&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.

Simplifying Marketing Automation With &Marketing And SharpSpring

Simplifying Marketing Automation With &Marketing And SharpSpring

by | Apr 30, 2019 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Insights

Simplifying Marketing Automation With &Marketing And SharpSpring

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SharpSpring’s marketing automation platform has changed the dynamic in which businesses can interact with consumers, through a variety of automated marketing strategies. With a diverse set of tools, SharpSpring enables business owners to track, build, and maintain customer relationships through one platform. Still, nearly half of all companies do not use marketing automation, and are missing the opportunity to nurture leads into conversions.

&Marketing has partnered with SharpSpring to make marketing automation easier than ever.  In this marketing automation guide, &Marketing and SharpSpring identify key automated marketing functionalities that can be used within the SharpSpring platform. After reading, you will understand:

  • Tips to improve your lead generation and nurturing campaigns.

  • Key marketing automation terms and definitions

  • SharpSpring functionality and how you can utilize

  • What automated marketing tools may be critical to your business.

 

DOWNLOAD MY MARKETING AUTOMATION GUIDE

Looking for additional tips on marketing automation? We can help. &Marketing combines the power of strategy and execution to help deliver engaging content and share information with an online audience.

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.

The Most Important Thing to Demand from Your Marketing Agency

The Most Important Thing to Demand from Your Marketing Agency

by | Mar 5, 2019 | Business & Marketing Strategy, Insights

The Most Important Thing to Demand from Your Marketing Agency

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Businesses tend to see digital and online marketing like magic. They want to hire wizards to make it work, and seldom ask the right questions or get involved in the process. The thinking seems to come down to “Am I getting leads?” If yes, good, if not, then they look for a better wizard. This cycle has left the marketing industry largely unaccountable, with all the activity happening behind a curtain that businesses owners can’t see.

While this may feel like it is just part of the nature of digital marketing, it isn’t. There is no good reason for your marketing agency to keep you in the dark, and staying in the dark is the biggest mistake you can make for your business. Digital marketing has the capability to be the most transparent, and least “magical” form of marketing ever. Here is what to ask for to make sure you see behind the curtain and own your own data regardless of which agency you use.

Get access and ownership of all your accounts.

Google, Bing, Facebook, Instagram, and all major online services that sell ads also allow for multiple users. You have a right and responsibility as a business owner to have administrative access to any ad accounts an agency manages for you. Do not believe any excuses like “we have a proprietary ad platform” or “we run our clients under our own account.” If you hear this, your agency is lying to you.

The best thing to do is set up a Gmail account like yournamemarketing@gmail.com, and use that to share with agencies and marketing professionals to set up on all your ad accounts. Even if they “have their own account” they can add that Gmail account as an admin user to all your ad campaigns. This means that if and when you change agencies and marketing professionals, all your accounts and history comes with you.

Own your own hosting account and domain.

NEVER let a marketing agency sell you website hosting “through” them. With few exceptions, agencies don’t actually have any hosting they run themselves. They white-label hosting solutions like WPEngine, HostGator, SiteGround, etc. There is no valid reason that they can’t build and manage a site for you on a hosting account you own directly.

After helping businesses with websites for two decades now, I am still shocked at how many of them fall for this. Having your marketing agency own your hosting means they have you by the balls in a dispute. Always sign up for your own hosting account, buy your domain name yourself, and then share access to it with marketing professionals you work with.

Own your own analytics.

All marketing agencies produce reports for their clients, but these reports come from data you should have access to. The purpose of a marketing report should be to help make data understandable but not to hide it from you. Even if you think you will never look at it, make sure you are an owner or admin user on all your analytics.

Some marketing companies do have their own analytics platform, this is the one place they might be telling the truth. But there are lots of free analytic platforms, like Google Analytics, that they can also set up on your website and online marketing campaigns. Even if they have their own platform, make sure you have Google Analytics, or another third-party platform, installed that you have ownership over. Doing this means you own your data and can check to see if they are giving you bad data.

Fire bad agencies.

If you get anything but enthusiastic cooperation in asking for these things, fire your agency. If they won’t work with you on owning your own data and having transparency, something is fishy in their business. Many well-meaning agencies simply don’t think to make sure you have access to everything, but bad agencies will fight against you or refuse to give you access.

I’ve been in this industry for a while, and have had to help clients fight to take back ownership of their data way too often. Everyone needs to know this is the best way to ensure the marketing professionals you work with have your best interests in mind.

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.

Email Marketing: Are You Asking Yourself These Questions?

Email Marketing: Are You Asking Yourself These Questions?

by | Feb 28, 2019 | Insights, Marketing Planning & Execution

Email Marketing: Are You Asking Yourself These Questions?

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For some odd reason, many Marketers tend to frown on email marketing. Sure, it’s not as glitzy as some of the other tactics available to the modern day marketer, but what may shock some, email marketing is (still) the most effective tool a Marketer can use.  The issue is, many people don’t know how to use it correctly. When done correctly, email marketing yields an amazing ROI and helps build a long-lasting customer relationships.

