One of the biggest mistakes I made when I went freelance was thinking that I could get clients and keep ‘em coming by simply having a pretty website.
Oh how wrong I was…
I knew about social media, content marketing and even SEO… and it helped.
But only in the long game. There came a point when I needed paid work STAT or I’d be crawling back to the job centre and taking the first role that came my way.
Definitely not part of my grand plan.

Things really only started happening for me when I took a totally different route. It was a scarier route, arguably less fun (unless the introvert equivalent of getting your teeth pulled is fun) and that was… email.
Direct pitches, personalised pitches, and not out-of-the-blue pitches.
Which meant YES I often had to meet people in person and YES I had to ask (and we all know about the problem with asking) and YES it definitely stretched my comfort zone.
But it worked. Within a few weeks I had landed a new client and had made promising connections with a few more, which would pay off in the weeks to come.
Now I’ve got an entire online course all about the art of the pitch (learn more about the Email Answer here) but for a quick win today, I thought I’d share some of the email extensions I use to help manage email campaigns, pitch like a pro and actually get clients.
 

1) GMass

GMass is a powerful mass emailing service that integrates with Gmail account as well as Google apps and Google Drive.
With standard email, you have a daily sending limit – but this tool works around that so you can go nuts if you need. It also avoids spam filters and allows for unlimited personalisation in mass email campaigns.
They’ve added a lot of new features over the last few months, one being the ability to get your email proofread by an English expert. Yep – you can get your pitches proofread by an English expert (not a robot) to correct common spelling and punctuation mistakes as well as give suggestions on how to improve your grammar. This amazing piece of kit has saved me a lot of time, energy, and stress!

2) Boomerang

Sometimes I like to get ahead of myself and pitch a bunch of people on a Saturday afternoon. Yep, I’m cool like that. But I don’t necessarily want to be bugging someone on their weekend – not everyone digs email as much as I do…
So. I Boomerang it. This is one of the features of the Gmail (and Outlook) extension: it lets you schedule your email to be sent in the FUTURE. Yep – time travel for email!
It also lets you schedule emails that you’ve sent to boomerang back to you, say if your recipient hasn’t opened or clicked on anything you sent. So, so useful for remembering to follow up – especially if you have a sieve-like brain like me…

3) Bananatag

Other than the awesome name, Bananatag is a great alternative to Boomerang that works as an email scheduling, tracking, attachment and template tracking tool.
What I like most is it’s click notifications: I can choose to be notified if I want to know when/if my recipients opens the email or clicks on a link. I will say that follow ups are pretty annoying if all they say is ‘Just checking whether you’ve seen this’ when we live in a world where you can know whether someone has seen your email.
With that knowledge, you can write more thoughtful follow ups – more of that in The Email Answer.
 

4) Grammarly

Grammarly is a life-saver for folks like me who are low on the Sensing function and therefore a bit rubbish when it comes to attention to detail. It flags up spelling and grammatical mistakes and integrates nicely with Gmail. No it’s not perfect, but it’s a great option if you can’t get a real person from GMass to check your emails for you.
 

5) Compose

Compose lets you write emails… offline. As in, you can be concentrating and crafting the best email pitch ever – all distraction free from more clutter coming into your inbox. For people who can’t get anything done until they hit inbox zero, this is a great tool for focus and productivity.
 
That’s it I think! If you have any more tools that help creative introverts get clients you can recommend them in the comments below, or put them to use by emailing me: hello[at]thecreativeintrovert[dot]com