BOOMERANG CASE STUDY - TABOOLA

My name is Mike Gifis and I've been with Taboola for a little over 2 years. I work on our media sales team and am focused on establishing new business with brands, agencies, and publishers in North America. I'm also responsible for maintaining relationships and expanding business with existing clients.

Taboola is the world's leading discovery platform, acting as a "search engine in reverse" that helps people discover content, products, brands and services they may like but never knew existed. Our personalized recommendations reach more than 750 million users each month, on hundreds of premium publisher sites across the web, including USA Today, Business Insider, MailOnline and The Atlantic.

Beyond personalized recommendations, Taboola also works with publishers to deliver audience growth and better on-site engagement, from audience exchange architectures to A/B testing solutions.

Since Taboola was founded in 2007, we have seen our reliance on email for sales outreach and customer relationship-building skyrocket. A large part of our communication with our customers takes place over email, and it is imperative that we make it as easy as possible to keep the lines of communication open, as well as demonstrate that we care about each customer individually.

Prior to using Boomerang across our organization, we were not nearly as diligent as we are now. Everyone on our team had their own systems of to-do lists, calendar invites, or relying on their memory to follow up with customers. Unfortunately, it led to inconsistencies in managing our customer relationships since it was so easy to let emails fall through the cracks. Boomerang has helped our team have an easy and consistent way of ensuring that we follow up on emails.

I think a lot about how we can improve our sales team's efficiency in order to help Taboola get even better at delivering solutions to our customers. With Google Apps, we already have a fast and robust platform we can rely on, which has been great for getting Taboola to where it is now. I often find myself looking for tools we can integrate with Google Apps to help make our team succeed and streamline workflows with ease. In Boomerang, we found exactly that.

A few "Taboolars" were familiar with Boomerang for quite some time, but we became loyal users after one of our colleagues pressed hard for the entire team to start using the tools on a regular basis. Since then, we have become dependent upon Boomerang to help manage our incoming and outgoing emails and day-to-day client relationships.

Boomerang makes it easy to communicate politely and follow up diligently with existing and prospective customers, as well as with colleagues. Boomerang's lightweight design doesn't slow down or interfere with the email interface that we're used to, like some other Gmail extensions. It's a simple tool that helps me and my team manage our own time and our customer relationships over email better. I love that when I log into my Google Apps, the Boomerang buttons and features fit nicely into the existing interface, almost as if they were meant to be there all along. Google Apps has been essential for us to communicate as a team both internally and with our customers. With Boomerang's integration, we can now be more effective with all of our email correspondence.

Two of our most-used features from Boomerang are "Send Later" and "Follow-Up Reminders."

Just because we're working, right now, doesn't guarantee that our email recipients are as well. This is especially true in cases where a customer is in a different time zone, or if one of us is working late at night or early in the morning. By scheduling emails to be sent at the right time, we can better craft our message with more relevance, ensuring the email is delivered when that person is most likely to read and respond to it.

We now have over 80 active users across our organization and we're adding more all the time. Boomerang makes it so easy for new users to be added, you simply have to download the extension and then as soon as you log into your email you're already good to go.

Strong relationships play a vital role in helping a sales team succeed and grow. Email can be a challenging platform for relationship-building, but we've found that sending emails at the ideal time and following up in a timely manner when necessary has helped us better accomplish the goal of building strong client relationships.

Using Boomerang's follow up reminders has increased the number of client responses as well. With Boomerang, we always remember to follow up with our clients, who may forget to respond when they're traveling or are especially busy. The way Boomerang seamlessly integrates their reminders into Gmail makes it easy for us to follow up with all of our customers in a timely manner.

This is especially important when reaching out to prospective customers where each interaction has more weight than one with an established customer. If we're emailing someone for the first time, or if we receive a request that will need to be handled later on in the day, Boomerang lets us resurface that exact email to the top of the inbox (at an exact time "from now," or at a set time and date) where it can remain until the task is marked as complete. This feature prevents opportunities from slipping through the cracks, helping us remember when to follow up with people, whether we're waiting on their reply or the other way around.

For our customers, these timely follow ups can seem almost magical - and on our end, it really makes us look like we have our act together.

Boomerang helps ensure that our entire team is following up appropriately and predictably. This process is crucial for managing a growing team; it helps us onboard and get new employees up to speed faster.

The value we get out of Boomerang is huge. Now that we've integrated it into our daily workflows and sales process, I could not imagine our team using email without it.