by Felicien | Aug 7, 2017 | Education
Email marketing is far from dead. In fact, it’s seen increased success in recent years. Both prospects and marketers find it to be one of the most flexible, useful channels for staying in contact.
Sending emails won’t help you succeed unless you use the right tools. If you want to increase your sales with email marketing, you must create great content and measure results. The Internet offers tools that let you do this. We can help you find the right tools—Here are some of our favorites.
Cortana Scheduling Abilities
If you use both Cortana and Microsoft Outlook, you should try Cortana’s more advanced scheduling abilities. When Cortana scans your emails, she can recognize language that refers to an upcoming meeting or phone call. And she can add this information to the right client contact info, as well as your calendar. This is particularly helpful when you’re managing multiple leads, and you don’t have the time to input every meeting or scheduled call into your calendar. Cortana also works with Outlook and Office 365 to pull information from the web and emails so your contact information is always up to date. This can save you a lot of time.
Google Smart Reply
If you’ve been using Gmail on your mobile device, you may have noticed an important change — When you reply to a client or lead, Google will suggest pre-made emails for you to use. Gmail notes your previous responses to clients and auto-creates a similar one. However, this won’t work for complex emails—Only for brief emails arranging a meeting time, etc. This service provides several options, so you can pick the one that makes the most sense and sounds like it came from you.
MailChimp
MailChimp is a handy email management tool that lets you use automation, advanced A/B testing, analytics, and much more. A/B testing is useful when you aren’t sure what email subject line to use. Plus, you can chart your email success rate, and how to improve it. MailChimp is most famous for creating surveys and polls that you can send to gauge interest in almost anything. For companies that want to use a specific approach, this is a great service to try. Don’t use it too often, or you may annoy your recipients.
Microsoft Office 365 Group Emails
Office 365 Groups helps you create teams based on your relationship to projects and other employees. You can add and update team lists as you choose to. One of the best advantages to this flexible setup is the ability to share data. Group provides a shared inbox and calendar in Outlook so you can carry on conversations and send emails to the entire Group automatically. It’s a great way to coordinate team marketing activities, and make sure everyone is on the same page.
Mad Mimi for Newsletters
Mad Mimi is a popular email marketing tool to create, send and track newsletters. If you regularly send newsletters, then it’s important to use a system to ensure quality, and track results. Mad Mimi is a great place to go for these capabilities.
Hiver for Brand Emails
If you don’t use Office 365 but still want to coordinate a marketing team, Hiver turns Gmail into a shared email service. You can coordinate tasks and assign client emails to various team members. It also offers tracking software so you can see conversations and responses over time and locate any weak spots.
Constant Contact for Templates
Today, the appearance of your emails is more important than ever before. An email needs to stand out, but not be too flashy. It should draw attention, but not look like an advertisement. And if you don’t have the coding skills, then building an email from scratch can be a big challenge. Constant Contact provides pre-made email templates for a variety of different messages to ensure that your emails look great on desktop and mobile devices – It’s a great tool if you don’t have email templates of your own.
Hemingway for Sending Concise Emails
People don’t have a lot of time to read emails, especially from brands they aren’t familiar with. This means you must use words effectively. We’ve covered design, but for help using the right text, you may want to try Hemingway. This simple web app scans your text and provides edits for easier consumption.
Raven URL for Analytics
If you want to track your email ROI, it’s time for analytics. Raven is a good choice because it works with Google Analytics URL Builder to show where visitors come from, when they visit your website, and when they open your email messages. See what impact your emails make when it comes to CTAs (calls to action) and conversion rates.
Let us know if any of these tools worked for you. And, if you have questions about email marketing, reach out to us. {company} provides a variety of IT solutions to businesses in {city}. Contact us at {phone} or {email} to learn more.
by Felicien | Aug 4, 2017 | Education
The recently discovered Fruitfly can have serious implications for your business.
You must take a proactive approach to cybersecurity to keep your data secure. Whenever a new hacking technique or virus appears, you must pay attention. This is the case with a new variation of the Fruitfly malware.
What makes Fruitfly so notable has nothing to do with the number of infected computers. Instead, it’s because Fruitfly targets the macOS operating system, and has been doing so for years without anyone realizing it.
Fruitfly Malware: Breaking It Down
To understand the situation with Fruitfly, it’s important to understand two distinct concepts: The original version and the variant that affected Mac computers in July of 2017.
Malwarebytes discovered the original version of Fruitfly. It spied on computers in medical research centers for years before being discovered. Once it was identified, Apple took steps to close the holes, and update its operating system to detect and eliminate it.
