Month: October 2020

Guest Post by Natasha Ellard- Co-owner and Managing  Director and of Urban Element

Managing projects and pipelines in a digital agency is not always easy. With so many current and potential clients to keep in contact with, it’s an art form in itself to be there at the right time, remember what’s happening in each organisation, and be able to provide communications that meet client needs at every stage of the relationship.

 Urban Element is an Oxfordshire-based digital marketing agency, specialising in PPC, SEO, and web design, managing a busy client schedule while upholding high standards for client engagement and delivery. With such expectations for our agency, we use Zoho CRM to complement our efforts, boosting our communications and conversions, and ensuring no contacts get lost in the process.  

 Whether you’re considering using Zoho CRM yourself, or you’re looking to understand the benefits of working with businesses who employ these tools, what follows is a dive into what we’ve been able to glean for our digital marketing agency in Oxford through the use of Zoho, so you can get an idea of what it could do for you.

 Zoho CRM from the perspective of an Oxford Digital Marketing Agency  

Zoho CRM, at a basic level, offers the same solutions you expect from every CRM system. It’s a way to manage clients’ information, monitor deal progress and activities, and pull reports on the progress of these relationships.

 What sets Zoho CRM apart from other CRM systems (from our perspective) is that it’s extremely flexible and has allowed our agency to amend fields and categories to really fit our business needs. That includes customisation of all reports, dropdown boxes, and tabs.

 From the dashboard, we can add leads to better organise potential work into a pipeline, and we can also better manage old leads ensuring we’re in periodic contact, delivering prospects with upcoming offers and business opportunities to keep them engaged with our agency.

 From an internal perspective, the ability to log activities and have them instantly viewable by all staff is hugely beneficial for internal transparency. This keeps everyone informed across client conversations and allows our team to allocate activities to colleagues, which will automatically flag with a reminder to them as the task is due to be complete. This feature alone has helped us drastically cut down on duplication of work and messy email requests for colleagues to do tasks.

 Another huge internal benefit is the ‘Deals’ section, which gives our agency a clear overview of what’s in the pipeline, and the likelihood of that deal going ahead so that we can effectively manage staff resources and forecast finances for the coming months. In the ‘COVID climate’, this feature is particularly important.

On an individual level, each person’s homepage is fully customisable so that it’s not an agency-template-fits-all type layout. Staff can tailor their view and choose apps that help them to be most productive, without impacting the views of other staff.

Zoho features we use and why  

With a bunch of features available, it’s handy to know what others use them for, to consider if they’re valuable to your business. What follows is a bit of a rundown on the tools we love and why.

Zoho PageSense  

Zoho PageSense is used in our agency to measure key website metrics, monitor analytics, and understand visitors’ online behaviour to help provide our clients with a personalised and optimised website experience; thus, it helps us to boost conversions.

 This service has played an integral part in helping to improve our paid social media marketing and pay per click (PPC) campaigns.

 For our clients, we have applied Zoho PageSense features to their landing pages to gain better (more granular) insights, improve their user design and interfaces, and strategically plan further improvements.

 PageSense tools we use a lot:

• A/B testing

• Heatmap recording

• Split URL testing

Through the heat mapping tool, we have been able to glean user behaviour while running a paid LinkedIn Campaign, promoting our SEO services to businesses across Oxfordshire. It has allowed us to see:

• Heat zones to most clicks areas

• Number of visitors during any custom date range

• Percentage of engaged visitors

• Number of visits

• Number of clicks

• Elements clicked the most

• Scrollmap tab (helps us see which segments of the page are most visited)

• Attention Map tab (tells us average time spent on page segments)

 With these insights, we have been able to improve our campaign bounce rate, increase the average session duration on-page, and provide clear CTAs to improve conversions.

Zoho Cliq  

Here at Urban Element, we have been using Zoho’s Cliq as our primary chat tool for almost two years. Cliq is a real-time communication tool that has allowed us to split internal team, management and client comms into separate chat channels, which has significantly improved and optimised our day to day workflow (especially during lockdown).

What we love about Cliq is that it’s easy to learn, it’s intuitive, and it’s far more cost-effective than similar chat clients currently on the market.

 Cliq allows us to:

• Share files

• Pin messages, files, and URLs

• Send messages to teams or direct

• Create and organise separate channels

• Project manage

• Plan events

• Set reminders and connect to our favourite tools

Zoho Vault  

As a digital marketing agency, we deal with a lot of client accounts, passwords, and usernames. Zoho’s Vault service has played a pivotal role in keeping internal and external digital data and accounts safe, secure, and encrypted.

 Zoho Vault feature allows us to safely, securely, and quickly store and back up vital login and account details so that we (and our clients) never lose access to an account or risk data breaches.

Final considerations  

From the outside, it can seem as though CRM systems are for internal use to help with customer relationships and marketing. The reality is that Zoho CRM—when used to its full potential—can be a powerful tool that helps us to boost results both for ourselves and for our clients. Whether our clients ever use Zoho themselves or they just use it through us, they can get the benefits of automating their marketing efforts.

 For us, Zoho has not only helped us to be a better-organised agency, with first-class customer relationship management, but it’s also played a pivotal role in the rise (and success) of our paid online marketing campaigns and is now considered an absolute must for our organisation.

It’s been only 1,000 days since Zoho Flow was launched, and we’ve built over 500 apps and 1,000 prebuilt flows already!

