Most people agree that if you’re trying to sell a product or an idea, raise capital or make any kind of business case, you need to communicate effectively & succinctly. Most often, to avoid wordy emails that tax people’s attention, PowerPoint slide decks are prepared & sent to prospects. But what’s often even more important, you need to personalize your pitch & send your slides to the right people. This is where ‘Slides’ by Vocus.io can be an advantage.
Slides can be thought of as a mail merge for PowerPoint or Google Slide templates. You generate a personalized slide deck for each lead in an Excel or Google sheet (previous export to a CSV file), capturing your pitch in a specific, personalized manner for each prospect. That way you give the impression that you care & that you’ve taken the time to adapt your presentation to each person’s particular needs.
Slides is a new addition to Vocus.io, a Chrome extension that aims to bring marketers a competitive advantage when using Gmail as a mail marketing platform.
Among other features it lets you:
- Accurately track email opens & link clicks
- Find people’s email addresses from their names
- Automate ‘gentle reminder’ followups
- Schedule your emails to be sent at the correct time
- Intelligently launch mail merge campaigns
- Integrations with CRM platforms like Salesforce
- Support for templates, polls, snooze…
To use Slides you 1st create a spreadsheet, which you’ll need to export to CSV format, making each column header a variable name that you then use within your template.
Then take your PPTX slide deck & insert variables in any text box that you wish to be replaced with corresponding values from the CSV file, which must be enclosed within double brackets. Finally, you upload the 2 files to the Vocus.io site & you’ll get a customized slide deck for each record in your CSV file.
Vocus.io is a Seattle, WA-USA-based company & offers a free 30 day trial of their main product, which you can get from their main product Site here. If you want to keep using the product after the trial, the cost is US $4.99/month. To try out just the slides component, you need to go to the slides page here, & upload your files. The CSV file is limited to a maximum of 20 records & the PPTX file can be 2 MB, max.
Image Credit: Vocus.io
•Share This•
