Category: Business

Staying Afloat During the Pandemic

Posted on by Elena Stewart

It’s no secret that the COVID-19 pandemic has wreaked havoc on countless small businesses. If your business has yet to re-open, or you are finding it difficult to stay afloat, it’s essential to figure out how you can push forward.

Hopefully, the information and advice below can help you get back on track so that your business can survive and continue to grow.

Figuring Out Finances

Let’s start with the engine that powers your business: money.

  • Assess how the pandemic has impacted your cash flow, sales, and profits.
  • Then, think of adjustments you can make to put your business in a better financial position, such as cutting expenses and/or adding revenue.
  • And look into the wealth of financial assistance programs, such as non-government grants and government loans that can help to keep you afloat as you regain your footing.

Afloat During the Pandemic

Image Source: Burst

Making Moves Online

Companies of all shapes and sizes were already doing more and more things online, but the pandemic has exponentially increased the need for such efforts.

  • Make sure you have a quality website that represents your company well and provides users with an engaging experience.
  • Up your social media marketing efforts to connect with your audience.
  • Whether it means selling items you already offer or finding new, trendy items to sell, open an e-commerce store to create some extra cash flow.
  • Make it even easier for customers to buy from you by developing a mobile app.
  • If possible, allow employees to work remotely, and make sure everyone is equipped to communicate and collaborate effectively.

Creating a Space at Home

Whether you have a large team of employees or it’s just you, remote work may be able to benefit your situation now and in the future. However, in order to do it successfully, you will need a comfortable place at home for working.

  • Pick a location for your home office that will help you stay focused and productive.
  • Make sure your office has adequate insulation, ventilation, and flooring, especially if you’re converting a garage or basement.
  • Position your primary workstation where natural light can flow in through the windows.
  • Make sure you get all the equipment you need to work productively.
  • And of course, you will need a daily routine that helps you actually get stuff done!

For small business owners, now is a time for making adjustments. Sit down with your budget to come up with ways you can improve your situation, and take advantage of everything the web can offer you.

Also, make sure you have a dedicated area at home for working remotely.

While there are plenty of other steps you can take to keep your small business healthy during the pandemic, starting with these will put you in a better position to succeed.

Top Technologies Your Business can Take Advantage of Today

Posted on by Dilip Tiwari

For outgrowing your business, you need to learn and update yourselves to new technologies so that you do not lag. Artificial intelligence plays a key role in this game of growing business.

Artificial Intelligence or AI refers to incorporating machines in such a way that they exhibit all the traits similar to human intelligence like problem-solving and learning.

AI is greatly used in finance and is the best technology needed for a business. AI is widely used in the detection of fraud and bank debited accounts.

AI can be used by logistic companies for better delivery methods.in the retail business, ai navigates your customer’s choice. HANA is the biggest example of the same.

It is a cloud platform that companies use to regulate their database of information. It is highly useful in sales transactions and is widely used by WALMART to handle huge transactions in a couple of seconds.

Artificial intelligence refers to the instilling of human-like behavior into machines. Technology and machines work following each other. Let us look at the importance of new technology in the business world.

Customer Experience and Service

The use of technology in business today is affecting considerably the growth in a very positive way. Whether your business is small or you are running huge merchandise interacting with your customer, communicating well, and providing them your services all the time will certainly help your company reach heights.

Providing your customer the comfortability and satisfaction are all that counts in making a small business huge merchandise. There are various apps.

1. Use slack instant messaging because most of the people prefer messaging than any other means to connect.

2. Justcall is a great app in keeping track of phone calls alongside emails for better efficiency.

3. The fresh desk app is easy to set up and is rated as rising stars by Forbes. This app offers self-services and measures customer satisfaction.

Anming a few more apps like Hubspot services hun, olark-live chat, Hootsuite, and many more.

Productivity and Business Marketing

The advantages of technology in business start becoming seeable when people recognize you by your brand and recommend your brand to others as well. Arrange webinars, create videos, and broadcast your brand on social media sites like Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Pinterest, and many more.

The list of few reliable apps is here

1. Buffer – helps in scheduling updates on all social media platforms.

2. Fiverr- large businesses are taking out all goods from the various freelance marketplaces. Easy to use, just post a project, pay for the services, and you are sorted with your latest logo design.

3. Asana- the best business productivity app which targets the best management of a project, helps the teams to stay focused on aim and meet deadlines smoothly.

4. Microsoft Evernote- is a potent app and a great solution for huge storage information.

Protecting Customer Privacy

Customer’s privacy is at the highest risk. To grow a business tremendously, the use of technology in a business today in terms of securing customer’s information is something very unavoidable.

Using software and technologies that will aid the same will be a great boon for the business. When a business starts to grow there is a very risk of its privacy. Nobody wants their data to be lost or misused by hackers.

