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Converting Twitter traffic is one of the biggest challenges for most businesses. Here are 10 tips to help you capture more visitors from Twitter.
Read the full article at: sproutsocial.com
Everyone gets frazzled around the holidays and it’s really easy for things to slip through the cracks. Instead of stressing over every last detail and running around unorganized, use these tips to get ahead and save yourself unnecessary stress.
Get Started Early
Spend the months ahead of the holidays doing what you can to be ready for them. Think about end of year reporting, plan your content and other assets for holiday marketing, coordinate client meetings… whatever you can get done ahead of time. Make a plan of action and stick to it. Give yourself and your staff ample time to work on each task a bit at a time, so there’s no risk of falling behind on the tasks that must be done over the course of the regular work day.
Rotate Everyone’s Schedules to Account for Time Off
Even though your office will more than likely be closed for the holidays, it’s likely that employees will also want to take time off before and after Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s to spend time with their family and friends. Obviously, the entire company can’t take the same days off if everything is to run smoothly. Meet with the team in September or October and discuss policies about requesting time off. Make sure there’s a deadline for requests, so you can see who’s taking time off and when, to ensure their normal responsibilities are taken care of while they are away.
When an employee takes time off, ask that they use an autoresponder to alert any clients and provide contact information for someone else on the team who is aware of the account, so if there are any issues that cannot wait until the employee returns, customer service doesn’t suffer.
Prepare Your Customer Service Team Ahead of Time
This is especially important if you’re in the ecommerce business and you’re selling products that are given as gifts for the holidays. Sales will no doubt go up, and as they do, your customer service team may get overwhelmed with requests for assistance with ordering/purchasing, returns and exchanges, gift receipts, billing, and troubleshooting issues. Make sure they are up to date with everything they need to know to quickly and efficiently solve any problems customers may run into. If the customer service team doesn’t have the information they need, they cannot effectively assist customers, which negatively affects their experience. Considering 47% of customers would take their business to a competitor within a day after a bad experience, and customer retention is more cost effective than customer acquisition, a well-prepared support team is essential.
Relax with a Holiday Party
Everyone is subject to stress through the holidays, and work isn’t the only source. Before the office closes for the holidays, invite all the employees and their families to a relaxed, casual, holiday party event. It gives everyone a chance to unwind and bond on a personal level, without the stress of what’s going on in the office. Plus, you can celebrate a job well done in preparation for the time off.
Delegate, Delegate, Delegate
Managers often feel like they have to do everything – and with the amount of stuff that must get done early to keep stress level down, it’s going to take everyone. Delegate tasks to everyone accordingly, to ensure the job gets done, and no one has too much to do at once.
Most importantly, remember to breathe, take time to relax after work, and get enough sleep. It’s hectic for everyone, and it will be over much faster than it feels like in the heat of a stressful moment.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
Wondering how you can better engage with your Facebook fans? Discover 26 tips to generate clicks, likes, and comments on your Facebook page.
Read the full article at: www.socialmediaexaminer.com
You’ve done your research and created buyer personas — now what? Columnist Jacob Baadsgaard explains how to place financial value on your personas in order to determine your search marketing budget.
Read the full article at: searchengineland.com
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
If you offered to grant a small business owner an unlimited quantity of a resource of their choice, what would they probably look for? More products, more financing, more employee support? Or something that companies large and small always tend to run low on: time?
The more efficient a company’s daily operations, the more time available to form personalized connections with customers, craft smart initiatives and improve the organization’s bottom line. This concept is at the heart of Insightly CRM’s newest features – workload automation. With the ability to automate and assign back-end and routine tasks, sales teams and marketing professionals can reclaim hours in their days, spend more time face to face with customers and decrease time spent in front of a computer.
Workflow automation isn’t always accessible for SMBs
Automation isn’t new in the business world, nor are they foreign to CRM solutions. However, most CRM platforms don’t offer workflow automation at a realistic price point for small and growing businesses, meaning sales reps get stuck with manually entering data for new sales opportunity – and potentially introducing a margin of human error. Now, Insightly CRM users can automatically create and send emails and notifications, communicate with supervisors, and complete administrative tasks, backed by assurance that their data is up to date and accurate.
In addition to workflow automation, our new mobile enhancements support recurring task support within the Insightly mobile app, as well as improved search capabilities for offline files and those stored in third-party systems. Combined, these mobile and automation features make it easier than ever to manage the customer’s journey while saving valuable time. For SMBs like Business Made Simple, getting back this time opens opportunities to deliver individual experiences to customers, improve the overall health of the business and fostering growth – results that any organization can benefit from.
