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Best 10 Business Management Apps

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By Julia Ching

Technology is GREAT — and it has changed the game. Tech has given us new ways to manage the businesses that are fine as they are — maybe — but it’s important to adapt. Now, managing the business workloads becomes efficient and less time-consuming. Here are ten of the best business management apps.

As a business owner, you have to complete many business operations at one time.

There are employee issues, payrolls, customer’s appointments, managing finances, marketing, and all that pop-ups. Indeed, you might be searching for new ways to streamline your business operations and to enhance productivity. Above all, to make your position in this competitive market.

The world is mobile.

Everyone likes to execute their tasks on mobile, it is because of the convenience factor it offers. Most of the companies have adopted agile working, which gives rise to mobile apps. It is the best tool that you can get to manage all of your important projects concurrently and can keep your business game on the top.

The market has many leading business management apps that are best to keep up the work efficiently.

These management apps permit the business team to share ideas, collaborate, and help in workload management. As a business owner, you can have an idea about your team activities and of course, their work status. While looking out for a business management app, consider the below measures:

  • Affordable.
  • Easy to use.
  • No commitment plans.
  • Can scale with your business.
  • Exceptional customer service if you need support.
  • It should have an immediate influence on investment.

So, after getting an outline of how these apps are important, know the best business management apps below.

Leading Business Management Apps you should know:

Streak

Qwaiting

Insightly

Salonist

Nimble

Zendesk Sell

Bitrix24

HRMWage

Salesforce

Freshsales

Leading Business Management Apps you should know

Qwaiting

Qwaiting allows you easy and effective management of queues and doesn’t allow your valuable customers to wait in the queue. As a leading business management app, it improves your business efficiency, profits, and thoroughly, changes the manner of handling the customers.

The Qwaiting apps don’t allow you to work manually and operate every necessary business activity by itself. From providing the ticket system, managing the customer details, employee management, appointment scheduling, sales funnel information, the screen with queue numbers, to provide real-time analytics, it covers everything.

Qwaiting allows the customers to follow the virtual queue online from the app, on-site kiosk, or from the mobile. It permits you to set up, manage, and configure the agent calendar and resource availability. With this app, you can easily check-in and manage the appointments. It provides notification to the customers about their turn and when they have to show their presence.

Also, from Qwaiting, you can have regular feedback from the customers. These reviews are quite helpful in giving you insights about where you are lagging and where the improvement is required. Accordingly, you can improve your marketing strategy.

Streak

Streak is a Content Relationship Management (CRM) app that offers everything that as a business owner you require. For those businesses who use Google and Gmail Apps, Streak is the best option. In addition to customer management, it allows you to track business analytics.

Like, in the case when you are just pitching or are about to crack one of the best deals, then, Streak enables you to check all the emails linked with every customer. Also, the newsfeed is there to update every team member about the current status of business analytics.

The streak has add-ons, from where you can integrate the appointments directly in the calendar to get more transparent experience. As the basic use of this app is meant for customer support, recruiting and sales, but, it can also be productive for everything from Fundraising to Project management.

We can say that, with Streaks, you can eradicate any possibility of time waste, and regular email drudgery with the mail merge and snippets. Manage the important emails and keep the tracking intact to communicate regularly with the customers.

Insightly

As a CRM app, Insightly incorporates many business management features that are the basic requirement of every business type. From this app, you can easily characterize the contact with tags, incorporate that with the social network profiles and then, manage the leads.

Insightly allows you to make the tasks for the team members, setting the pipelines and then track the status of the assigned tasks. Also, it sends email reminders to all-time to time. The app has an easily navigable and understandable user interface. For those who are new to it, will find it more engaging with the customer-oriented features. For the integrations, projects, and relationships, this app works best.

Salonist

As one of the best Salon apps, Salonist tops in the race. With the cloud-based ability, it allows all the Salon owners to streamline their daily operations without any hassles. It integrates all those features that are required to operate the Salon activities effectively. By allowing a Salonist to handle all of your work, you can utilize all of your productive time in generating more Salon productivity.

The synchronization of the calendar part with Outlook, Google calendar, and Apple, allows the customers to schedule, reschedule, and cancel their appointments easily. It includes email and SMS marketing, from where you can notify the customers regarding important events and activities.

Also, you can get the correct figure of your inventory from the report and analytics it provides. And, accordingly, you can refill your stocks and sell them continuously.

Nimble

For those businesses, who have a great social media presence, should choose Nimble. The Nimble app is a Content Management System that gathers the information of customers from their social media profiles. Then, it updates it all in the database and consequently, saves a lot of time of yours. Also, it examines the shared interests and combines that with Outlook, Hootsuite, and Gmail and with more services.

In addition, it examines the relationships you more valued and interacted with. And, accordingly, it offers more future opportunities with them. From Nimble, you can make quality relationships, nourish the customer relationships, approach faster and smarter, secure more deals, and work easily from the inbox. Give Nimble a try, it is worth spending the additional time.

Zendesk Sell

Zendesk Sell, a name behind customizing the sales pipeline effectively is deserving to be on this list. Primarily, it was termed as Base CRM. As all the leads cannot be created equal, so, this mobile app gives more priority to the leads and opportunities for your business.

