Top 10 UX Design Principles

6 Oct 2020 Web design

Design principles are widely accepted guidelines, laws, and design considerations that the designers apply with discretion. In other words, they are fundamental pieces of advice for the designer to make easy-to-use, eye-catching designs. These are applied when creating, selecting, and organizing elements and features in the work. In a UX design, it is crucial to find ways to improve usability, influence perception, increase appeal, teach users, and make effective design decisions for projects.

Top UX design principles to keep in mind while designing the website

  1. Know your user and their needs – A website is only as good as its user’s experience. The focus of all UX design principles is on users throughout the design process, understanding their needs, expectations, motivations, and frustrations thereby making it clear that the website design should work on providing and improving the users’ experience with the product and services. A clear understanding of these will help the designer to build and focus on the personas throughout the design process. It is important to know what the users are looking for in a design.
  2. Content is supreme – To give a website a more meaningful direction, it is important to focus on crafting a story of a brand or a product before getting into the visual design phase of a website. Telling a story can connect people to an idea or a product or service. Start with planning the content and then move around designing the website.
  3. Have a clear hierarchy – It is one of the best tools for designers to help a user smoothly navigate throughout the design easily. There are two different hierarchies involved in UX design for a website.
  • The first hierarchy relates to information with the focus on how the content is organized across the website. This mainly refers to a primary navigation menu that includes the main sections. This is the menu which you notice when you arrive on a site. As you click on each item, what you see is the secondary menu that gets more specific moving you down the information hierarchy.
  • The visual hierarchy is the way the designer helps the user navigate more easily with a section or a page. Visual hierarchy requires the more important content to stand out like for instance, headings are typically larger than the body text and often use a different font. Similarly, interactive elements use different colours to draw attention to its interactiveness.
  1. Consistency – Users expect products to be consistent with similar products they have used in the past. The more familiar the product, the more easily the users will learn and have a better experience without any additional learning cost. This consistency makes the design process easier for the designers as they don’t have to reinvent new designs with every project.
  2. Understand accessibility – An important rule to keep in mind while designing a website or an app is accessibility. It is for the designer to make sure that the design is usable for as many people as possible including people with disabilities. Accessibility can mean many things at the interface level. From the ease of keyboard navigation and speech input technology to controlled animation for photosensitive user amongst other things. Remove any hurdles in the design layout for easy navigation.
  3. Begin with mobile in mind – A “mobile in mind” approach should be adopted to cater to the needs of the users and not face any issues when scaling up the design. Designers should focus on designing mobile and desktop wireframes at the same time to test the breakpoints.
  4. Experiment with animation – Interactive web design and animation can add movement and make the website come to life. Animation, when done well, has been known to help educate the customer about how the website or an app function. It is usually seen that users respond positively to small, unexpected, and playful elements.
  5. Ease in finding the right information – The most important information should be the easiest to find. Once the user is acclimatized with the site, more advanced features and technical details can be unveiled. For many sticking to the principle of being minimalistic and showing only what is necessary has proven to work well.
  6. User control – Focuses on providing greater flexibility of use and control of where a user is within the design, enhancing UX. An essential part of providing user control is to allow users to backpedal or recover from any errors. For instance, when a user is creating a new item like an email or an event, a cancel button should let them abandon the task. An undo button also comes in handy for reversing an unintended or undesired action. Another way to improve user control is by providing users with ways to improve their efficiency. Keyboard shortcuts are a great way to do this and so does advanced searching help users find what they are looking for more efficiently.
  7. Tree-test the prototypes – Tree testing exercising is done to evaluate the performance of the site’s architecture. It helps in understanding if the navigational paths are intuitive, and do they lead the users where they expect to go quickly without any confusion. For example, while browsing for something unique on an e-commerce site is the user able to find it easily, or is it a challenge? The answers to such a question can be found once tree-testing is done.

You want users to come back to your website for the products and services that you offer. The challenge than any web designer faces is to make the experience unique and as smooth as possible. The above UX design principles can surely help you in the right direction to achieving that.

Top 10 Affiliate Marketing Programs

5 Oct 2020 Content

How does the idea of making money while sleeping sound to you?

Affiliate marketing is how you get started. The main idea behind this kind of marketing is to promote other people’s products through an affiliate network, earning a commission if people buy these products thanks to your marketing efforts. This is a revenue-sharing model where if you have a product and want to increase the sales, then you offer the promoters a financial incentive through an affiliate program. Let us now look at the definition of what affiliate marketing is. “Affiliate Marketing is a process of earning a commission by promoting other people’s or company’s products. Choose a product that you like, promote it to others, and earn a piece of the profit for every sale that is made by you. In today’s online scenario affiliate marketing programs provide you with offers that can be promoted online. People can sign up for these programs online, use the existing marketing material and/or links with a unique URL, and convince others to click on it. In the event that someone signs up for the product or service using the URL, you can earn a commission.

Some of the best known Affiliate Marketing Programs can be found below:

  1. Amazon Associates – Amazon is a great platform for affiliate marketing and especially for beginners. The vast marketplace takes care of most of the sales process, bringing the leads to you. Signing up for the Amazon Affiliate program is an easy process and is free of cost. Once accepted, you can sell any Amazon products, including third-party ones without getting into individual programs. It is a great way to make money without having a strong background in affiliate marketing.
  2. CJ Affiliate – One of the largest affiliate networks since 1998 with expertise that shows in every aspect of their work. It is a great program for experienced marketers, featuring 300 brands. It has a very stringent selection process where you need to apply with your website which needs to be found worthy of becoming a partner based on traffic, quality of content, and optimization. However, this is just the first step. The next step involves applying individually to each vendor for their products to sell and you may or may not be accepted. The program has shown a 43 percent year-on-year growth in commission making it an attractive option.
  3. ShareASale – It has been in business for nearly two decades and is also one of the largest affiliate networks with a lot of trust in the industry. It is a well-loved program due to the user-friendly interface, easy free sign up and supports for the affiliates running multiple websites. A major advantage for this program is the standard and digital payout options with digital payouts being rare among the popular affiliate programs. With over 5000 vendors, you get a huge library of products to choose from. The only drawback with this program the pay-out threshold of $50 may be difficult to reach for newer websites who are still struggling to build their traffic.
  4. ClickBank – With 6 million digital products across 20 categories and with a reach of over 200 million people worldwide, ClickBank is an attractive choice for affiliate marketing. It offers a very high commission and has a reputation for regular payouts. The product base is easy to navigate making it easy to find products to promote. Unfortunately, they do not offer digital payments.
  5. eBay Partner Network – Offers a great way to tap into the massive affiliate potential of the eBay market. The sign up to this program is simple. As an affiliate marketer, you need to advertise eBay products through your social media, blog, or website to earn a commission for every product sold via your link.
  6. JVZoo – Relatively a newcomer with only 6 years of experience using the SaaS approach. The products can be listed in the marketplace for free and JVZoo earns a 5 percent standard commission on anything that sells. The affiliate marketers are paid instantly as the item is sold. Affiliate marketers stand to make more money when affiliates that they recruit sell products. Another advantage of using this program is that when a buyer referred by you purchases another product that may not have been referred by you, you get the commission for that sale as well.
  7. Fiverr Affiliates Program – It pitches itself as one of the world’s largest digital service marketplace with over 11 million users spread across over 190 countries. It offers a substantial commission plan and has no limit on referrals. It is user friendly and has an attractive portfolio of creative resources to promote.
  8. Shopify  – It is one of the leading e-commerce programs used by online retailers and bloggers. It offers a great partnership for affiliate marketing and you can earn a lot per referral. Shopify is known to be the leading contender in its space with very few other eCommerce platforms coming close to it. While the pay-outs are good, the audience needs to be selling things online for the platform to be relevant to them.
  9. PartnerStack – An affiliate program that focuses on promoting software products and tools including well-known popular software. 30 percent of the software sales can be attributed to the channel partners so if there is an audience for a particular software, then it has great potential for an affiliate marketer. PartnerStack focuses on building partnerships between the product owners and the affiliate marketers which is an advantage.
  10. Affiliate – This is a top choice for affiliate marketers looking to have access to many verticals which means a large variety of products and offering to choose and focus on to get the best results. Once accepted to the program, it gives you access to your very own affiliate manager that helps in optimizing the traffic and create a bonus program to gain the maximum.

No two affiliate programs are the same. Depending on your niche, your audience, and your personality different affiliate programs may be better suited for you. The different affiliate programs covered here offer a range of possibilities for a beginner to an advanced affiliate marketer.

 

Top 10 Payment Gateways

1 Oct 2020 E-Commerce

Having safe online payment methods is one of the crucial elements of running a successful online store that can achieve its sales objectives. Multiple and reliable payment methods significantly impact the volume of sales and engagement. If the payment gateways on a website are not reliable, it impacts a business negatively by increasing the bounce rate on the store and drives away a large number of customers who can purchase on the store. Hence it is essential to be aware of all the top online payment gateways and companies that provide good payment services to deal with to enhance and boost the online store, make the process of payment smooth, fast, and secure and gain the confidence of the shoppers. A payment gateway should allow merchants to accept multiple transaction facilities like debit/credit cards, wallets, etc. securely on the website as well as a mobile app.

How does a payment gateway work?

The customers while shopping on the website or app adds the product or service to the cart and proceed to the payment page. The customer is prompted to provide the details of the credit/debit card to make the payment which is the 16-digit card number along with the name of the cardholder, the expiration date, and the CVV number. This information is then submitted and securely passed to the payment gateway based on the integration type. The payment gateway encrypts the card details and after the security checks, the card information is sent to the acquiring bank. They further send these details to card schemes like Visa, Mastercard, etc. It is for the card schemes to ensure another security check before sending the payment information to the issuing bank. The issuing bank authorizes the transaction after security and fraud check. Whether the payment is approved or declined, the message is sent to the payment gateway which further sends the message to the merchant. Based on the message from the payment gateway the merchant either displays the payment confirmation or asks the customer to try again. Some of the top payment gateways provide smooth transactions and the whole process runs in the background in real-time within a few seconds.

Having understood how the payment gateway works, the next step is to look at the factors to consider when choosing a payment gateway.
• Security- the payment gateway security standards should meet the PCI Data Security Standard and should be integrated with 3D secure. This ensures protection against fraud and hacking activities.
• Easy Website Integration- the payment gateway integration should be simple and the customer support should be good. Any issues that you may face should be resolved quickly and with ease.
• Payout time- some of the best payment gateway service providers have taken a reasonable timeframe for payouts. It is important to check payout time frames before the integration process.
• Multi-currency option- if the business is global, then the payment gateway provider should support multi-currency payment.

Here are the Top 10 Payment Gateways

1. Paypal – It is one of the leading online payment companies that help people and companies to send and receive payments without the hassle of providing any financial information using just an email address. Paypal operates in 203 countries and has taken over most of the auction sites as well as e-commerce sites for businesses that rely heavily on PayPal e-payment services. The differentiating feature of PayPal is that it accepts electronic payments in more than 25 currencies in the world and supports most of the widely used credit cards like Visa, American Express, Mastercard, etc. Some of the other important features of PayPal are that it has a mobile application that makes it easier for the customers to manage their accounts via a mobile phone, provides advanced protection from fraud, and that you do not need a merchant account to use Paypal. It is PCI compliant, offers Express checkout, and also provides the option of bill me later.

2. PayFort – This is an Amazon Company, operating in Arabic speaking and surrounding countries such as UAE, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, Lebanon, Jordan, and Qatar. Payfort’s payment gateway accepts and proceeds multiple online payment methods with high security in order to minimize transaction risks in your site and boost your revenue.

3. Stripe – It is a cloud payment gateway platform that helps in accepting and managing online transactions anywhere in the world. It is a complete solution for online payments with features like custom UI toolkit, consolidated reports amongst other things. It ensures a smooth movement of funds for any business while preventing frauds offering great security, managing revenue, and drive sales. Since it offers an open API that helps in integration with the ecosystem of the business. Some other important features are that it provides a mobile customer interface, allows multiple- currency payouts, offers payment options, has a dispute handling feature.