Learn more about workflow automation and increase your company’s productivity today with a free trial of Insightly.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
Welcome to Turn It Up Tuesday, where we bring you 4 weekly tips—a tip on running your business, a tip on using Insightly CRM, a tip on improving your sales, and a tip on improving your life. Enjoy this week’s tips!
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Convert Opportunities to Projects |
| Did you know that Insightly makes it easy to convert your sales opportunities into projects?
Doing so can be especially handy when your company wins a deal that requires post-sale coordination. For example, let’s assume you own a growing consulting firm that serves the technology sector. Your sales pipeline is primarily focused on winning initial consults, each of which is unique to the given client. Once the ink dries on the contract, your team moves into hyper speed to deliver on your promises. In this example, it may be helpful to convert the original opportunity into an Insightly project. From the opportunity’s “actions” dropdown, simply click on “convert to project” and follow the prompts.
Now, all of the sales information that you worked so hard to collect is conveniently accessible from the newly created project. As your team works through milestones or project pipelines, they can see the whole story without aimlessly searching through archived records. Insightly achieves this by:
Stop reinventing the wheel. Keep your team organized by letting Insightly do the administrative work. Convert your first opportunity to a project today.
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Engage New Customers With Marketing Automation |
In addition to aligning your human capital with customer needs, it’s also wise to leverage your IT resources accordingly. With the advent of marketing automation, your company can easily (and affordably) engage new customers through email. Unlike traditional email marketing, which requires your staff to remember to do something, marketing automation allows you to build rule-based campaigns. As new customers meet certain criteria in your CRM, they can be added to a nurture sequence that automatically emails them important information. A car dealership, for example, might use marketing automation to pass along important warranty and service information. After a customer drives a new vehicle off the lot, he or she could be added to a personalized campaign that looks like this:
Just think about the cost to manually send each of these customer emails. Now, consider the cost savings by automating the entire process. How can your company leverage the power of marketing automation? To get started, think like a new customer (or prospective one), evaluate what information could be helpful, and then implement a plan to communicate in a more automated way.
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Don’t Be Shy About Unsubscribing |
Speaking of marketing automation, you’re probably on a few email lists yourself. Some lists you may have subscribed to, while others you can’t recall for sure. Needless to say, your inbox is overflowing. Perhaps it’s time you hit the “unsubscribe” button. Some people are hesitant to unsubscribe, as they’re worried it might get the sender in trouble. Actually, the unsubscribe button is there as a courtesy to you, the recipient. Senders realize that you’re not a static entity, and their messages may not always appeal to you. Marketers operating in good faith would prefer that you unsubscribe now, rather than continuing to receive content you’re not interested in. From a practical standpoint, each unwanted email consumes a fraction of your day. Even if you never click on most messages in your inbox, you still have to delete them. The simple act of deleting an email takes at least a second or two. Now, multiply this by the dozens of other unwanted messages that you receive. Over the course of a year, the simple act of deleting emails can turn into hours of time – time that you could be doing something more productive. So, before you delete another unwanted message, consider a better option – click unsubscribe once, and you’ll instantly get seconds of your life back!
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Develop a Post-Sale Servicing Strategy |
As your deal flow increases, it becomes easier to identify product (or service) delivery bottlenecks. Without the right approach, your sales team’s actions can actually accelerate the problems you seek to correct. Strategic organizations are very definitive about how and when sales representatives are involved in the customer lifecycle. Should a sales rep be the point person for receiving customer service issues? How are reorders to be processed? Should the sales team prepare quotes, or should that be done from a central office? While there’s no magic answer to questions like these, it may be a worthwhile exercise to at least consider limiting your sales department’s involvement for certain customer activities. Of course, with any business decision, there are tradeoffs to change. These might include: Pros of Limiting Sales Team Involvement:
Cons of Limiting Sales Team Involvement:
Whether you decide to keep your sales team focused on the entire customer lifecycle or shake things up, it’s important to develop a plan and measure success. The ultimate goal is to create happier customers, which results in more predictable sales revenue for your company.
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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.
About the author: Matt Keener is a marketing consultant and President of Keener Marketing Solutions, LLC. Matt specializes in content marketing and strategic planning, having helped numerous Saas (software as a service) companies and other small businesses worldwide. Read more of Matt’s work, check out his book, or connect with him on Linkedin.
Never mind the fact that we’re living in a digital age. The pockets and purses of every serious professional are lined with that most essential staple of the business world: business cards.
