For many years and counting, WordPress has reigned as the most popular Content Management System. In fact, if you’re planning to build a site, we urge you to try WP. It’s easy enough to be understood by the non-tech-savvy and flexible enough to be used by pros when developing a site. Not to mention, it’s completely free to use.Continue reading →
Real estate property buying is something that is much more complicated than you may think at first glance. Much research is needed and you have to be determined in order to make a very good choice. Mistakes do tend to appear because of the lack of experience or understanding about the process. Since you are here, you surely want to put your hands on the very best possible properties so do be sure that you follow the advice we will mention in the following paragraphs.Continue reading →
As an entrepreneur, you may be trying to decide whether or not to build your business on the cloud.
There are 5 primary reasons why it’s a great idea:
First, you’ll reduce your costs. It’s less expensive to deploy applications on the cloud than through on-site hosting. Your hardware costs are lower and your applications can make better use of system resources.
Second, you bypass constraints of time and space. If you are outsourcing many aspects of your business, people in other countries can access the applications they need to work with through the Internet. Neither location nor time zones slow your business down.
Third, IT experts take care of your technological needs. You will always be using the most up-to-date applications. The cloud provider takes care of all software updates, often improving performance over previous versions based on user feedback. You also don’t have to worry about problems in your hardware. The cloud providers take care of the manpower and costs of hardware replacement.
Fourth, you can select from a wider choice of applications. Software that you have decided to use may not have all the functionality that you had hoped to find. With legacy technology, you would be stuck with your purchase. With the cloud, you have the flexibility to try something else that might work better for you. What’s more, you don’t have to buy the software; you can just pay for what you use. Even better, implementation is faster.
Fifth, you are helping out the environment. Onsite deployment requires much higher energy usage than action on the cloud. Shared resources cut down on energy utilization. You’re not only growing your business, but contributing to the green movement.
Still, despite all these reasons for using the cloud, you may be hesitant, wondering how you can acquire cloud security. You can get security for a public cloud or for a data center with physical, virtual, and private clouds. Security software offers a wide range of security capabilities, including anti-malware, intrusion prevention, host firewall, integrity monitoring, and log inspection.
Although the cloud provider will secure all hardware and software for you, you are still at risk due to careless user behavior.
Phishing for Dollars
One of the biggest threats today is phishing. This is a highly profitable online racket.
Phishing is the criminal practice of tricking users into disclosing personal information. This information is then used to steal from your financial accounts.
Hackers may use the following tactics:
Cyber criminals may not always want to steal the money in your financial accounts.
They can also profit by stealing your identity and pretending to be you when hacking into banks and corporate financial accounts.
When trying to steal your identity, they may look for details like
Armed with this information, they may either try to make some educated guesses about your login credentials or try to use it to get access from a service provider by pretending to be you.
Here is what the Federal Trade Commission says about Phishing: “When internet fraudsters impersonate a business to trick you into giving out your personal information, it’s called phishing. Don’t reply to email, text, or pop-up messages that ask for your personal or financial information. Don’t click on links within them either – even if the message seems to be from an organization you trust. It isn’t. Legitimate businesses don’t ask you to send sensitive information through insecure channels.”
3 Simple Steps to Stay Safe
Here are 3 steps you can take to stay safe on the cloud:
Take Personal Responsibility
Data breaches on the cloud are rare. Often, when they do happen, cloud providers get the blame. But data breaches are frequently the result of employee carelessness rather than loopholes in the technology. Using the three simple steps, your business can enjoy a long, safe and happy life on the cloud.
It’s safe to say that living in the ecommerce world of the present day is akin to trying to survive in the Amazon jungle. At least in the sense that juggernauts like this marketplace continue to set standards that are copycatted by nearly every other ecommerce store that desires surefire success.
Of course, small business is the heartbeat of the internet, even in lieu of big corporate contenders. And just because there may be monsters like Amazon and eBay lurking in the thickness doesn’t mean that smaller online entities are deprived their true chance at success.
What it does mean, however, is that in order to compete, online stores need to assure that they sustain an omni-channel presence that attacks every possible angle for measurable success.
The drawback, up until recently, with harnessing this advantageous approach is that it’s very difficult to compare analytics, mine customer data, expand customer relationships and, ultimately, know customer behaviors and patterns across broad sales channels and demographics.
Therein enters the possible solution. It’s being procured by leading services providers, and it has many bells and whistles. This newfangled SaaS is a cloud hosted ecommerce CRM software that connects all the dots. But just how does it help you succeed with your online store?
Secure Cloud Hosting
For starters, no more software install requirements. This drawback has previously hindered many providers and end users. With cloud hosting, not only is the level of privacy and security greatly enhanced, but usability is also rewarded with simple onboarding.
Client servers host the data and the software while user nodes merely connect and look at it while the host manages the bandwidth and functions. This equates to effortless onboarding and across-the-board compatibility and usability.
Integrated, Seasonal Analytics
Perhaps the greatest benefit of ecommerce CRM is that it has the ability to instantly integrate with all of the sales channels a retailer is using. This integration – typically via API – enables the seamless gathering and repopulation of all the analytics, metrics and trends.