These are the solutions for the problems

1. Message control helps the business from getting attacked via emails.

2. Cryptoscanner- the software claims to stop ransomware in milliseconds.

3. Expensify- David Barrett the CEO of the software calls this management system “ Expensify: the cooperate cared for masses”

Secured and Hassle-free Payments

Paypal stands firmly out of all the other apps. It helps to transfer money to and from any foreign account.

Gpay is like that best all-rounder cricketer and is a tool that offers almost everything to do. For apple uses apple cash is the best technology needed for a business. Apple cash credit/debit card make and receive payments.

Venmo is another app owned by PayPal and is the third most used app in finance apps.

The world where payments are made online makes them hassle-free and secured with the best apps like a square that provides the best fraud security.

Shopify will make your transactions easier if you accept both offline and online payments.

Flint is the best option if you do not have the attachment and dongle, just scan the customer’s credit card number and payment is done.

Storing and Managing Big Files

Storing and managing big files can be stressful. But the latest technology trends are helping big businesses to sail through this mess easily.

Here are a few cloud-based apps that will make your business less disruptive. Being organized is the key to the business which can unlock all the doors to success.

Dropbox, google drive is simple yet effective apps that allow users to store anything including photos, videos, big documents, spreadsheets, and presentations in one place.

Using these technologies software reduces the amount of stress, costs, and time.

The proof hub will become you under one roof store. This app has plans you can adjust according to your needs.

One drive, ignite, and share files are also reliable, secure, and fast sharing apps in this list.

Machine Learning, Robotic Process Automation or RPA, Virtual Reality and Augmented Reality, Cybersecurity, Blockchain tutorial, Internet of Things (IoT) are another thing to keep in mind.

Business nowadays is completely based on the latest technologies. If you are not learning new things and experimenting with new technology you will lag and there are chances that you might even knock out the game. Think out of the box and start taking risks.

Taking risks will help you explore the broad spectrum of the world of technology. If you are a small business owner and want to expand business tremendously then these apps are your partners.

Starting up a business may take a lot of thinking and decisions but do not waste time collecting information about the apps. These are the apps that are going to make your name a brand and will market you.

Digital marketing is another important thing that business-related people are using rapidly. When your business is growing it becomes a target for the hacker to steal the data and information from your company.

Do not give them a chance to do so. Make good use of these technologies and expand your business on a great scale. All you need to do is connect these apps to your computer, smartphone, and every other gadget.

There are even small technologies like Cortana by Microsoft and Siri by apple which are also grounding their foot in the market.

Although these are not constructed with abilities to solve large problems they can prove a really helpful tool in daily life. Keep your team focussed on the goal, and meet deadlines on time. The team needs to stay very productive which becomes even easier when you have access to use the technology. Maintain good communication with your team.

And guide them on how to use technology to pace up the response time for the customer queries.

Nobody has so much time to wait for the company to reply to the query they have placed.

5 Mistakes That Can Destroy Your Magento Store’s Success

Posted on by Alex Husar

So you’ve gone the extra mile to help your potential customers reach your store, and they’re here. Terrific! But why do so many of them leave without making a purchase? And that’s after all the effort and resources that you’ve put in.

With our extensive expertise in eCommerce and years of hands-on Magento development services, we’ve identified the key factors that may be hindering your conversion rates. It’s time to address these issues head-on and revitalize your store’s performance.

On this page, we’ve gathered the main reasons why your conversion rates aren’t as good as you want them to be as well. Plus, we give recommendations on how to make things right.

Why are the Conversion Rates of your Magento Store Poor?

There are many ways to explain why your Magento conversion rates aren’t skyrocketing, but we’ve brought it down to the five most common ones that we’ve encountered multiple times when working with this stores.

1. Unoptimized Store Speed

If page load time is slow, your store’s performance isn’t great. Yes, you can have the prettiest design in the world but don’t ever forget that people hate to wait. They will leave your store in about 8 out of 10 cases if they get impatient with page loading.

According to HostingTribunal, “a 1-second delay eats away 7% of the coveted conversion rate.” Therefore, getting the best of your store’s speed should be among your priorities at all times.

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Giving a couple of pointers on what to pay attention to in order to make your Magento store faster:

  • review your images(whether they are optimized not only in terms of image weight);
  • make use of nitty-gritty features like Lazy Image Loading;
  • get rid of unneeded data and logs;
  • narrow down the use of your plugins to the ones you actually need;
  • get your hands on caching tools like Varnish.

For optimal store speed acceleration and consequent Magento conversion rate optimization, of course, it’s better to turn to Magento development pros who’ll help fuel up the website to reach its best speed results.

2. Your Store Isn’t User-Friendly

Your Store Isnt User Friendly

Navigation should be intuitive. End of story. Your clients have to have every opportunity of shopping with ease. They shouldn’t be wasting their time on attempts to find something on the store or wrestling with the question of how to do something (for example, how to zoom in on a product image, close a pop-up, or try to click on an “unreachable” option from the droplist).