Little scraps of cardboard have been essential tools of the trade for some 400 years, when the first “visiting cards” and “trade cards” appeared in Europe. The idea then was exactly the same as it is today: To remind a social contact, colleague, or business prospect who you were and provide them a means to reach you should they wish to continue the engagement.
While they’re still as critical as ever, in the 2000s, small pieces of paper have given way to myriad other ideas in the world of business cards. From unexpected materials to unique shapes and sizes to new approaches to messaging, the business card has lately received a modern upgrade that many professionals are putting to impressive use.
Here are ten examples of avant garde business cards that may help inspire a revolution in your own pocket.
The Recla Group is the publisher of The CLEAR Business Directory, a directory of businesses which have been screened for fraud and other problems. To reinforce the directory’s transparency-focused vision, COO Justin Recla prints his business cards on transparent plastic, with the company logo front and center – “clear” being indicated in two separate ways. Says Recla, “The cards are definitely ‘door knockers’ and get an immediate response. Our referral rates and new clients have increased threefold since using the cards. I believe it is working because of the congruency of the branding of the business with the look of the card.”
Recla says he pays $115 for 1000 of the cards at Morning Print.
Rebecca Rausch of Neon Lizard Creative works heavily in the world of technology, and as such it makes sense to showcase her company’s high-tech chops, however subtly, via the company’s business card. Solution: Neon Lizard’s cards are printed on thermal-sensitive card stock, which change color with heat or cold, cycling through shades of gold, blue, rust, black and green. Says Rauscuh, “‘Neon Lizard’ plays off the chameleon, which changes color. It shows that I can change my design style to suit the client.”
“I run an extremely eco-friendly bath and body company,” says Kristie Garduño of GivingSoaps.com. “We sell mainly online, and all orders are shipped in reclaimed boxes filled with shredded junk mail. The boxes that we can’t use for orders (too far gone, odd sizes, etc.) are chopped up in small squares and then stamped with our contact information and a short explanation of ‘Why am I being handed a piece of cardboard?’ As soon as people read the text explaining it, they think we’re brilliant.”
Not only does Garduño’s card reinforce its earth-conscious messaging and corporate values, the cards are also virtually free to produce.
A great business card doesn’t just provide contact information, it can also work as a miniature brochure for your company, or as a brief primer to the major issues in your industry. Gregg Steiner, president and founder of Cabinet Garden, is a producer of custom cabinets and closets for indoor gardeners, primarily of the cannabinoid kind. This type of agriculture requires a very specific and complex setup of lighting, water measurement, and ventilation – and Steiner knows that amateurs may well be oblivious to the specific needs of growing plants in an enclosed, indoor space. Solution: A business card that not only looks like one of his cabinets, it works like one too, opening on a fold like the hinge of a door, to reveal the “interior” of the cabinet inside. “People love the design and they always read it because they find the card intriguing and very informative,” he says. As a bonus, the card itself is made out of hemp-based paper.
Corporate attorneys come with a reputation of stuffiness and stodginess, which was exactly what lawyer Radiance Harris wanted to avoid when she came up with the idea for her calling cards. “My business card is square shaped and incorporates the colors yellow, black, and white, my eye-catching logo, nontraditional headshot photo (in which I am smiling and wearing a bright pink sleeveless dress), and a modern, yet minimalist layout,” she says. “When I launched my law firm, I knew that I did not want to come across as your typical stuffy suit-wearing attorney, and my business card is just one aspect of my unique, authentic, and honest brand as an attorney. I’ve been told that my unique business card makes me stand out from other lawyers because it conveys that I am approachable, trustworthy, and different.”
How do you ensure your card isn’t immediately thrown away? By giving it purpose well beyond its intention. “I write books and have done away with traditional business cards in favor of bookmarks,” says Pamela Danziger. “They are distinctive in design, allow for more room to tell my story, and most of all they are functional.” Danziger prints a different card/bookmark for each book she publishes, so she can either include the corresponding bookmark when she sells or gives away a copy of a book – or, better yet, can include a different book’s bookmark in order to cross-promote another title. Either way, the new owner of the book gets Danziger’s contact information and will likely keep it around as long as the book is being read.
Functionality doesn’t necessarily have to have anything to do with the business you’re in. An accountant may find it too frivolous to give away pencils, for example. That said, you don’t have to resort to that age-old trick of giving away annual calendars in the hopes they’ll be pinned to the bulletin board.