Retailers can then instantly organize this data into meaningful breakdowns and charts. Shoppers’ patterns and tendencies can be quickly identified and harnessed to procure more substantial relationships, outreaches, sales events, etc.; resulting in healthier conversions.
Shipping & Returns
For far too long have smaller retailers been forced to work amongst numerous software sets just to accomplish their daily tasks. But with built-in integrations like shipping and returns software, this worrisome headache becomes a thing of the past.
Instead, newer CRM for ecommerce merges all of this into one robust, central hub. This means that as orders come into any sales channels, they are instantly imported into the CRM. They can be sorted, edited and managed, with the ability to compare rates and generate shipping labels as well as update customers.
On the returns side, the software enables an automated system that lets customers process a return and generate a return shipping label from the retailer’s website; just like Amazon allows. Serial returners can be identified and avoided in future sales events while loyal customers can be remarketed to and rewarded.
Social CRM
Of course, social CRM is a backbone, too. The ability to import your analytics, tailor campaigns and directly connect with customers to expand the relationship is essential to success.
But ecommerce CRM takes it a step further by allowing users to cater messages, track trending hashtags and products, and even find comments that relate to their demographic, amongst many other useful social features and functions.
Newsletters & Emails
Naturally, CRM that’s designed for ecommerce will include the standard fit and fare of traditional marketing tools. Things like an email and newsletter designer can be expected.
But the main difference here is that you can take the analytics from your sales channels and market your products to customers who are the most likely to convert and the least likely to make a return, with aftermath analytics that you can use to improve your sales events even more in the future.
Live-Action Networking
Since it’s cloud based, newer CRM allows you to connect your entire team in real-time. You’ll likely have to purchase additional licenses once you reach a specific user threshold. But the connectivity is there and is powerful.
Imagine sharing a task list that’s complete with live chat with tagging and a team calendar that connects your entire back office. Now accountability is no longer in question. Being able to know that your entire team can access your operational data, and communicate in real-time with file sharing is a priceless addition to any ecommerce business.
These are but a few of the very many features that newer, groundbreaking ecommerce CMR solutions have to offer. Such usability can enable store operators to improve revenue, reduce returns and increase productivity exponentially. It’s truly must-have in today’s Amazon jungle.
The world of eCommerce is so much more complicated than what many think at the moment. Everything is complicated and the competition is currently growing in every single industry. The difference between success and failure is normally attached to a really thin line that many do not actually know a lot about.Continue reading →
It is safe to say that WordPress is one of the most flexible CMS platforms out there. You can create any site with WordPress at its core. You can also host a WordPress site on anything from shared hosting to a dedicated server. Regardless of the type of web hosting service to use, there are simple ways to optimize WordPress to run faster and smoother. We are going to discuss 5 of those ways in this article.Continue reading →
Sustaining a successful email marketing campaign is a challenge, but unlike website visitors who simply arrive at your website and then leave, email subscribers are here to stay — because they believe in your products and ideas.
Without prior experience, email marketing can sound like something that only takes up your time and isn’t worth the effort. Take content marketing for example, it’s the most trending digital marketing topic you will find right now, but did you know that email marketing also involves the practice of marketing content, and making it convert? It’s not like all your product sales happen inside of the email inbox.
In the following guide you will learn about three critical points in email marketing, which are: learning how to build authentic relationships with your subscribers, how to attract and capture your subscribers attention, and why listening to your subscriber feedback can be good for your business. Let’s get right to it.
Email is the one place where you can get real with your subscribers. At the beginning stages of email marketing, it was assumed that all emails should be addressed towards everyone on the list, and it was used more like a standalone marketing platform, rather than a way to cultivate personal relationships.
Email marketers who take time to segment and personalize their emails can enjoy a huge increase in engagement, revenue, and overall email opens percentages. Campaign Monitor ran a huge study to understand modern email marketing, and the future of where this field is heading.
The question is, how do we create more personal relationships with our readers?
One way to do this, would be to talk about your business and the challenges you are facing openly. This creates an atmosphere of transparency where you are freely sharing business growth data with your subscribers, and encourage them to become part of something bigger. Buffer is one such company that excels at transparency, their transparent values have inspired countless startups and businesses to get real about their relationships with users.
Allow your customers to have a say in how your business grows, make them feel like they are part of the growth strategy, and the effect of such personalized relationships is going to pulsate in all areas of your business.
Scientific research will happily tell you that on average, a visitor of any kind will spend approximately 8 seconds on a digital page with their full attention, before deciding to either stay, or leave.
So, you have 8 seconds to make a lasting impression from the moment a subscriber lays his/her eyes on your email. That’s a short amount of time, so what can be done to keep their attention captivated?
Make a checklist of these points for your next campaign, and continue to test your email performance even after you have sent the initial campaign, a good dataset for understanding the performance of each of the points will consist of at least 5 individual campaigns. Keep in mind that email templates can also be highly beneficial when it comes to personalization and engagement, find templates that resonate with your message and use them.
