Bring Your Brand to Life

Through the Power of Story

Category: Tips and tricks

The little voice at 3 AM, the heart that beats too fast…

The little voice at 3 AM, the heart that beats too fast, and the atrophied, calcified systems? Join me at Innovate New Albany for the Sundown Rundown event on April 10 from noon to 1 PM as I help you uncover that little voice that keeps your customer up at night. The key that can transform your customer’s worst nightmare into an emotionally-charged customer story; the double-edge sword that helps you retain current customers, while sealing the deal with new ones. In this one-hour workshop, you’ll leave with a worksheet, and examples, to help you get started building your own customer success story. Get tickets here.

Why build emotional stories instead of rational ones? Analysis of data from the IPA (the UK-based Institute of Practitioners in Advertising) compared the profitability boost of 1400 campaigns and found that campaigns with only emotional content performed nearly two times better (31% vs. 16%) than those with only rational content.estories

Your road will be much easier if you create content that builds an emotional connection with your customer. Stories are far more powerful than data. So, why not create content that’s actually going to solve your sales problems. A good customer story will provide all the data they need to make a logical decision, while giving them the emotional pull they need to move forward.

Gmail Has Made the Risk of Missing an Important Email Too High: How to Get Your Non-Tabbed Inbox Back

Over the past week, Google has introduced new “tabs” to its Gmail inbox. No longer can we see our entire list of emails on one page — but we have to select a tab to see all of our mail. The mail has been automatically filtered into different lists — and guess who organized the list? Gmail. Gmail has decided it knows, better than we know, which email messages are:

  • Priority
  • Social
  • Promotions
  • Updates
  • Forums

I couldn’t even venture at guessing which of the emails I read could be classified for any of these categories — would news about the promotion I’m writing for The Green Mountain Coffee company be consided priority — or would Gmail assume it was a non-essential promotion? Gmail already has “filters” in place, which allows us to pre-select keywords in emails to filter particular messages into user-created lists. This feature has been working fine for years — so why the change?  Giving Gmail control of the filtering is madness. The risk of missing an important email is running too high.

Getting your old inbox back, without the tabs, isn’t just a wish — it’s a matter of effiency. It’s to see the inbox, at a glance, and without worrying that something important isn’t here, because it’s in the wrong, Gmail-genereated tab.

Here’s how to get your old non-tabbed Gmail inbox back.

Open your gmail inbox, and over to the right hand side is a little gears button.

gmail tabs001

Click on that little arrow, and you will get a drop-down menu that looks like this:

gmail tabs002You will want to click on the words that say, “Configure Inbox.”

Click there, and a smaller window will open up:

gmail tabs003

 

Here, you can “select tabs to enable.” If you want to have all of your email in one list — just select one tab. I’ve chosen “Primary.”

Hit save, and the box will disappear, and all of your emails will appear under the priority tab.