The recently discovered Fruitfly variant is a different matter altogether. This new version of Fruitfly has been around for at least five years. While the total number of infected Macs is estimated to be only around 400, it could be much higher than people realize.
What makes this new version of Fruitfly so terrifying is that it can not only capture screenshots and keystrokes from affected Macs, but it can also take over the webcam and capture live images without a person knowing that anything is happening. Even though the green indicator light on all Mac hardware is wired directly into the motherboard (meaning that if the camera turns on the light is supposed to turn on), Fruitfly has found a way around this.
Fruitfly is also capable of analyzing other devices that are connected to the same WiFi network—Something that should be troubling to business owners and enterprise users.
The exact method that Fruitfly uses to infect machines is still unknown, but it involves tricking users into clicking on malicious links in fraudulent emails. While it’s true that the primary “command and control” server used by Fruitfly’s creator was shut down, there are potentially hundreds (if not thousands) of infected computers in use that still have the malware strain hidden inside.
Due to the nebulous nature of Fruitfly, there aren’t specific steps that you can take to protect yourself, or remove an infection that’s already occurred. Security experts recommend that Mac users install a program like OverSight, a tool specifically designed to monitor the use of a computer’s microphone and webcam.
Mac Malware: What You Need to Know
The fact that “Macs don’t get computer viruses” is a myth that’s existed since the 1990s. In 2006, security researchers discovered the first piece of malware specific to the OS X operating system. Fast-forward to 2015, and more than 1,400 unique malware samples were discovered.
Part of this stems from the fact that there were so many more Windows computers in use, and that Windows was a less secure operating system. This combination resulted in a virus and malware explosion during the 1990s, along with the fact that personal computers became a more ubiquitous part of our daily lives.
With Apple’s resurgence over the last 15 years, the pendulum has swung the other way. There are still more Windows viruses than there are Mac viruses. However, malware attacks on Macs were up an incredible 744% in 2016 alone. During the fourth quarter of that year, malware samples targeting the macOS operating system increased by 245%!
All of this underscores the importance of employee training in terms of cybersecurity. If your employees assume that because they’re using Apple computers, they don’t have to take steps to protect themselves, they’re a security vulnerability for your business. Mac users now get targeted by phishing scams and other types of sophisticated attacks. As a business leader, you must take steps to ensure all your employees are regularly trained on how to remain safe in the digital world.
The Fruitfly malware may be one of the most-recent strains to target Apple computers, however, it certainly won’t be the last. If you’re in {city} and would like to learn more about this or other cybersecurity topics, contact {company} by sending an email to {email} or by call us at {phone}.
by Felicien | Aug 4, 2017 | Education
On July 5th, 2017, disaster struck a series of hospital networks in Michigan. Caro Community Hospital, Caro Medical Clinic and Caro Quick Care all lost access to not only their desktop and laptop computers, but also phones, email services and even patient records. A message on a computer screen confirmed administrators’ worst fears—They were a victim of ransomware.
According to Caro CEO, Marc Augsburger, the ransom note provided a single email address to use to determine the payment required to recover the locked data. The hacker specified a payment of $120,000 should be made in Bitcoin!
Instead of paying the hacker, hospital administrators decided to quickly shut down all electronics following the attack. This caused a great deal of disruption, but the damage was mitigated due to IT policies and procedures that were already in place. Hospital staff were well trained on keeping paper-based records in the event that such an incident occurred. All computers and other devices were also backed up remotely on a regular basis, so it was only a matter of time before Caro could get its systems back up and running.
What made this ransomware attack so unique was the extent of the machines affected.
Traditional ransomware strategies seem to be one of quantity over quality. The files on a single infected machine are quickly encrypted, and the ransom is typically a few hundred dollars. This particular strain didn’t just affect servers, computers and other devices, everything connected to the Caro network was affected, including the VoIP phone systems that were operated by those computers.
Make no mistake—The disruption was absolutely a bad thing, but the situation could have been far worse were it not for these policies. They also helped guarantee that no personal information of employees or patients was compromised during the attack.
It took nearly two weeks to get all hospital operations back up and running. Caro administrators contacted both the FBI and the local police in the immediate aftermath, both of which are still searching for the person or people responsible. The FBI indicated that this was a brand-new strain of ransomware, and one that they would continue to watch out for in the future.
The State of Malware
As the Caro hospital staff discovered, ransomware is the “latest trend” in terms of cyberattacks. To say that the digital world is getting more dangerous is something of an understatement:
There were 22 million new malware samples in the first quarter of 2017 alone.
A new malware specimen is emerging every 4.2 seconds, a pace that’s getting faster all the time. To put this into perspective, there were only about 6.8 new malware samples discovered in the entirety of 2016.