The last thing for maximizing our email marketing efforts, is user feedback.
Feedback is something that is being given back to you, based on what you are first providing. If the service you are providing is bad, then feedback is likely going to reflect that. If the service you are providing is good, but could use specific alternations based on customer interest, then customer feedback is also likely to reflect that need. The wonderful thing about email marketing, you don’t need to wait for customers to give their feedback to you, you can just ask for it yourself.
Here is a sample email you might be sending out in this regard:
Hey Mark!
My name is Alex Hope, and I am one of the Marketing Director’s here at Hopeful Inc. We are always looking for more ways to make our products better, and this has largely been possible thanks to the amazing feedback that our customers like you are giving back to us. I was hoping that it would not trouble you too much if I asked you to fill out a quick survey to help us understand your current relationship with one of our products.
If this sounds good to you, please follow this link to proceed with the short 5-minute survey. Your feedback will help us in making Hopeful Inc. the best company out there!
Thanks for being of so much help!
Alex Hope,
CEO, Hopeful Inc.
With a few modifications, you can make your own personalized email that would encourage your customers to leave their feedback on your survey. This feedback could be the crucial point for adding a new feature, or utilizing your newly learned customer pressure points to create a more personalized experience, in turn really helping your email campaign to grow and flourish.
Creating personalized experiences with each of your email subscribers allows you to listen to them independently, which creates an atmosphere of trust and sharing. This way, you can more clearly understand what are the needs of your customers, and act accordingly based on your business capabilities.
Author:
Alex Ivanovs continues to work with WordPress clients all over the world to deliver better performance and visibility, amongst many of the methods he uses — digital marketing is one of them. You can find more of what Alex is doing on daily basis at Colorlib, where he helps to manage the editorial calendar.
Every single web developer and web designer out there will tell you that the industry is constantly changing. Trends come and go and the true professionals always know what works great and what has to be avoided at all costs. We normally see many platform changes and updates that happen in one year. The smart web designer will always use the latest strategies as a site is built. With this in mind, here are some of the 2016 web design trends that absolutely all web designers need to be aware of. A failure to take these into account would lead towards an improper result.Continue reading →
Gadgets have become a major part of our daily lives, whether we’re using them in the home, for entertainment or at work. Companies are constantly developing new products with innovative features that are designed to appeal to our increasing love of technology. If you’re always searching for the next new gadget, here are some of the top products that you have to look forward to this year.
The Bluetooth Keyboard
We now have a range of mobile and computer devices in our homes or offices, and many people want to interact with more than one at a time. Data published in the Salesforce 2014 Mobile Behaviour Report shows that 41% of people use both their smartphone and tablet at the same time a minimum of once per day. Logitech has provided a solution with the release of the K480 Bluetooth keyboard, which can be used on three different devices. This enables you to switch from a smartphone to tablet or desktop instantly.
Speedy SSD
The G-DRIVE ev SSD is a high-powered solid state drive which comes equipped with a USB connection and up to 400MB/s transfer rate. This machine will work with Windows Vista, 7 and 8, as well as Mac OS 10.6.
The Smartpen
Whether you’re involved in software testing or other occupations, there are times when you require the ability to record notes whilst you’re writing. This is now achievable with the Livescribe Echo Smartpen. It enables you to save your information to an iPhone, iPad or PC using the micro-USB connection, which will also recharge the pen. Depending on the specific model, you can store up to 800 hours on one pen.
Portable music
With the SyrenPro you can listen to your music wirelessly wherever you are. The Bluetooth speakers are weather-resistant and work on both mains and battery power. http://sigatransformers.co.uk/custom-transformers/ are a toroidal transformer manufacturer who use these parts to increase sound quality.
iPad Scanner
Thanks to the increased use of mobile devices and social networking sites, sharing photos has become a global phenomenon. According to the 2014 Internet Trends report, 1.8 billion photos are now uploaded and shared each day across the world. This is now even easier with the Photo iPad Scanning Dock, which enables you to scan your photos straight to your iPad. The docking system keeps the iPad in position and charges it while in use.
The Power of Presentations
Companies are always making presentations on a range of topics and in a number of locations. It might be a presentation about software testing by Bugfinders, for example. The NEC VE281 is a mobile projector which can be used where a compact but high-performance unit is required. The machine is lightweight, 3D-ready and is equipped with high-quality speakers.
Portable Speakers
With the WOWee One Slim users can attach the speaker to their mobile, tablet or PC wherever they are. This portable speaker is compact but produces a clear sound, and the rechargeable battery provides a maximum of 10 hours use on one charge.
When your IT system is broken, it might seem like your entire life has shut down. With many businesses cutting costs by moving features online like payroll, scheduling, and transactions, and IT system that is down is sure to slow your business’s pace to molasses speeds. Since IT is so important to businesses, it is even more important that IT support be extremely reliable and quick to respond. The phrase “time is money” is not just an empty platitude, but a fact of life when you run a business, so IT support needs to be able to support you by saving your down time, and saving you money.Continue reading →