Our Current Favorite Tool: ChoiceResponse
Photo by albertogp123.
Today we wanted to share a bit about one of our current favorite tools. It’s actually a small app we built ourselves called “ChoiceResponse.” It’s a very simple tool that allows you to send multiple choice emails via a bookmarklet in your browser.
The idea to develop ChoiceResponse emerged as we have become increasingly frustrated with the limits of regular email. In our experience, here’s what happens all too often with regular email:
- You receive an email (in the midst of a dozen other emails).
- You scan it quickly on your phone and it is “marked as read.”
- By the time you’re back at your computer, that single email has been buried in your inbox by the constant influx of other emails over the course of just a few hours.
- The email enters your inbox black hole and is unlikely to surface for a number of hours or days, if ever.
Another thing we’ve noticed about email is that the time it takes someone to respond to an email is directly proportional to the length of the email. That is, the longer the email, the longer it will take the recipient to reply.
So, we got to thinking: how could we fix this? To encourage people to respond to emails, we thought about what would make responding easiest on the recipient.
We’ve realized that most of our emails are asking one main question or trying to gather some information. Furthermore, we generally already know the possible responses to our email. So, why not spell it out for the recipient and allow them to simply “click” on their chosen response?
That’s when we started trying out multiple choice emails and ChoiceResponse was born. With ChoiceResponse, you compose your email and then select the text you’d like to make into multiple choice options. The options are turned into links and the recipient is free to click (or tap, if using a phone) their response. After the click or tap, the recipient is also given the chance to add an additional response if they’d like.
It’s not fancy or complex, but that’s why we like it. Our main goal is to respect our recipients’ time and make it easy for them to respond.
Check out the ChoiceResponse website and feel free to sign up for the beta if you’d like to test it out for yourself!