As stated earlier, time counts. And this goes beyond how quickly pages load. It’s all about the full picture in general, you don’t want customers to get frustrated and hit the exit site “X”. If things are “easy-breezy”, people are more likely to buy.

Is your store really mobile friendly? Check out the current statistics on eCommerce purchases made using mobile devices that were gathered by OuterBox.

The recent increase is already an evident change in user behavior. Hence, if it isn’t as simple to buy something on your store using your smartphone or tablet as it is from your desktop, you’re in trouble.

Regardless of mobile or desktop, user experience is key. Try to analyze how users navigate your store and think of ways to make things better.

Consulting professional UX/UI designers on the matter can be a good recommendation in this scenario. They’ll not only help to move things around but to actually enhance your page layouts for perception convenience.

As a result, this can for sure boost your Magento conversion rate.

3. Inefficient Checkout Process

Another thing that greatly explains why the conversion rate of your Magento store is far from perfect is that the store’s cart and checkout aren’t optimized.

As a rule, the major reasons for cart abandonment can be narrowed down to:

  • Non-transparent pricing and large additional costs that come to light only when attempting to purchase the product.
    The lack of opportunity to make the purchase without registering on the website.
  • The checkout procedure is just too lengthy and complex.

That said, mentioning some ways you can solve the cart abandonment problem are:

Be clear about the extra costs:

This regards all the add-ons for shipping, delivery, taxes, just to name a few). Consider lining out what the price is made up of right on the first step of the checkout so that the visible calculation omits unnecessary questions and lives up to client expectations.

Add the functionality of the Guest Checkout to your Magento store:

Moreover, you can add the feature of Social Login, allowing users to access your store via social media channels like Facebook or Google.

As such, many shoppers don’t want to register and leave their contact details because they simply don’t wish to receive email send-outs or just because they don’t trust you yet.

Without obligatory registration, more clients will finalize their purchase journey since they’ll be asked for their email address maximum.

Rework the steps of your checkout:

Recently, numerous store owners have shifted to a one-step checkout layout as, right from the start, it gives the customer the impression that they won’t be wasting their time going through multiple time-consuming steps to complete the purchase.

4. Your Store Seems Untrustworthy

Especially relevant in the case with first-time visitors to your store, you must make sure that the store is a secure environment.

When you come to think of it, for most people, leaving their personal or credit card details on an unknown store is a tricky question. Usually, there’s a lot of hesitation on the line.

Mentioning other ways to improve the conversion rate in your Magento store, you should make use of the security badges. At the least, this way you’ll have a visual confirmation that your store is secure, for example, this can be put on a checkout page.

Plus, a good way to make your customer feel more comfortable when using your website is by providing multiple ways to get in touch with you. An example of this could be adding a chat plugin to your store. For instance, Magento LiveChat is available free of charge.

Go even further by running your store’s security scans so that you’re sure that there are no vulnerabilities or hazards threatening neither your store nor the data on your clients that you must safeguard.

5. Inconvenient Payment Options

You’d be surprised to find out how many clients you might have already lost because of the seemingly ridiculous lack of payment method options. The world of eCommerce, in general, has been built on the grounds of “the convenience of shopping”.

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It’s its underlying premise. Paving the ground for your potential shoppers and assisting them in quickly finding exactly what they need is vital, but so is giving them the chance to pay the way they want to.

A scarce or unsuitable choice of payment options is yet one more core reason why your Magento store doesn’t convert the way it should.

Furthermore, when your potential customer has spent more than enough time on selecting and putting items in their cart and doesn’t find a method to pay in, this kills their shopping experience. And you know what? They most likely won’t ever return to your store again.

To avoid such an unpleasant situation, acquire the best available payment methods combo with a lot of variety that’ll suit not only your needs but those of your clients as well. If out-of-the-box Magento functionality doesn’t cater to your necessities, there are plugins and extensions on the official Magento Marketplace.

Available for free or on a paid basis, these can solve the problem and are a good starting point.

Summing up, reaching the best possible conversion rates is among the main aims of every business. Apart from what was mentioned above, there are other things you can try doing in order to brighten up the conversion picture: make shopping more personalized by granting product offerings or get your hands on retargeting and remarketing.

Just as with most spheres, eCommerce has its own best practices for growing conversions, and at times even a couple of simple tweaks can really change the game!

How To Implement B2B Customer Retention Strategies In SaaS

Posted on by Jay

B2B software companies have to spend time and money on customer retention strategy. It is not easy to retain your existing customers and get new ones as well. However, it is essential to stay in the game. If your company’s software is not getting traction with customers, you will soon lose them and see a gradual decline in business. SaaS companies have a much easier time with retention strategy than B2B software companies.

Wondering what strategies are working out best for SaaS companies? Read on for 10 of the best strategies for B2B customer retention. But first:

Why Do SaaS Businesses Need A B2B Customer Retention Strategy?

Customer churn has the power to rip a hole in any business. In fact, a recent CallMiner study found that avoidable customer churn costs companies $136 billion a year.