4. Skrill – One of the well-known payment gateways that understand the modern payment demand in terms of payment processing and money transferring. It has many top companies as their customers owing to the use of innovative business solutions that they offer. It is one of the successful UK-based payment gateways that supports 30 different currencies and has been recognized and awarded by many top companies like Deloitte Technology and several others. Some of the important features include email transactions, provides quick access, and offer a free account.

5. Authorize.net – A global payment gateway providing strong infrastructure and security for smooth, fast, and secure transfer of transactional data. It manages the routing of transactions in an online setting without the installation of any specific software just like in the case of swiping your card. With a merchant base of 370,000 around the globe, it accepts payments securely ensuring a smooth experience. It has a fully integrated checkout payment system that accepts and processes payments from other bank accounts through the Authorization.net virtual terminal or the user’s website. Some of the other features that it offers are e-check processing, customer information. Manager, retail payment, Mail/phone payment, advanced fraud detection.

6. PayTabs – PayTabs is well-known for leading-edge payment processing and fraud prevention system. This flexible and secure online payment solution enables e-businesses to make or receive payments online with ease, create and send invoices through agile and unique technology. Moreover, PayTabs’s innovative layers of security management are certified by both Visa and MasterCard.

7. Telr – Is one of the most well-known payment gateways, which supports multiple popular payment methods. It is accepted in more than 100 countries, and constantly updates more payment methods. There are three payment levels: Entry, Small, and Medium, which are great for startups, SMEs, and e-commerce businesses in the emerging market.

8. Cashu – Cashu is considered the first and the largest online payment solution company in the Middle East and North Africa (MENA). This secure payment gateway applies modern fraud prevention and AML systems to avoid all risks associated with online transactions. Every transaction is guaranteed without any risk of chargeback. With Cashu, you will have a lot of opportunities to grow your business across markets on both a local and global scale.

9. 2Checkout.com – Whether you’re tapping into international markets, looking to boost conversion rates, or running a subscription-based business, 2Checkout can help you tackle the complexities of digital commerce, globally.

10. Payoneer – One of the world’s leading online payment company offering its services to individuals and businesses around the globe. It has its presence in more than 200 countries enabling businesses and individuals to send and receive money in a safe, simple, and low-cost way.

To be successful in e-commerce, many factors need to work simultaneously. If you provide products and services online, you need to understand how these work for the success of your online business. Your choice of the payment gateways can either lead to success in business or its failure. Choose wisely.

Top 10 Tips For Social Media Community Management

30 Sep 2020 Social Media

Strong customer relationships can help your business succeed, retain customers, and help in building an emotional connection between the customers and the business. One of the most efficient ways to build and nurture these connections is to create an online community. The online community becomes a platform for interaction with customers regularly. With the growth of this community, the business, its leads, and referrals grow too. However, effort need to be focussed on monitoring conversations, organizing data, and having metrics to measure, run, and grow a successful community and humanizing the brand at the same time.

What is Community Management?

Community management refers to an active effort to build an authentic community among a business’s customers, employees, and partners while encouraging conversations with the brand’s social media presence. This gives an opportunity to the people interested in the brand, to put their point across and have questions answered online. The key to community management is to directly engage in conversations with social media users and at the same time highlight those who advocate your brand.

Why is it important to have Community management?

The popularity of community management has grown and is now recognized by all types of businesses. Proper management of the community is important to the success of a brand and allows any business to:

  • Get feedback and ideas from the customers through real conversations.
  • Provide support when needed by the customers, fans, and prospective customers
  • Increase brand awareness among the target audience
  • Build relationships with the audience and the brand.
  • Learn about the needs, wants, and expectations of the customers with regard to product, services, support and content.
  • Boost conversion, sales, and customer interactions.
  • Provide value addition to customers beyond a product or service.

There are many steps involved in building effective community management for social media. There are different tools and requirements available for each of the social media platforms. Let us look at how to build a community management strategy.

  1. Choose a primary community channel – Different social media platforms are preferred by different demographics. Getting an understanding of where the target audience is spending time online will help you reap the most from community management efforts. Each platform has its unique best practices and user expectations. Understanding each platform is essential for the growth and success of community management.
  2. Identify your audience – Once you have selected the social media channel, the next important thing is to identify the audience on that social media platform. By doing so, you can gain insights into the kind of content the audience is interacting with, what are their likes and expectations from similar brands, and who they engage with. This information can help in devising the content for your target audience and the platform chosen.
  3. Ask the target audience what type of content are they looking for – It is not only important to identify the target audience but also know what is the content they are looking for so to create that content. This will help reach the target audience through the content they seek. Regularly asking for feedback and suggestions show that you care about their opinions and what they have to say. This helps in enhancing brand loyalty and advocacy and creating interaction within the community.
  4. Identify the parameters for success – It is important to define the parameters for success. These are based on your business and what matters most to it. For example, you might want to focus on the increase in followers or the amount of content shared/like by the followers or simply increase brand awareness.
  5. Goal setting – It is important to set attainable goals to achieve the different objectives of the business and measure success. Try doing a trial run in case if you have never set goals for social media community management and measure your success. Based on the results obtained during the trial run, you can make adjustments to the goals and begin collecting data for analysis.
  6. Post regularly and engage with the audience – To be successful on social media, one needs to be consistent with the posts and engagement. A clear plan for posting on various social media platforms should be laid out for the audience to know when to expect content and they begin to start trusting your brand. Social media offers a great opportunity to develop relationships with your brand with the audience. It is important to let the audience know that they matter and the company values their opinions, comments, and concerns and is happy to address any questions or queries that they may have. Whichever way you choose to interact with your audience, make sure to address each person as an individual and be authentic. It not only adds a human element to the interaction but also makes the brand trustworthy to its community members.
  7. Use images and content wisely – Images can be emotional and elicit a response in the community. Choose images wisely to avoid sending out the wrong message about community values.
  8. Measure the results – Measuring results on social media should not just be about quantitative data as numbers don’t always reflect the impact of the efforts. These results are rarely immediate. Hence, you should decide on the method that works best for your business goals. Some of the common ways of measuring results are social listening which involves monitoring all social media accounts to look for and track all mentions, keywords, customer feedback, and discussion related to the brand, its product, and services. A deeper look at these can help analyze and give insight into what is working for the customers and followers and what activities need to be modified

Having considered the important steps in creating a community management strategy, let us gain some insight into the top 10 tips for social media community management.

