Month: February 2023

From Crisis to Opportunity: Why Businesses Must Embrace Digital Transformation to Succeed in 2023

Post author By Adeeb Malik
Post date February 16, 2023
No Comments on From Crisis to Opportunity: Why Businesses Must Embrace Digital Transformation to Succeed in 2023

Featured Image: Crisis to Opportunity: Smart Transformation

Today, businesses are facing different challenges across diverse scales. Hampered revenue streams, logistics issues, cyber risks, ineffective digital strategies, slow product demand, etc.

The common link between all these issues is deep rooted in the operational side of an organization. As the competition is on a rise, with businesses establishing themselves on a digital level, many MSMEs often find themselves on a crossroad.

There is always a conflict between choosing quality or quantity, value or volume, productivity or performance. Most of these hurdles are often caused by irregular resource allocation and consumption, operational side challenges, slow growth, restraining budget, decreased performance, low product quality, etc.

These issues often lead businesses to fail in delivering value and promise to their customers. Thus, making it extremely difficult to sustain and grow.

In this Alarming Scenario, is Smart Business Transformation the Right Choice?

This is where embracing digital technologies comes to the rescue. As organizations are transitioning to a digital medium, it is the need of the hour. Scaling effectively, operating efficiently, and exploring diversely is required to effectively sustain in this modern era.

Only a smart transformation can enable organizations to successfully wade through this uncertain tide!

Let’s look at what strategic business transformation offers, digital transformation benefits, and how it enables organizations to do more, achieve more.

Understanding Digital Business Transformation

Digital Business Transformation is aimed at integrating digital technologies into all areas of business operations and functions. The goal is to fundamentally change the traditional approach undertaken by businesses, to drive value, and deliver unmatched products/services to their customers. Thus, swiftly transitioning to become a smart organization.

One thing that businesses often miss is the fact that transformation does not require radical changes or revamps to operations and functions. It’s directed towards integrating technologies that enable them to push past boundaries, simplify their functioning, achieve more ROI from resources, most importantly, drive creativity, innovation, and growth.

As a business, you can expect changes in default organizational functions. A business transformation includes but is not limited to automating manual processes, digitizing customer interactions, implementing cloud-based infrastructure, leveraging data analytics to make better decisions, and driving operational excellence across the whole organization.

Digital Transformation has been a hot topic across the industry. There are hardly a few who understand it truly and of course, its successful implementation. With changing industry dynamics and digital transformation trends, it becomes quite a tricky adoption!

According to a report by McKinsey, the pandemic has accelerated the adoption of digital technologies by several years, with businesses that were once hesitant to invest in digital transformation are now realizing that it’s essential for survival.

Benefits of Embracing Digital Technologies to Transform

Organizations are pushing towards establishing digital avenues, creating a solid footing across the digital world, and carving a unique identity. This has led to an immediate rise in competition across industries.

Proving the need for a swift, systematic, and exceptional digital transition that brings results, revenue, and growth. But how does embracing digital technologies benefit organizations?

Improved Customer Experience

Digitizing customer interactions enables businesses to provide a more personalized and effective experience to the customer. By using different technologies, gain access to key insights like user expectations, behavior, choices, etc.

Empowering organizations to craft precise, result-oriented, and successful campaigns for maximum customer engagement and interaction.

Transform customer experience with technologies that take personalization to the next level. Create targeted strategies that aim towards generating more user intent and interest.

This experience also works for existing customers, also providing key data sets for product/service improvement. Thus, leading to increased loyalty, successful conversions, enhanced digital reputation, and revenue!

Increase Efficiency and Productivity

Embracing digital technologies opens doors for countless integration possibilities. Organizations can use these technologies to push past barriers and break boundaries.

Transformation provides a tech-oriented mindset and value-driven approach that fosters creativity and innovation. Thus, enabling teams to build faster, deploy successfully, strategize precisely, scale freely, and grow diversely.

The most integral step to increasing efficiency and productivity is Automation. It enables businesses to streamline operations, reduce costs, conserve resources, manage effectively, collaborate seamlessly, etc.

Digitization is the key that enables businesses to unlock their true potential and achieve holistic growth while driving value and delivering excellence.

Enhance Decision Making

Digital technologies allow organizations to have a complete track of each resource, process, operation, and function. This is enabled by leveraging big data and analytics to deliver intelligence, empowering teams to improve their productivity and enhance performance. This also opens the space for new opportunities and growth verticals.

Apart from business intelligence, the data can be used to form patterns and find trends. This allows organizations to precisely measure and track the performance of each strategy/campaign/business function.

Thus, providing key insights into core business operations, and providing accurate and precise data, will ensure better decision-making, especially on important business undertakings.

Enable Agility and Innovation

Digital technologies enable businesses to be more agile and responsive. Whether it is changing market conditions, trends, or practices, it allows them to adapt quickly and innovate freely.

Organizations often use predictive analytics to understand the current market scenario and then effectively leverage it to create multiple future projections. Thus, allowing them to build strategies beforehand and gain a definitive edge.

Innovation is achieved by optimized processes and effective results. Businesses are always experimenting, some strategies are a hit, and some are a miss.

Digital technologies enable them to leverage the data of each hit-and-miss strategy to create precise strategies that work, deliver value, and are result-oriented. Saving a lot of resources, and time, and thus, freeing up resources for experiments=innovation!

Key Steps to Ensure a Successful Digital Transformation

However, digital transformation is not without its challenges. Many businesses struggle with the complexity of implementing digital technologies and integrating them into their existing systems and processes.

This can require significant investment in both time and resources, as well as a cultural shift towards a more tech-focused mindset. To successfully navigate the digital transformation journey, businesses must use business transformation strategies and a collaborative approach.

This should be done via a zero-based approach that takes inputs from each function and process, to ensure that the result truly transforms and provides an architecture that becomes the pillar of business success and achieving goals!

Here are some steps to ensure a successful digital transformation:

Define Your Digital Transformation Strategy

Before diving into digital transformation, it’s important to define your goals and develop a clear strategy for how digital technologies will support your business objectives.

You have to make a clear roadmap, defining what exactly you wish to achieve with this transformation and where you position yourself in the future.

Create a Culture of Innovation

Digital transformation requires a shift in mindset and culture, with a focus on continuous learning and innovation. Encourage experimentation and empower employees to contribute ideas and take ownership of the transformation process.

This will also enable them to grow and shift to a fast-paced working environment, which will open up space for innovation, creativity, and growth!

Invest in Digital Infrastructure

To enable digital transformation, businesses must invest in the necessary infrastructure, such as cloud-based platforms, data analytics tools, and cybersecurity.

This will ensure business operations run effectively and your services and digital products are always aligned with the latest technologies to give maximum ROI and value to your customers.

Foster Collaboration and Partnerships

Digital transformation is not a solo journey. Businesses must collaborate with partners and vendors to leverage their expertise and support the transformation process.

This also ensures that every aspect of your organization is in line with the latest technologies, enabling you to push past barriers, create milestones, and become a benchmark in the industry.

Measure and Monitor Progress

Digital transformation is an ongoing process, and businesses must continuously monitor and measure progress to ensure that they are achieving their objectives and adapting to changing market conditions.

Digital technologies ensure your business is always evolving but to achieve that you must be vigilant and attentive to your tech, and use it effectively to work for you, with you!

Conclusion

The rapid shift towards the integrated world has made it clear that integrated transformation is no longer an option for businesses – it’s a necessity.

By embracing digital technologies, businesses can improve customer experience, increase efficiency and productivity, enhance decision-making, and enable agility and innovation.

This is just the beginning as transformation is not a one-time solution, it’s a continuous process to achieve flexibility, scalability, and success. As we push towards a digital future, it becomes highly imperative to understand the current scenario of the industry and the market.

Thus, calling the need for smart solutions that are able to propel organizations seamlessly.