In 2015, attacks occurred at a rate of about 1,000 per day. Fast-forward just a year later, and that number climbed to about 4,000 per day – an increase of 300%!
The number of phishing emails is also on the rise. In the first quarter of 2016, 92% of phishing emails contained some form of ransomware. Just a few months later, that number grew to 97.25%.
Learning as much about ransomware and other forms of malware is the key to ensure your organization doesn’t suffer the same fate.
If you had to make a list of the worst cybersecurity threats facing businesses today, it’s this particular strain of malware that can encrypt all of the files on a computer and network. This means that every kilobyte of data on a machine is lost forever, unless you’re willing to pay a hefty fee to the criminal holding your data hostage.
According to a study conducted by Friedrich-Alexander University, most of these attacks are successful because of overconfident users. 78% of people claim to be aware of the risks associated with clicking on unknown links in emails, and of phishing in general—Yet they go on to click on these links anyway.
Because ransomware infections are most often the result of accidentally downloading a malicious file, many assume it’s a situation where a little common sense goes a long way. Recent events have proven this isn’t enough.
As a business leader, it’s important for you to understand that ransomware is just one of the many types of digital threats that should concern you. Hackers are getting more sophisticated all the time, and the key to staying protected involves making an effort to stay one step ahead of them. Cybersecurity training for your employees is essential.
If you’re in {city} and would like to find out more about cybersecurity issues, OR if you’re interested in cybersecurity training for your staff, please don’t delay—Contact {company} at {email} or {phone}.
by Felicien | Aug 4, 2017 | Education
Do you know how to customize Windows 10 to fit your needs?
If your job requires work on a PC every day, even the smallest details can make a huge difference. Flexibility has never been a selling point for Windows. But, with the release of Windows 10, Microsoft has changed this perception by providing ways customize it.
I love that Microsoft is trying to be more customer-oriented. I’ve never been a fan of previous versions that straight-jacketed users into doing things the Microsoft way. With this release, Microsoft has finally released some power to us. It’s worth spending an afternoon optimizing your Windows 10 OS to make it work for you.
Take Control of Windows 10 OS
Create your own themes. While Windows 10 gives us a number of nice themes, it’s unlikely any of these will be your ideal one. That’s okay. Windows 10 now lets you create your own desktop themes to match your needs and personality. You can find the Theme folder under Personalization in the Settings file. Click on it and change your theme’s background, color scheme, alert sounds, and more.
Declutter your Start Menu. Windows 10 OS comes with a lot of free applications. Let’s face it—You probably won’t ever use them. You can regain some space on your Start Menu by right-clicking on these unwanted apps and selecting “Uninstall” from the pop-up menu. Unfortunately, there are some apps Windows 10 won’t let you uninstall. Fortunately, you can remove most of them with Windows PowerShell. Learn how to use Windows PowerShell to uninstall apps in this tutorial.
Make folders for your Start Menu. Another new feature is the ability to create folders for the Start Menu. By combining similar apps into one folder, it’s much easier to find the software you need. To do this, make sure all the apps you want to add are already in the Start Menu. Then, all you need to do is left-click, hold down the button on the app you want, and drag it on top of another app you want in the same folder. You can repeat this process to add more apps. After you’ve added all the apps you want in the folder, you can access them by clicking on the folder and clicking on the app you wish to use.
Manage Cortana. Cortana is Microsoft’s answer to Siri and Alexa. However, this digital assistant is not to everyone’s liking. Unfortunately, Windows 10 no longer allows you to turn off Cortana. If you want to get rid of it completely, it can be complicated. Nevertheless, it’s a “snap” to change the settings to have a better relationship with Cortana.
The constant search bar at the bottom of the page is distracting. I suggest that everyone gets rid of it by right-clicking the bar, selecting Cortana and then deselecting the Show Cortana and Show Search Box options. You can access even more settings for Cortana by clicking on the notebook icon under Settings. There are a number of options, but the most useful setting is the “Hey Cortana” option. This lets you use your voice to interact with your computer by first saying, “Hey Cortana” and then asking a question in the same way you access other types of virtual assistants.
I suggest my clients turn this feature off, especially if they’re worried about draining their laptop’s battery. However, if you’re using a desktop computer, or you want to have the ability to use “Hey Cortana,” this is the place to adjust the settings. I recommend those who do should enable “Active Listening,” even when the computer is locked, and choose the option to prevent the computer from going to sleep.
Heavy users of the “Hey Cortana” feature may want to train Cortana to recognize their voice by reading six short phrases. To access this option, click on the Learn my voice button you’ll find with the other Cortana options.