  1. Set community rules and guideline – Having community guidelines for all members and contributors are important to keep the conversation positive and effective and have an accurate portrayal of the brand. Having basics like being respectful to everyone, not sharing private information on the platform, not having discriminatory or derogatory comments. Creating a page with the guidelines makes it easier for any new member to access this information. The FAQ document can also provide this information.
  2. Check the community regularly – It is important to check on the community members, the content being shared by your brand and its customers. Whether it is related to your forum, community website, or the brand ambassador program, it is the job of the company to ensure smooth running with people receiving the support they need, their queries are attended to and there is a sense of community.
  3. Be original – There needs to be originality in the way the community is managed. The voice and branding should make you stand out to your fans, followers, and your customers who come to your community. Being genuine and human in the interactions is the key to making your community members feel valued.
  4. Listen – Listening is crucial to community management as it requires thoughtful interactions with its members. This could be social listening, responding to online feedback, reviewing FAQ pages and forum regularly, listening is how the community can be improved and built. It also shows your members and audience that they are valued and that you care about their experiences within the community.
  5. Appreciate – A major part of successful community management is about appreciation for the members. This helps in building trust and brand loyalty between the brand and its members. Some important tips to show appreciation are by interacting with new community members and asking them how you can make their experience a good one. Another way is by paying attention to the biggest contributors to the community and appreciating them from time to time by sending them messages.
  6. Share user-generated content – Online community management is not only about your audience sharing the branded content. User-generated content such as reviews and stories can help increase the genuineness of the brand for the prospective audience
  7. Ensure that you maintain your brand voice at all times – Maintaining the brand voice is critical to community management. It is what makes the community unique and stands out to its members and audience. It is important for all people working on maintaining the community to understand the brand voices through all interactions, content, and engagement.
  8. Discover new ways to engage – Always discover new ways to engage members of your community. Learning why members engage in your community, their wants will help you explore new ways to interact with them.
  9. Examine how your audience engages with your competition – The company can learn more about its audience by understanding how they engage and react to your competition. This will help you as a brand understand what the competition is doing that you are not. Is the competition engaging the audience in a way that they expect them to? Getting answers to some of these questions will help in understanding the strengths and weaknesses of the competition in engaging and leveraging social media to gain an advantage over them.
  10. Stay organized – Community management of social media is about managing a lot of information from questions asked for stories shared. It is important to keep it all organized so that the information can be used to the advantage of the brand.

Using these tips can help turn the online community into a valuable tool that drives leads, nurtures customers, attracts a new audience, and enriches the experience of working with the brand.

What Are Backlinks and Why They Matter?

27 Sep 2020 Digital Marketing

Backlinks are essential for a website to receive free visitors from search engines like Yahoo, Google, and Bing. A backlink is a link created when one website links to another. Backlinks are also referred to as “inbound links” or “incoming links” from an external site and are very crucial for SEO. They are an essential feature of the web that makes the web a powerful source to share content, ideas, and make these discoverable. Websites with a high number of backlinks tend to have high organic search engine rankings. In other words, backlinks to a website are a signal to search engines that others have confidence in them and vouch for the content.

How to get Backlinks to the website?

Gathering backlinks may seem like a complex process, but there are smart ways to obtain and earn links to a website.

  • The broken link-building method – This works best to create one-way links to a website. It involves getting in touch with a webmaster to report a broken link on his website in your niche. You can recommend other websites to replace that link or your website. The chances of gaining a backlink to your website are high.
  • Getting backlinks through infographics -Infographics is one of the most popular ways of bringing traffic to the website and gaining backlinks. They work well as it is easy to understand and share visual data. Care should be taken to select the infographics for your website which are unique and tell a story to the audience. Research and gather data for the content on the current trending topics relevant to your website and have the infographics prepared. List these infographics on the various infographics directories and reach out to people who have previously linked to similar infographics or have shared them on social media using email.
  • Guest articles – Guest blogging is one of the most effective ways to reach out to a new audience. By publishing, articles on the popular website will get the content in front of a new audience and will help gain more exposure. It not only helps in gaining backlinks but also improves the online reputation and social media following.
  • Spy on the competitors – To get more organic traffic, it is imperative to know what online marketing strategies are the competitors following. Spy on their social media and look for link building techniques and content marketing methods. A good way to know what the competitors are up to is by setting up alerts to know when they are publishing new content. Try and gather information on when and what backlinks the competitors are earning or building.
  • Build internal links –Internal links are key to running a successful blog. With a good internal linking structure, the users can navigate through the website easily and have a good overall user experience.
  • Promote the content – To generate backlinks, content should be promoted. Reach out to the current and new audience through email and social media channels to promote the content.
  • Write testimonials – An easy way to earn quality backlinks is by writing testimonials for websites that you are using.
  • Get interviewed – Online interviews are a great and easy way to earn backlinks to your website. Being showcased on a website that runs interviews provide a great boost for backlinks.

Earning backlinks can be a challenge but with the above ways, you can easily find many link building opportunities. Having stated how backlinks can be generated, let us now look at why backlinks are important for any website.

