You want to keep business opportunities warm.

For your sales and client success teams, pursuing opportunities is nearly synonymous to Gmail follow ups. Since conversations with leads and clients tend to be via email, you’ll want to keep email threads alive.

“It takes 6 to 8 touches to generate a viable sales lead.”
- Salesforce

Fortunately, Gmail now includes scheduling and snooze. Having said that, I won’t be surprised if Google decides to turn off these features (just like Inbox by Gmail, Google+, Wave, Allo, and other killed Google products).

Today, we’ll go through tools used by professionals to prevent opportunities from falling through the cracks.

There are apps that allow you to schedule ‘if no reply’ email sequences. These can serve as reminders or send emails later whenever necessary. These automations allow you to keep track of conversations and even take action on your behalf.

We handpicked and compared your best options for automated Gmail follow ups, reminders, and “send later” extensions for Gmail:

1. Vocus.io - all-in-one solution for sales & client success email communications
2. Boomerang for Gmail - schedule sending and email reminders
3. Followup.cc - lightweight email followups
4. Gmelius - shared inbox, collaboration, and automation sequences for Gmail
5. Rebump.cc - email followups made easy
6. FollowupThen - simple email reminders
7. Auto Follow Up for Gmail by cloudHQ - Send Automated Follow Up Emails with Mail Merge from Gmail
8. Right Inbox - increase email productivity with scheduling and more
   

Vocus.io - all-in-one solution for sales & client success email communications

Overview

The product comes with a suite of tools for sales and client success teams:

• Automatic Follow-ups (if no reply) - one-on-one automated Gmail follow ups sent to your non-responsive recipients.
• Mail Merge Campaigns with Automatic Follow-ups - send bulk emails and schedule 'if no reply' follow-ups for the entire contact lists!
• Send Later/Scheduling - schedule your emails to be sent at the best time to win your recipient's attention.
• Accurate Email Tracking - track link clicks or email opens between multiple recipients.
• Templates with placeholders for follow-ups - Be efficient with handling repetitive tasks. Just hit few keystrokes and your email is good to go!
• Team Billing & Dashboards - create teams, centralize your billing, and share reports with your team.
• Salesforce Integration - Native support for Salesforce
• Auto-BCC - integrate your preferred CRM provider using the smart BCC address.
• And much more!

Pricing

Subscriptions start at $5 per user, which includes the features you would need for email follow-ups.

The Starter plan at $10 support sending bulk mails. The Professional plan for $20 per user includes Basic and Starter features plus other advanced features for your team.

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Boomerang for Gmail - schedule sending and email reminders

Overview

Boomerang allows you to create Gmail follow up message as you're writing the original email. You can then set a schedule when to send a followup email after no response.

Boomerang’s Gmail follow up reminders allow you to attach a note to the message as you schedule it. You can manage your emails and bring event details back to your inbox when you're ready for them.

Respondable is a neat feature that shows a meter within the composed email. The meter reflects how likely you'll get a response based on factors such as subject length, word count, and reading level.

It lacks native Salesforce Integration but you can set it up as they have an auto-BCC feature as well.

Pricing Plans

Boomerang has 4 tiers - Basic, Personal, Pro, Premium.

The Basic plan is free, coming with the barebones that work as your Gmail follow up reminder tool.

The Personal plan is $4.99. It includes the Basic Plan features plus an extra feature of adding notes in your messages.

The Pro Plan costs $14.99 while the Premium Plan starts at $49.99 per month. The Premium Plan is ideal for sales and client success professionals as it comes with the more advanced features like CRM integration.

All new Boomerang accounts come with a Free 30-day Trial of Boomerang Professional. If you don't subscribe after the free trial, your plan will convert automatically to Basic Plan.

Followup.cc - lightweight email followups

You can set up your emails using a sequence that will be sent if the original email doesn't get a response in 1-10 days.  Pre-filled default templates are available but they don’t have templates with placeholders for Gmail follow ups.

If you want to know how to delay sending an email in Gmail with this add-on, you can use their Send Later feature.

Send later lets you schedule emails to be sent at a later date and time of your choosing. The email will be stored in your drafts folder until it is sent. If you plan to edit the content for any reason, you will need to reschedule it as well.

When an email is opened, you can receive desktop notifications or within your inbox.

They have a native Salesforce integration and also allows you to connect via Zapier.

Pricing Plans

They offer two types of plans: Followup for Email, Followup Personal CRM

FollowUp for Email is a productivity suite that keeps your conversations and tasks.

The monthly plans are Starter $23/month, Professional $36/month, Salesforce Edition ($50/month). Note that the $23/month plan doesn’t cover auto-followups.

Followup Personal CRM allows you to have centralized contacts in Gmail.