While the journey towards digital transformation can be complex and challenging, businesses that take a strategic and collaborative approach will be best positioned to succeed in the post-pandemic world!

General

How Zero-Based Budgeting Can Enable Your Business Cut Costs Without Sacrificing Quality

Post author By Adeeb Malik
Post date February 15, 2023
No Comments on How Zero-Based Budgeting Can Enable Your Business Cut Costs Without Sacrificing Quality

Featured Image: How Zero Based Budgeting Can Enable You to Cut Costs Without Quality Sacrifice

In today’s rapidly evolving business landscape, cost management has become a critical aspect. Whether it’s about long-term planning, short-term strategies, new product build, creating different strategies, etc. every diverse need of a growing business requires resources. And these functions are important to ensure long-term sustainability and profitability.

The most trivial thing about creating a budget is often the approach that businesses take. There is no denying the fact that we are pushing towards a modern world, where having a digital workplace and workforce is of utmost importance.

Along these lines is a growing need for strategies, integrations, upgrades, etc. And all of these are important, especially for MSMEs, aiming to create a unique brand image and identity.

This sounds like a complex challenge but there is an approach that is highly effective and drives results: Zero-Based Budgeting (ZBB). Let’s look at what it is and how it enables businesses to maintain quality with reducing costs.

Index

Understanding Zero-Based Budgeting
What Zero-Based Budgeting Offers

Steps to Implement Zero-Based Budgeting

Understanding Zero-Based Budgeting

Zero-based budgeting (ZBB) is a cost management technique that involves starting the budgeting process from scratch, rather than basing it on the previous year’s expenses.

The idea behind ZBB is to justify each cost item and allocate resources based on current business priorities and objectives. The process involves re-evaluating every expense in the budget to determine its relevance and importance to the business.

This approach enables businesses to have a fresh perspective on their objectives and growth direction. This also leads to the creation of different opportunities that were once hidden owing to the old budgeting system.

What businesses also achieve is a handful list of priorities and goals which can be easily targeted and achieved during a financial year. Enhancing performance, driving results, and achieving success!

What Zero-Based Budgeting Offers

ZBB offers more than just cost-saving opportunities. It enables organizations to reassess strategies, think proactively, and function towards short-term goals, instead of one or two long-term goals.

Today, it’s about moving fast and achieving faster. If businesses want to compete and take a definitive edge, they have to operate in sprints, instead of running a marathon.

Identify Cost Savings Opportunities

By starting from zero and building the budget based on the business’s current needs and objectives, ZBB can help identify and eliminate unnecessary expenses. It allows businesses to identify cost-saving opportunities that may have been overlooked in the past.

With ZBB, businesses can easily track and manage resource allocation and consumption to better understand the core business functions. It also opens the door for many possibilities and growth opportunities. ZBB, if integrated with the latest technologies enables organizations to grow exponentially and diversely!

Increases Accountability and Transparency

ZBB promotes transparency and accountability throughout the organization. Every cost item must be justified and should align with the company’s objectives, ensuring that each department is accountable for its expenses. It eliminates the “use it or lose it” mentality that often results in overspending.

This also promotes a fair and responsible culture amongst the workforce. As every expense is noted and accounted for and is available to the teams, it inspires a sense of responsibility.

This promotes a responsible working environment, where teams take ownership of their tasks and duties. Thus, creating a culture that leads to productivity, performance, and growth.

Facilitates Effective Resource Allocation

ZBB helps businesses allocate their resources effectively by aligning them with the most important business objectives. It provides a clear understanding of which expenses are necessary to achieve these objectives, enabling businesses to allocate resources more effectively.

This also paves the way for businesses to understand their immediate needs from wants. Thus, allowing an effective resource allocation that comprises important objectives and priorities.

What also is a bonus is a complete track of each resource and its output, to deeply understand each business operation’s output and performance.

Enhances Business Decision Making

ZBB promotes strategic decision-making by forcing businesses to evaluate and prioritize each expense item. It helps businesses make more informed decisions about where to invest their resources, which in turn leads to better overall business performance.

This also enables businesses to prepare for bigger investments in the long run like digital transformation, new technologies, hardware, etc. Businesses can make better decisions while saving resources, and also streamlining daily operations. Thus, achieving precision and performance, without compromising on quality!

Steps to Implement Zero-Based Budgeting

Although ZBB sounds simple, it can be quite tricky to implement it successfully, owing to its intricate procedure. Organizations often forget that the end goal is to achieve more by consuming less, and not just cost-optimization. It can sometimes lead to a spiral that hampers overall growth and business direction.

Here are some important steps to successfully implement Zero-Based Budgeting

Identify and Define Business Objectives

The first step in implementing zero-based budgeting is to identify and define the business objectives. These objectives will serve as the foundation for the budgeting process and help determine which expenses are necessary to achieve them.

This will also bring out a clear picture and roadmap of the business, its functions, and projections under review. Thus, enabling management to set the right priorities, enabling a clearly defined brand identity and objectives

Analyze Current Expenses

The next step is to analyze current expenses to identify which are necessary and which can be eliminated or reduced. This involves evaluating each expense item in detail and identifying opportunities for cost saving.

It goes way beyond the cost-saving measures, as each item that is eliminated or added holds a value attached, which enables businesses to pin exact value to every expense. This will enable organizations to drive value and change toward every business objective.

Prioritize Expenses

Once the analysis is complete, the next step is to prioritize expenses based on their importance to the business objectives. This involves developing a ranking system that helps identify the most critical expenses that must be funded first.

Ranking the objectives also allows a systematic journey to achieve goals. This ensures every team is in-sync, working towards the same goal, ensuring that all business operations are geared towards a single purpose – Success!

Develop a Budget and Implement

The final step is to develop the budget and implement it. This involves allocating resources based on the prioritized expenses and ensuring that each department is accountable for its expenses. The budget must be reviewed regularly to ensure that it is aligned with the business objectives.

This also opens the doors to use analytics to track the utilization of resources, sprint results, and other useful insights which can have a key impact on overall productivity and performance. With consistent tracking and updates, businesses gain actionable intelligence to craft precise strategies, ensuring success!

Conclusion

Zero-based budgeting is a highly effective approach for businesses looking to reduce costs without sacrificing quality. By starting from scratch and re-evaluating every expense item, businesses can identify cost-saving opportunities and allocate their resources more effectively.

The process promotes transparency and accountability, enhances decision-making, and ensures that the budget is aligned with the business. It also paves the way for other opportunities like Change Management, Agile Operations, DevOps, etc.

Achieve operational excellence and enhanced productivity. Which goes to add value to the brand and its overall reputation in the market!

General

Transforming Customer Engagement: A Holistic Approach to Customer Experience

Post author By Adeeb Malik
Post date February 14, 2023
No Comments on Transforming Customer Engagement: A Holistic Approach to Customer Experience

Featured Image: Transforming Customer Engagement - A Holistic Approach

Empowering employees to deliver exceptional customer experiences can have a profound impact on a business’s bottom line. When customers have positive experiences, they are more likely to be loyal to a brand, repeat purchases, and recommend it to others.

That’s why customer engagement has become a top priority for businesses of all sizes and industries. In fact, a recent study found that 86% of buyers are willing to pay more for a better customer experience.

Customer engagement has become a critical component for businesses to succeed in today’s market. With competition increasing every day, the ability to create an exceptional customer experience has become a key differentiator for businesses.

Customers have become more demanding than ever, expecting personalized and relevant experiences across all digital channels. Therefore, raising the need for an experience that engages users, ensures a seamless interaction, leads to conversions, and also keeps existing customers happy.

Businesses that fail to deliver on these expectations risk losing their customers to competitors. It also leads to a negative impact on the overall reputation and Online Reputation Management (ORM) of a business. Today, it’s all about creating a dominant and visible digital identity, failing to do so can directly affect a business’s sustainability.