  1. Backlinks determine how high the content of the website gets indexed – Search engines like google use search spiders to index websites based on the quality of the backlinks they have. Good quality backlinks and indexed content on search engines drive more quality traffic to the website. The website becomes more relevant. Inbound links to the website indicate the importance and relevance of the website. Google gives more weight to the website that has been endorsed by other websites. But remember, backlinks that lead to wrong content will keep the ranking low of the website on search engines.
  2. Type of backlinks matter – Better results with inbound links can be achieved through proper placement of links within the contents of the website. Backlinks placed in the middle of sentences commonly referred to as “contextual backlinks” are important in SEO as the contents are subjected to having them linked. These links are directly related to the topics and keywords on the website so they generate higher ranks.
  3. Building quality backlinks takes time – Backlinks that get added to a website abruptly will not have any impact. Backlinks added over a period of time are considered by search engines. The criteria for rating backlinks by search engines have become stricter than ever before.
  4. Backlinks help in building relationships – Link building involves reaching out to other relevant websites for the promotion of content or infographics of your website. This helps in building long-term relationships with key influencers in the industry which can further lead to your website is highly regarded and trusted.
  5. Backlinks help in generating referral traffic – We know that backlinks have a direct impact on the rankings, but it is important to note that a good backlink can help increase the traffic to the website too. This increase in traffic can lead to higher sales. The value of the link is not just about SEO but also about the customers.
  6. Backlinks help in brand building – Good backlinks can help a brand establish itself as an authority in its niche. Link building techniques such as content creation help in showing the audience the expertise of the company and go a long way in building the brand.

Building quality backlinks is extremely important for any website for not only Search Engine Optimization but for achieving the long-term objective of brand building increased traffic and building long-lasting relationships.

The Democratization of B2B Sales

27 Sep 2020 Blog

COVID 19 pandemic has changed the lives and livelihood of many around the globe. Although the full consequences of the pandemic are yet to be seen, the impact of it is visible on the economies of the world. During this period the sales leaders need to adapt to the new normal where they face fearful buyers, tighter budgets, and the inability to hold in-person meetings to make adjustments to the sales strategies for the new customer habits. The changes in customer behaviour have made the sales leaders realize that they need to address and adapt to the new reality and revisit their sales model.

  1. Get proactive and create buyer-centric strategies – The focus of any organization needs to be on developing a comprehensive approach for customer outreach and lead generation through outbound and inbound lead generation channels. With the fast-paced digital advancement, the customers have ready access to information required to purchase with multiple options available and high expectations for personalization. The customer wants value addition, continuity, and meaningful interaction every time they buy hence the selling approaches need to be enhanced using AI tools to deepen sales integration for nurturing opportunities at scale.
  2. Revisit the sales process – Post COVID world is way too competitive. The focus for any organization cannot just be on one-time sales, rather the sales team needs to focus on a series of value-added efforts. Every prospective customer who contacts you may or may not be eager to buy. The sales process needs to be outlined for every stage of the customer’s journey from initial contact and discovery stage to product demo, Q&A with decision-makers to closing the deal.
  3. Siloed sales routes fall short with buyers – As the customer buying cycles and the purchasing team grow, the buyers look for increased convenience, value for time and more flexibility to move between channels for their immediate needs and preferences. Buyers are becoming more loyal to experiences vs unique sales route.
  4. Disruptions in traditional selling due to remote working – Remote working has taken over since the onset of the pandemic. With major giants like Microsoft, Facebook, and Twitter revaluating their work from home policy and work from home becoming the new normal with many other companies, the shift will have an impact on the role of the seller and the methods of selling are going to change dramatically.

Today, there is a clear shift that can be seen in sales which is now more team-based collaboration rather than it being about a few individuals. B2B organizations are laying emphasis on ‘sales are for everyone’ approach as:

  1. Sales representatives have the flexibility of closing large deals – The inside sales representatives have far additional opportunities to do more and close big deals more efficiently at a lower cost to the company than the field sellers. Many companies are shifting their resources to inside sales for higher efficiency and to better map the buyers’ preferences.
  2. The convergence of inside and field sales activities – The activities of the selling professionals are shifting from traditional ways to becoming more digital. The digital buyers need to be engaged on channels where they are more active by both the inside and field sellers to leverage relationships. With sellers and buyers having access to digital tools, the physical and virtual boundaries are blurring.
  3. After-sales activities have a direct impact on retention and growth – The focus of any organization is no longer on closing a sales deal but on the after-sales activities that help deliver a consistent experience to the buyers to enhance the wallet share and advocacy for the brand.
  4. Revenue generation to be supported by more employees across an organization – All leading B2B companies are introducing incentive programs and guidance to have all employees help with sales and achieve the targets.

Let us consider how digital tools are driving the change and enhancing the sellers. The role of the seller has evolved with the focus on bringing value to the process and deliver insights on how things need to be done. Having a stronghold on the digital tools lends an advantage to the sellers by:

  1. Instilling confidence and accuracy in selling – The new tools available like Kaia offer AI assistance to sellers based on buyers’ interests. Kaia flashes digital information cards visible to the seller that help with relevant information for the conversation or address the specific question posed by the buyer. This tool help sellers engage successfully.
  2. Reorganize the sales meeting dynamic – Another tool that is driving the change for sellers is Kaon interactive which is an omnichannel customer engagement platform bringing in buyers through engaging with them. The seller provides the buyer with an interactive application to explore options on their own. The role of the seller is to guide and observe the actions of the buyer to understand their preferences and interests. The focus for the seller shifts to validating ideas, answering questions and advise the buyer in a meeting.
  3. Deliver tailored market insights – With the use of Klue’s tool the sellers can stay informed about the products and market moves of the competitors. The sellers are able to leverage the database to provide the buyer and prospects tailored market insights. The tool helps the sellers outline various market activities and their impact on their customers’ business.

With the shift to remote working and boardroom meetings and face to face interactions becoming a thing of the past, the hierarchies between inside and outside sellers have blurred. Pre and post COVID trends will come together to change the business models, sales strategies, and unsettle industries. It is time for a B2B sales leader to take advantage of the current changes and reset their definition of sales success by evaluating the onsite meetings and understanding that they will be an exception used for major deals and the rest of the meeting will shift to the online platform. Investment in digital tools needs to be increased and enhanced to maximize productivity with the remote working model. With the platforms being used to assist sellers for revenue intelligence, the sales leaders now have access to data that can be used to their advantage. Relationship analytics can be used to identify account managers with deep relationships with buyers, understand buyer behaviour to deliver the experience to increase buyer responsiveness. The companies now need to focus not on an individual seller to compensate for a deal but on compensating larger teams for the collaborative effort in the sales process.

