is mostly limited to the space between curiosity and desire, but actively develop a capacity for disgust when it becomes too much. And it has become too much. Some people may say that we just need better information skills and tools, not less information. But this misses how fundamentally our minds need space and time to turn information into understanding. When every moment is filled with new inputs, we can’t fully absorb, process, and reflect upon what we’ve consumed. Reflection, not consumptions, creates wisdom. Reflection requires quiet, isolation, and inactivity. Some people say that while technology has expanded over the last twenty-five years, culture hasn’t. If they needed a good defense for that idea, well, I think this is it: A world without idleness is a truly world without creativity. I’m using loaded moral language here for a purpose — to illustrate an imbalance in our information-saturated culture. Idleness is a pejorative these days, though it needn’t be. We don’t refer to compulsive information consumption as gluttony, though we should. And if attention is our most precious resource — as an information-driven economy would imply — why isn’t its commercial exploitation condemned as avarice? As I ask these questions I’m really looking for where individuals like you and me have leverage. If our attention is our currency, then leverage will come with the capacity to not pay it. To not look, to not listen, to not react, to not share. And as has always been true of us human beings, actions are feelings echoed outside the body. We must learn not just to withhold our attention but to feel disgust at ceaseless claims to it.

a week ago 15 votes
Root Labs by BRIGADE

Challenge Develop strong brand foundations for an international supplement company with a proven product to help them take the US...

a week ago 34 votes