But how can businesses go beyond traditional customer service and transform their entire customer engagement strategy? By taking a holistic approach to customer experience.

Index

What is Holistic Customer Experience?
Steps to Achieve Holistic Customer Experience

What is Holistic Customer Experience?

A holistic approach to customer experience means taking a comprehensive, 360-degree view of every touchpoint, both, digital and non-digital that a customer has with a brand. This includes not only the products or services a business offers but also the interactions customers have with employees, the website, mobile app, social media, and any other channels used to engage with customers.

A holistic customer experience strategy is focused on creating a consistent, positive experience for customers throughout their journey with a brand. This means that every interaction a customer has with a business should be intentional, seamless, and reflect the company’s values.

Customer engagement is a measure of how effectively a business can establish and maintain a relationship with its customers. It involves a deep understanding of their customers, their behaviors, and their preferences. Also, understanding and aligning customer needs, wants, and expectations with the business’s goals and capabilities are important.

This understanding is achieved through data and analytics, which helps businesses identify patterns and trends in customer behavior and preferences. Businesses use a combination of strategies, tactics, platforms, etc. to create a positive emotional connection between their brand and customers. The goal of customer engagement is to build trust and loyalty, which leads to increased customer retention and higher lifetime customer value.

A highly engaged and invested customer is more likely to buy from a brand, stay loyal, and advocate for the brand. Thus, making it highly important to create a user journey that creates more than just an impression on the users!

Here are some steps to achieve a holistic customer experience:

Understand Customer Needs and Expectations

To create a customer experience that truly resonates with customers, businesses need to understand their needs and expectations. This can be done by gathering feedback through surveys, social media, and other channels.

Businesses should also analyze customer data to identify trends and insights that can inform their engagement strategy. By taking a data-driven approach to customer experience, businesses can identify areas for improvement and create personalized experiences that meet individual customer needs.

Focus on Employee Engagement

Employee engagement is critical to delivering exceptional customer experiences. Businesses need to ensure that employees are trained, motivated, and empowered to provide outstanding service. It also adds to the culture of the entire organization, showcasing sought-after company values and beliefs. Adding to customer success!

This means providing employees with the resources and support they need to do their jobs effectively, including training on the company’s products or services, as well as customer service best practices. Businesses should also ensure that employees are recognized and rewarded for delivering exceptional customer experiences.

Deliver Consistent Experience Across Channels

Customers expect a seamless experience across all channels, whether they’re engaging with a brand in-store, on the website, or through social media. Businesses need to ensure that the experience is consistent and reflects the company’s values and messaging.

This can be done by creating a customer engagement plan that outlines how the business will interact with customers across all channels. The plan should include messaging guidelines, response times, and escalation procedures to ensure that customers receive consistent and timely support.

Provide Personalized and Relevant Interactions

Today’s customers expect personalized interactions that are tailored to their needs and preferences. Businesses need to leverage customer data to deliver personalized experiences that resonate with individual customers.

This can be done by using data analytics to segment customers based on their behavior, preferences, and demographics. Businesses can then use this information to deliver personalized messaging and offers that are relevant to each customer.

Personalize

Personalization is about tailoring the customer experience to the individual needs and preferences of each customer. It is about creating a unique experience for each customer that resonates with them. Personalization can be achieved through a variety of tactics, such as using customer data and analytics to deliver personalized product recommendations, customized messaging, and targeted promotions.

Personalization also involves creating a seamless and consistent experience across all channels, including websites, mobile apps, social media, and in-store. By delivering a consistent experience, businesses can build trust and loyalty with their customers.

Omni-channel Engagement

Omni-channel engagement means creating a seamless experience across all channels and digital touchpoints. It is about integrating all the channels that a customer interacts with and ensuring that the customer’s experience is consistent across all of them.

An omni-channel approach requires businesses to understand how customers interact with their brand across all channels and how to deliver a seamless experience regardless of the channel.

Customer Journey Mapping

Customer journey mapping is about understanding the customer’s journey from initial awareness of the brand to the final purchase and beyond. By mapping the customer journey, businesses can identify pain points and areas of opportunity.

This knowledge can be used to create a more personalized and engaging experience that meets the customer’s needs and expectations. It also provides key insights that enable businesses to build precise strategies and successful campaigns.

Customer Feedback

Customer feedback is a critical component of a holistic approach to customer engagement. It involves listening to the customer’s voice and understanding their needs and expectations. Customer feedback can be obtained through a variety of channels, such as surveys, social media, and customer service interactions.

By gathering feedback, businesses can identify areas for improvement and make the necessary changes to enhance the customer experience. Responding to customer feedback also helps to build trust and loyalty with customers, as it shows that the business values their opinions and is committed to providing the best possible experience.

Data and Analytics

Data and analytics play a critical role in a holistic approach to customer engagement. It involves collecting, analyzing, and using customer data to gain insights into customer behavior and preferences. This data can be used to enhance overall customer experience while also providing key insights for changes in business operations.

This data also serves as intelligence for teams to effectively understand and break down operations to find key areas for improvement. Analytics can also provide information regarding your product/service offerings, thus, creating opportunities for future feature additions, features, and functionalities.

Conclusion

A holistic approach to the customer experience is critical for businesses looking to create loyal customers and drive long-term growth. By understanding customer needs and expectations, focusing on employee engagement, delivering a consistent experience across channels, and providing personalized interactions, businesses can create a customer experience that sets them apart from the competition.

At the end of the day, customers want to feel valued and understood. By taking a holistic approach to customer experience, businesses can show customers that they care and are committed to delivering exceptional service at every touchpoint.

WooCommerce

How setting up multiple notices for your products can increase your sales?

Post author By Sudeep Ghogare
Post date February 6, 2023
No Comments on How setting up multiple notices for your products can increase your sales?

Communication is one of the important aspects when doing a business. And, one such way of communication is “notices”.

Notices are a means of formal communication targeted at a group of people. The primary agenda of a notice is to inform the group of some important events like making an announcement of an event, issuing certain instructions, making appeals etc.

Generally, notices are written and displayed in public places, where it is accessible to all. You can find them posted on notice boards or walls of the street. If the notice is meant for a wide range of audiences, it can even be printed in newspapers. If governments want to issue a notice, it is published in national and public newspapers.

So, what about digital notices?

What about people who have online stores and want to showcase notices on their products (or literally on their entire store!)? How do they do that?

How will notice help an online store owner/manager?

Let us paint you a picture.

In the distant future, you planned on starting your business. As the world around you has moved on to become digital, you opted to do the same. You built your online store. And, bam! Here comes a festive season. You know your business is going to boom during the festive season. So you pulled out some cards and crafted discounts on a few items. When you tried to place those sales discounts on your online store, you find that you cannot do it that freely.

To cover up this exact worry, we have built a plugin for your WooCommerce-based online store.

Product Notice for WooCommerce — It is a hefty little plugin that powers your WooCommerce-based website. The plugin allows you to set up custom notices for your products on your WooCommerce-WordPress website.

Showcase notifications, alerts, announcements, general notices or any other kind of note which you’d want to display on your online store. We have also added more features so you can customize them to your requirement.

With our Product Notices for WooCommerce, set up:

Global Notices – Put up notices across your entire online store.
Per-Product Notices – Only put a notice on the products you wish to highlight

The plugin features don’t end here. With the rising popularity of and demand from our plugin users, we have recently incorporated major updates.

Our latest update allows you to add custom style to the appearance of your notice. The custom style provides you with the option to choose custom backgrounds, borders, and text colours, such that, your notices follow your web page design layout.

We have also integrated the colour picker option to add more flexibility.

Another major update on the plugin allows you to show the notice text elsewhere on product pages or any part of the website with the help of shortcodes. By using [crwcpn-notice] shortcode, you can display the configured notice in the plugin settings on a different location on the product page.

