&Marketing Now Offers Managed Email Signatures For Google GSuite

&Marketing Now Offers Managed Email Signatures For Google GSuite

by | Jun 25, 2019 | Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

&Marketing Now Offers Managed Email Signatures For Google GSuite

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&Marketing is excited to announce that we are now offering managed email signatures for our partners who use Google GSuite (Gmail) for their organization’s email.

Why Do You Need Managed Email Signatures?  

The average office worker sends 40 emails and receives 90 emails per day. Maximizing these regular touch points can help you:

  • Inform contacts about your company and your brand

  • Generate traffic to your website

  • Notify your contacts about company news and updates

  • Build trust

  • Generate referrals and leads

In a nutshell, managed email signatures mean that all the email signatures for your team are designed, set, and managed in one place. They all look the same and act as a consistent part of your brand that clients and friends see on a daily basis. Over time, we have learned through our experiences with client analytics that email signatures are often the biggest driver of traffic to blog posts and other quality pieces of content marketing.

Aside from brand consistency across your organization, managed email provides the ability to update all signatures with new content (text, links, or images) without having each person update their own every time. This provides a more streamlined process for providing your contacts with a constant flow of fresh information just from your email signature alone.  

How Managed Email Signatures work:

1. We create a signature template to match your organization’s branding and content strategy.

2. We provide a shared Google Spreadsheet where you can input all your organization’s contacts and information to share with our team.

3. We push the signatures straight into Gmail so they show up automatically for everyone in your organization.

How to Use Email Signatures to Power Your Marketing

A well executed content strategy is a powerful vehicle for showing your customers and audience that you are a thought leader within your industry. Consistent and compelling content will also keep them engaged with your brand. The challenge in our media-saturated world is getting good content noticed. An up-to-date callout in your email signature is an effective way to call attention to your latest articles, videos, ebooks, and other important information.

Here are some ideas for making the most of the platform available with your email signature:

  • Social – Show off your latest blog article

  • Events – Highlight your next upcoming webinar or seminar

  • Sales Support – Have your sales team signatures link to next steps or FAQs for potential customers

  • Donations – Link to the donate page for nonprofit organizations

  • Promotions – Call out your latest promotion or limited time offer

  • Holidays – Connect with your customers with holiday-focused content updated for each season

  • Reviews – Ask your customers to leave a review on Google Local, Facebook, or Yelp

Your Next Steps

While other companies offer something similar to a SaaS (software-as-a-service) solution, we found the cost too prohibitive for our clients. Rates were surging as high as $100/month per person. We want our clients to be able to leverage this effective marketing tactic without breaking the bank, so we created our own.

As more organizations rely on &Marketing to help them keep their content fresh and engaging, we will be using this new service as another way to help your business to keep your audience coming back for more. Whether you are already an &Marketing client or would like to sample our services for the first time, talk to us about getting updated, well-designed, and consistent email marketing for your organization.

&Marketing is offering limited-time pricing while we work to build and continually improve this service. For now, email management is only for available those with less than 100 users who use G-Suite for their email service. Keep an eye on our updates for this to change as we grow and expand, and contact us if you’re interested in learning more about how managed email services can transform the way your organization communicates!

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.

Sorry Not Sorry: Qualifiers And Apologetic Work Culture

Sorry Not Sorry: Qualifiers And Apologetic Work Culture

by | Jun 14, 2019 | Insights, Storytelling & Branding

Sorry Not Sorry: Qualifiers And Apologetic Work Culture

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Over a decade ago, I was writing a letter to someone and signed it “All my best.” When I asked someone to read what I wrote they asked me if I really wished this person the best. I most certainly did not wish this gentleman “All my best.” In fact, I did not wish him even a small portion of my best. Ever since then, I have tried to pay attention to how I start or close an email. ‘

Fast forward ten years. Recently, I was updating our Managing Director, Rajat Kapur, on the current status of each of my projects. I told him that I would call someone I needed to follow up with and say, “I am just checking in on that proposed plan we sent you.” Raj stopped me to ask, “ Why ”just”?” I hadn’t even thought about it, really. But yeah, why ”just”?  Why am I “just” calling this man, for whom our company works, to get an answer? No, not “just.” Give me a damn answer, Mr. CEO. 😉

As a result of this conversation, Raj and I started talking about different qualifiers we hear.

“Actually, you’re right.”  

Are you surprised I’m right?

“Can I be honest with you, I do not think that’s a good idea.”

Have you not been honest this whole time?

“I’m sorry but I hate that.”

Why are you sorry if you hate that?

When I say to someone, “I’m JUST checking in on that proposed plan we sent you” it diminishes what I’m doing and makes it seem less important. I’m not just doing anything. I’m doing my job.

Sorry, I’m Not Sorry.

Now that this is front of mind, I’m hyper-aware of these speech qualifiers people use. I find myself listening to the way men and women speak. I noticed that sometimes I catch myself apologizing to someone when I don’t understand something,  or when I need their help. “I’m sorry, but I need help.” Why am I sorry? Am I sorry? I am not sorry, dammit. I don’t hear men using qualifiers as much as women, though it does happen. I also hear men apologize a whole hell of a lot less than women. My unfounded, unscientific hypothesis is that women are taught to be nice more than men are.  

During a recent project kick-off call with a small team, I took their silence in response to something I said as a lack of buy-in or confusion. I noticed I kept saying, “Does that make sense?”  I read the absence of affirmation as the presence of misunderstanding. Since then, I’ve promised myself not to keep taking silence as a chance to ask that question. We’re all adults, and the onus is on each person to speak up if they disagree or don’t understand. From now on, silence will be a source of affirmation rather than consternation for me.

The Just Not Sorry app, which is a Gmail plug-in with over 35k subscribers, underlines words in an email that might undermine the message you’re trying to send. The app explains itself like this: We’re Just NOT Sorry! Let’s build awareness of how we qualify our message and diminish our voice. Inspired by the writings of Tara Mohr and others, this Chrome Extension for Gmail and Inbox will warn you when you use words or phrases that undermine your message. Commonly used qualifying words and phrases are underlined for you to choose how you want to address them. Hover over the underline to see additional information about how using the phrase is perceived.

It looks like this:

How Managed Email Signatures work:

1. We create a signature template to match your organization’s branding and content strategy.

 

In her article “3 Communication Mistakes with Big Impact”, Tara Mohr calls these statements, “shrinkers.”  She writes, “‘Notice how “just” shrinks or qualifies what comes next? Notice how “actually” makes the speaker sound like she’s surprised that she has a question?” In other words, qualifiers dilute the message and water down your communication, diminishing its impact. Who wants to do that? Not me.

I am trying to pay attention to the way I say things when I talk to colleagues and clients. This adjustment is showing me that the way you say something can impact how people interpret and react to what you say. For now, I hope they interpret me as someone who does not need to qualify what she says. And for that folks, I’m #sorrynotsorry.

About the Author

Marketing Director Tracey Colla focuses on ensuring each client’s needs are being met in a timely, productive, and creative way. She is a well-rounded marketer, with a talent for identifying opportunity, product strategy and positioning, go-to-market strategies and launches.

About &Marketing

In today’s fast paced world, many growing businesses are struggling to modernize their marketing approaches because either they don’t have the expertise or the bandwidth to do it themselves.

&Marketing provides seasoned marketing strategy professionals and a nimble execution team to help our clients achieve their goals. Our unique partnership model allows us to augment our client’s existing teams or outsource the entire marketing function in an affordable, flexible, and transparent way.