Particularly, the Zendek Sell selects only those leads that are more important and worth spending time. It links that leads to the business first. The business management part allows you to centralize the attention to the deals and leads from the automated scoring rules from Zendesk Sell’s full-funnel analytics. Hence, those businesses whose aim is only to capture the leads can go with this app.

Bitrix24

Bitrix24 is here to give you the best experience for your potential customer and business. It provides a free version that at least 12 users can use with 12 gigs of storage space. At the next level, the pricing table is fair and incorporates the plans that are available for all businesses.

This content management system is quite broad and provides several customer management and collaboration tools. Sign up with this business management app and experience effective customer management, projects, customer support, tasks, eCommerce, and internal communication. Get this all-in-one business management tool if you really want to have beneficial results.

HRMWage

HRMWage is the preeminent business management and cloud-based human resource management app. It includes wage management, payroll management, and attendance tracking. This Human resource management tool makes every task feasible and streamlines every issue faced by HR’s for their day to day activities. The salary calculation, interviews of various job aspirants, leave management, employee performance tracking, and many more are covered.

You can easily track the employee details at any time with the management app. HRMwage also assures security and does not allow any data breach. It also eradicates the process of leaves whether it is a short day, half-day, or full-day, and makes the handling process easy.

The employee can apply for the leaves directly from the HRM only. Also, it allows easy tracking of employees and makes the hiring process smooth. From the right document management, HR can know which sessions or courses the employee can adapt to the company culture.

Salesforce

You must have come across the word, Salesforce, even if you have not known any CRM tools. It is one of the most utilized business management apps for small businesses, particularly. Salesforce incorporates every single feature on the dashboard itself. Now, you can sell all of the customer details in one place, this app gives you access to the database whenever it is required.

It offers great in-app assistance by providing access to several tutorials and guided set-ups. Salesforce holds the capability to include more business apps, also, this app offers you everything your business might require. This is how this management app keeps your business ahead from all the competitors.

Freshsales

Freshsales gives you a powerful CRM system, with an activity capture, Artificial Intelligence leads scoring, built-in phone, etc. Freshsales admits that it has 15,000 customers to assure it, customers, that they have a large and solid base.

It offers outstanding reviews with exceptional features, such as; sales leads, Built-In Phone & Email, Associated Conversions, Intuitive Sales Pipeline, etc. FreshSales has four economical plans that fit perfectly for all business sizes.

Concluding Remarks

Gone are the days when managing business is a tough or impossible task. Technology has given us many ways that you can adapt and streamline every business operation. Business management apps are one of the best ways to get ahead.

Choose an app that fits your business size, and watch how your streamlining efforts change your brand position in the market.

Image Credit: Lukas Rodriguez; Pexels

By Julia Ching

Julia Ching is associated with Salonist- Salon Appointment App, where she is working as a writer. She manages all content management projects and is keenly interested in writing technology, CRM software and Business Software related topics.

Sourced from readwrite

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4 Techniques That Will Make Any Team More Creative and Productive

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Sourced from Next Big Idea Club

“Psychological safety doesn’t just make work more pleasant for everyone—it makes teams more successful.”

Mollie West Duffy is an organizational and leadership development expert. She was a lead organizational designer at global innovation firm IDEO, and has written about workplace culture and more for Harvard Business Review, Entrepreneur, Fast Company, and Quartz.

She is also the co-author, with Liz Fosslien, of No Hard Feelings: The Secret Power of Embracing Emotions at Work. When No Hard Feelings became an official Next Big Idea Club selection, Mollie stopped by our headquarters to discuss the secrets of trusting, creative, productive teams. We’re proud to share some of her key insights below.

Successful teams depend on psychological safety. Google did a study to figure out what factors contributed to great teams, and the best teams had psychological safety, meaning that members felt they could suggest ideas, admit mistakes, and take risks without being embarrassed by the group. These teams were less likely to leave their jobs, brought in more revenue, and were rated twice as effective by executives.

Adam Grant studied the writers’ room at The Daily Show. He found that psychological safety helped these teams get to burstiness, which is when group members build on one another’s ideas so rapidly that the room feels like it’s bursting with creativity. Teams need a base of psychological safety so that members don’t take the interruptions that often come with rapid-fire idea generation personally.

“The best teams discuss ideas frequently, don’t let one person dominate the conversation, and are sensitive to one another’s feelings.”

To create an open environment of psychological safety, use these four techniques:

  1. Encourage open discussion. Questions like “Does anyone disagree?” do not effectively invite opposing viewpoints. Especially if someone on the team is quiet, ask each team member to write out their thoughts and then have everyone share them out loud. And don’t forget follow-up questions like “Say more about that.”
  2. Suggest a bad ideas brainstorm. Have team members throw out purposefully absurd ideas, or ask them to come up with the worst suggestion they can think of. This exercise takes the pressure off, and allows team members to be silly and adventurous.
  3. Ask clarifying questions, to make it okay for others to do the same. When team members use acronyms or jargon, ask them to explain (and avoid using them yourself ).
  4. Use generative language. If someone has an interesting suggestion, respond with, “Let’s try it!” If you like the gist of someone’s idea, say, “Building on that idea…”

The best teams discuss ideas frequently, don’t let one person dominate the conversation, and are sensitive to one another’s feelings. Remember, psychological safety doesn’t just make work more pleasant for everyone—it makes teams more successful.

