WSI Blog


This month’s video – Mobile Marketing Tips

How is the increased use of mobile devices going to effect how you market your business on the internet? This video sets out key key elements for you to consider.

August Client Webinar – Mobile Marketing

There are 6.8 billion people on the planet – only 3.5 billion of them use a toothbrush – but 4 billion of them use mobile phones! So says Forbes in “Fifty Essential Mobile Marketing Facts” an article that also tells us that the majority of mobile users access the internet only through their mobile devices. The world is obviously in the grips of a major mobile mania!

In the face of this kind of compelling evidence, it is clear that if you don’t do your mobile marketing right, you may not only lose out a huge chunk of potential customers – you may even cause severe harm to your brand credibility!

To ensure that you are leveraging your mobile marketing efforts in the right direction, WSI invites you to attend a free webinar on “3 Ways to Guarantee Customers Don’t Abandon Your Mobile Site”@ 4 PM (BST) on August 28, 2014. We assure you that this will be 60 minutes well-spent!
“3 ways to guarantee customers don’t leave your mobile site”

Thursday August 28th @ 4 PM – 5:00 PM (BST)

Register Now – Click here

Don’t miss the webinar and mark up the time and date on your calendar!

Go Faster

WSI Digital Marketing Doncaster

How to improve your email efficiency…and a bit about Mobile Marketing

This month is all about speed.  The Peregrine Falcon is the fastest bird on earth with a maximum airspeed of 240 mph. Generally, humans are wanting to go faster each day. We use mobile devices to access information instantly where ever we are.  We can do Social and Emails on the run.  The increase in the use of mobile devices to browse the internet means we need to cater for those users – so the experience is faster and easier still!  Hence this month’s theme, Mobile Marketing. There is plenty of useful information and a great webinar on offer to help you get to grips with Mobile Marketing (ie: marketing to people who are using mobile devices to engage with you.)

I have also been promising to send some tips out on how to improve your email efficiency – so, seeing as it ties in with ‘going faster’ its a double whammy this month :-)

If you filter through the various statistics it seems fair to say that the average business person spends about 25% of their working week on emails – or perhaps they stretch some of this time into their non working week!

We are big Gmail fans and very heavy Gmail users here at WSI.  Here are some tips we all use that definitely speed up processing emails.  To all our clients out there ( Hi :-) ….please make sure you check these out if we have you on Google Apps.

6 Easy to implement tips for Gmail Users

1. Enable Send and Archive in Labs
2. Enable Key Board Short cuts – (the reason for this is not obvious)
3. Consider switching to the ‘Priority Inbox’
4. Enable ‘Reply All’ by default.
5. Create your email Signature
6. Enable ‘Undo Send’ in Labs

To see why and how to do the above get the detail here.

1 Easy to implement tip for Outlook Users

1. Ditch Outlook – I know that sounds drastic if you are an Outlook user but our advice to all our clients is that the Gmail email client is far more productive than Outlook.  There is a whole list of reasons for this and not enough time or space to go through them this month.  Stay tuned for why to ditch Outlook in next months email.

6 ways to improve how you use Gmail

Here are 6 tips to improve your email efficiency with Gmail. For all our clients on Google Apps (that would be everyone if at all possible) but for now its just nearly everyone….here are some things to check in your Gmail settings to make sure you are getting the maximum email speed factor from your Gmail system.

1. Enable Send and Archive in Labs

2. Enable Key Board Short cuts – (the reason for this is not obvious)

3. Consider switching to the ‘Priority Inbox’

4. Enable ‘Reply All’ by default.

5. Create your email Signature

6. Enable ‘Undo Send’ in Labs

Here is the detail on why and how to implement these:

1. Enable ‘Send and Archive’ in Labs

By enabling this setting on your gmail the following button will appear on your email editor:

sendandarchive

When you reply to an email you can either send or ‘SEND AND ARCHIVE’.  Send and archive is much more efficient because it automatically removes the thread from your inbox until one of the recipients replies back to you.  This stops your inbox getting cluttered with emails that you are currently dealing with but where the ‘ball is not on you court’ at the moment.  The Google term ‘Archived’ is different to Outlook.  In Google terms, Archived means the email is still there readily accessible in your mailbox, just not visible on your inbox screen.  You can find it any time by using the Gmail search function which is simple and effective.  In Outlook terms ‘Archived’ means you may well need a certified Microsoft Technician to help you get it back.

To enable ‘Send and Archive’ click ‘settings’ at the top right of your Gmail screen, see here:

settings button

Then hit the ‘Labs’ tab at the top, then scroll down and enable the ‘Send and Archive’ Lab from the list.

2. Enable ‘Keyboard Short cuts’ – (the reason for this is not obvious so read on)

There are a whole bunch of keyboard short cuts that can speed up using Gmail – here is a link to Google’s list of keyboard shortcuts – which is interesting…BUT the best thing about enabling keyboard short cuts is that it causes this little marker to show up against emails you are looking at when you do an search on your mailbox.  See below on the first email….there is a little blue marker at the left edge.

keyboardshortcuts

This marker shows the email I just looked at – so if I do a search, then check an email but its not the one I want, I click back to the search and I can easily see the last one I checked.  This really does make it a lot easier if you are searching for a particular email or content.

To enable keyboard short cuts, click ‘settings’ at the top right of your Gmail screen (as above) and in the ‘General’ tab, click ‘Keyboard Short cuts On’.

