6 Gmail Tricks You Need to Know!

6 of the best Gmail tricks you never knew existed

 

A few years ago, a Quora user asked the internet if they would share some lesser known Gmail tips. Over 100 answers later, the thread has become a surprisingly useful resource for anyone who uses Gmail on a regular basis.

Rather than ask you to sort through all 100+ answers, we’ve cherry-picked 6 of the most valuable tips and tricks from the list, all of which you can see below:

 

Use keyboard shortcuts

You have two email addresses

Find out who sold your email to spammers

Mail delegatioN

 Compose in a new window

The best of Labs

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

Cracking The Code to Inbound Marketing

A Campaign Approach

You might be thinking there’s a lot of work associated with an inbound marketing effort. That would be an astute observation. There is an incredible amount of work to be done to get all the necessary pieces of an integrated inbound marketing program together including all the blog posts, email, lead nurturing, video and educational materials. But all that work doesn’t have to be done at once. The best way to focus your efforts is to take a campaign approach to your inbound marketing. A campaign allows you to focus your marketing and content development efforts on a particular industry, service or targeted persona. The result is a concentrated effort that typically delivers improved results because your content is focused and direct. Campaigns are typically three to four months. An overall theme is created for the campaign.

 

The messaging is specific based on industry, service or persona. A few high priority keywords or keyword phrases are selected and the content includes a high concentration of these keywords. The Trio of Offers is designed to be directly related to the campaign theme. Blogs and emails are focused on this campaign. Landing pages and call-to-action buttons are created specifically for the focused effort.

 

Here is a representation of a real campaign for a national payroll services provider:

Campaign Strategy: Focus on acquiring new small to medium-sized business clients who have a variety of payroll or HR needs.

Target Persona: The business owner thinking about outsourcing their payroll. They are extremely busy managing their company. They might have an internal administrative person helping out with general HR or payroll processing issues. They have had some mistakes in the past and just want payroll to be processed without errors, on time and without their personal involvement.

Campaign Theme: Payroll Personalized For Your Business

Sample NRO: Whitepaper – 9 Secret Challenges Most Payroll Providers Hope You Never Find Out

Sample LRO: Webinar – Tips And Techniques When Outsourcing Payroll For The First Time

Sample DBO: No obligation, 30-minute call with a payroll specialist to discuss payroll processing at your company. Email Topics: Outsourcing Payroll Means You Get To Work On Strategic Issues For Your Business

Blog Topics:

1. What ADP And Paychex Don’t Want You To Know About How They Process Payroll

2. 3 Tricks To Make Sure Your Payroll Is Perfect Every Week

3. How A Payroll Specialist Works With You To Save You Money

4. What Government Regulations Impact Your Payroll And What You Need To Do About it

 

Campaigns provide two other success factors that can’t be overlooked. First, they allow you to set performance-based expectations at the start of the campaign. Metrics like website traffic growth, conversion rates and leads generated. As an example, for a campaign like the one above, you might look for 20% increase in website traffic month over month and a lead goal of 30 new leads over the course of three months.

 

TIP : Working to continuously improve the performance of your marketing month over month is the fastest way to realize the kind of results worthy of celebration.

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

3 Things you Need to Do When Looking at Analytics

Your Analytics - Tracking, Testing and Goal Setting

 Over the past few years, marketing has transformed from an art into a science. Tracking, testing and metrics are key data points to help you make decisions that drive your business. Today we get real-time insights into what’s working and what’s not. Right now, from my smartphone, I have access to our company’s marketing metrics and the metrics for every single one of our clients. I quickly see if organic traffic is up or down vs. last month. If the social media initiatives we launched across are working or not. If a specific client’s conversion rates have increased as a result of a new piece of content we created or if we need to reconsider the CTA (call to action) button we created for that content.

Never before have we, as business owners, CEOs and marketing professionals, had this level of insight into marketing performance.

One of the most important parts of tracking the performance of your inbound marketing program is setting up a regular rhythm to review your performance. Even if you are looking at your stats daily, you still need a weekly 30-minute session to dig a little deeper and you need a monthly 60-minute session to review performance for the past month, set goals for the next month and discuss any adjustments that need to be made so that you ensure you hit your goals going forward.

It’s actually less critical that you hit your numbers and more important that you have a plan in place when you don’t hit your numbers. Every business can have a down month, but making sure your down month doesn’t turn into two, three or four down months in a row is the objective of this monthly session.

Here are some actual tactical adjustments we have made during one of these sessions:

 

• If visitors to your website are down for this month vs. last month, schedule a series of weekly guest blog posts for the upcoming month. Guest blog posts can add hundreds of visitors over a few days and contribute up to 20 leads a day in some cases.

• If leads are down this month vs. last month, time for a new free report or tip guide to drive up conversions. One you get traffic to your website up on a consistent basis, you should consider adding new educational content to turn those visitors into leads. Adding new content to your site on a monthly basis could increase lead generation by 30% month over month.

• If your site is getting a lot of returning visitors and not enough new visitors, take a look at your publication strategy. Find a few new websites that cater to your target personas and get them to publish one of your existing whitepapers, tip guides or e-books. Create a dedicated landing page to track traffic and conversions. If the website you select has enough daily visitors, then this tactic is sure to increase both traffic and leads for your business.

 

What gets measured gets done. Once you have this process in place, you will see month over month improvements. When you look back over a 12-month period you will see dramatic increases in both website visits and leads for your business. In some cases, clients have seen 5x increases in traffic and 3x increases in leads.