The B2B sellers need to start preparing for a different buying and selling landscape where the sales leaders must reorganize and incentivize team success. With more and more companies reducing the sales headcount since the onset of the pandemic, the B2B sales leaders need to transform strategies to better meet the needs of the current and future buyers. The sales teams need to conduct an audit and renegotiate vendor contracts to roll out the tools to revenue teams. The next step is to educate the sellers with digital tools that help increase interactivity, foster self-discovery, and collaborate to take the seller and buyer engagement to the next level. Invest in upskilling and reskilling the revenue team to meet the buyer expectations for tailored, omnichannel interactions. With the blurring of inside and outside sales, the hierarchies need to become insignificant to start thinking of all sellers as sellers. The sellers need to be armed with the right tools and training to take on buyers in the new digital environment. Lastly, the organizations need to relocate the variable compensations across the organization to incentivize a wider range of employees who can contribute by opening up their networks and help in other ways to the sales.

 

 

Top 5 Software For Analyzing Website Performance

23 Sep 2020 Web design

The speed of the website is one of the most important factors leading to a high conversion rate. Fast loading websites gain from higher SEO rankings which have a direct impact on user experience, low bounce rate, engagement as well as conversion rates. Conducting a performance test for any website helps in understanding the responsiveness and the scalability of the website, which have a direct impact on the user experience and the revenue generation.

Before beginning the process of testing a website for its performance, it is important to keep in mind a few considerations.

  • One of the most crucial things to understand is the purpose of the website. Is it to provide web services or is being used to sell products and services.
  • Understand the reason for testing and what is it that needs to be measured. E.g. response time, number of users, etc.
  • Understand customer expectations
  • Understand the availability of QA tools and the project schedule.

What are different kinds of performance test that can be conducted for a website?

  • Performance test – This is done to check the responsiveness, speed, and scalability of the website
  • Load test- this is done to check the behaviour of the website under a certain workload.
  • Stress Test – This is to check how the system reacts under extreme load conditions and helps in finding out issues related to memory leaks and synchronization
  • Endurance test – This is done to ensure that the system can handle the expected load for a long period of time.
  • Capacity test- it is done to understand and check how many users/transactions can be supported at one time.

To conduct Website testing the following tools can be used

  1. GTMetrix – A free application that summarizes the page performance based on key indicators of page load speed. It generates scores for webpage performance and gives recommendations to improve it. The key features of this application are:
    • It allows testing the website from 28 different servers located in 7 countries
    • It provides a summary of the key performance indicators
    • Website performance can be tracked through monitoring and it is presented in graphs.
    • It allows checking a webpage on different simulated devices.
    • It allows us to playback webpage loads with videos that help analyze the bottlenecks.
  1. Pingdom – Is a free website and performance monitoring tool dedicated to making the web faster and reliable. The key features of this application are:
    • It allows you to examine all parts of the webpage
    • Provides performance overview
    • Traces the performance history as results are saved every time testing is done. Changes over time can be reviewed.
    • Allows testing from multiple locations.
  1. DareBoost – Is an online application which analyses and optimizes the website performance. It allows a large number of checkpoints when analysing the site speed. It is mainly designed to reduce page loading time and increase its quality. The key features of this application are:
    • It allows comparison with competitors for website speed.
    • It analyses webpages continuously to detect quality and loading related issues.
    • It enables you to check the user behaviour on the website.
    • You can test the mobile website using this tool.
  1. GeekFlare – It is a collection of free tools that are used to test the website for security, Domain Name Server performance, network, and SEO issues. The key features of this application are:
  • You can see how fast your server responds to the browser request.
  • It allows you to check if your site has a secure header or not.
  • It can quickly find out the hosting provider for any website.
  • It checks for any broken links on your websites.
  • It analyses server preferences, certificate details, supported protocols, etc.
  1. SpeedCurve – It is a tool that measures website performance and design. It enables you to debug website performance issues at the page level. The key features of this application are:
  • Measure when the most important content renders
  • Provides engagement charts and uses the data to understand the impact of page slowdowns on the site’s bounce rate.
  • Any metrics can be tracked including conversion rate, A/B testing, and cart size.
  • It enables you to debug website performance issues at the page level.
  • Helps in creating performance budgets and get alerts.
  • It enables you to track the code changes between deploys with the use of its Deploy API.

For analysing the performance of a website, there is a multitude of different tools available. Knowing which ones work best for you will depend on your business needs.

Contact the experts!

 

10 Tips For Working From Home

22 Sep 2020 Blog

‘Working from home’ is the hottest topic in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic. A large number of companies have implemented work from a home policy which is a new reality, but it takes time to get used to. In the UAE alone, 70 percent of the workforce was restricted to their homes at the beginning of March this year. Even with the restrictions easing after the initial three months, things have not gone back to what they were and may never go back to it even after the pandemic is over. Working from home has been a mixed experience for employees, with most stating an increase in productivity and a few stating that an office environment is important to be professional and productive.

An interesting study conducted by Forbes Middle East showed that three-quarters of the respondents work as well or better at home, with 42 percent stating that they were as productive at home as at work and 34.3 percent showed an increase in productivity when working from home.

Working from home has its benefits from achieving greater work-life balance, increase in performance to business continuity but it also involves self-motivation to get as much work done as one would in an office setting in a given amount of time.

Working from home is a blessing in many ways, but it can become a problem if it is not managed well.

We will explore some useful tips on how to be productive when working from home. These tips will make sure that you are successful in getting your work done and maintaining your mental well-being.

