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Back on July 31 of this year I wrote a post on this application that was … less than complimentary. As a matter of fact, the only positive thing that I had to say about etacts, other than “it might hold promise if they ever get it working”, was that “it wasn’t even stable” (smile). Well, in all fairness, I have deleted that post from this site and I am starting fresh because ….. etacts has a whole new back end and it is certainly an application worthy of your attention! It’s even stable! LOL
Etacts competes with Gmail add-ons like Rapportive and Gist which are both excellent products in their own rights. It belongs in the family of applications that brings a little bit of social networks and CRM to your Gmail account. It does have some unique features not found on either of it’s two main competitors. Let’s look at a couple of screenshots …
To your far right we find the etacts “social badge” and this will display in the body of an opened email and includes links to social networks and contact work history (via LinkedIn). It will not display if no social networks are identified and etacts finds these networks on it’s own. On the near right you will see the main etacts display as it would appear on your right sidebar of an opened email. Sorry about the image quality on these screen shots but, see the “Stay In touch” button? Etacts allows you to set a recall schedule (quarterly, weekly, monthly, etc.), or one based on a certain # of days, and will remind you if you have not stayed in touch with this individual. Sweet! Below that you will see your recent email conversations. Think of what Xobni does for Outlook in terms of collecting your emails for this specific contact. In doing so, once again, etacts brings another needed feature to Gmail. Recent Tweets are also shown and there is a even a section to create individual notes. Finally, some statistical information is included.
Etacts does not stop there. This same information will be displayed within an email that you are composing just by double clicking on the email address in the “To” field. Etacts also allows you to set a reminder on this email whereby if you have not received a reply within a certain number of days etacts will email you a notification. Notifications that are generated where you have not kept in touch with certain contacts based on your set schedule will also include a listing of new contacts that you have recently added and ask you if you would like to set a schedule for those.
I have to say that I am very impressed by the strides etacts has made in improving both their product and their stability. There is no software to load but you do establish a web account and it does provide you with a dashboard which you can use to review your contacts and establish call back schedules. This dashboard also lets you see contact groupings via tags, recently added contacts, and a number of other pre-defined group selections. Etacts will operate as an extension for Chrome or as an add-on for FireFox.
Thanks for visiting!
Craig
Related articles
- Etacts Builds What I Want (avc.com)
- Analytics for Email (marketing.fm)
- 4 Counterintuitive Stories From Rapportive’s Seed Funding (gigaom.com)
- All Hail The Gmail (gigaom.com)
- Killer App for Gmail Gets Backing from Calacanis and Others (readwriteweb.com)
- Gist Gets $4 Million and the Catalyst is the Cloud (readwriteweb.com)
Craig M. Jamieson is a lifelong B2B salesperson, manager, owner, and a networking enthusiast. NetWorks! Boise Valley is a business to business networking organization for the most serious sales and marketing professionals only.