Sourced from Next Big Idea Club

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7 things you should do before bed to have a productive morning

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By Dara Pollak

We all know there are things we can do to be productive when we wake up (i.e. coffee), but what about before we go to sleep? These are just a few things you can do to ensure you set yourself up for a good night ’s sleep to wake up feeling refreshed and ready to take on the day. Even if the day is sitting at home and taking a bunch of zoom calls.

Create a peaceful place for sleep

Your bedroom should be used only for sleeping, and a lot of people admit that they browse online in their beds, stay on their phones in bed, and watch TV to fall asleep. Try to stay away from electronics 30 minutes – 1 hour before bed. If you must have your devices on in bed, turn on “nightshift” on your iPhone (and other devices now have similar features), which cancels out blue light. Why is this helpful? Blue light is proven to disrupt our sleep cycles by “convincing” our eyes that it’s still daytime.

Ambient noise can be helpful if you find the right kinds

As mentioned above, the TV is not a good source of this, but white noise or pink noise can promote better sleep. Pink noise is classified as lower intensity and more soothing than white noise. Pink noise can be found in nature – think rustling leaves and light rain, or a cat purring. According to this small study, pink noise has been said to reduce brain wave complexity, so you can wake up ready to work! You can stream pink noise sounds on YouTube.

Don’t drink caffeine past 3 pm

It may seem like a long time before bed, but caffeine stays in your system for 5-6 hours after you drink it. In older adults, it can take even longer to process the caffeine out of the system. If you must have a beverage at night time, try some caffeine-free hot tea.

Pillow sprays

Lots of companies make pillow sprays now with essential oils and calming scents like lavender, which is proven to help slow activity in the central nervous system and aid in falling asleep faster. A popular one to try is ThisWorks Deep Sleep Pillow Spray – spray in the air around your bed or directly mist onto your pillow. You can also try an essential oils diffuser to keep a steady mist of lavender or sandalwood, both great sleep scents.

Keep your bedroom at a cool temperature

No one likes sleeping in a hot, stuffy room. Optimal sleep temperature is around low-mid 60’s. If you get really hot when you sleep, you can look into cooling systems like the ChiliPad, which is a mattress pad that cools, helping you stay at optimal sleep temperature all night long. They can be pricey, but worth the investment if you have temperature issues.

Create a before-bed routine to help calm your mind

Journal, meditate, read, or try coloring! There are tons of coloring books for adults now, and this practice has been proven to reduce stress and anxiety by calming the activity in the amygdala, which creates a similar state in the brain as meditating. If neither of these options appeals to you, try some simple breathing exercises 30 minutes before bed. There are plenty of apps now that offer guided meditations and exercises for free.

Don’t drink too much water before bed

Avoid liquids at least an hour before you go to bed, and always use the restroom before you actually go to bed. Waking up in the middle of the night to do this can bring on a slow morning!

Feature Image Credit: SHUTTERSTOCK

By Dara Pollak

Sourced from LADDERS

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How a good, simple web design can really help your website perform better

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Keep your web site simple, streamlined, and easy to use

A lot of work goes into creating a well-functioning website that will turn visitors into customers. You need to choose a reliable and fast web hosting service, design the look of the product pages, and fill the site with useful, informative content.

One thing that’s crucial is site useability. Modern internet users expect to instantly understand how your website works when they first arrive. If your site’s confusing, they’ll be quite happy to head to your competitor’s instead.

A well-designed site subconsciously leads site visitors exactly where you want them to go, all the way from the initial landing page to the checkout. It makes every step simple and intuitive, all while subtly selling your value proposition.

Every online business is different, but there are some tricks you can employ to improve your site design that work on just about every website.

Learning from print media

Traditional print media may seem like a dinosaur compared to digital media, but how people interact with websites mirrors how they read physical newspapers and magazines. The home page of a website is like the front page of a newspaper⁠. There’s usually a logo, several main headlines and stories, and sections pointing to other pages where the reader can find more information on the topics they are most interested in.

It’s fine to have a site brimming with pages full of useful, exciting content, but you shouldn’t try to cram as much information into the home page as a newspaper does on its front page. The home page should be simple, uncluttered, and make it clear how the website can be navigated. Sub-pages shouldn’t deviate from the basic navigational structure introduced on the home page.

Consider differentiating each type of content by giving it a different color. For example, set shopping cart elements as one color and informational elements as another. Maintain that color scheme throughout the whole website so the visitor will always know how to get to the content they need.

Below, we outline 10 design choices that always improve a website and 10 that should always be avoided.

Design dos

1. Be age aware

If you have an older readership, avoid small fonts. Serif fonts are also more difficult to read, so don’t use them.

2. Use the logo

Visitors expect to be able to return to the home page from every page on your website. Typically, this should be via your company logo, situated at the top left of each page.

3. Use a footer

Include a footer on every page that links to important information such as opening hours or how to contact your company.

4. Remember mobile users

Your website should work on mobile phones just as well as it works on desktop computers. Sometimes, you will need to modify how your site looks and functions on mobile devices to accommodate smaller screens. If your website is image-heavy, consider that lower-resolution images will load faster and use less bandwidth while also reducing your web hosting service fees.

5. Speed is critical

A slow site will cause visitors to become frustrated quickly, so make sure you are using a fast web hosting service with a good track record. Pay particular attention to the homepage when optimizing the speed of your website as it is your most-visited page.