If you wish to show a product-specific notice on a different page, post or elsewhere on the website, you can use the id attribute of the shortcode to do so. Using this [crwcpn-notice type="product" id="123"] will display the notice configured for the product with ID 123 on the desired location on the website. How amazing is that!

To show the product notice on a different location on the product page, you can use the shortcode with an additional attribute type. So, the shortcode [crwcpn-notice type="product"] will display product notice on the product page at the desired location.

Now that you have complete power over the appearance and location of your notice, why not start updating your online store with notices of your liking!

To learn more plugin details, visit our page. Or, download it from the WordPress plugin repository. Also, don’t forget to drop a rating and review for the plugin!.

Get Started!

Business

Here’s Why Your Business Needs a Website

Post author By Ritu
Post date February 6, 2023
No Comments on Here’s Why Your Business Needs a Website

Do you run a small, medium or large business? Does your business have a website? It is 2023, an era of everything online and if your business still lacks visibility in the internet world, you’ve got some serious worries. Among various reasonable and crucial things in a business, there comes the requirement of a website. The first thing that a potential customer does is head straight to the internet and look for your business website online. It doesn’t matter if your business is small or large, visibility and credibility are two of the most important things for any business.

Many business owners might be unaware of the fact that today almost 80% of consumers look for a product online before they actually go to buy it. And if your website has been optimized well for the search engines, that customer might end up buying that particular product from you. Now imagine if you weren’t up on the internet, you would have lost that customer.

The traditional sales and marketing techniques may get you a good number of customers but having a professional website will generate even more sales. Many people rely upon the usual business operations and having a website is the last thing on their mind. But what most of them don’t realize is that a website is an inexpensive and effective sales and communication tool.

How does a website benefit your business?

Let’s talk about the benefits that a website brings to the table.

Your presence at all times isn’t requiredA website is a tool for your business to be able to communicate with the customers. You might not be available at some odd hours but your website is always up there to answer every query that the customer has. This means that your business is always running even if you’re not. Say, you have a physical store that sells cupcakes to the customers. Your store is abuzz with customers visiting your store to buy the delicious cupcakes you make and sell. However, a physical store has its own limitations. There are limitations of store opening and closing time, workers and helpers on a leave and what not. Heads up! You’re losing your customers. Imagine, you put the same business online and decide to sell cupcakes online. Customers can visit your online store and place an order for your delicious cupcakes anytime and anywhere, be it midnight or a national holiday. Your store is now always open and accepting orders. You saved bunch of lost customers and often adding new to your list. See the difference!
Creates an online presenceSure you have a presence in the physical world but is it fair for your business to not have a brand image online? People associated with your business such as customers, partners and investors should have an easy access to your business. The only way for them to reach out to you online is through your business website. Thus, you create an online existence of your business and let it proliferate.
A website covers every aspect of marketing for your businessIt is also adequate to say that a website helps your business gain an easy and a higher ROI than any other form of advertisement. It is the most effective way of marketing and is also the best way to have an online identity or presence. The impact of visualized content is far more than any other content because pictures serve as a proof of your business. Your business website can readily offer brochures, catalogues and other information about your products and services. All this information can be certainly updated as soon as a change is derived in the business, establishing a dynamic business.
Increased reach of marketHaving a website gives you the opportunity to create a wider impact on the market. As many people visit your website, there’s a rise in the sales and thus, your reach in the market also expands. In addition to it, the chances of extending your services to the global market also increases. Also, in case of products and services, recommendations & referrals work well for your online business. If planned well, your website can be effectively used to convey authority and trust to potential customers.This helps the customers to have a better vision of your business, boosting the chances of them converting into a successful lead. Your website is like a star-employee for your business who works 24×7 without demanding a paycheck, whatsoever.
Let your competitors see the face of the earthIf your competitor has a website and you don’t, there’s no question that your customers will go to your competitor because they are likely to find them more trustworthy. The presence of your website makes it possible for the customers to have faith in your business and they would always know where to come back if something falls apart. You put your products and services on your website and let your customers choose if they’d like to do business with you and this creates a trusted customer base. Talk about authority, your website holds it firm for your business.

Getting Started with building a business website

To start with, it may feel a little more daunting to an end-user, as to how to get your website up and running. It is rather easy to get started. You can do it yourself if you know the how-to or to keep costs down, you can ask a friend to help, or you can hire a professional Web developer to do it for you at a modest cost.

If you have a basic knowledge of how things work behind the scenes with web development and want to kick start with your website, you would rather want to consider using a Content Management System. This will also help you control the costs and also handles the major load for you. If you’re just starting out, or if you value ease of use, customization and performance, then WordPress is for you. WordPress is continually evolving and powers most of the websites on the internet today. Click here to read why you should build your Website with WordPress as your CMS.

Today when almost every individual is already using a smartphone, a laptop and is present on at least one of the many social media platforms, it is a bane for your business to not have a website. The rate of growth in terms of sales, money and customers is predicted to crawl when you refrain from having a website and escalate rapidly when you have one. A website is not a luxury item for your business, it is rather a requirement to achieve tremendous growth and success.

WooCommerce WordPress

Want to Highlight Notices on your WooCommerce site? Not a Hassle Anymore!

Post author By Sudeep Ghogare
Post date February 6, 2023
No Comments on Want to Highlight Notices on your WooCommerce site? Not a Hassle Anymore!

If you have a business that requires an online store, chances are your site is built on WooCommerce, powered by WordPress. With a market share of 25%, WooCommerce helps you build an eCommerce store using WordPress as the operating system.

Launched in 2011, WooCommerce quickly became the primary solution for users to build their online stores. With features that covered all the necessities mentioned below, WooCommerce has become a go-to platform for online stores.

With features such as:

Free
Open-sourced
User-friendly
Extensible and extensive
Customizable
Secured

— WooCommerce turns your WordPress-powered website into a fully functioning eCommerce store.

As of today, there are requirements for some eCommerce stores to put up instant notifications, updates, promos, etc. For instance, an online clothing store requires a discount notice to be put up. The current WooCommerce functionality is limited to the product description area, where you can hardly put up any eye-catching notice.

CloudRedux, finding and understanding the challenge to put up notices on web stores for their own clientele, came up with the idea to build a plugin that will benefit the requirement.

Product Notices for WooCommerce

This transformative plugin powers your WooCommerce based store and puts up your notice in front of your audience. The “Product Notices for WooCommerce” plugin lets you set up and display notices for products on your WooCommerce-WordPress website. With this plugin, you can set notices globally to display on all products or on a per-product basis.

An extensive, one-of its kind, this WooCommerce plugin allows you to set up important notices, highlights, promos, discounts etc. on your webstore.
With this plugin you are able to put up two kinds of notices:
1. Global Notice: These are the notices that you can highlight across your store. This feature allows you to set up notices to show on all the products. It may be some kind of market announcement, alert, or for any other criteria.
2. Per-Product Notice: This feature allows you to show notices on a per-product basis. The notice may be in the form of promo, discount, or any other criteria. This feature also allows you to hide the global notice from the page, thus allowing custom store notices an easy task.
With its inbuilt functionality to change the appearance, you can modify your notice as per your requirement.
HTML and shortcodes are fully supported in the notice text field. This gives you better flexibility to be creative while creating notices, promo, alerts or discount notifications.

Downloading the plugin

In case you have the requirement to put up notices or highlight important information on your e-store, you’ll need to download the latest, one-of-its-kind WooCommerce plugin.

Install the plugin by visiting www.cloudredux.com or download directly from the WordPress repository.

Installing and Activating the Plugin

Step 1: After downloading the plugin, head towards the WordPress dashboard > Plugin > Add New

Step 2: Search for Product Notices for WooCommerce in the search bar.

Step 3: Locate and install the plugin.

Step 4: Click to activate the plugin.

Setting up Global Notices

If you are in need to put up important notice across your e-store, you can make it happen with the Global Notices feature. You can put up important notices, announcements, or any updates across every page by default.