Protect your privacy. Privacy is a huge issue these days, and many Windows 10 users are wary of Cortana. Cortana collects and stores a wide range of personal information, like your web browsing, and passes it on to Microsoft. However, in addition to Cortana, Windows 10 includes other features that may present privacy concerns, like WiFi Sense and an Ad ID for tracking you across multiple apps. I suggest business users adhere to the strictest settings for any device that connects with a company’s network.
I also suggest every business user turns off the following features:
Cortana’s “Getting to know you.” You can find the option to turn off speech services and typing suggestions under Setting> Privacy > Speech, inking & typing.
Sync your settings. Turn this off under Settings > Accounts > Sync your settings.
Notifications on your lock screen. Block notifications on your lock screen by turning it off under Settings > System > Notifications & action.
Ad-tracking ID. DeselectLet apps use my advertising ID for experience across apps at Settings > Privacy > General.
Windows 10 is a great operating system if you know how to use it. For more tips and information about Windows 10, contact {company} in {city} at {phone} or {email}.
by Felicien | Aug 3, 2017 | Education
Do you need to incorporate updated technology into your existing network?
Is your small or medium-sized business taking full advantage of today’s technological capabilities? If you answered, “Yes,” then you deserve a hearty congratulation. However, if your answer is, “No,” don’t worry. You’re not alone.
Results from a recent 2017 survey conducted by the Deloitte-MIT Sloan Management Review reveal that only 25 percent of businesses that responded believe they are taking advantage of all the technology benefits available today. As shocking as these results may be, the results were no surprise to those who conducted the study. The researchers found similar results over the past three years.
Let’s take a moment to discuss what this report actually reveals. Since the information in this study is based on self-reported surveys, it means those responding knew they weren’t getting the most they could from their technology. Additionally, many felt this way for years, yet they never tried to correct the problem. Why?
As somebody who is constantly on the lookout for new business-friendly technologies to share with my clients, I know how difficult it can be to adopt them. However, in this increasingly competitive marketplace, your business needs every advantage you can provide. That’s why I want to share some ways to help your business technology “grow up.”
Three Ways to Help Your Company’s Tech Mature
Develop a roadmap to better technology. Just like with any other journey in life, it can be difficult to know where to turn to get to your destination if you don’t even have the right directions to follow. Many of the business people I speak to on a daily basis understand that their companies aren’t making the most of technology—And, they don’t know what steps to take to get where they want to go. What I find even more troubling is when an owner of a business admits to me that he doesn’t have a clue where he wants his company to be technology-wise.
That’s why I always recommend to my clients that they have a clear goal in mind before incorporating any new technology into their business’s strategy. I suggest that they set a realistic technology goal based on their current and future business needs, and then develop a long-term plan to reach it. Those businesses that don’t employ in-house staff to create a technology roadmap, should always consider working with an outside IT expert who can guide them.
Use technology to make meaningful changes in the way your company does business. Any new technology you introduce needs to be worth the disruption it will cause. Never expect your employees to adopt new technology without issues. Even the smallest changes are difficult to adapt to. And when your employees have been doing something in the same way for years, they don’t want things to change unless they offer a major benefit.
On the other hand, while employees may respond positively to technology that makes their lives easier, don’t constantly add new technology for the sake of convenience. For example, if you’re currently using an email service that works well for your company, don’t be tempted to upgrade to a new email service that offers slightly faster access. Instead, focus on how to make changes to your business with more impactful technology, (like swapping out a clunky traditional PBX system for a cloud-based PBX/VoIP service).
Invest in your employees. Don’t forget that technology is worthless without employees who both understand it, and are able to use it effectively. If you want to transform your business from one that’s technologically immature, you must be willing to devote time and money into training your employees.
This training must focus on two things — Explaining the how and why of the new technology. First, you need to train staff members on how to operate the new technology. However, don’t forget the most important part of the training—Explaining to your staff why the new technology is better than the old for helping your company reach its goals.
Adopt or Disappear
You have two choices when it comes to technology for your business—To adopt to changing technology, or let your business slowly lag behind as more tech-savvy companies overtake you in the marketplace. No one can expect an established business to transform the way it uses technology overnight, and it’s foolish to believe the road to incorporating new technology won’t be long and rocky. However, no matter how rough the path, you need to start taking the first steps before you get left behind “in the road dust stirred by others in front of you.”
For information on up-to-date IT strategies and solutions for your business in {city}, {company} can help! We help businesses use a variety of technology services designed for their unique needs. Contact us at {phone} or {email} to learn more.