6. Consider the disabled

A significant proportion of web surfers are disabled, so take steps to ensure your website can be browsed by them. Web design guidelines created by the Web Accessibility Initiative (WAI) outline how to ensure everyone can understand, navigate, and interact with your website.

7. Count those clicks

Using web analytics tools, you can see which of your pages on your site are the most popular. Count how many clicks it takes to get from your site’s homepage to these pages and consider rearranging your site’s structure to make it easier to get to these pages.

8. Show color control

It is common to create a color scheme for your website by pairing colors from your company logo with complementary and contrasting colors. Once you’ve chosen a color scheme, investigate if it is readable by someone with a visual impairment or color blindness.

9. Use bigger pictures

Big, bright images draw a visitor’s attention and sell your products to them. Still, larger images will impact load times and increase the bandwidth costs charged by your web hosting service. Optimize larger images for the web by using image compression, making them faster to load without reducing the quality too much.

10. Big buttons

Call to Action (CTA) buttons encourage visitors to perform those important actions you want them to make, such as adding a product to their shopping cart. Ensure these buttons are big, bright, and obvious on every page.

Design don’ts

1. Stay away from some web technologies

Web technologies like Flash and Java that don’t work on all systems should generally be avoided as they reduce your website’s potential audience.

2. Don’t use sidebars

Because banner ads in sidebars have become the norm, people have learned to tune them out automatically when reading a website. Therefore, avoid using sidebars for your important content.

3. Keep fonts under control

Keep the number of different fonts you use on your website to a minimum. As a rule, two to three fonts are more than enough.

4. Limit scrolling

You should include the most important information on your site ‘above the fold,’ meaning readers shouldn’t need to scroll down to get to the main focus of each page.

5. Never underline text

You should avoid underlining text, as users will confuse it with a clickable hyperlink.

6. Avoid lengthy forms

Every field you add to a form requires effort from a visitor. Many people will simply click away when faced with a lengthy form. Keep forms short and only ask for the information you really need from the visitor to get them to the next stage in the buying process.

7. Don’t be rude

Avoid pop-ups that bombard the visitor as soon as they hit your homepage for the first time. They’re annoying and ineffective.

8. Don’t be long-winded

As a rule, online text should have fewer than 20 words per line, because long lines are hard to read. Paragraphs should normally not be longer than 50 words in length.

9. Never overload a page

While it’s tempting to include a lot of content showing why your products and services are the best, remember that less is more. Use white space to increase readability and move some of the information on busy pages to sub-pages.

10. Avoid auto-run objects

Avoid automatically playing sounds or video when visitors first arrive on a page. Leave it to the visitor to decide if they want to play these elements.

Final thoughts

Familiarity with your own website can make finding problems with its design difficult. Therefore, it’s important to get someone who is unfamiliar with your site to test every part of it and give you valuable feedback.

If you don’t know where to start with a new website design, jot down 10 websites you visit often and what you like about their design. Also, write down anything you think could be improved upon. This will give you a shortlist of things to aim for in your new site design.

Accept that most website designs are imperfect at first and need to be tweaked. Finally, don’t be afraid to break the mold. The trick is to have a memorable design that differentiates you from the competition without being confusing or annoying.

Check out our guide to this year’s best web hosting solutions.

Feature Image Credit: Photo by Hal Gatewood on Unsplash

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How To Use Google My Business To Get Better Rankings On Google (Without Ads)

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By Alex Bider

Using Google My Business successfully is like wielding any other digital power tool. With the right application, you can build a listing that’ll get found by the right people. With the wrong application, you could do some lasting damage to your online presence.

In 2020, the first page of Google search results is one of the environments where successful marketing can be found. Appearing at the top of page one gives automatic authority to a website. Google My Business results typically display at the top of page one, above the organic results.

Properly optimizing your Google My Business listing can be enough to make you appear frequently in local search results, and there are many ways you can monetize the traffic you’ll get as a result.

How To Create A Google My Business Listing

Log in to the Google account you want to use, and go to https://www.google.com/business/. Click on “Manage Now,” and then enter the information as prompted, starting with your business name.

Note: You only need to enter an address if you have a store, office or other location where you meet customers face to face. If your business provides goods or services to a specific area, you’ll be classified as a service area business. If that’s the case, make sure you tick the corresponding box at the bottom of the form. If you have a service area business, this is also where you’ll specify which areas you serve.

Lastly, choose your business category, and add your contact information. Then select “Finish” to move on to verification.

Many businesses will have to verify via postcard, which can take up to two to four weeks to arrive. But some will get the option to verify by phone or email — be sure to check if you qualify for these speedier options.

How To Audit And Optimize Your Account

Once your business is verified, there are a number of ways to improve your odds of showing up in Google search results. Make sure you’ve filled out all the information fields possible, covering the keywords and topics relevant to your business. It’s also good to mention any special features or benefits that your business brings to the table. Are you bilingual? Mention it in your description!

You’ll also want to add a profile photo and upload a few other pictures that either display your location or give an idea of what you do. Current customers love to be able to see a business making progress, and showing that you’re actively evolving can help to attract new clients.

Double-check that everything is correct, and consider making a post or two to get things started. Google My Business posts can include images, text and call-to-action button links. They’re a great way to feature sales, draw more attention to your content or just get people clicking through to your website.