After installing and activating the plugin, follow the steps below in order to put up Global Notices

Step 1: On the WordPress dashboard navigate from WooCommerce > Settings > Product Notice

Step 2: Add your custom content in the text area

Step 3: Select appropriate appearance for your notice

Step 4: Save the changes

Your Global Notice will be set up as shown in the figure below.

Setting up Per-Product Notices

If you do not want to display a notice on all of the products, you can set up notices on a per-product basis. In order to do so, follow these steps:

Step 1: Head to the Edit Product screen > Product Notice/Information meta box

Step 2: Add the relevant content in the Notice text field

Step 3: Choose from a set of default appearance styles to set up how your notice shows up on the page

Step 4: Save the changes

The final view of the update will look like the image below:

Disabling Global Notices on Product Pages

In case you would like to selectively disable the Global notice on one or more products, you can do so by following the instructions below:

Step 1: Head towards the product on which you want to disable Global Notice

Step 2: Navigate to the Disable Global Notice meta box.

Step 3: Select the check box to hide the global notice.

Step 3: Save and Update

You’ll notice that the global notice no longer shows up on the product page. Any notice added specifically to that page will still be displayed.

To get an idea, see the image below:

Wrapping up!

Now that you have the option to communicate better with your users, make sure you make the best use out of it. With our unique WooCommerce plugin, make your news available to users easily.

We, at CloudRedux, aim towards contributing to society as it gives us back a platform to build on. With this plugin being the first step towards transformation, our goal is to deliver many more unique innovations.

WooCommerce WordPress

Adding and Sending Custom WooCommerce Email for WooCommerce 3.0+

Post author By Aniket Ashtikar
Post date February 6, 2023
No Comments on Adding and Sending Custom WooCommerce Email for WooCommerce 3.0+

WooCommerce 3.0 was rolled out with lots of exciting features for end-users as well as developers. Several advancements including use of CRUD classes and others were introduced with this release to make WooCommerce more performance-friendly.

This also lead to changes in the way interaction between post types, taxonomies and related data happens. In one of our previous articles we showed you how could you (without using any plugin) add and send custom WooCommerce emails. And as we continually receive comments and requests about modifying the code to also make it compatible with WooCommerce 3.0+, I decided to quickly (yeah, I know this is very late 🙁 ) get onto this.

This tutorial has been tested to work with WooCommerce 3.0+. So, if you are looking to add and send custom emails in WooCommerce 3.0+, follow the instructions below.

First things first!

It is highly recommended that any customization be kept separate from the theme. A plugin like WP Designer could come in handy if you want to add such a customization. This example requires you to FTP into your website and create custom directories and files inside wp-content > uploads directory. Following is a list of directories and files that need to be created:

Create directory crwc-custom-emails inside wp-content > uploads.
Create file crwc-email-functions.php in the root of crwc-custom-emails directory (crwc-custom-emails > crwc-email-functions.php).
Create file class-crwc-welcome-email.php in the root of crwc-custom-emails directory (crwc-custom-emails > class-crwc-welcome-email.php).
Create a sub-directory emails inside crwc-custom-emails directory.
Create a new file crwc-welcome-email.php inside the emails directory (crwc-custom-emails > emails > crwc-welcome-email.php).
You can also choose to create a sub-directory plain inside emails directory and then create crwc-welcome-email.php file inside plain directory (crwc-custom-emails > emails > plain > crwc-welcome-email.php). This will be used in case emails use plain content-type.

Building custom email class

The custom email class that we create would actually define the email trigger plus the email content. We can extend the default WC_Email class and hence make use of all of the parent email class methods & members that are available. This makes life really easy 😉

Add the following code to class-crwc-welcome-email.php file.

<pre class="EnlighterJSRAW" data-enlighter-language="php" data-enlighter-theme="" data-enlighter-highlight="" data-enlighter-linenumbers="" data-enlighter-lineoffset="" data-enlighter-title="" data-enlighter-group="">&lt;?php
if ( ! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) ) exit; // Exit if accessed directly
if ( class_exists( 'WC_Email' ) ) :
class CRWC_Welcome_Email extends WC_Email {
	
	/**
	 * Set email defaults
	 */
	public function __construct() {
		// Unique ID for custom email
		$this-&gt;id = 'crwc_welcome_email';
		// Is a customer email
		$this-&gt;customer_email = true;
		
		// Title field in WooCommerce Email settings
		$this-&gt;title = __( 'Welcome Email', 'woocommerce' );
		// Description field in WooCommerce email settings
		$this-&gt;description = __( 'Welcome email is sent when an online training program account is created for the customer after the purchase of the online course.', 'woocommerce' );
		// these define the locations of the templates that this email should use, we'll just use the new order template since this email is similar
		$upload_dir = wp_upload_dir();
		
		$this-&gt;template_base  = WPD_BASE_DIR . '/wc-emails/';	// Fix the template base lookup for use on admin screen template path display
		$this-&gt;template_html  = 'emails/crwc-welcome-email.php';
		$this-&gt;template_plain = 'emails/plain/crwc-welcome-email.php';
		$this-&gt;placeholders   = array(
			'{site_title}'   =&gt; $this-&gt;get_blogname(),
			'{order_date}'   =&gt; '',
			'{order_number}' =&gt; '',
		);
		// Trigger email when payment is complete
		add_action( 'woocommerce_payment_complete', array( $this, 'trigger' ) );
		add_action( 'woocommerce_order_status_on-hold_to_processing_notification', array( $this, 'trigger' ) );
		add_action( 'woocommerce_order_status_on-hold_to_completed_notification', array( $this, 'trigger' ) );
		add_action( 'woocommerce_order_status_failed_to_processing_notification', array( $this, 'trigger' ) );
		add_action( 'woocommerce_order_status_failed_to_completed_notification', array( $this, 'trigger' ) );
		add_action( 'woocommerce_order_status_pending_to_processing_notification', array( $this, 'trigger' ) );
		
		// Call parent constructor to load any other defaults not explicity defined here
		parent::__construct();
	}
	/**
	 * Get email subject.
	 *
	 * @since  3.1.0
	 * @return string
	 */
	public function get_default_subject() {
		return __( 'XYZ Online Training Program', 'woocommerce' );
	}
	/**
	 * Get email heading.
	 *
	 * @since  3.1.0
	 * @return string
	 */
	public function get_default_heading() {
		return __( 'Welcome to Online Training Program', 'woocommerce' );
	}
	/**
	 * Prepares email content and triggers the email
	 *
	 * @param int $order_id
	 */
	public function trigger( $order_id, $order = false ) {
		if ( $order_id &amp;&amp; ! is_a( $order, 'WC_Order' ) ) {
			$order = wc_get_order( $order_id );
		}
			
		if ( is_a( $order, 'WC_Order' ) ) {
			
			$this-&gt;object = $order;
			
			$this-&gt;placeholders['{order_date}']   = wc_format_datetime( $this-&gt;object-&gt;get_date_created() );
			$this-&gt;placeholders['{order_number}'] = $this-&gt;object-&gt;get_order_number();
		
			//* Maybe include an additional check to make sure that the online training program account was created
			/* Uncomment and add your own conditional check
			$online_training_account_created = get_post_meta( $order_id, '_crwc_user_account_created', 1 );
			
			if ( ! empty( $online_training_account_created ) &amp;&amp; false === $online_training_account_created ) {
				return;
			}
			*/
			/* Proceed with sending email */
			
			$this-&gt;recipient = $this-&gt;object-&gt;get_billing_email();
		}
		// Send welcome email only once and not on every order status change		
		if ( get_post_meta( $order_id, '_crwc_welcome_email_sent', true ) ) {
			return;
		}
		if ( ! $this-&gt;is_enabled() || ! $this-&gt;get_recipient() ) {
			
			return;
		}
		// All well, send the email
		$this-&gt;send( $this-&gt;get_recipient(), $this-&gt;get_subject(), $this-&gt;get_content(), $this-&gt;get_headers(), $this-&gt;get_attachments() );
		
