March 8, 2016 by user

Scoring Big With the Point System

Turn It Up Tuesday: Tips from Insightly to Take Your Business to 11

Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 3 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!

	Scoring Points With Your Customers
	In the last quarter of 2015, online shopping cart abandonment rates reached a staggering 75.45% across retail, travel, and fashion. So what’s driving us as consumers away? Pricing. Have you ever shopped for an airline ticket, found what you thought was a great deal, only to be shocked and dismayed after all of the taxes and fees were added on? While you can’t control tax rates on products and services, you can create your own incentive program — a fun and creative way to keep customers happy and engaged. Here are few ideas: Point System Programs like those favored by the airlines have long been popular and successful.. Whether it’s a discount, a freebie, or special customer treatment, set up a program that helps your customers work towards earning a certain amount of points that they can redeem for rewards such as gift cards or special discounts. Offer Fee-Based VIP Rewards Charging money for the privilege of joining a rewards program may seem counter-intuitive, but sometimes a one-time (or annual) fee that offers customers extra perks can be beneficial for both business and customer. Play Games Who doesn’t love a good game? Turn your loyalty program into a game to encourage repeat customers and — depending on the type of game you choose — help solidify your brand’s image. Companies like Influitive offer a “gamified” online platform that help you build out comprehensive engagement communities that keep you in close contact with customers.
	Using Insightly with MailChimp
	If you have a paid Insightly subscription, Insightly integrates seamlessly with your MailChimp account. For those of you not familiar with MailChimp, it’s an online newsletter/marketing platform that’s well worth checking out. With this integration, you are able to import contacts to Insightly from your MailChimp account and export contacts from Insightly to any of your MailChimp lists. Insightly will copy contact names and email addresses between the two systems. Your MailChimp account can be set up to communicate with Insightly on a per-instance basis. This means that you only need to set up the Integration once with your own account information, and then all your users will have access to the feature. To set up your MailChimp integration, please follow these steps: Log into Insightly using an administrator account, select the profile icon, and then navigate to your System Settings > MailChimp Integration page. In another browser window, log into your MailChimp account and navigate to the API Keys page. If you have a key in your API keys list, copy the long string of characters to paste to Insightly. If you do not have an API key, you will need to create one. (See MailChimp’s About API Keys article for all the details.) Return to the MailChimp settings page in Insightly and paste the key in the MailChimp API Key text box, then choose a Contact Email Option. This determines which email address from your Insightly contacts will be used when you send a contact to a MailChimp list. The default email option is First Email Address Listed, which will select each contact’s first address whether it is labeled as a work, home or other email address. Click the Save Settings button to complete the setup. This week’s tip comes from our resident product expert, Tony Roma. Tony’s been helping businesses implement software solutions for over ten years.
	Go Take a Hike
	The next time you feel the urge to “step outside for a bit of fresh air,” you’ll be pleased to learn that it may have a more profound affect on your overall sense of well-being than you likely realized. There is a caveat, however. Research conducted at Stanford University revealed that taking a hike 90-minute hike in nature can alleviate negative thinking, depression, anxiety, binge-eating, and more. The study, which included taking measurements of neural activity in the subgenual prefrontal cortex, found that people who enjoyed a 90 minute hike in nature showed reduced rates of neural activity associated with common stress reactions such as rumination. Sorry city dwellers, while you might enjoy a brisk walk downtown to get the blood flowing, the ambient sounds of traffic, crowds, etc. don’t tone down the neurons. Looks like nature reigns supreme once again. Send Us Your Tips. Would you like to share your tips with Insightly customers? Send them to us! If we use one in our weekly feature we’ll send you a $10 Amazon Gift Card! Contact us on Facebook, Twitter, Google+, or send us an email. Check out Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial of the best CRM around. About the author: Marta Bright is Insightly’s Content Manager. She’s been writing about the “business of technology” in the Silicon Valley for more than a decade.