Unfortunately, that effect is amplified when your customers are businesses because chances are, they’ll replace your product with one of your competitors’. That can be devastating if you’re running a SaaS company that relies on customer loyalty or long-term subscriptions to turn a profit.

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Still, the best B2B customer retention strategies aren’t just about playing defense. A mediocre customer retention strategy will keep clients from leaving, but a stellar strategy will excite your customer base, fortify customer loyalty, and inspire clients to recommend your product to everyone they know.

Here are 10 strategies to take your B2B customer retention to the next level:

1. Give B2B Clients Engaging Resources

Especially in the SaaS world, customers will have questions about your product. When problems pop up, they want to solve them right away—while they’re experiencing them.

If you want to increase customer retention, give them the resources to solve problems on their own. Start by crafting quality inbound content that answers their potential questions, and give them access to it 24/7.

When you assemble a knowledge base full of webinars, blogs, e-books, white papers, and other useful content, your customers will be able to answer questions on their own time. As they learn more about your product, their bond to your brand will solidify.

2. Educate Customers Right Away

As a SaaS marketer, you know a customer’s experience doesn’t stop at the sale. If your customer starts using your product without knowing how to use it, that’s a recipe for frustration and churn. That’s why education during the on-boarding process is at the heart of B2B customer retention.

Give customers video tutorials, shower them with welcome emails, and send out newsletters to keep them engaged. These little educational guides will show them how to get the most out of your product. In turn, they’ll reward you with their loyalty.

3. Use Customer Feedback To Improve

It’s easy to get defensive when customers give constructive feedback, but feedback is invaluable if you want to retain customers. Treat it like gold.

Use Customer Feedback To Improve

Of course, you should learn everything you can from feedback and use it to improve your efforts, but don’t stop there. Be sure to let your customers know their voices are being heard, and show them how you’re using their suggestions. Showcasing this give-and-take relationship will strengthen your partnership and encourage them to keep working with you.

4. Keep Your Finger On Your Customer’s Pulse

Customer churn doesn’t have to be a surprise. And if you watch for red flags, you can address issues before customers go quietly into the night. Here are some things to watch out for:

  • They haven’t logged on to your platform in a while.
  • They’re searching your website for cancellation info.
  • They’re less engaged or using your product less.

When a customer throws up a red flag, reach out and see how your company can help. A simple follow-up call or email could be enough to pull them back in.

5. Make Business Personal

More and more, customers want to build a connection with the brands they use. And the more they interact with your brand, the more loyal they’ll become.

Make Business Personal

That’s why excellent customer retention strategies rely on personalized content. Set up loyalty programs, send personalized emails, and keep B2B clients engaged with content that answers their questions. It all adds value to their experience and makes them want to stick with you.

6. Treat Loyal Customers To A Surprise

Especially in B2B relationships, emotions are on high alert. Nobody wants their business to fail, so owners naturally have high expectations for the companies they work with. That’s what makes pleasant surprises so powerful.

Every business relationship is a chance to delight, impress, and deliver outstanding service. By surprising loyal customers with a simple thank you card, small gift, or free upgrade, you’ll remind them how much you value their patronage. They’ll reward you with their ongoing business.

7. Communicate Non-Stop

Communication is the glue that bonds B2B relationships. And a proactive communication strategy can solidify your customer retention plans. Even if your customers are perfectly happy, it’s smart to carve out space on your calendar to connect.

Beyond setting regular meetings, you can beef up communication by sending out newsletters or launching a full-on automated email marketing campaign. All the while, keep track of customer engagement and reach out to them when communication drops off.

I’ve worked with the team at Andolasoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.

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Salesforce, Houston, Texas

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For SaaS companies, uninterrupted communication doesn’t just lift retention. It creates new up-sell and cross-sell opportunities that feed your business’s bottom line.

8. Build Trust With Social Proof

Trust is at the center of any relationship—and that goes for B2B partnerships as well. That’s why some of the best SaaS customer retention strategies out there rely on social proof.

By sharing testimonials, case studies, and customer stories with your clients, you can show them new ways your product can help them. At the same time, don’t hesitate to reach out to happy clients for a quote or interview about their experience with your company. This will remind them of everything you’re doing for them, and it will help them see that they’re an asset to your team.

9. Wring Out Everything You Can From Exit Interviews

It can be heart-wrenching when a customer ultimately cuts the cord, but that’s no reason to skimp on exit interviews. Exit interviews are a chance to crawl into the head of a dissatisfied customer and find those little nuggets of information that will improve your marketing efforts. By learning everything you can from those customers that churn, you can make little tweaks to boost retention.

10. Elevate Experiences With Better Customer Service And UX

B2B customers can’t afford to muddle through poor experiences. If they can’t find a product or solution to their problems right away, there’s a good chance they’ll look somewhere else. In fact, one Accenture survey found poor experiences caused nearly one in two customers to give up on a company’s website and conduct business elsewhere.

