Using TextExpander, you can share your marketing message with the company, grant editing control of that message to the right people, and ensure that your entire staff are always using the current version of the message on all their devices. Many folks, including Smile, have a marketing message at the bottom of their email signature.
One problem with these messages is that it’s really easy for them to get out of date. Another problem is that the person who updates the message isn’t usually the one who uses it. The new TextExpander solves both of these problems with ease. When we released TextExpander, our marketing message was:
New! TextExpander for Mac, iPhone, iPad, & Windows (in beta) Share the power of your snippets with the team. Sign up for a TextExpander account today
http://smle.us/new-te @TextExpander
Here’s our current marketing message:
New! PDFpen 8 Your PDF toolkit isn’t complete without digital signatures, file & audio attachments, and PDF portfolios. Learn more at
http://smle.us/sigpp8 @PDFpenNew! TextExpander for Mac, iPhone, iPad, & Windows (in beta) Share the power of your snippets with the team. Sign up for a TextExpander account today http://smle.us/new-te @TextExpander
Notice that it’s been updated to include PDFpen 8, released last week. I didn’t have to do anything to make that happen, and that’s the magic of TextExpander. We set up a snippet with the marketing signature, and we include that in all of our other signatures. We did that by creating a snippet with the abbreviation sigsup and including that in our signatures using %snippet:sigsup%.
See out blog post on expanding snippets inside of other snippets for more on nested snippets.
Maia handles Marketing and PR for Smile, and she maintains a snippet group, shared with all of us, which contains the sigsup snippet. She has edit access to this shared group. When it’s time to update our marketing message, she edits the sigsup snippet, then immediately everyone has the current marketing message in all of our signatures.
Prior to the new TextExpander, Maia had to update a snippet group on a web server, which was occasionally updated by everyone’s TextExpander app. Or, she’d have to send the snippet group file around to everyone and hope they updated their group eventually. It took a while for everyone to have the updated message, and the process discouraged more regular updating.
With TextExpander, we’ve got 100% of the team updated the moment Maia updates the snippet, and that’s trivial for her to do. TextExpander keeps our marketing message current, and it can do the same for you.
