This app wants to help you understand why people aren't responding to your emails

Boomerang, the app that focuses on email productivity, just launched a new tool for people who struggle with getting people to respond to email.

It's called Respondable, and it gives Boomerang users insight into how likely their emails are to get a response, in real time, as they write.

For basic Respondable subscribers, emails are evaluated on four different areas: the subject line length, the word count, the reading level, and how many questions you include. For Pro or Premium users, the tool will also analyze your emails in terms of your positivity, politeness, and subjectivity.

Respondable

After using the product for about a week, I did learn a bit about my writing (I am often a bit too polite in my emails and I write them at about a 5th grade reading level).

However, there is definitely room for improvement. While Respondable could flag that I was being too polite, it didn't give me any specific suggestions on how to improve. And when evaluating the likelihood of getting a response by analyzing the number of questions in the message, all questions appear to be weighed equally, even though questions like, "Can you talk Monday at 3 p.m.?" would typically more readily receive a response than a question like, "How are you?"

"We definitely have plans for improving a few things," said Alex Moore, CEO and co-founder of Boomerang. "One thing is we want to provide the ability to train machine data to the user's own data and behavior."

The idea for Respondable actually struck after the team began looking into machine learning. From there, they wrote a 2,500-word blog post about what makes a good email and sent it out to their users. The company later decided that it would be better to build this information about respondability into the body of the email.

Respondable will be available to all 45 million Boomerang users on Tuesday morning on Gmail, Outlook and Android.

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