That’s why it pays to invest in customer service and your website’s user experience (UX). The more seamless a client’s experience is, the more likely they’ll be to stick with you for the long run.

These retention strategies should help you keep your B2B customers for the long haul, but when it comes to SaaS marketing, they’re just the tip of the iceberg.

Want to make your SaaS product invincible? Let’s Discuss!

How To Boost eCommerce Sale During Covid19 Pandemic

Posted on by Jay

Since the last few years, COVID-19 has made the most unexpected impacts worldwide. As of December, 2021, COVID-19 has affected millions of people worldwide with many deaths.

As with the New variants of Covid-19, the Omicron variant is emerging again, creating a major impact on millions of lives and to the economic sector.

As for the impact on the global business, we can’t say the industry like eCommerce is experiencing the complete fallout. The online sale has taken the hit but it is not completely down.

It’s clear that moving forward, choosing between online sales and brick-and-mortar stores won’t be the answer — instead, “offering a compelling Omni channel experience…is a requirement for survival,” says McKinsey analysts.

The drastic E-commerce growth amid movement restrictions induced by Covid-19 has increased the online Retail sales from 16% to 27.6% in 2021.

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According to a report by UNCTAD, online retail sales have grown in many countries, with the Republic of korea holding a large number of  shares at 25.9% by 2021, up from 20.8% the year before.

This pandemic has spread to over 100+ countries now. But as an eCommerce vendor, it is also time to deliver to their customer despite the circumstances.

Actually, it is very important to handle every step along the way with safety as paramount.

Despite this “post- Covid” era, the situation is constantly changing. With retail and E-commerce business has begun to observe behavioural shifts in the shopping habits , along with many new behavioural shifts observed in the shopping habits.

Online Shopping Increases By Demographic:

A report by BigCommerce has shown that in the Covid-19  various gender and age-groups have adopted E-commerce in varying degrees.

According to a survey it was observed that in the UK and US, 96% of millennials and GenZ are worried about the pandemic which has affected the economy. The widespread worry was  observed that this age group differentiate their behaviours  more noticeably in comparison to other generations.

Agility PR has reported that 30% of millennials has done more Online shopping during pandemic. In contrast 20% of Gen X, 24% of Gen Z and 8% of Baby boomers. 

More data has shown that 24% of boomers and 34% of GenZ have seen Covid-19 has created an impact on the items they are purchasing, compared to nearly half of millennials. These effects might include the cutting back on spending, carrying certain items  and spending less on the experiences.

There is also much disparity observed between genders, with 24% of men found to be online shopping in the pandemic, in comparison to 18% of women. Also, one third of men, in comparison to 25% of women, said that Covid-19 has created more impact on how much they spend on products.

Here I have drafted some safety measures that you should adopt to make your selling experience more effective.

Sanitize Every Place That You Work

For the safety measures, you need to do this at shipment centres, inventories, warehouses, and all the workspaces of your organisation where works are made out. This is the top priority for included people, especially those in the eCommerce sector, considering the far-reaching geographical capabilities of the industry.

Here are some precaution checkpoints of sanitization that you can undertake:

  • Screening the warehouse personnel regularly
  • Instant sanitization of the warehouse
  • Minimizing the working resources and maintain the social distance
  • maintain heavy caution on entry and exit points
  • An emergency phone line to contact the hospital or police station, if required
  • Maintain the manual register for all visitors
  • Contactless delivery

By setting as an example India with1.3 billion people shut down, the World Health Organisation (WHO) said “India’s COVID fight could make or break the global war. WHO said India has a tremendous capacity to deal with the pandemic as it has experience of eradicating smallpox and polio”.

With the contactless initiative, customers can ask the delivery guy to leave their order package in a secure location, from where the end-user can pick it up.

“It can go a long way in containing the spread of COVID-19 and protects both your courier partner and the end customer.”

Winners On The E-Commerce Shift:

Big commerce has reported that month over month, the food and beverage has increased. The impact of E-commerce on emerging markets has grown to 18.8% and also shows a big growth in the downloads of  mobile applications. It has allowed people to hire personal shoppers to prepare and also in some cases they deliver the goods.

The rise of E-commerce popularity was observed as many of us were quarantined  at home, usinging Netflix, Disney+ and all the gaming subscribers has observed growth at an unprecedented rate in Q1 2021.

Provide Training On Sanitization

In these testing times, the biggest threat to society is perhaps, ignorance.

Ignorance, perhaps this is the biggest threat to society. It is so important that each and every single person is well informed about the basics to fight effectively.

Government officials of many countries have adopted epidemic training and awareness procedures for staying safe.

This includes;

  • how to wash your hands
  • how to wear a mask
  • how to stay away from infected surfaces
  • how to deliver using contactless delivery

Collaborate With Shipping Aggregators

The most advantageous outcome of partnering with a shipping partner is to reduce the workload of your internal team and make sure a clean, hygienic shipping process end-to-end.