David Jacobson is the founder of TrivWorks, a corporate entertainment production company specializing in trivia events. In lieu of traditional business cards, for a year now Jacobson has been handing out customized tubes of lip balm. “They are professionally made, with a label displaying my logo, contact info, and a cheery catch phrase,” says Jacobson. “Many of my potential clients or business contacts are women, and they love to carry lip balm around in their purses. It’s far more memorable than just a card, as well as practical – and delicious!” While it’s hardly an inexpensive option (Jacobson pays about $1 per tube, in bulk), the staying power of a lip balm is far beyond that of a scrap of cardboard. A typical tube of the stuff is likely to roll around in a pocket or purse for months – reinforcing your brand messaging every time it’s used.
“I think our business cards straddle the line,” says Jennifer Boaro, COO of The Cat Ball, LLC. “I don’t find them terribly unusual, yet over and over I see people handle them with a curious look because they aren’t typical and do stand out. Customers play with the paper, comment on the thickness and quality, and then I start to hear the comments about our images. We are always asked where we get them.”
Boaro says “images” because her cards feature hundreds of different cats, courtesy of Moo.com’s Printfinity program, which lets you print a different image on every card in your pack. Whether you want to customize the outgoing card to each recipient or turn your cards into a “collect ‘em all” game, having a pocketful of cards where no two are alike gives you tons of options that otherwise wouldn’t be available. “I’ve seen people paw through a stack of cards, trying to decide which one to take,” says Boaro.
Kathy Marcelle is a designer and the owner of Sugar Pear Design, a stationer in the Midwest. “I do my own letterpress printing and of course my cards are letterpress printed. My press, a Craftsmen press from the 1940s, is 100 percent manual. I also hand mix my own printing inks. Each card has slight variations from the one before – giving them each their own unique personality. But what makes them have that unexpectedness to them is their thickness. The paper stock that I choose is 100 percent cotton, which allows the impression of the printing plate to really go into the paper stock, giving it an awesome texture and indicating superior quality.”
For a stationery company, your business card isn’t just a repository for contact information, it’s perhaps the most important sample of your work you have. Remember that in some cases, your business card may not be only about who you are – it can also be used to showcase exactly what it is you do.
We live in a digital age, so why not give out a digital card? Swapping phone numbers or email addresses is a nice start, but simple digits are impersonal and easily lost in the morass of your phone’s address book. Ted Jenkin, founder and co-CEO of oXYGen Financial, upgrades the number swapping dance with his “mobile card,” which contacts receive by texting “Ted” to 89800. (Feel free to try it.) Sending the text gets you back a link to Jenkin’s personal page and one to the business, the former full of contact information and even a video introduction to the company. “It’s the best card I have ever used and I’ve made tons of money with it,” says Jenkin. “I can drip text people on an ongoing basis because the software allows you to capture the mobile number of the other person when they take your card.” Find out more about the technology, which costs $18/month, at Ditch the Nametag.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a huge variety of verticals. Learn about all of Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
About the Author: Christopher Null is an award-winning business and technology journalist. His work frequently appears on Wired, PC World, and TechBeacon. Follow him on Twitter @christophernull.
Is Facebook part of your holiday marketing plan? Discover 10 Facebook tips to widen your visibility and reach during the holiday season.
Read the full article at: www.socialmediaexaminer.com
Choosing the right CRM for your small business can be a daunting task. You don’t know whether a service that fits your business and budget right now will still be the best choice six months from now. Rest assured that Insightly will grow right along with your business. We continually evolve our service to ensure our features meet all your needs.
Perfect Plans
You need a CRM plan that fits your budget and the size of your business. Nothing too big, but nothing you’ll grow out of too quickly. You also need to be able to change the size of your plan as your business grows. Insightly offers a completely free starter plan plus four premium plans that increase in size incrementally.
You can start as small as necessary and scale up as your business grows. The free plan even allows two users, so you and a partner can access the best of Insightly without spending one cent. It includes 2,500 records so you can build up quite a lot of leads before you’re ready to upgrade.
Features You Need
Is there anything quite as frustrating as finding a product that’s just about perfect, but lacks one or two features you absolutely need? Or using a product for a year or two, then having to switch to something else when it can’t keep up with your growth? Insightly listens to your suggestions. We are constantly improving and adding features that make it easier on you to convert those leads to sales.
This list is just a glimpse at some of the changes we’ve made over time. As you collect leads and nurture sales, you can be sure that Insightly is growing and evolving right along with you.
At Insightly, we offer a CRM used by small and mid-sized businesses from a variety of verticals. Learn about Insightly’s features and plans on our pricing page or sign up for a free trial.