  1. Have clearly defined working hours – Working from home is a commitment that requires discipline. If you want to be productive and get the maximum out of your time, then there is a need to have clearly defined working hours in place. If you feel that you are most productive early in the day then plan your working hours accordingly. In many roles, working involves other people as well where emails need to be responded to and meetings need to be held remotely within the working hours of the company. Plan your working hours as per your role and commitments.
  2. Set up a workspace – To be productive from home, the best thing to do is to set up a separate workspace where you are most comfortable and away from distractions to focus on your work. Establishing a designated comfortable workspace can help train your brain that you are in a place where work is done productively.
  3. Establish a work routine – Follow a routine when working from home similar to what you would follow at your workplace. Get up, get dressed, and prepare yourself mentally to start work. Make a schedule as you would in the office. Plan your breaks to allow yourself some rest time between your work and to ensure a fresh mind and energy to go through the working hours. Keep the housework for later as they are distracting and make you lose your focus and work rhythm.
  4. Design a process for collaboration – Working from home involves interacting with others, be it meetings, assignments, giving, or receiving feedback. There should be a clear process in place to collaborate with different people when working remotely. From using chat apps to meeting software, there should be a clear guideline for the various tools to be used for work.
  5. Prioritize your tasks – To be productive when working from home, it is important to learn how best to manage your time and prioritize your work. Spend some time every day before the start of the workday to organize your tasks and prioritize. Be objective and don’t plan more tasks than you can manage in the day.
  6. Use your peaks in productivity to your advantage – When working from home, it is important to identify when your energy levels, motivation, and concentration are high. Plan your schedule based on these factors to get the most out of your day and stay motivated. A task that is more complex and requires more focus and energy, schedule it for the morning. Spend less productive time on tasks that do not require mental effort.
  7. Communicate – With the new normal of working from home, there are many challenges that one is likely to face. The key to overcome these challenges is to communicate with your direct upline or your co-workers. Have a clear plan in place that lays out the expectations from you with regard to communicating regarding different aspects of work. This plan may evolve and change as you go along. Remember to reach out and ask for help. If communicating through video conference is the need of the hour then use that instead of email to avoid any miscommunication.
  8. Avoid distractions – Working from home can lead to developing some unproductive habits. Avoid social browsing, checking personal messages, and reading the news during work hours to be able to meet the deadlines. If you fear that you will give in to one of these distractions, use applications that can block access to social networks and websites during the workday.
  9. Use time management tools – Time management tools come in handy if you are struggling to stay focused on your task and being less productive. Tools like RescueTime and harvest will help in monitoring the amount of time dedicated to each task to help you discover how you lost time. TomatoTimer can be used to schedule the time of maximum concentration with breaks.
  10. Stay connected with your co-workers – To efficiently work from home, it is important to stay informed about any changes in the company that may impact your work. Line of communication should be kept open with your boss as well as your co-workers. This will not only help you in performing better but also help you stay connected and ease the loneliness you may experience when working from home. Scheduling calls at the beginning of the day to plan out the work with team members, catch up calls at the end of the day to see how far each of you has reached works well in staying connected.

Working from home presents an excellent opportunity to develop new professional skills that can help you in your current job as well as for the future. The benefits of working from home go far beyond just skipping the commute. You can focus on your professional life along with ensuring the welfare of your family.

10 Ways to Drive Engagement to your Website

18 Sep 2020 Web design

Engaging with visitors to a website is just as important as driving traffic to the website. Engagement is not only about attracting visitors but making them stay on the site to achieve your goals by fulfilling their needs. It is one of the most important aspects of website design for understanding the performance and ROI on and is directly linked to the growth of the business. A positive user experience enables trust and builds relationships with prospective customers.

How Does Website Design Impact User Experience?

How the website is perceived by the users and how they interact with it can tell if the site is a success or a failure. The website design can influence the user experience in the following ways:

  • A well planned and designed website will ensure that the reader keeps scrolling. This would mean, organizing and grouping content into smaller parts with the use of visuals, banners, and other elements to utilize the white space.
  • The first impression always matters. So, grab the attention of the visitor. It takes a split second for a visitor to decide whether they would like to scroll through a website or not. It is important to have high-quality visuals and cohesive design with text organized systematically to hold the attention of the visitor.
  • The functionality of a website plays a huge role in the overall user experience. Responsive web design ensures the website and its functions are the same when accessed from different devices.
  • Having a well-planned updated website is the key to making an impression on the visitor and presenting the business as professional and reliable. It reflects the clean and professional manner of conducting business.

Having stated how website design can impact user experience, let us look at some of the important elements of a good website design

  1. Strong, limited colour pallet – Colour scheme and usage of colours play an important role when it comes to website design. People associate colours with certain things so use colours thoughtfully to make an attractive website. The number of colours used on a website is a very important element as too many colours can be visually distracting. A Simplified colour scheme with 2 to 3 colours makes it easier to focus and is preferred in modern website design.
  2. White Space – It is a term used for the space that acts as a buffer between all the elements on the page including sidebars, margins, etc. There should be ample room around various elements on the website for a clean and organised look. As the current trend in website design is all about minimalistic style, having white space on the website will allow the visitor for easy navigation.
  3. Tell a Story – As mentioned earlier, a good website design should be able to attract the attention of the visitor and have them scroll down the page. This can be achieved through the use of visuals that help tell a story and captivate the audience. Video is another source to introduce the brand to the first-time visitor and provide information about the product and services. Graphs, charts, and data visuals help in putting across information in a more attractive way rather than content that carries all the information in text form. Finally, the words used on the website should complement the storytelling and guide users.
  4. Offer a Search Bar – People browsing the website are usually looking for specific information. Engage them by helping them find what they are looking for swiftly. The search bar should be placed where visitors would expect it to be which is the top right corner of the page. Features like auto-suggest and drop-down menu can enhance the user experience.
  5. Loading time for the website – If the speed at which a site load is slow, then the engagement will suffer. According to Think with Google, 53 percent of the people leave a mobile page if it takes more than 3 seconds to load. Similarly, 47 percent of people expect a desktop page to load in 2 seconds or less. As the load time increases the bounce rate increases too. The speed of the website can be increased by using compressed images, enabling browser caching, reduce the number of plugins, reduce server response time, and minimize HTTP requests.
  6. Call to Action– Converting visitors into leads and customers is very important for modern website design as websites are meant to connect with people who are interested in your offering. Once there is a connection, it is important to retain these visitors. Converting visitors into customers start with the process of having them sign up for e-mail newsletter, subscriptions, free products forms, free consultations, or other exclusive invites. This is only successful when there is a Call to Action. These should be incorporated into website design as they help in gathering important contact information of the visitors to continue interactions and convert them into customers.
  7. Organized Card Designs – Currently the focus is on minimalistic website design which has made the use of cards very popular. Cards help in organizing content by grouping together text and image forming an eye-catching element. This helps visitors consume the content more easily. Using cards for website design helps you achieve a clean, organized look while prioritizing user experience.
  8. Clean Backend Coding – The modern website design element is the most important from a functionality point of view. Coding dictates the performance of a website. Ensure clean backend coding to help in making it easier to write, read, and maintain how the website functions.
  9. User-Friendly Design – The website should be designed keeping in mind the user. It should be user friendly. If the users get a good value from the website and they keep coming back to it, it starts ranking higher on Google search. Always remember to give more importance to the content rather than SEO especially when you are starting out to be able to build a group of loyal and recurring visitors.
  10. Elements to boost SEO– Having stated earlier that website should be user friendly, but one must not forget the importance of SEO. There are elements of modern website design that enhance and improve the SEO of the website. These are a part of the backend coding for pages and posts. Meta tags, title tags heading tags, and other HTML coding go a long way in improving the ranking of the website on Google search engine. Ensure to teak and optimize these elements to improve the search ranking.