3. Consider switching to the ‘Priority Inbox’

The ‘Priority Inbox’ presents your emails in a different way to what your are probably used to.  It splits your inbox into three sections:

First it shows ‘Important and Unread’ emails.  These are emails you have taught Gmail to know are important because you have previously marked a similar email as being important or Gmail has worked it out based on the recipients and senders of that email.  So this is everything you have not checked out yet that you definitely want to deal with first.

The second section is ‘Starred’.  These are all the emails you have read and marked with a star.  All these emails are effectively ones you need to deal with or want to keep in view in your inbox until you archive – or better still, respond to the email and click ‘Send and Archive’ as described above.  So this section is effectively ‘work in progress’ or your ‘to do list’ of emails.

The third section is called ‘Everything Else’ – when you have been using the Priority Inbox for a few weeks you will quickly find this section is full of circulars, junk and not really very important stuff and there’s loads of it!  So, if you want to save lots of time you can just delete it!  You will find there are many emails in this section, which normally, if you are not using the priority inbox are distracting you from the really important emails you need to deal with as a priority.

The Priority Inbox is a great way of saving time dealing with unimportant emails.  To enable it click ‘settings’ at the top right of your Gmail screen (as above) and then click the ‘Inbox’ tab at the top and select ‘Priority Inbox’ from the drop down.

4. Enable ‘Reply All’ by default.

The standard Gmail setting when you reply to an email shows a button on the email you are reading at the top right which is a single ‘Reply’ arrow.  If you want to reply to all recipients you have to click the drop down next to the button and select ‘Reply All’.  We have found that the majority of our email replies are ‘Reply All’ emails so to make the ‘Reply All’ button show as default like this:

Reply All

click ‘settings’ at the top right of your Gmail screen, then click the ‘Labs’ Tab at the top and scroll down to enable the ‘Reply All’ tab.

5. Create your email Signature

You can create a signature to appear at the bottom of all your emails.

If you have already created your email signature you can do it here:

signature

To save time we include the sign off, if it needs changing I can edit it in the email before I send.

To create a signature click ‘settings’ at the top right of your Gmail screen and in the ‘General’ Tab scroll down to ‘Signature’.  Note you can create different signatures for different mailboxes if you have more than one mailbox set up.

6. Enable ‘Undo Send’ in Labs

This is a biggy!  How many times did you hit send and then just remember something else you wanted to say, or something you forgot to attach?  ‘Undo Send’ leaves a message a the top of your screen for a few seconds  – see here:

Undo Send

If you want to ‘bring the email back’ just click on the links and hey presto – your email is back, no damage done, you can edit your email and resend, or start over again!

Email Marketing is amazing but don’t under estimate Linked In…

WSI Digital Marketing Doncaster

There is no doubt that Email Marketing is still one of the most,if not the most, effective online marketing tools available to ANY business, small medium or enormous! It is so effective because email is still the main form of electronic communication, despite the massive increase in popularity of the various social media channels. It is not a one horse race though, we would always recommend using a number of communication methods with the aim of being able to communicate with each member of your audience in their preferred way.

This is where Linked In comes into play, especially for Business to Business communication. A combination of email marketing, Linked In and perhaps Twitter gets most of the bases covered. So now we get to my message for this month…Email Marketing is great, very important and you can learn all about it through the material below, but DO NOT UNDER ESTIMATE LINKED IN and prepare yourself for significant growth in the use of Linked in and the impact that it will have on you as a business person in the future.

I see Linked In as the area of most potential for the majority of our client base in terms of generating leads and gaining a ‘Sales Process Competitive Edge’ and consequently we are engaging in more training, guidance, advice and support on Linked In each month.

If you are a bit hazy on Linked In – maybe signed up but don’t really know what to do next here is a Mind Map which I use as a way to help people get their heads around it – pardon the pun! Hopefully you will find it useful.

 

Last Months Webinar, Tips on creating shareable social media content….Did you miss it?

If you missed last month’s webinar on Creating Shareable Social Media Content here is the recording link so you can catch up any time.

http://bitly.com/RecordingCreateShareableSocialContent

Rather read? We also offer you a download for the executive summary of the webinar so you can always refer to it wherever you may be.

Creating Shareable Social Media Content – Whitepaper 

5 Steps to World Class Email Marketing

Like fashion trends, marketers seem to always be changing their minds about the condition of email marketing. Is it dead? Or is it alive and kicking? The buzz around social media and other “hipper” digital marketing tools have left many brand custodians wondering if email marketing is ineffective and old-fashioned, or if it still works.

As a company whose bread and butter comes from providing cutting edge digital marketing solutions to clients, you’ve got to believe us when we tell you that email marketing is not just alive – but that it’s thriving! Fact is it’s the most effective lead nurturing and management technique   according to most marketing professionals across the globe. The secret is and here is the catch in doing it right!

Attend WSI’s free webinar on “5 Steps to World Class Email Marketing” at 4 PM(BST) on July 24, 2014 to get some “insider secrets” that will help you produce email marketing campaigns that are better than some of the best. We promise you’ll leave with a bucketful of wisdom that you can apply to score a perfect score in your email marketing program!

The session’s free – it is entertaining – and it’ll provide you a valuable insight into how to go about creating compelling social media content.

“5 Steps to World Class Email Marketing”

Thursday July 24th @ 4 PM – 5:00 PM (BST)

Register Now

Don’t miss the webinar and mark up the time and date on your calendar!