What You Need For Ongoing Success

Succeeding on Google My Business is a pretty simple formula, but it requires creativity and dedication to execute correctly. Here are some tips:

• Appealing images are a must. Make them at least 720 x 720 pixels and either JPGs or PNGs.

• Quick and open responses to customer reviews (whether positive or negative) will go a long way.

• Checking your GMB insights at least once a week will keep you up to date on how different tactics and trends affect your business.

How To Stand Out From The Crowd

Keeping consistent with both the quantity and quality of your posts will set you apart from other businesses that allow their listings to languish. Pointing links from websites and other social platforms to your GMB listing should also help to improve your ranking.

Most brands don’t put enough effort into their GMB listings, so if you run a special promotion for your audience there, you’ll be more likely to get and maintain a potential buyer’s interest.

Final Thoughts On Optimizing Google My Business

When you manage to rank in the top three GMB listings for a local search term, it increases your exposure and your inherent authority significantly. This won’t just increase your traffic; it will increase your targeted buyer traffic. People who have money to spend and only a few minutes to make a decision will trust you based on your ranking, reviews, easy-to-comprehend descriptions and appealing images. When they click through to your website, the rest is up to you.

Feature Image Credit: Getty

By Alex Bider

Alex Bider is the CEO and Senior Internet Marketing Consultant at 2Marketing.com.

Sourced from Forbes

 

 

 

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HOW TO CHOOSE THE RIGHT PLATFORM FOR YOUR E-COMMERCE MIGRATION

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By Duran Inci.

There are a number of reasons a business might undergo an e-commerce migration, such as if your business’s needs are changing or if you simply want to upgrade your e-commerce services. In other instances, however, your platform might simply be out of date. For many websites using Magento 1, this is the case.

After June, users will no longer receive support for Magento 1, according to Adobe. Website owners will be on their own for customer service, upgrades and developments unless they upgrade to Magento 2 (or another platform entirely).

The question then becomes, “How do you choose a new platform?” Many factors go into this decision, and because my company specializes in e-commerce marketing and migrations, I have ample experience with making such choices. There are a few aspects you need to consider, especially in order to comply with new regulations.

Data security

A business cannot have data breaches. From a customer standpoint, data breaches can cause a loss of trust. From the business’s standpoint, you can get in trouble with the law. The payment card industry data security standard (commonly referred to as PSI DDS) requires that systems are updated with security patches to protect from vulnerabilities. Approved scanning vendors (ASVs) can help you determine if your company is compliant with PSI DDS requirements. A sensible owner won’t stick with a platform that a credit card vendor will be forced to refuse.

When it comes to choosing a platform, research how successful the platform is at preserving customer data, and look at any history of breaches. That way you can ensure you’re compliant with data security requirements, especially with changes to the GDPR in the European Union.

Cost of your investment versus the return

While free platforms exist for your e-commerce store, and there are platforms that run on a tiered pricing schedule, you ought to figure out how high of a monetary and time return you want on the monthly fees and startup costs. The hard part is that no single platform is a cookie-cutter solution; businesses differ in terms of their needs.

Many e-commerce platforms are either software as a service or open source. SaaS provides prepared business solutions so that the owner or marketing team in charge of the site doesn’t have to implement any coding. They do have a recurring fee and allow for less control, but it’s better for those who want a high-quality site that’s standard. You don’t need a team of specialists for it or a web host to ensure that your business stays online.

Open source does require coding, but it gives you more control over your individual website and customization. You also have more freedom to scale.

Tiered pricing varies widely depending on the platform you choose. You might be able to choose a basic plan for less than $50, while a more advanced plan could cost you more than $200 within the same time frame. If you opt for a tiered pricing platform provider, remember that the difference lies in API support, product filtering, price lists and other additional filters. Not every business needs to necessarily receive unlimited API calls, but one that does can take advantage of the feature for a price.

User experience

My clients want to manage their storefronts and optimize shopping for their customers. The learning curve should be minimal, even if they are delegating the services to a marketing team. That way, if they want to handle the back end, complicated steps won’t hinder them.

Take add-ons, for example: They can customize and improve your storefront. Some platforms require separate file transfer protocols and modules to install these add-ons, which can become laborious. Others make it very easy for a user to conduct an installation.

Ideally, you also want a platform that will cross-manage the multiple processes that e-commerce requires. You are not just covering inventory or distribution of goods and services; an online platform needs to wear all the hats in the business. This includes marketing, keyword optimization and SEO.

Management of opportunity costs

By opportunity costs, I am referring to the price of making a selection and missing out on the other alternative platforms. A business owner needs to give up on a benefit after they make that choice and remain aware of it. Managing opportunity costs means that you take full advantage of the choices you make.

I have seen this time and time again: A client starts a business on a platform, and they are pleased to see revenue and improved shopping experience. But then they plateau and become stagnant, unable to grow. The owner knows that they should start to migrate.

Sometimes, a platform can limit your potential to optimize revenue or to increase conversions. What’s more, a new storefront could unify all of the processes and save you the time of having to monitor each one for efficiency. You simply need to figure out which one is right for you.

Users might also miss out on automatic updates to platforms if they choose to stay on the same one. It might not seem like much, but automatic updates mean that you have access to the same resources that other owners on the same platform do. What’s more, in the case of breaches, you receive updated security patches without having to handle it proactively.