The aim of any website should be to provide a fluid and intuitive user experience by integrating the 10 elements in the modern website design. Prioritize user experience and ensure website optimization not just for design but for its functionality. If users can easily access your website, engagement will follow.

10 Interesting Facts About LinkedIn

16 Sep 2020 Social Media

LinkedIn, founded in the year 2003, is the world’s largest professional network. It has grown from a platform where the users would post their resume to an undisputed leader for professional networking, building business relationships, recruiting, and advertising for niche markets. With the current member base of 706 million in more than 150 countries in 24 languages, the LinkedIn network is set for exponential growth in the coming years.

To discover more about LinkedIn, let us look at some interesting facts about the platform:

  1. More than 70 percent of LinkedIn users are based outside the US. 87 million Millennials are using the platform. Out of that number 11 million hold decision-making positions. 90 million of its users are senior-level influencers. LinkedIn has undoubtedly, become a popular platform for recent college graduates with 46 million students as its users.
  2. 80 percent of B2B leads are generated on LinkedIn. It is a perfect place for a B2B marketer to have their presence and use the network for lead generation. Producing content and becoming an expert in your field is another way to tap into the potential the platform offers with 6 out of 10 users actively looking for industry insights.
  3. LinkedIn members want to have a mentor or to be one to others. This feature of LinkedIn was introduced in November 2017 which primarily connects members across the network for mentorship opportunities. To get started, you need to go to your LinkedIn profile and find the Career Advice hub. Enter your preferences and a list will be provided to you with recommended members based on the specifications, mutual interest, and profession. An important point to note is that this feature is available to the users for free.
  4. Another feature of LinkedIn that needs a mention is the live video streaming service which was launched in February 2019 called LinkedIn Live. It gives its members and businesses a platform to build deeper connections and drive more engagement. Live videos get on average 7x more reactions and 24x more comments than the standard videos. It is helpful for the launch of new products, showcasing the people behind the brand, or to demonstrate thought leadership. All you need to ensure is that the live videos are engaging and interactive.
  5. LinkedIn is the most used social media platform amongst Fortune 500 companies and 41 percent of millionaires use this network. These figures provide enough evidence that it is the place to reach your ideal customers and clients and decision-makers for B2B companies.
  6. 70 percent of people who are hired through LinkedIn are hired at companies where they have connections. Who you know plays a very vital role in getting noticed on LinkedIn. It allows its users to have a maximum of 30,000 connections but you can grow your network by creating compelling content, thereby establishing you as an expert in your field.
  7. LinkedIn users use some phrases in their profile that may sound unique and powerful but they may be the same words that are being used by everyone else. To stand out, you need to make a change and avoid the 10 words mentioned below with a suggestion for their replacement
  • Motivated- ambitious, determined, fired up
  • Passionate- enthusiastic, fanatic, zealous
  • Creative- original, artistic, inventive, gifted
  • Driven- energetic, enthused, dedicated
  • Extensive experience- accomplished, trained, capable
  • Responsible- accountable, reliable, in control
  • Strategic- tactical, goal-oriented, purposeful
  • Track record- stats, accomplished, performance history
  • Organizational- structural, administrative, managerial
  • Expert- skilled, savvy, sharp
  1. LinkedIn has come out with the top Hard skills and Soft skills that companies are looking for on the network in 2020. Hard skill essentially is the ability of an employee to do a specific task which requires specialized knowledge and technical abilities and is easy to measure whereas soft skill is more about the way you do specific tasks- like how you collaborate, solve problems, adapt, and make decisions. These skills are more difficult to measure. A survey conducted by LinkedIn of 2000 business leaders found that 57 percent of them say that soft skills are more important than hard skills. Let us look at the list of skills

Hard Skills                                                      Soft Skills

  • Blockchain                                               Creativity
  • Cloud computing                                    Persuasion
  • Analytical reasoning                              Collaboration
  • Artificial intelligence                             Adaptability
  • UX design                                                Emotional Intelligence
  • Business Analysis
  • Affiliate Marketing
  • Sales
  • Scientific computing
  • Video production
  1. 30 percent of the engagement of a company on LinkedIn is by its employees. They play a crucial role in advocating brands and help them boost their reputation and succeed. Employees have 10 times more reach across social network sites than the company’s official page.
  2. LinkedIn carries 15 times more impressions for content than job postings. It has transitioned from being a recruitment platform to a professional one where people can find resources and information. It is viewed as one of the most credible sources for content and now 98 percent of the marketers use LinkedIn for content marketing for B2B businesses and lead generation.

LinkedIn as a professional platform has many features that one can explore and benefit from. Used wisely it can help a business and a personal brand grow.

Use the platform to your best advantage.

 

 

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