Today’s marketers are continuing to utilize and convert customers through email marketing, while keeping the cost of their marketing budget low. Even further, great marketers are segmenting their audience and targeting high value leads, by measuring results of previous emails and using analytics to back marketing decisions.  Check out some statistics below:

  • Did you know that for every $1 spent, email marketing generates $44 in ROI. – Campaign Monitor

  • Email marketing works 40 times better at getting customers than Facebook and Twitter, and compared to social media, it offers a 17% higher conversion – Entrepreneur

  • 95 percent of people who sign up for a newsletter from a recognized brand consider the email useful – Entrepreneur

  • Emails effortlessly nurture leads. A nurtured lead increases sales 20% more than a cold lead. At 33% less cost than other lead-generating mechanisms,  emails generate 50 percent more sales – Entrepreneur

Despite these overwhelmingly positive stats, companies today still have a lack of regard or respect for the people that opted in to be communicated with them. So how can we utilize this tactic in a way that respects your target audience? &Marketing challenges you to ask yourself these questions.

Who is My Audience?

If you’re sending someone who is seeking information about your services (top funnel), case studies or a meet request (bottom funnel), you could be alienating that person. How does the prospect interact with your emails? What content did they download? What is their behavior or experience with you? Has your sales team already reached out to them and identified their place within the funnel? From a B2C perspective, do you know what particular products or services each member of your audience is interested in? Do they want coupons or promotions or do they want they want to see new products or services that you are offering? Do the proper research on your list and audience, segment it out, and create the appropriate messages for each them.

What’s My Goal?

Every email should have a desired goal. Whether it’s an e-promo or a newsletter, a well designed email should have a clear message which will lead users to accomplish that goal. Don’t email just to email or think that because you send a goalless email you are increasing “brand awareness.” If email marketing is in service to a larger goal, then make sure each email has mini goals designed to help you achieve the larger goal. Once you have the goal, it’s easy to make design and content decisions, and then measure the success of the campaign to see where you can improve.

How do I Measure Effectiveness?

Your email service provider (ESP) has important reporting capabilities, and can help you determine who opened the email and what content they engaged with. Reports from your ESP are great at identifying what users actually acted on, though it doesn’t cover everything you should be measuring. This is where Google Analytics comes into the equation. First, create a campaign tagged URL with Google’s Campaign URL Builder. This will tag all the links in your email so that Google Analytics will be able to associate all traffic from that email, to that campaign. Then you’ll be able to see how at a higher level how your audience interacted with your web site when they got there from your email. Through combined ESP and Google Analytics, you will have sufficient data to gather insights and prepare your next campaign.

What Did I Learn from this Campaign? 

Review and evaluate the metrics – Understand what your statistics mean and benchmark them against previous campaigns. Create a comprehensive dashboard that gives you all the pertinent information you need to make the best decisions about your email marketing strategy going forward. Common email analytics include open rate, click-through rate, and conversion rate. On Google Analytics, common analytics for landing pages are: bounce rate, average time on site, and bounce rate.  You can even measure the amount of sales an email generates if you have an eCommerce component to your site.

Am I Following Up?

Email marketing is only as good as the follow up plan you have in place for each campaign. Make sure you create a strategy for each audience type, every link that’s clicked, every person that opens/doesn’t open your email, etc. Remember if they’ve given you permission to talk with them, they are interested in you on some level. Email marketing is great way to determine who is a qualified lead and who needs more nurturing and you can tailor your campaigns to each of those segments.

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.

&Marketing to Present at “Growing Your Business in Chester County” Seminar

&Marketing to Present at “Growing Your Business in Chester County” Seminar

by | Oct 15, 2018 | Events, Marketing Planning & Execution

&Marketing to Present at “Growing Your Business in Chester County” Seminar

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Rajat Kapur, &Marketing’s Managing Director, will be presenting at the first-ever “Growing Your Business in Chester County” Seminar. Raj will be partnering up with Ken Knickerbocker of VISTA Today on Thursday, Nov. 1st from 8AM to 1PM at the Chester County Economic Development Council’s Conference Center to speak about sales & marketing strategy and execution for business leaders in Chester County.

The session, sponsored by First Resource Bank, is tailored specifically for small and medium-sized business owners, along with their sales and marketing leaders, and will focus on essential marketing and sales tips, tools, and hacks to successfully identify, contact, nurture, and secure more business in Chester County.

For $99, attendees will learn modern, best-in-class marketing principles and practical sales resources focused on Chester County, as well as gain:

  • an awareness of the culture, tools, and resources available to grow your business

  • an overview of the latest marketing trends designed to grow your business and empower your sales teams

  • a customized workbook of tools, tips, contacts, and hacks to help you grow your business in Chester County

  • access to the exclusive ‘Grow Chester County’ Facebook group to continue networking after the session and share exclusive content and updates

  • an opportunity to network with other Chester County-based business development and sales professionals

  • a Q&A discussion panel with local business development leaders

  • access to a one-hour, one-on-one consulting session focused on developing a personalized Chester County marketing and sales plan

In order to provide everyone with the most time and opportunity possible to focus on finding and improving Chester County connections, a continental breakfast and boxed lunch is included with each ticket.

Ken Knickerbocker is the publisher of VISTA Today and founder of American Community Journals, a network of county business journals publishing curated and original stories about each county’s commercial, community, and cultural scene. He currently lives in western Chester County.

As the Managing Director of &Marketing, Rajat “Raj” Kapur strives to provide small, medium, and mid-market businesses unparalleled marketing strategy and execution services. His team of professionals can either “augment” an existing team or “outsource” the marketing function for a client. Raj brings nearly two decades of professional experience in marketing, sales, and strategy development experience spanning B2B and B2C Fortune 50, mid-sized, and small companies.

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.