Regarding migration, some users worry about losing valuable customer orders. If this is something you don’t feel equipped to migrate yourself, you can consider asking a professional web developer for help. They will know how to migrate those orders. Any losses should only be for the short term.

Know how to protect yourself and stay updated. That means assessing what you want out of an e-commerce storefront. The right store platform online can help you level up and allow you to grow in the long run.

Feature Image Credit: GETTY

By Duran Inci.

Duran Inci is an internet technology executive with 15+ years of experience and the CEO of Optimum7.

Sourced from AdAge

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Ad market ‘surprisingly’ resilient despite 13% slump this year

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While UK ad spend is expected to decline by 13% this year, this is only slightly worse than during the last recession despite the much worse economic outlook for 2020.

The UK advertising market is forecast to decline by 13% year on year in 2020, according to media agency GroupM, but it is expecting the sector to bounce back next year with growth of 13%.

While the figure shows a steep fall this year, GroupM believes the extent of the decline is “potentially surprising” given the economic outlook for the year. EY’s chief economist forecasts that UK GDP growth will fall by 8% this year, compared to the 4.2% drop experienced during the 2009 recession.

Yet the decline in UK ad spend is not expected to be commensurately worse, with this year’s decline only one percentage point below the 12% decline experienced in 2009.

GroupM global president of business intelligence, Brian Wieser, believes the main reasons for this are twofold. Firstly, many of the sectors that have been worst hit by the coronavirus pandemic are light advertisers.

“The consequences of the pandemic are narrowly felt, meaning the sectors which have been hit the hardest may very well have been lower intensity advertisers relative to other sectors,” he explains.

“Restaurants are among the hardest hit sectors, but restaurants are low intensity advertisers. That is bad for society on many levels, but it doesn’t necessarily impact the ad market as much.”

Secondly, ad spend among small and medium-sized businesses has held up relatively well. Wieser points to the fact the revenues of digital advertising companies such as Google and Facebook, which have a longtail of advertisers, have held up reasonably well as evidence for this.

“Small businesses that might have been in a desperate fight for survival looked to operate in a digital world and shifted resources towards digital advertising as a result,” he says.

“If we think most large advertisers cut spend everywhere they could, then implicitly the rest of the advertising base held up. We hear anecdotes of this or that small business that people used to go to, they are now getting online. That is among factors of why the advertising downturn was not more severe.”

This is not just about digital advertising, although it has felt the knock-on impact, but about the digital transformation of small businesses. Even five years ago, it would have been very difficult for many to transition to digital, especially in just a few months. But new technology and social media platforms have made this much easier.

“It is not just that [small businesses] can advertise online, it is the digital transformation of their business operations,” says Wieser.

“Five years ago, they could have advertised online, but it would have been harder to transition consumers to buy certain categories of goods through digital means, or to implement management platform software with their website. That is where the change has been more profound, advertising is the knock-on effect of that.”

The impact on media

This is part of the reason why digital advertising is forecast to see the slowest decline this year, with GroupM expecting an 8% fall in 2020 followed by an 11% rebound in 2020 – meaning total spend will be higher than 2019.

Within digital, some sub-sectors are expected to still experience growth, including a 45% increase in ecommerce-related advertising this year. Search, however, will be hit by the negative impact from travel brands cutting spend and decline by 8% this year, followed by a 6% gain in 2021.

The ‘digital extensions’ category, which consists of digital ad revenue from traditional properties, will underperform this year with a decline of 13%, although it will bounce back to 20% growth in 2021.

TV will be hit hard by the ad pullback from big brands, with GroupM forecasting a 15% decline this year and then 13% growth in 2021 as deferred spend is spent. However, this growth next year could be curtailed should professional sport not return in a meaningful way as GroupM currently assumes will happen.

Print is forecast to experience a 24% decline in 2020, followed by an 18% gain in 2021, while outdoor ad spend will decline by more than a third (35%) this year but increase 23% in 2021.

If you have assumptions about how people do things, how they want to engage with brands, how they want to consume brands – challenge those now.

Brian Wieser, GroupM

Finally, audio ad revenues are predicted to fall 16% this year, followed by 14% growth next, while cinema will experience the worst decline of any sector this year at 50% and a relatively slower bounceback of just 25% growth in 2021.

Wieser says the forecasts show that while the impact of coronavirus has been rapid, a return to near 2019-levels for most media sectors is expected in 2021 if key assumptions around coronavirus (such as when a vaccine might be available and the avoidance of a second wave) are met.

“We made some big assumptions, change those and we change the numbers. But if assumption holds up our report is optimistic about a relatively quick rebound next year due to pent up demand,” he says.

“People who speak about a V-shaped recovery usually talk about it in a shorter sense – that in a few months things will be back to normal. That is absolutely not going to happen. But decades from now we’ll look back, see things are better by the middle of next year and describe it as a V-shaped recovery.”

Wieser also urges marketers not to waste this period by using it as a “time to rethink”, particularly as the pandemic has shown consumers are “open-minded” to doing things differently.

“If you have assumptions about how people do things, how they want to engage with brands, how they want to consume brands – challenge those now. We have already seen there are different ways of operating, people are more open-minded to doing things differently, buying different combinations and packages because we’ve had to do such a major reset to habits,” he concludes.

“Questioning the things we assume we think we know about how and why people do what they do is important. As is figuring out the best way to organise a business for a world that is less dependent on physical retail and what that means for a brand.”