 

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

Why Software Makes it Easier to Generate Leads

Your Leads - They Need Proper

Care and Feeding

 

You don’t need software to implement an inbound marketing program for your company, but it sure does make it easier. It’s going to help you in three very specific areas: education, analytics and automation. For most of you, this is going to be your first inbound marketing program. Some guidance and education is necessary when you do something for the first time. Software provides that guidance. For example, you might forget to include one of your keywords in the title of your blog post. You want a software tool that reminds you. You might forget to tag a new landing page, but if your software recommends keywords that makes your job easier.

 

TIP: If you want an inbound marketing program that generates leads, software isn’t optional, it’s a requirement for automation and analytics.

 

There is a community of inbound marketers and if your software connects you to that community you benefit from their experience, knowledge and learning. Now you become a better, more effective inbound marketer, too. There are a lot of marketing analytics tools. Google Analytics is a free tool available to everyone, but marketing automation software typically comes with everything you need to gain insights into the performance of your marketing and make the necessary adjustments to see you reach your goals in short order.

 

You don’t want to spend your time creating charts and graphs and you don’t want to spend your time trying to interpret them either. It should be quick, clear and flexible enough for you to drill down into important areas on an as-needed basis. Part of inbound marketing is executing a consistent and repeatable set of tactics like blogging daily, emailing monthly, nurturing leads as they come in and sharing content across all your social media sites. Marketing software helps make these regular tasks easy and it helps make them fast. Remember, you want to be spending your time thinking, being creative, coming up with new ideas to generate leads – not posting every single blog post to all your social media sites. There are a variety of good marketing automation software tools including Marketo, Pardot, Eloqua and Infusionsoft. If you are looking to automate some of the marketing tasks you execute today all of these software tools provide a lot of value, but if you are planning to implement an inbound marketing program, HubSpot is the only one that helps you with all aspects of inbound marketing including connecting you with a community of inbound marketing experts.

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

Why You Need to Give Your Leads some TLC

Your Leads - They Need Proper

Care and Feeding

 

Just because someone visits your website and downloads one of your e-books doesn’t mean they are ready to chat with you about hiring your company or buying your products … at least not yet. Actually, no one is really ready to have a personal conversation with anyone until the pain associated with their issue becomes acute. As marketers, you never know when that pain is going to be acute, so you have to continually nurture your leads with even more educational content. The real purpose for this nurturing is to help them feel progressively more comfortable with your firm. The more you help them with links, educational materials, videos, blogs and other relevant content, the more likely they are to hire your company.

 

TIP: Since your prospects will never buy until their pain becomes acute, lead nurturing keeps your company in front of them, so when their pain does become acute, they pick you.

 

This nurturing process can be automated and it’s recommended that this not only be automated but also planned out and personalized based on the lead’s target persona and profile. This ensures that everyone has the same remarkable experience, regardless of who they are and where they are in their own internal buying process. Regular email marketing campaigns are excellent examples of lead nurturing. Every month you publish an educational article along with a few other items you want your prospects and clients to know about and now everyone gets reminded of what you do, how you do it and why they should feel good about working with you.

 

Another great way to nurture your leads is with automated personal emails. These Outlookstyle emails come for you or someone at your company. They are personalized and include links to additional educational content. They could be specific blog posts, additional whitepapers, upcoming webinars or special e-books available just for them. These automated emails are scheduled upfront to send at predefined intervals (say 3 days, 6 days and 9 days) after a significant event or interaction with your company. Of course, the timing can be adjusted at any time and customized for any situation. Along with these emails we also get intelligence on the performance of these campaigns. Who is opening them? When did they open them? Did they click through to any of the materials? This information is critical to helping you adjust the performance of the campaign and move these leads through the funnel toward becoming a new customer as quickly and as efficiently as possible. 

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014

How to Place Content to Drive New Prospoects

Your Publication - Placing Content Drives New Prospects

 

Publishing is a concept that is familiar to everyone. Newspapers, magazines, TV stations and even websites publish stories in one form or another. I bet you didn’t know that, as a business, you have to be a publisher also. Why? Because your prospects are out there and with the traditional media infrastructure fading fast, you have to be smart enough to get your educational content in front of your target prospects. 

 

 TIP : Don’t duplicate content. While it seems like you would be able to reuse a blog post from your site on an industry site, if Google finds out (and they will) it’s going to be a long time before you see the top of any search rankings. 

 

A great way to do that is by guest blogging. Popular blog sites have thousands of readers and even more people who have subscribed to the blog. By offering your opinion and sharing helpful tips and advice on a popular blog, you drive brand new prospects to your website. If they like what they see on your website and they get a remarkable experience (remember this from earlier in the book) they turn into leads. Another way to publish your content is to extend your existing relationship with trade publications, trade associations and industry groups. Every industry has associations and groups like this. While their magazines might be getting thinner and thinner, their online properties are growing fast. They are looking for smart, educational and creative content to share with their readers, members and visitors. If your company can provide that content, they are usually happy to give you access to their website. Now these perfectly targeted prospects see your content, click through, land on your website and turn into leads. When you think about it, it’s not much different than what you used to do. Instead of buying space and placing advertisements, now you offer educational content with links back to your website. It should cost a lot less and drive a lot more business for your company than traditional outbound marketing. Better yet, it’s perfectly aligned with how your prospects want to buy, bringing your company that much closer to getting the deal.

 

 

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Topics: Sales and Marketing, sales, sales leads, Leads, real estate, marketing, Roman Badnarchuk, lead generation, Sales Training, N5R Sales Training, marketing agency, Top condo sales trainers, 2014