		// add order note about the same
		$this-&gt;object-&gt;add_order_note( sprintf( __( '%s email sent to the customer.', 'woocommerce' ), $this-&gt;get_title() ) );
		// Set order meta to indicate that the welcome email was sent
		update_post_meta( $order_id, '_crwc_welcome_email_sent', 1 );
		
	}
	
	/**
	 * get_content_html function.
	 *
	 * @return string
	 */
	public function get_content_html() {
		return wc_get_template_html( $this-&gt;template_html, array(
			'order'			=&gt; $this-&gt;object,
			'email_heading'		=&gt; $this-&gt;get_heading(),
			'sent_to_admin'		=&gt; false,
			'plain_text'		=&gt; false,
			'email'			=&gt; $this
		) );
	}
	/**
	 * get_content_plain function.
	 *
	 * @return string
	 */
	public function get_content_plain() {
		return wc_get_template_html( $this-&gt;template_plain, array(
			'order'			=&gt; $this-&gt;object,
			'email_heading'		=&gt; $this-&gt;get_heading(),
			'sent_to_admin'		=&gt; false,
			'plain_text'		=&gt; true,
			'email'			=&gt; $this
		) );
	}
	/**
	 * Initialize settings form fields
	 */
	public function init_form_fields() {
		$this-&gt;form_fields = array(
			'enabled'    =&gt; array(
				'title'   =&gt; __( 'Enable/Disable', 'woocommerce' ),
				'type'    =&gt; 'checkbox',
				'label'   =&gt; 'Enable this email notification',
				'default' =&gt; 'yes'
			),
			'subject'    =&gt; array(
				'title'       =&gt; __( 'Subject', 'woocommerce' ),
				'type'        =&gt; 'text',
				'desc_tip'    =&gt; true,
				'description' =&gt; sprintf( 'This controls the email subject line. Leave blank to use the default subject: &lt;code&gt;%s&lt;/code&gt;.', $this-&gt;get_subject() ),
				'placeholder' =&gt; $this-&gt;get_default_subject(),
				'default'     =&gt; ''
			),
			'heading'    =&gt; array(
				'title'       =&gt; __( 'Email Heading', 'woocommerce' ),
				'type'        =&gt; 'text',
				'desc_tip'    =&gt; true,
				'description' =&gt; sprintf( __( 'This controls the main heading contained within the email notification. Leave blank to use the default heading: &lt;code&gt;%s&lt;/code&gt;.' ), $this-&gt;get_heading() ),
				'placeholder' =&gt; $this-&gt;get_default_heading(),
				'default'     =&gt; ''
			),
			'email_type' =&gt; array(
				'title'			=&gt; __( 'Email type', 'woocommerce' ),
				'type'			=&gt; 'select',
				'description'	=&gt; __( 'Choose which format of email to send.', 'woocommerce' ),
				'default'		=&gt; 'html',
				'class'			=&gt; 'email_type wc-enhanced-select',
				'options'		=&gt; $this-&gt;get_email_type_options(),
				'desc_tip'		=&gt; true,
			)
		);
	}
		
}
endif;</pre>

Viewing custom email settings

The code mentioned above will help us to create custom class with all settings and triggers. However, to be able to see the custom email settings that we created along with the default emails on WooCommerce Emails screen under WooCommerce > Settings > Emails, we’ll need to add this class to the default email classes in WooCommerce. In order to do that, we’ll make use of the woocommerce_email_classes filter to include custom email class to the default classes.

Add the following code to crwc-email-functions.php file (inside crwc-custom-emails directory).

<pre class="EnlighterJSRAW" data-enlighter-language="php" data-enlighter-theme="" data-enlighter-highlight="" data-enlighter-linenumbers="" data-enlighter-lineoffset="" data-enlighter-title="" data-enlighter-group="">add_filter( 'woocommerce_email_classes', 'crwc_custom_woocommerce_emails' );
function crwc_custom_woocommerce_emails( $email_classes ) {
	//* Custom welcome email to customer when purchasing online training program
	$upload_dir = wp_upload_dir();
	
	include_once( $upload_dir['basedir'] . '/crwc-custom-emails/class-crwc-welcome-email.php' );
	
	$email_classes['CRWC_Welcome_Email'] = new CRWC_Welcome_Email(); // add to the list of email classes that WooCommerce loads
	return $email_classes;
	
}</pre>

Now, when you navigate to WooCommerce > Settings > Emails, you should be able to see the custom email Welcome Email that we added to the list of emails on that page. If you click on the Configure button, you will find settings screen that allows you to enable/disable the email, edit/update the email subject and heading and choose the email content type since we added these settings in the custom class we created above.

Creating custom email template

Until this point, we have been able to create email class that helps create email trigger and set-up email content and we have also been able to add our custom email to the WooCommerce Emails screen. We still need to define the email template that will be used for the email content. The paths to the email content templates have already been defined in the custom email class we created above. Let’s add the actual content that will be used by the welcome email we send out to customers.

Add the following code to crwc-welcome-email.php file (inside emails directory).

<pre class="EnlighterJSRAW" data-enlighter-language="php" data-enlighter-theme="" data-enlighter-highlight="" data-enlighter-linenumbers="" data-enlighter-lineoffset="" data-enlighter-title="" data-enlighter-group="">&lt;?php
/**
 *
 * Welcome email content template
 *
 * The file is prone to modifications after plugin upgrade or alike; customizations are advised via hooks/filters
 *
 */
 
if ( ! defined( 'ABSPATH' ) ) {
	exit;
}
/**
 * @hooked WC_Emails::email_header() Output the email header
 */
do_action( 'woocommerce_email_header', $email_heading, $email ); ?&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;?php _e( 'Thank you for your purchase of Online training course. Your account has been successfully created over the Online Training Program portal.', 'woocommerce' ); ?&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;?php _e( 'Use the following credentials to login to the portal:', 'woocommerce' ); ?&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;
	&lt;strong&gt;&lt;?php __( 'Login URL: ', 'woocommerce' ) ?&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;?php _e( 'https://example.com' ); ?&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
	&lt;strong&gt;&lt;?php __( 'Username: ', 'woocommerce' ) ?&gt;&lt;/strong&gt;&lt;?php echo make_clickable( esc_attr( $order-&gt;get_billing_email() ) ); ?&gt;&lt;br /&gt;
&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;p&gt;&lt;?php _e( 'Below are the order details for your reference.' ) ?&gt;&lt;/p&gt;
&lt;?php
/**
* @hooked WC_Emails::order_details() Shows the order details table.
* @hooked WC_Emails::order_schema_markup() Adds Schema.org markup.
* @since 2.5.0
*/
do_action( 'woocommerce_email_order_details', $order, $sent_to_admin, $plain_text, $email );
/**
* @hooked WC_Emails::order_meta() Shows order meta data.
*/
do_action( 'woocommerce_email_order_meta', $order, $sent_to_admin, $plain_text, $email );
/**
* @hooked WC_Emails::customer_details() Shows customer details
* @hooked WC_Emails::email_address() Shows email address
*/
do_action( 'woocommerce_email_customer_details', $order, $sent_to_admin, $plain_text, $email );
/**
 * @hooked WC_Emails::email_footer() Output the email footer
 */
do_action( 'woocommerce_email_footer', $email );</pre>

You can modify the email content template as required based on your specific requirements and accordingly, the details that you’d need to send out to your customers.

Start making Custom WooCommerce email work

We’re almost there with starting to send custom WooCommerce emails to the customers. All we need to do is to trigger our code. The filter we added to include our custom email class to list of default email classes is placed in crwc-email-functions.php, but hey!, wait a sec.. did we actually include it so that it is executed by WordPress? No, not yet. Let’s do that.