There are many vendors using this workflow, so you will be able to choose an alternate courier partner without wasting any time.

Keep Customer Support Paramount

To ensure customer satisfaction and general peace amongst customers, make sure that customer support is available round the clock.

Customer service at whim can make sure that the customer and the seller are constantly in touch.

Okay. These are the safety measure for online vendors to ensure the safety of packing to deliver the goods to end-users.

But can we see this lockdown period as an opportunity to boost your eCommerce sale?

As people are willing to stay at their homes these days and they need their daily life stuff also.

So, the answer is YES!

Strategies To Boost Online Sales

It is very obvious that the consumers are spending more time on the internet as they are social distancing and IT professionals are working from home.

So, our recommendation would be to consider your online presence of the online store. This depends on the eCommerce platform you use. Various eCommerce platforms have different limitations.

Example; The core features of Magento, WordPress, are pretty much search engine friendly.

If everything is OKAY.. then revisit your marketing spend and improve the effectiveness of your virtual communications.

1. Reach Out To Your High-Value Customers

Analytica says, “20% of your customers contribute 80% of your total revenue”. Considering this you need to prioritize the high-value customers ensuring their lifetime loyalty.

eCommerce Stats
Source: Squarespace

Applications like Wakeupsales, (cloud-based Salesforce Automation tool) act like the customer relationship solution and contacting platform all in one.

Through this, your marketing staff can stay in touch with the prioritized high-value customers remotely.

So, you can send personalized recommendations that include links to purchase online.

2. Adapt Your Marketing Messaging

During this sensitive period, you also need to rethink your marketing strategy.

However, brands should be cautious of pivoting too far away from their core brand messaging, or worse yet, coming off as opportunistic.

Below are some examples of brands that made simple adjustments to their messaging to “read the cultural room” while remaining authentic.

3. Create “Social Experiences” On Social Media

Staying home means surfing the internet and social media. So the brand needs to get creative about how they leverage their social media presence.

The brand can create problem-solving social media campaigns to gain more reach of your brand or product.

Also, consider the campaign must make aware of your brand and how your brand gets to solve the daily life requirement.

This helps to acquire loyal customers.

4. Offer Free Shipping Or Local Pickup And Delivery

Shipping cost is always a barrier for online users. So if possible, you can consider offering free shipping.

There is another option available “curbside pickup”.

This term of delivery is actually, a customer ordered a product online and can pick it up fro your local store.

It decreases the hassle of the delivery process. And for customers, it also cut the waiting time.

Still, you need to integrate the whole setup on your eCommerce website. This is not a big development process. You can integrate this delivery set up by hiring an eCommerce developer remotely.

5. Extend Your Return And Exchange Policy

“Extending your return and exchange policy in acknowledgment of the current climate could alleviate buyer doubt and incentivize online sales.”

So, changing the return policy can bring some sighs to your customers. As on the lockdown period, the delivery time and pick up time could be delayed. So, extending the return period could help to gain some loyal customers too.

6. Use Retargeting Ads To Reach Your Customers

Paid advertising can help you to reach such people which you cannot go with organic campaigns. And doing it smartly would help you to regain such visitors who were at your store before.

Technically, we called this a Retargeting campaign.

I’ve worked with the team at Andolasoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.

Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist

Salesforce, Houston, Texas

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Through it, your ads or product can be displayed to those users who visited your website recently.

The various ads managers like Facebook, Google, etc have the algorithm to perform such methods.

Conclusion:

Developing and delivering the fruitful content display will always have the high-end stuff for your eCommerce website too.

So, before adopting all these methods and strategies, you need to ‘consider your existing website performance and capabilities.

When we come to the point of COVID-19, there is no ETA on when this crisis is going to end. But it is heartwarming to see all people coming together to fight this pandemic.

As the new Covid Variant, Omicron is growing gradually, therefore it is important to take all the necessary steps and grow your business gradually. Develop your E-commerce application now with Andolasoft. 

Our experts, App developers, will guide you with this path, by developing your desired eCommerce Application.

We at Andolasoft also urged the merchant to follow the guideline and secure every touchpoint.

Is your eCommerce site fully integrated to fight this situation? Let’s Discuss.

How To Make Your SaaS Development Idea Successful

Posted on by Jay

With many SaaS companies in the market these days, it’s becoming harder for everyone to stand out from the crowd. That’s why it’s important for any SaaS business to have a well-thought-out development road-map. If you don’t, you’ll do yourself a serious disservice, because a successful SaaS business is built on solid, tested software solutions. Even so, there’s a lot of competition out there. That’s why you have to be extra cautious when thinking about your SaaS development strategy.

