Brand Wings - Blog by Gregory Salzman

Email Event Data Now Available

Tue, 22 Mar 2022 12:24:29 +0000

Brand Wings logs a great deal of data so you can always go back to see exactly what happened. In the administrative application you can see a list of all email messages the system has sent out. We recently added the ability to see all events associated with that email, such as being opened or clicked. This is very helpful if you need to understand the engagement of the email or track down any deliverability issues.

To begin, go to History--Notifications in the administrative application. Next, find the notification you would like to learn more about. Click on the details icon on the right right of the row. This opens up a window with a summary of the email message:

If you click on the EVENT HISTORY link on the top right, another window will open with a list of key data about the lifecycle of the email:

In the More Info column, you may see either information on which URL in the email was clicked or data returned from the receiving email server. While this data may not be meaningful to you, it could be helpful to an IT administrator if you need to track down any delivery issues.

The GeoIP column contains an icon for some events that will provide you with the public IP address from where the event occurred and attempt to provide a latitude and longitude for where it occurred. Please note that is based on public data and may not always be accurate:

Manage how your contact interacts with your marketing content.

Thu, 17 Mar 2022 21:23:13 +0000

Do you ever wish you had the ability to manage the marketing content interaction with the contact you are sending an email to?

Brand Wings features the ability to easily send assets and personalized templates to your contacts via email. The email contains a link that your contact can click on and be directed to your sales portal. From there, your contact can view the asset or template.

With our latest version, we give you more options to manage how your contact can interact with the asset or template. First of all, we introduced an option at the asset or template level that allows you to control if the contact can download the file, versus simply viewing it in the web browser. The advantage of not allowing your contact to download the file is that the latest version is always available within the sales portal.

In the admin, click on the Permissions tab of any asset or template. You'll see a new option to control if your contact can download the file or not:

Please note this option will only be available if "All Delivery Options Allowed" or "Email" is checked. It's not applicable for the Download or URL options.

Now that you have made this change, your contact may or may not see the option to download the asset on the portal page. Here's a screenshot of the page without the ability to download:

New Content Page Organization Options

Tue, 08 Mar 2022 14:37:17 +0000

Content Pages allow you to communicate important information to your sellers, such as guidance, training materials, and policies. This recent blog article provides a helpful overview of content pages and how to use them for training purposes. In our most recent release, we added some new features to make content pages even more powerful.

The first two features can be found in the administrative area, when viewing or editing the content page details:

The brief description field is new. Content you add will appear in the listing of content pages in both the portal and the administrative application. This helps users quickly learn more about the purpose of the content page without needing to read through it.

We also added the ability to assign labels and label values to content pages. Labels are a very helpful tool for organizing content, especially as the amount of your content grows over time. Labels can be used in the administrative application to quickly filter down to see only matching content pages. In the portal, you can define pages that list all matches to labels or label values. This includes all sales tools such as Assets, Templates, Products, and Email Campaigns.

Content Pages can now be directly added to Folders as well. You may add a content page to a folder in the same way that you add other sales tools. First, expand the Content Page section on the left. Next, click and drag the content page to the folder you wish to show it in.

Here is a screenshot of the portal folder page, now that I have added the content page. The Content Page now appears next to a Product and two Templates.

New Team Notification Features

Wed, 02 Mar 2022 17:47:09 +0000

Keeping your sellers well informed is critical to success. The Team Notifications feature in Brand Wings is a great way to communicate with your direct and channel sales people. You can learn more about this on our website here or in a blog article here. With our latest release, we added scheduling and new selection controls to make team notifications even more powerful. Let's take a look...

First, we added a number of new options to select which sellers will receive the notification. Previously you could only choose by specific sales teams. We now give you several options to make it easy to quickly filter down to the correct recipients:

Here's a quick overview on the new options:

All: Send to all sellers
All Internal & All External: When you define sales team types, you can set whether the team is internal (part of your organization) or external (a channel or partner, for example). Selecting one of these will include all sales teams having a sales team type that is internal or external.
My Teams: When sales teams are created, an owner (administrative user) is set. If you create the notification and choose this option, any sales teams assigned to you will receive the notification.
By Team Type: These team types are defined by you and assigned to sales teams
By Label or By Label Value: Brand Wings supports creating labels and label values (like tags and sub-tags) and assigning them to teams. This can be helpful if you want to segment teams by various product lines or regions
Specific Teams: This is the same as what Team Notifications previously supported. This allows you to individually select which sales team(s) will receive the notification.

The second feature we added to Team Notifications is the ability to schedule the notification. After you have created your notification and clicked the Save Notification, button, a Send Options window opens:

You can select a date and time for the notification to be sent out. This allows you to define a notification at your convenience but optimize the timing of the distribution. Alternatively, if you are ready for it to be sent immediately, click the "Send it NOW" checkbox. When finished, click the "Send Notification" button.