In order to do so, you can just add the following code to your theme’s functions.php:

<pre class="EnlighterJSRAW" data-enlighter-language="php" data-enlighter-theme="" data-enlighter-highlight="" data-enlighter-linenumbers="" data-enlighter-lineoffset="" data-enlighter-title="" data-enlighter-group="">$upload_dir = wp_upload_dir();
include_once( $upload_dir['basedir'] . '/crwc-custom-emails/crwc-email-functions.php' );</pre>

That’s it! Now on, when a customer purchases an online training product from your store, he would receive a welcome email with his credentials. Cheers!

Business

Online Business Failure: 6 things you are doing wrong and how to do it right?

Post author By Aniket Ashtikar
Post date February 6, 2023
No Comments on Online Business Failure: 6 things you are doing wrong and how to do it right?

We know reading this title will “Break Your Heart” and maybe you will have that strange and daunting feeling to increase the possibility of your success. Starting an online business has no guarantee of success, period! But that’s how running an online business is like, right? You have read all the success stories of entrepreneurs and it felt so great that you took action to set-up your own Online Business. Woohoo!! And then, there you are reading this piece – it means you are missing that kink in your master plan or maybe you want to identify the main reasons of online business failure before starting your business.

According to research conducted by Bloomberg after the failure post-mortem of the companies, it states that 8 out of 10 companies fail within the first 18 months. That’s a whopping burn rate of 80 percent or simply we can say that a new business has 1 in 5 chances to survive in less than two years. That’s pretty depressing! While as an entrepreneur when you study how businesses succeed, you should also learn about the darker sides of online businesses failure. Surely, you don’t fail until you totally give up. Remember Henry Ford? His first two automotive efforts turned out to be a failure. We see him as an innovator who knew what might look like failure to some is a real innovation. But then you have to hit the road just one time. That’s it!

Why most of the Businesses Fail?

Business failure is a harsh reality. You could fail 10 times and reinitiate your business 11 times. If at any of the next attempt you made it happen, you didn’t actually fail because you didn’t give up. There are some specific reasons why businesses are failing. You build successful business strategies, statistics but if you fail to realize some crucial things or just overlook or push aside certain things, YOU’RE GONNA FAIL. Let’s put together a summary of mistakes entrepreneurs or business owners typically make in running an online business; where do they go wrong and most importantly, how can YOU avoid making these fatal mistakes? So if you don’t want to be a part of the 80 percent category there are some ways to combat it.

Reason #1 – You have no Customers because there is no market need
According to CB Insights, tackling problems that are interesting to solve rather than those that serve a market need was cited as the No. 1 reason for business failure, noted in 42% of cases. It is far simpler: the companies didn’t solve a big enough problem.

This is like self-evident. Let’s get to the basics. Even though it feels obvious, it is not! And, let me warn you this is HUGE. Businesses fail all the time because they are trying to solve a problem that nobody really cares about. If you put your product or service out there and nobody buys it, there’s a good chance you should look for a more important problem to solve. If no one wants your product or service your company isn’t going to succeed. Simple, right! Also, a lot of people, go into business with a different or a wrong perception, they see a business and they are like, “Oh, this is awesome, I can do it too.” Seriously! Remember, for every $137 billion company like Amazon, there are countless number of frivolous online businesses that never make it.

The Fix – Just think about this, you receive a service or product that totally blows your mind. And, what you are going to do next is to recommend the product to your network, “word of mouth”, you see. Why? Because you found it useful, something that is delivering value. It’s all about VALUE.

First, find a Market. What is your market? Don’t say, “Um, everyone.” That’s not your market. You need to identify the group, the cluster of people whom you will be helping. The second thing is Need. What do people need? What are people looking for? Whether it is a market of recruiters searching for a perfect candidate or a super easy tool for accountants, your product or service should be able to universally serve with a scalable solution. Remember, you must be having great technology, data, expertise or reputation but your technology should solve the pain points of your target market; ultimately making their lives easier. It is always about delivering VALUE to market that will eventually pay you like spades in future.
Reason #2 – You are not listening to your Customers
An amazing thing happens when an entrepreneur sees a potential opportunity in the market and addresses the need with a new idea of a product or a service. But things don’t go well when you don’t have a complete understanding of your customer which is actually crucial to your product and company’s success. Businesses fail when they neglect to stay in touch with their target audience, their customers and don’t understand what they need and the feedback they offer. How do you know if the problem you solve is important enough? Have you been listening?

The Fix – Customers are the final arbiters and will tell you what they really think about your product or service. Remember, there’s a reason why “the customer is always right,” because without customers you don’t have a business. Listen to your customers, like for real. Walk 1,000 miles in the shoes of your customer. Your customer is the key. Don’t just pay lip service and even 280 characters of your tweet won’t count. Make real conversation with real customers. This is one of the most important ways to avoid online business failure.
Reason #3 – You are not able to compete in the market
Your competition is not always startups; there are large companies too that are incubating ideas. In fact, you need to look out more on the giant ones. When the competition is fierce especially in lucrative markets where the stakes are high, companies get out-competed in the race. Sure, you may have the first-mover advantage but second-mover advantage can allow companies to quickly incorporate what you have validated and sink your ship in a blink.

The Fix – Let’s take an example of Nokia, there was a time when the company ruled. Nokia failed when the smartphones took over the market. The company was much behind in terms of functionalities and innovation and was the one to enter late in the market. Whether a giant company or small startup, you have a competitor for your business to watch out. You need to be different, innovative and ahead of your competition in every aspect. You need to find ways and stay in business.
Reason #4 – You have no Marketing Strategy
It is vital that a business puts ample efforts into marketing at the bootstrapping stage. No matter how great and useful your product or service is, it will gracefully fail if no one knows about it or is not able to find the customers. Poor and inefficient marketing has always been one of the major causes of online business failure.

The Fix – While you don’t always need a fully dedicated professional PR team to market your offerings but you need to make the target audience aware of the product or service existence in one or the other way. The goal of marketing is to connect your business’ value to the right customer. Start marketing and advertising your products or services online with social media marketing, content writing & marketing, email marketing campaigns or print media whatever suits your business well.
Reason #5 – You are not being able to decide on Product Pricing
Finding a balance between the selling price and cost of the product is a real challenge and tipping to either of the sides can be disastrous for a company. Businesses always suffer between pricing good enough to maintain positive margins and covering all the operating costs, while also to price low enough to lure customers.

The Fix – You need to find out that sweet spot of not too expensive and not too cheap price for your product while simultaneously maintaining the healthy margins. How do you do this? First, know your customers, figure out the segment you are targeting. Second, know your costs, your revenue target, your competition most importantly. Do keep track of outside factors that will impact the demand for your product in the future.
Reason #6 – You are not optimizing your conversions
Optimizing conversions is not only about more clicks, more money, more growth. It is so much more than that. Most of the entrepreneurs and business owners forget to address this important aspect of business success. With the implementation of several other strategies and techniques to target and drive customers optimizing your web pages for conversions can impact so many other areas of your marketing. Entrepreneurs and business owners should understand that you can always get more traffic but you can thrive only when you are able to capitalize on the existing traffic. And, this is where most businesses fail.

The Fix – For a sustainable business and positive ROI ensure that you start optimizing conversions at early stages of business. Remember the reason you are optimizing conversion rates is to provide a better experience to your users who will ultimately be your customers. Ensure that you follow fundamentals to optimize your conversion rate with creating a powerful lead magnet, by increasing organic traffic with search engine optimization, A/B testing for your web pages according to demographics, conversion funnel, and other digital marketing activities. The better you do it, the more potential you have at churning a profit. Now is the time to get your website conversion rate optimized!

The Final Fix to avoid Online Business Failure

While there can be several other reasons for business failures like no business plan or model, losing the focus, product misfit, not having the right team and resources however according to industry experts and entrepreneurs the above-mentioned remains to be the main reasons for a business exiting the market.