Feature Image Credit: Shutterstock

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Pandemic Exacts Toll: Digital Strategies Pay Off And Marketers Expect Them To Pay Forward

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By Christine Moorman

Optimism among marketers plummets to levels last witnessed during the Great Recession. Optimism about the economy is 50.9 (out of 100) compared to just three months ago when it was 62.7. In February 2009, following the Great Recession of 2008, this rating was 47.7. B2C companies are more pessimistic than their B2B counterparts, as are larger revenue companies (>$10B) compared to their smaller counterparts (<$25M).

Against this backdrop, The CMO Survey conducted a Special Covid-19 Edition survey, asking marketing leaders at U.S. for-profit companies to share their survival strategies, KPIs, and predictions about the future. Here are the top results.

1. Marketing jobs lost: Although 62% of marketing leaders reported no job losses in their companies, 9% of marketing jobs have been lost, on average, due the pandemic. The largest percentage of marketers (24%) anticipate these jobs will never return. Planned marketing hiring drops to the lowest point in CMO Survey history, going negative for the first time ever with average hiring predicted to be -3.5% in the next year.

2.    Customer prioritize digital experiences: Marketers report increased openness among customers to new digital offerings introduced during the pandemic (85%), increased value placed on digital experiences (84%), and greater acknowledgements of companies’ attempts to “do good” (79%). Marketers expect this increased focus on digital to be a permanent shift in consumer behavior.

3.    Marketers pivot digital: Given customer shifts, marketers are, in turn, adjusting their offerings and pivoting their businesses. Some 60.8% indicate they have “shifted resources to building customer-facing digital interfaces” and 56.2% are “transforming their go-to-market business models to focus on digital opportunities.” Consistent with this, CMO Survey results show the largest single drop in traditional advertising spending (-5.3% expected over the next year), further solidifying the shift toward digital.

4.    Marketing budgets hold: Despite headcount loss, 30.3% of marketers—the largest segment—have experienced no change in their overall marketing budgets during the pandemic with 41.3% reporting gains and 28.4% reporting losses. On average, marketers report they have gained about 5% in their budgets during the pandemic and expect an 8.4% increase in digital marketing spending over the next year.

5.    Marketing objectives remain modest: When asked what objectives they are focused on during the pandemic, the #1 and #2 responses from marketers are “building brand value that connects with customers” and “retaining current customers.” Consistent with this, marketing employees were leveraged more for “getting active online to promote the company and its offerings” (69%) and “reaching out to current customers with information” (65%) compared to growth objectives such as “generating new products and service ideas” (44%) or “building partnerships” (41%).

6.    Marketing leadership promoted: 62.3% of marketers report that the marketing function has increased in importance during the pandemic. Building brand and customer retention through digital, mobile, and social strategies are reported to be key to that heightened role. This importance is striking given 9% marketing job losses—marketers are doing more with fewer people.

7.    Social media shines bright: 84.2% of marketers say they have used social media for brand building and 54.3% say they have used it for customer retention during the pandemic. Given this focus, marketers have increased investment social media budgets 74% since February—an increase as a percent of marketing budgets from 13.3% to 23.2%. This strategy appears to have worked: For the first time in CMO Survey history, the rated contributions of social media to company performance rose—up 24% since February. This is an important finding because social media contributions have previously remained flat and at average levels since 2016 despite rising investments.

8.    Online sales performance increases: Online sales have grown to the highest level in The CMO Survey history. They now constitute 19.3% of sales—a 43% increase over just three months ago. Small companies (with fewer than 500 employees) are taking advantage of selling online, with ecommerce accounting for 26.1% of sales.

9.    Overall sales revenue drop 17%: Despite online sales gains, marketers report major losses across sales revenue, profits, and customer acquisition during the pandemic. Biggest reductions are to sales revenue, which dropped 17.8% on average, with 16.9% of marketers reporting the loss of over 50% of their revenues. Considering winners and losers, 64% of marketers report sales losses compared to 30.3% that report gains and 5.2% reporting no change. Marketers expect these sales revenues to increase 4.2% in the next year driven by the view that consumers’ current lower likelihood to purchase (67%) and unwillingness to pay full price (43%) will return to pre-pandemic levels within 6-12 months.

10. Pandemic weakens environmental focus: Covid-19 has also dampened marketers’ likelihood to make changes to reduce their offerings’ negative impact on the ecological environment. The number of marketers indicating a willingness to change their products or services to reduce their negative environmental impact has dropped from 72.9% to 52.7% with attention shifting to easier-to-implement marketing promotions (58%). More marketers report that Covid-19 makes sustainability efforts seem “like a luxury” than it “created opportunities to increase sustainability efforts” in their companies.

11. Use of influencers expected to rise: Marketers report that 7.5% of their marketing budgets is focused on online influencers, mostly on LinkedIn, company blogs, Instagram, and Facebook, and that they anticipate large gains in the use of influencers in the next three years (up to 12.7%).

Detailed analysis of these and other results are available here. I hope these findings from our Special Covid-19 Edition of The CMO Survey are useful as you navigate these next few months and beyond. I will be taking a deeper dive into these findings during a webinar on June 25th at 1PM Eastern sponsored by the Marketing Science Institute and the American Marketing Association. You can register by following this link. I look forward answering your questions and taking your comments.