Guide Your Sellers At Every Stage

Thu, 17 Feb 2022 13:52:30 +0000

It's critical that your sellers engage with potential customers at every stage in the sales cycle. Knowing how to properly engage at each step can be a challenge for many sales professionals. Brand Wings allows you to easily organize content and sales tools around selling stages so you can be sure your sellers are properly equipped to win more deals. In this blog article we'll take a look at how to do this.

The first step is to identify your selling stages. In this example, we will use Prospecting, Presentation, Handling Objections, and Closing the Deal. After you have identified these stages, you want to create a folders for each stage, possibly organized under a single folder. In the admin application, go to Portal-->Folders to start defining your folders. In the screenshot below, you can see we created a folder called "Selling Stage" and added Folders to correlate with each selling stage below it.

When creating or editing folders, we strongly recommend you provide a brief description of the folder and supply an image to represent the folder.

To edit a folder already created, select the folder and then click/tap the gear icon above.

After you create your folders, you can drag content into each of those folders. Expand the options on the left to find the Asset, Product, Template, and Message Campaigns that you would like to add to the folders. Selecting a folder will show the tools that you have added to that folder. You can select and drag the items to change their order within the folder.

As a reminder, you may need to add a reference to this in your portal navigation, depending on the structure of your portal. In this example below, I am dragging the "Selling Stage" folder I created into the navigation menu:

That's it! Your newly created folders and folder items will now be available to your sellers in the portal:

Create Sales Training Materials

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 17:56:21 +0000

Providing great training to your sellers is critical to success. Whether you are onboarding a new sales person, introducing a new product, or introducing new commission plans, it's critical to make sure all information is easily accessible and well organized. In this blog article, we'll review a few strategies on leveraging content pages to provide training resources to your teams.

Let's begin with a quick refresher on content pages. In Brand Wings, you can create an unlimited number of pages containing content that you provide. These content pages will be displayed in the portal and can be easily found by your sellers. Content pages are managed using our powerful editor in the admin area, the portal section:

When creating training materials, there are a few features in our editor that may be especially helpful to you:

Remember there are no limits to the number of content pages you create. Go ahead and consolidate all your important training materials on your portal so they can be easily found and used. Your sellers will thank you for it.

Allow Sellers to Personalize Brand Approved Email Campaigns

Wed, 26 Jan 2022 13:42:02 +0000

Message Campaigns are a great way to provide your direct and channel partner sales teams with brand approved email campaigns that they can easily send to an audience of many or to a single contact. You can learn more about them here and here. With our latest release, you can now optionally allow these sellers to include a personalized note in the email campaign. This note will be formatted and placed in the email campaign in accordance with your branding guidelines. In this article, we'll take a look at how to easily set this up.

To begin, either create a new message campaign template or edit an existing one from the Brand Wings admin.

In the text block where you want the note to be inserted, click the Merge Tags dropdown and insert the {{Message}} tag. The note that the sales person enters will be inserted at this location, using the font styling settings you have selected.

Now, the portal, if the {{Message}} tag exists in the template, the sales person will be prompted to create a brief note:

Add Images & Descriptions to Folders

Thu, 13 Jan 2022 13:36:27 +0000

Folders in Brand Wings are curated groupings of marketing tools, such as Assets, Templates, Email Campaigns, and Products. With our latest release, you can now define an image and description for each folder you create. In this article we will review the steps to upload folder images and set descriptions.

1) In the Brand Wings admin, navigate to Portal-->Folders

2) To manage an existing folder, click (or tap) the folder, then the gear icon. To create a new folder, use the New button.

3) The folder detail window opens:

In this settings area, you can type in the name and description. For the image, you can either drag/drop the image to the image area, or click on the image area to be prompted to located the image. When done, click save.

In the portal, you will now see the folder use the image and description you have set:

Manage Asset & Template Delivery Options

Wed, 22 Dec 2021 16:32:41 +0000

Brand Wings allows sales users to digitally deliver assets and customized templates using three options: Downloads simply pulls the file down to the sales user's device. URL generation creates a link that sales users may copy and paste. Email delivery sends the asset or template to a contact and provides key data like when the email was opened and items were received. Up until now, all three options were available with all assets and templates. With our latest release, you can now manage which options will be made available on a per asset and per template basis.

Import Contacts & Companies From Excel

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 14:24:50 +0000

We just added the ability to import Contacts and Companies into Brand Wings from an Excel or CSV file. Your sales team users can perform the imports directly from the portal. Administrators can also import Contacts from the admin app and even assign which sales teams will own each contact. In this blog article, we will take a quick look at how to do this.

After some time to process, Brand Wings will return a status window to you showing you the results of the import:

If any records failed, you can click on the Result Details button to see contacts or companies had problems.

The process for your sales team users to import contacts is very similar. The primary difference is that they may only import Contacts and Companies for themselves. Also, if the sales team is using an integrated CRM, this feature will not be available. They should use the CRM to import data instead.