Tout lets you send out targeted emails with analytics

Using email as a promotional tool is tricky. Yes, there are great tools, a la MailChimp, for sending out emails in bulk and managing huge campaigns. What if you have just a handful of emails to send out every day, though? "Personalized bulk mail," if you will?

Tout is a service created to exactly this end. It's very simple (too simple, perhaps). It lets you set up a bunch of templates and quickly shoot a template to someone else.

So far, it's nothing you couldn't do with Gmail's Canned Responses feature. What makes it interesting are the "analytics" features; these are only available on the paid version which costs a very steep $30 per month. Still, if you do decide to pay, you'll get to see whether or not a particular person read your email, whether they clicked a link from that email, and also compute aggregate stats per template.

While the service seems kind of interesting, my biggest beef with it is the price tag. Come on ... $30 per month? That's completely out of proportion for a cute email application, even if it does integrate with 37signals' Highrise.

You can see the demo video for the service after the jump.

Tags: bulkmail, business, email, mailchimp, marketing