If you work in sales or marketing, you probably shoot off a few hundred emails per week easily. But what happens after you click send? ContactMonkey CEO Scott Pielsticker wanted to find out, so his company built Bridge, a new plugin for Outlook and Chrome that lets you stalk other people’s inboxes by showing you when and on what device the person opened your email. The tool highlights the time and device in orange when you open a sent email. Bridge also keeps track of a conversation thread, so multiple back and forth emails will also show the time and device that was used during each interaction. There is also a real-time activity ticker on the right sidebar of your inbox, which Pielsticker, who has a background in sales, notes is perfect for salespeople who want to know exactly when to follow up with a hot lead. Pielsticker likens this feature to a “stock ticker for email”. Bridge costs $4.99 a month, and comes with a 14-day free trial. Pielsticker used Salesforce, MailChimp, and Constant Contact extensively in the past, but he wanted a simple solution that he could view from his inbox to track his potential leads. Adding an email tracking too like Bridge was a natural progression for the company, because it fits into Pielsticker’s vision of making it easier to interact with business contacts online. ContactMonkey’s first product was an online business card that your contacts can import it into 19 address books, on their computers, their web-based email, and their mobile phones. “When we launched our business card download tool, the response was fantastic. As email inquiries poured in, we started to realize that the act of simple back and forth email communication felt broken, which validated the evolution of our product line,” notes Pielsticker. ContactMonkey is based in Toronto, Canada, and has raised $800,000 in seed funding since the company was founded last year.
