One of the reasons we built BuzzStream was to make it easier to conduct outreach that’s highly relevant and personalized, but to do it at scale. The Outreach Module is a big part of this, and we’ve made a number of recent improvements to it.
Send Emails Directly through Your Account
BuzzStream now connects to your email account in the exact same way you’d connect with a smartphone, Microsoft Outlook or any other mail client. This means that any emails you send from BuzzStream are coming directly from the email account you’ve connected with. By connecting this way, you don’t have to worry about deliverability problems caused by others who are connected to the same server. Additionally, the “sent from” information in the email will match your account.
To connect BuzzStream to your email account, just click on Settings:
Select “Connect to Email:”
And select your email provider:
For gmail and google apps, BuzzStream uses OAuth to connect to your account with one click. For other providers, just put in your email credentials and BuzzStream will take care of the rest. If you need help, check out the help documentation or email us (support@buzzstream.com).
Improved Support for Team-Based Outreach
If you’re conducting team-based outreach, there might be times where multiple people are reaching out from the same email address. BuzzStream supports this by letting you connect to an email account and mark it as a shared account. When you send emails from the Outreach Module, they’ll come from this email address, but within BuzzStream, you’ll be able to track who actually sent the email. This is valuable for any future outreach efforts, since you’ll know who sent emails to the contact and how they responded.
To set this up, look for the “who can send from this account” option when you’re connecting to the email account and select “everyone.”
“Do Not Contact” List
One of the things that’s unique about BuzzStream is that it’s built to serve as a central repository for all of your link building and PR relationships and it gives you a way to apply them to specific campaigns. To better support this, we’ve added the ability to mark a domain or an email address with a “Do Not Contact” flag.
Once you mark an email address or domain as “Do Not Contact,” any time someone tries to add a contact with the same domain or email address, they’ll be notified that it’s flagged. Additionally, contact information in the List View is replaced with the “Do Not Contact Notification” and the ‘Send’ button in the Outreach Module is disabled.
To mark a contact as “Do Not Contact,” simply click the link in the ‘Contact Information’ section of the record:
Once you’ve clicked this, select whether you want to block the contact by his/her contact information or by the domain.
Usability Improvements and Bug Fixes
In addition to the Outreach enhancements, we’ve squashed some bugs for you and implemented a number of usability enhancements:
- Contact info for a person is shown on all associated Media Outlets and Link Partners (and vice versa)
- When you set up BuzzStream, the account owner can now set the date format for the account…something our European customers will appreciate.
To set this up, just go to ‘Settings’, select ‘My Info’, and scroll to ‘Other Settings’
- Fixed a bug that was preventing Numeric Custom Fields from sorting correctly
- You can now edit contacts when you’re in your master database (i.e., All Contacts)
- Results from Link Prospecting searches are now retrieved much faster (typically within minutes)
- Addressed performance issues that were preventing metrics from being collected in a timely manner
- Added support for semi-colons as a delimiter for Imports
- On the ‘Links’ page, we’ve added an icon next to the ‘Linking From’ field that will open the link in another tab.
- Fixed a bug that was preventing custom field values added through the Buzzmarker from being saved.
- Fixed a bug that prevented people from changing ‘Editing’ permissions when creating/modifying Roles.
- Links from URL shortening services are now excluded from auto-discovery