The statistics say SaaS has been wiping out the dependency of an enterprise’s old, outdated software to pursue its operations. And the reasons are:

  • Software-as-a-Service has the on-demand usage model with the minimum entry point. Unlike on-premise apps, as z huge upfront costs need to be showered at the time of software updates, customization & other IT-infrastructure related requirements.
  • On SaaS, the end-users don’t have to invest in the total IT-infrastructure setup, as the entire hosting, customer support, and hardware & software implementation process are taken care of by the SaaS vendors itself.
  • The elements inside these cloud offerings can be easily scaled up & down by doing changes with few clicks or adjustments from the data centers and with certain cost allocation, whereas if the investments are done on the on-premise infrastructure, the cost & load would be comparatively heavy.

By the end of this year , 80%-90% of businesses will run their core operations over the Software-as-a-service model. It’s because this software helps to continue with complicated tasks without putting a load on hardware memory, run from anywhere via an internet connection, purchased on a subscription basis, leaves the technical glitches & upgrades part with the providers only.

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That means software-as-service is here to stay and those who are on a lookout to become a SaaS application development provider, they need to be mindful of the pitfalls of software-as-a-service development and come up with practices & measures that can help them stay afloat & reap home the desired revenue figures.

Don’t know these pitfalls or measures that can help you become a top-notch SaaS app development services provider?

Worry not, the following has all the answers that Infoxen believes will be of sheer help to you.

1. Know Your Client-Base First

Knowing the target audience is very important before starting the software-as-a-service-based development business – as based on that only you will prepare your acquisition & pricing strategy.

A complete list covering buyer persona in terms of his behavior, business type, profession, motivation, passion, demographics will help you march towards the path where you can easily identify “type of product or service they are looking for”.

Know Your Client-Base First

By interviewing such elements or your potential clients, you can plan to create an MVP (Minimum Viable Product) first, as such products will always have scope for further enhancements & will always invite users to put-in their thoughts & functionalities within it.

You can develop as many product packages based on every different buyer persona to gain a competitive edge.

2. Choosing A Pricing Model That Compliments Your End-Users Requirement

On a broader level, there are 3 types of pricing models for extending software-as-a-service solutions that you can choose from-Usage-based pricing, flat-rate pricing & Tiered pricing. Let’s extend these terms to get their better understanding:

  • Usage-Based Pricing:

It’s the most common pricing model where users pay the fees each time they use storage, data or make transactions. As a development company, you can opt for this type of pricing model for your clients who have a small startup or financial base and cannot afford to pay extensively at one go.

  • Flat-Rate Pricing:

It’s the basic pricing model where only a single software-as-a-service product, with a particular set of features under one pay, is made available to the end-users. Here a predetermined subscription fee is charged from the client’s pocket. As a SaaS application development service provider, you can go ahead with this model if your end-users are comfortable at paying hassle-free all at once rather than after utilizing the services.

  • Tiered Pricing:

Here a variety of software-as-service packages at different cost plans, features & functionalities are circulated for different clients’ requirements. This model is great to have on-board if your company wants to target buyers of multiple personas & requirements single-handedly.

You can choose any of the above pricing models based on your client behavior, buying pattern & growth opportunities.

3. Keep User-Experience & Customer Satisfaction Mainstreamed

To start on a good note as a SaaS development company, make sure the user-experience & customer satisfaction you deliver to your clients is top-notch. Be precise & careful while developing your first software, choose the UX elements carefully.

Keep User-Experience & Customer Satisfaction Mainstreamed

Here is how you can add on to your Customer Satisfaction:

  • Be transparent with your customers, timely update them with every module, and ask them for necessary suggestions to ensure project success. Along with it, find the best solutions to treat lacking areas before final deployment. Since every development will be parsed through agile methodology, it will be easy to iterate fast & make the fixes asap.
  • To give your clients the hang of your developed software, draft some welcome emails, tutorial guides, or allot a personal assistant to guide through the functionality of developed products from your end.
  • There is no such thing as over-communication. You can strengthen your bond with your clients by always keeping them in the loop, questioning their requirements, gathering their feedback to foster a better product development environment & customer experiences.

4. Deploying SaaS-Specific Marketing Practices

Software-as-a-service solutions since they have no physical traces and changes constantly need special attention when it comes to their marketing. Although, if SaaS products are carefully architected & render top-notch services, there lies no need for marketing tactics, much.

But if the product has just started on hit & trial methods and demands huge penetration in the market on the initial levels, these all things for you as SaaS application development providers can do to gain better traction with your prospects:

  • Give your customers free trials to let them vibe with the product & get the better tuning with it until they don’t start paying for it.
  • Shoot a series of blog posts in the software-as-a-service community, defining your business stories and how you craft products suiting to every project requirement.
  • Reward a customer if he/she suggests you or refer your SaaS app development services by inundating some reward programs.