No matter what, don’t let the fear of failure stop you from trying anything. Despite talking about reasons of failure we will leave you with the words of Thomas J. Watson – “If you want to increase your success rate, double your failure rate.”, a planned and continually improved approach will help you stay afloat in the competition.

Business Search Engine Optimization

Mobile Friendly Website: One Business Necessity You May Have Been Ignoring

Post author By Ritu
Post date February 6, 2023
No Comments on Mobile Friendly Website: One Business Necessity You May Have Been Ignoring

The genesis of small ideas reinforce big businesses.

Sadly, today big businesses stand on a staggered bridge if their online strategies are not up to the mark.

Earlier, every business owner was content with how his product was perceived as there was no virtual audience to encourage or criticize the product. The reception of a product’s feedback was close to zero due to limited traditional marketing tools & techniques. But today it’s a shame if you fail to create your visibility in the online market. Probably that’s how e-Commerce came into picture.

With online marketing measurement tools like online surveys, feedback pop-ups, reviews on social media pages, YouTube ads and various others; it has become easier now to measure or assess the impact of your efforts.

A website is a critical and inexpensive element of your business and never ever than before must you have felt the need to have a mobile friendly website.

The audience has evolved and by all means, they are now looking for everything on their mobile devices. And we all know how smartphones have taken over. But,

What happens when you don’t have a mobile friendly website?

Recently, a friend bought some clothes that are in vogue from an e-Commerce website, which she stumbled upon and recommended to me. When I decided to check it out on my phone, it took forever to load. Since it was a friend’s recommendation, I decided to have some patience and waited long enough for the website to load. Once it loaded, the fonts were poor and so tiny that I could hardly find anything. Menu and product filters were hidden somewhere and gave me a difficult time. Eventually, I abandoned it. The point is that I waited long enough only because of my friend’s recommendation, but that barely happens.

Heard of Google’s Mobile First Index?

The reason I talk about Google as a reference point for SERP performance in this blog is solely based on a belief (and it is strictly personal) that Google is the most-preferred search engine today. There are other (probably better) search engines too that do commendable job, but when it comes to a wider audience reach, Google tops the list and hence, the preference.

Unless you’ve been living under a rock, the talk of the internet world is Google’s Mobile First Index. With a growing number of mobile users, Google now prioritizes websites that perform equally well or better on mobile screen sizes.

The criterion to decide what pages rank have changed and the focus has shifted to how adaptable is your website on mobile, tablets and other handheld devices. It simply transpires to this:

If you have a website designed for mobile phone and desktop, the search engine will prefer websites that perform well on mobile. And if you don’t have a mobile site yet, the ranking will be based on your regular desktop website.

However, even if you have a responsive site, mobile-first indexing will hardly affect you.

The point is that Google will prioritize mobile over desktop, encouraging people to either have an optimized mobile website along with desktop version or at least resort to a responsive site.

So, why should you have a mobile friendly website?

Because:

Google wants you to..

The fact is that Google now favors websites which are mobile friendly enough and quickly digs out those websites every time a user performs a search. These websites would lead in SERPs because they provide better user experience. When Google rolled out this update, many big names already anticipated these changes and were ready before others could fathom it.

Your business clients want you to..

For B2B sales, today it has become a trend and a necessity to have a smooth functioning mobile friendly website for business credibility. There’s a fair possibility of you never acquiring a chunk of business clients because processes like mobile friendly websites are critical to them. And trust me you’re already losing a big chunk.

And everyone else wants you to..

The whole world is using their mobile devices now. From baby boomers to millennials to everybody else (if there is) are using mobile phones to make small & big purchases. The fact that we’d rather visit a website using a mobile device is very high than using a desktop. A huge number of population is drifting towards mobile phones, here have a look at how the rate of mobile phone users has increased.

Furthermore, whenever a user tries to open your website on a mobile device and if it is slow or not responsive, the chances of him ever coming back to your website is highly unlikely. There goes your precious customer!

That’s all about everyone associated with your business. But,

What are the ultimate goals of having a mobile friendly website?

Well, to name a few, we have – ever growing customer reach, increased web traffic, a rise in customer engagement and a boost in sales. Eventually, you showcase your business anywhere and everywhere, allowing an easier and immediate access to customers.
A super rich user experience through site speed, appealing design, discreet fonts, structured & prudent content and compelling CTAs. All in all, a wonderful experience for users to consider their time spent wisely, resulting in recommendations and a better ROI.
A mobile user has a particularly different mindset than a desktop user. Their thought process is quicker; if things take a while, they are no good to them. In the experience mentioned above in this blog; I, as a mobile user, decided to abandon an e-Commerce website upon noticing its poor functioning. Imagine how many customers you’ve been losing! The goal is to make your website so compelling and mobile friendly that users remain engaged throughout.

The future is mobile and for a business to thrive, it should be their utmost priority to keep up with such evolving processes as they say ‘Change is the only constant.’

Is your website ‘mobile-friendly’? Check now.

Business

5 Reasons to Employ Email Marketing Today

Post author By Ritu
Post date February 6, 2023
No Comments on 5 Reasons to Employ Email Marketing Today

Have you been looking for ways to incorporate digital marketing strategies lately? Or do you just want to explore the world of online marketing? Email marketing could be the answer in either scenarios!

In this mayhem of corporate world, every company is battling with their competitors to acquire more and more conversions. There are numerous ways to generate leads and revenues and every business has their marketing strategies aligned right as per the books.
But do they know how things keep evolving as we go and how businesses take an unpleasant turn even if a single marketing strategy goes wrong. Apparently not! Experts know that marketing is paramount and this is why they pay maximum heed to it.

A marketing team finds the most valuable data to create enlarged constructive content such as blogs, infographics, videos and many more. In 1988, Nike launched a marketing campaign called ‘Just do it’ to promote sales. The campaign was so successful that today ‘Just do it’ has become Nike’s trademark. Need we say more about marketing?

With so many kinds of marketing strategies such as social media advertising, influencer marketing, content marketing, purpose driven marketing why do we want to talk about email marketing? Emails have been around the corner ever since the internet was introduced and almost everybody checks their emails today. Many would say that email marketing is obsolete today. We say NO as we see many top notch companies leveraging email marketing strategies to get a large number of leads.

So what exactly are these benefits that we keep talking about?

Stronger and Loyal Customer Base – Having a strong email list means having a loyal customer following. Your social media followers might miss out on your recent content but your email list customers will take over as they signed up for your products in particular. When a customer signs up for your email list, they feel entitled to receive updates such as newsletters, new product or campaign launches.
Brand Awareness – Email marketing techniques such as sending recommendations after a customer bought a product or sending customized emails when a new product/ campaign is launched, etc. are sublime ways to acquaint more customers with your business. Typically marketing experts add a ‘call to action’ button in their emails with a captivating one liner to encourage the customer to click. These tactics are proven methods, which eventually increases brand awareness and click-through-rates.
ROI – It has been observed that emails are 40% more effective than any other social media platform. As per Constant Contact, when a business spends $1 on email marketing, they receive a revenue of $38. Many marketing opportunists are already aware of this fact and have achieved laudable goals such as highest conversion rates, wider audience reach, increased click-through-rate (CTR) on their website and an increased ROI out of their online business.
Cost Effective – If you have a budget set aside for marketing purposes, you may want to consider email marketing. Since the customer following is usually dynamic, it is rather easier to recreate, redesign, and re-purpose your content with an allocated budget.
Direct Reach – Receiving an email with “Hello” or “Hello Dave”, which sounds better? The one with your name, right? Such email tactics ensure that the customer feels valued enough. Email marketing is a tried and tested method, which allows you to segment your customers as per demographic trends. And this works brilliantly in reaching out to a targeted audience.

Having a business with great revenue is excellent but building a valuable relationship with your customers is even better. If you have not been able to utilize email marketing yet, the time is now because ‘better late than never’.