The monthly plans are Free, Professional ($23/month), Executive ($36 but now comes with a limited offer of $9/month)

Gmelius - shared inbox, collaboration, and automation sequences for Gmail

Like Vocus.io, their Chrome Extension gives you the Snooze and Follow-up features. Both are similar Gmail follow up reminders where it brings back email conversations to your inbox at a date and time of your choosing.

The snooze feature is for your incoming emails. The follow-up feature is for your outgoing emails.

One of their advanced features that other Gmail follow up reminders tools lack is template variables. It works like Vocus.io's snippets.

Send Later considers time zones into account to improve the likelihood of the emails to get read.

The email tracking uses per recipient tracking to give individual metrics on a list of contacts, including those in CC and BCC. Team activity reports give you an in-depth view of individual metrics.

The Kanban board could be good for team project management.

Gmelius lacks native Salesforce Integration but you can set up auto-BCC.

Pricing Plans

Gmelius offers 3 plans which you can be billed monthly or annually.

A Free plan which is ideal for small teams, the Plus Plan which is $12/user per month, and Growth Plan $24/user per month which is great for growing companies.

Rebump.cc - email followups made easy

With this Gmail add-on, you can only send up a maximum of 10 followups per message. You can use a non-Gmail/Google Apps address with Rebump but you will need to sign up with a Gmail or Google Apps address first. You can also rebump your email using your mobile.

It lacks the main features of its competitors. You can only Rebump emails with a single recipient and you can't integrate any CRM.

Any email sent to multiple recipients via the TO or CC fields will not be rebumped. A reply from the main recipient or the BCC recipient will be considered a reply and will stop the bumps.

Pricing Plans

Unlike other Gmail follow up reminder tools, Rebump.cc offers two-tier plans - Unlimited and Unlimited Plus.

Unlimited Plan is $5 per month but doesn't have email tracking. The Unlimited Plus is $12 per month which includes email tracking, personalized bumps, and sequences.

FollowupThen - simple email reminders

FollowupThen is a flexible email address that can be used with any email system on any device.

To use it, you send an email to a predetermined address. FollowupThen will respond with a reminder, at the time you've determined. For example, you want to be reminded to email back in 10 minutes, you forward the email to 10minute@followupthen.com.

You can get SMS reminders for tasks, or alerts for a no-reply on an urgent email. It doesn't allow email tracking but offers a response detection followup.

While this app works great in following up tasks, you can't integrate it with Salesforce or any other CRMs.

Pricing Plans

FollowupThen offers monthly and yearly plans per user.

Free Plan users have limited usage of followups and tasks. The Personal plan at $2 per month includes attachments and calendar integration. While the Professional Plan at $5 per month is ideal for small teams. The Company Plan which is priced at $9 per month is ideal for growing companies as all the advanced features such as SMS reminders are available.

Auto Follow Up for Gmail by cloudHQ - Send Automated Follow Up Emails with Mail Merge from Gmail

Gmail Auto Follow Up by cloudHQ is a sales engagement product from cloudHQ's family of Gmail tools.

The suite includes mail merge, follow up templates, email tracking, and related features.

Unfortunately, its integrations are limited to Auto-BCC. It lacks native integration with Salesforce or advanced customizations with Webhooks or Zapier.

Pricing Plans

Gmail Auto Follow Up by cloudHQ comes in two formats: its premium $14.99 tier and a free plan.

The free tier adds their branding to every email you add and is limited to 200 emails per month.

Right Inbox - increase email productivity with scheduling and more

Right Inbox is known for Gmail follow up reminders, Send Later, Recurring Emails, and similar features.

It also allows you to format emails with Signature Templates and the ability to embed GIFs.

Interestingly, while this app comes with a variety of templates, they lack team collaboration features. For instance, their Notes and Templates cannot be shared with your colleagues so you will have to do that manually.

Pricing Plans

RightInbox has multiple pricing variations. It changes based on yearly vs. monthly periods or solo vs.  team pricing. It can go as low as $4.95 if paid annually for teams and as high as $7.95 if paid monthly for an individual.

On the other hand, there is a free plan. However, professionals might find the limits to be too constrained, serving mostly as an "extended free trial".

Over to You

Now that we’ve gone through your options, I hope that this informed your team’s purchasing decision.

Professionals tend to look for products that give them an edge, far beyond generic tools from Google.

The best Gmail extensions offer the following:

• Automated Gmail follow up (via 'if no reply' detection)
• Gmail follow up reminders and scheduling
• Email engagement tracking
• Team collaboration features (e.g. shared followup templates)
• CRM integration
• And much more

Vocus.io is built for professionals, giving you an advantage over other Gmail users.

Compared to other sales-focused products, it comes with a better price tag, more advanced features (e.g. follow-up templates & placeholders), and delivers a more elegant user experience.

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