5. Preparing For Third-Party Integrations Way Before The Software Development

Since SaaS applications work on a cloud network, their integration with data centers & other third-party platforms has to be secure, effortless & quick. A SaaS development company here has to be well-equipped with third-party integration strategies way before they commence with the development phase. Here is how you can go ahead:

  • SaaS applications must have great data synchronization with different third-party channels. For instance, if the app targets the travel tech industry, the integration with accommodation options like Airbnb could be considered.
  • Consider developing a platform that makes your end-users life easier by enabling them to work with PDF files, ZIP files archives to streamline data import.
  • Create a browser extension of your product to let users have your product in hand all the time. For instance, popular app Grammarly has a web extension that allows users to integrate it with already in use applications.
  • Decide the payment integration option that users prefer and are safest in all accord.
  • To achieve great user coverage, integrate your product or software with SDK tools of framework like Microsoft (as it’s vastly used for enterprise suites).

6. Render Software With Possible Offline Mode Support

Downtime of the app or unstable Wi-Fi can take a toll on anyone, especially when the important task is in process.

International Data Corporation compiled a stat that “for the fortune 1000 companies, the average cost they had to bear after their unplanned application downtime was ranging between $1.25 – $2.5 per year”.

No matter the enterprises operate via software-as-a-service applications, one downtime or poor-connectivity can lead to unsubscription of such software.

Extend support of offline accessibility as a SaaS application development services provider:

  • Make provision for the information or data to store even in the offline mode, as soon as the connectivity restores, data should be able to sync well.
  • Make a feature of “download files” (to let users download important files) when situations like downtime come unannounced.
  • Make an automated/manual update function to help with the syncing of data or documents when a proper connection is available.

7. Bring Aboard A “Customer Success Management” Department

“Customer success is not about support or being reactive – it’s always about being proactive.”

Having a customer success management department will act as a link between “where the sales happen” & the “product’s functionality” – which will help to evaluate your customer’s actual health by using mixes of usage data, contextual inputs, marketing, sales & customer support strategies.

The advent of such will evoke the users to share their true stories behind the usage of such software or product, which will eventually help to drive more cross-sells.

This is how you can funnel your CSM or Customer Success, and Management team:

  • Customer success management (CSM) team should be collaborative with the other organizational teams be it sales, product or marketing as it will help in sketching & resolving customer issues from all ground levels.
  • “Users love when they are served beyond their expectations”, the job role of your CSM team shouldn’t restrict to just delivering what users are expecting but it should race beyond the delivered promises as well. Your team can go the extra mile by preparing product based on different users & their traits, arrange some webinars or seminars to educate your product scope, or shoot a support mail even after delivering the product maybe with a message “Hey, how are you doing with the software we developed for you”.
  • Be on tips with the consumer metrics, these metrics can be in terms of – when & how soon the user is willing to upgrade to high-subscription plans, or how much they are liking the product/software that they are ready to prefer it to a friend or inside their circle.

8. Keep Your Analytics Handy To Measure The Key Metrics

It’s important to keep the analytics handy to determine the progressing growth of SaaS development services company, as such businesses are prone to suffer losses in the early years of their operation. Losses occur because acquisition costs exceed, sometimes customers pay only after utilizing the product/services, which is why actual revenue comes very late.

Thereby, it becomes immense for such software development businesses to know & understand the key metrics in advance – to know whether their business is scaling up or is turning towards major pitfall.

I’ve worked with the team at Andolasoft on multiple websites. They are professional, responsive, & easy to work with. I’ve had great experiences & would recommend their services to anyone.

Ruthie Miller, Sr. Mktg. Specialist

Salesforce, Houston, Texas

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To know when to put the breaks on time or know if your company is viable in proceeding ahead, consider the following metrics to measure success:

  • Consider billing date over the booking date to evaluate your revenue flow, as on billing date you get the actual sum flowing into your bank account – this will help you access the true financial health of your company.
  • Evaluate the reason behind the churn rate. Churn rate is a situation where users stop subscribing to a particular service (here it’s SaaS). Calculate the number of churn rates & possible reasons that triggered its advent.
  • Balancing the Customer Acquisition Cost is the cost spent on customers to persuade to buy the product/service. LTV or Lifetime Value is a predicted net profit that is expected from the future relationship with customers. The LTV figures should be 3 times greater than CAC, even if it’s the other way, that should not be continued for a long time as higher CAC value depicts that the company is putting a lot of cost on retaining customers than actually gaining from them.

These were the few metrics that can help to evaluate your business drive & allow you to put in the breaks before you are close to any downhill.

Winding Up!

These were the few ways demonstrating how you can go big with your software-as-service specific development business, the success & profitability of establishing such business lies in how well you are staying in competition and treating your customers with the best possible product ever.

Go the extra mile, beyond delivered promises, know what your customer’s persona is, find what pricing strategy is keeping LTV in action, create your metrics that are visible in your customers’ success, and chalk out several other your side of strategies to funnel your business.

To get basic to extreme support in the preparation of your SaaS-based business model, reach out to Andolasoft Inc, a SaaS application development company, where we consult, develop & deploy the high selling SaaS-based products by following the aforementioned points & hundreds of others (which you will find out on consulting us).

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