THE CMO SURVEYSurvey Results Archive – The CMO Survey

By Christine Moorman

Sourced from Forbes

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How to fix Twitter and other websites that won’t load in Safari

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Do you ever find that websites sometimes refuse to load in Safari on your Mac, no matter how long you wait? The problem has been plaguing Twitter users in recent months, and can occur with other sites, too.

Fortunately, there’s an easy fix.

You may have already resorted to using another browser. When this problem surfaces, switching to Chrome or Edge (or anything other than Safari) can be an easy fix. But who wants to swap browsers because one website won’t load?

Another extreme solution is to clear all your Safari data. That’s quick and effective, but it means losing all your open tabs, having to log in to all your favourites sites again, and other little annoyances.

Instead, you can efficiently target only the site that isn’t loading. Here’s how to clear Safari data for just one website when it isn’t loading.

Fix websites that won’t load in Safari

Before following these steps, ensure that the problem really is just with Safari. Obviously, you should make sure your Mac is connected to the internet. Then try loading the problematic site in another browser — maybe on your iPhone or iPad — or checking its status on Downdetector.

If your connection is fine and dandy, and the site loads on another device, follow the steps below to clear its Safari data:

  1. Open Safari.
  2. Click Safari in the menu bar, then click Preferences…
  3. Click Privacy, then select Manage Website Data…
    How to manage website data for Safari
  4. Use the search bar in the top-right corner to find saved data for the website that won’t load.
  5. Select the saved data, then click Remove.
    How to delete website data in Safari
  6. Click Done.

Once that’s finished, you can visit the site again, and it should load without any issues … at least for now. Some users find that the problem reoccurs every few weeks with certain sites, such as Twitter. So you might need to repeat these steps later, unfortunately.

If this fix doesn’t work for you, there could be other things that are preventing the site from loading. If you use a content blocker, ensure that the site you want to visit hasn’t become inadvertently blacklisted, and try restarting Safari.

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Facebook Just Took a Huge Step Toward Monetizing WhatsApp

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By Adam Levy

After numerous delays, it’s rolling out a key feature in the messaging app.

Facebook‘s (NASDAQ:FB) efforts to monetize WhatsApp — the messaging app it paid $19 billion for in 2014 — have been delayed and rethought several times over by CEO Mark Zuckerberg and his management team. Plans to place advertisements in WhatsApp Status were suspended earlier this year and efforts to launch a payments platform in India have hit a roadblock.

But WhatsApp payments is finally launching. Not in India, but Brazil, WhatsApp’s second-largest market by users. The service is built on Facebook Pay, which the company plans to use as the foundation to support payments across all of its apps. As e-commerce becomes a bigger part of Facebook’s business, WhatsApp payments represents a major step toward monetizing WhatsApp’s 2 billion users.

How payments will make money in WhatsApp

Facebook will charge fees in line with industry standards for payments made in WhatsApp. That means peer-to-peer payments won’t cost users anything, while businesses will pay a fee to receive payments from customers. In Brazil, that fee is 3.99%.

It’s worth noting Facebook uses a similar fee structure for payments in Messenger, which it rolled out in 2015. But Messenger payments haven’t become a major source of revenue, because most users don’t use the app to communicate with businesses, and when they do, they’re not using it to transact.

It’s far more common to use WhatsApp for business interactions, especially in countries like Brazil or India. In fact, WhatsApp rolled out an app just for businesses in 2018. It amassed over 5 million users within a year. There’s still a lot of room to grow that number, as Facebook boasts 140 million Pages on its flagship platform. What’s more, its investment in and partnership with Reliance Jio could bring millions of businesses onto the platform.

At the end of last year, WhatsApp introduced the ability to add a product catalog in the business app. And it offers a paid API for businesses to more easily handle communication with customers. The addition of a payments platform within the app will support both.

Supporting the full ecosystem of Facebook apps

Payments in WhatsApp cannot be considered in a vacuum. Supporting commerce in the messaging app will make click-to-message advertisements on Facebook or Instagram more valuable. That’s because they increase the ability to convert a message into a sale, and Facebook could have additional user data about their payments behavior in its messaging app.

Moreover, Facebook is using the Facebook Pay platform it started rolling out last year in order to support payments in WhatsApp. The unified platform allows users to enter their payment information once, and use it across Facebook’s family of apps.

Facebook has made several efforts to increase commerce on Facebook and Instagram over the past year. It introduced Checkout on Instagram and Shops on Facebook. Both aim to reduce the friction customers experience when clicking through advertisements on its platforms, as well as make it easier for retailers to establish an online presence. Adding payments in WhatsApp could help increase conversions for its other e-commerce products and vice versa.

Looking at the WhatsApp payments rollout as part of the larger ecosystem of services from Facebook points to the real potential of the service. While commerce within WhatsApp could be a nice source of revenue, commerce across all of its apps could add up to something truly meaningful for the FAANG stock, which generated over $70 billion in revenue last year.

WhatsApp payments in Brazil is just the first step for Facebook, but it’s extremely meaningful. The country represents a sizable portion of its market, and a fast-growing economy. Increasing the number of users with payment information connected to Facebook Pay should support much broader applications than just sending some cash to a friend, and that’s where the real opportunity lies for Facebook to finally make some money from WhatsApp.

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Feature Image Credit: FACEBOOK.

By Adam Levy

Sourced from The Motley Fool

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