In other words, we’ve managed to bring you at least 1 new app and 2 prebuilt workflows every two days, since launch.

Thanks to regular input from our partners and users, we’ve had no problem choosing the right apps. In fact, some of the most used third-party apps on Flow, like Outreach, QuickBooks, and RingCentral, were brought to our notice through your suggestions. Our collection, which spans over 65 categories, enables businesses to freely choose the apps that work best for them, without worrying about interoperability.

 And at the same time, Flow has made major strides in the Zoho ecosystem. By 2019, a mere year after launch, 1 in every 3 Zoho One users was using Flow, and over 10,000 flows were built exclusively among Zoho apps. Some users have integrated as many as 6 Zoho apps in a single flow!

 The depth and variety that the Zoho suite offers magnified the need for a platform like Flow. So much so that, for some business, Flow turned out to be a dealmaker. This got us digging deeper into Zoho APIs, to make tighter, more tailored integrations possible.

Now there are over 400 business tasks you can readily automate with your Zoho apps, just using Flow.

 To sum things up, Flow has helped its users bring the Zoho suite closer, bridge the suite with the rest of the cloud, and even build their own ecosystem of apps outside of Zoho. And we plan to continue to deliver value in all three areas going forward!

 Head to the Flow Gallery to find out if our latest apps (we added 20 just last month!) offer any interesting new opportunities for automation at your business.

And don’t forget, as you set up more integrations with all these new apps, you’re going to need easier ways to maintain them. After all, time saved with automation shouldn’t be time spent on maintenance! 

That’s where our latest product update comes in handy.

3 new troubleshooting features to help you manage your flows efficiently:

 Visit earlier versions with ease

Some recent edits to your flow causing trouble? You can now review its earlier versions in detail to trace and identify errors easily. Learn more. 

 Rerun failed tasks, anytime

If a task fails because of configuration errors, this feature lets you take control, set things right, and then re-execute the task at any time. Find out how.

Get around glitches with auto-rerun

When a task fails due to server or API glitches, Flow can automatically make up to 8 attempts to re-execute the task for you. Learn more.

With so many new possibilities for integrations and easier ways to manage them, we hope we can help you be more productive than ever!

We also wanted to let you know that we’re gearing up for our next steps. So if we’ve missed any app that’s important to your business, now’s a good time to let us know!

Remote work has become our new normal, with organizations around the world adapting to the work-from-home structure. While there have been notable benefits, the inability to implement extensive cybersecurity measures continues to be a worrying concern for many businesses. With people accessing sensitive accounts from remote locations, the demand for data security and privacy solutions is at an all-time high. Many organizations have adopted password managers for the first time to safeguard their business passwords and other critical data. To help such businesses meet their security needs during remote work, we recently upgraded Zoho Vault to satisfy our world’s current requirements.

Vault’s new interface (in beta) with a refreshing new design is packed with features that help businesses improve user productivity, streamline user access, and make password management effortless for teams. These new features are exclusive to the new interface and aren’t widely available with other password management solutions in the market.

1) Detailed security dashboard

With over 80% of data breaches being caused by stolen or brute-forced credentials, it’s important to consistently monitor your business password security. Vault’s new interface includes a security dashboard offering extensive details on your passwords’ safety. You can view the strength of your personal and business passwords, identify reused passwords, and analyze various actions performed in your organization in real time.

2) Clutter-free folders

We’ve made multiple enhancements to password management in folders in the new interface. Efficiently organize your passwords in different folders and subfolders. You can also select different passwords you own and drag them into a folder of your choice to create a copy of your passwords in the folder. You can also easily filter and manage passwords within a folder using custom filter options. Finally, you can now allow users to create subfolders whenever you share a folder with them using the Modify or Manage privileges.

3) Integrate with popular SIEM solutions

Zoho Vault integrates with popular Security Information and Event Management (SIEM) tools like Sematext and Loggly to help admins manage all their Zoho Vault audit logs from one place. SIEM tools gather sensitive security logs from various services and provide a holistic view of imminent internal and external threats, keeping you well informed of all activities performed in your organization.

4) Move passwords to trash

We have introduced an exclusive option to help you soft-delete passwords. You can now move passwords you deem unnecessary to the Trash bin instead of deleting them permanently. This prevents accidental deletion of passwords from your vault, and also allows you to restore them back to your account and to the respective folders with their sharing privileges intact.

5) Easy access to support

Access to technical assistance is crucial when managing your sensitive data in a password management solution, and this is exactly what Vault’s new interface offers users. You can now instantly raise support requests from within your Vault account and also easily access links to help documents corresponding to your active tab.

What’s cooking?
Along with the redesigned web interface, we’ll soon be releasing revamped versions of our browser extensions. These new extensions will load faster and include a detailed view to help you perform all critical password management tasks from the extension. In addition to Chrome, Safari, and Firefox, the new extensions will be supported on popular browsers such as Microsoft Edge (Chromium), Opera, Brave, and Vivaldi. Exciting times ahead!

Stay safe and secure with Zoho Vault.

New to Zoho Bookings? Let me give a brief introduction. We’re an appointment scheduling software for customer-facing teams, consultants, and service providers. Our software makes it easy for their clients to find the perfect time to meet with them.

Appointment scheduling software is always part of a larger ecosystem of software. Because of that, it’s most useful when there are integrations with your other business apps. We’ve been focused on integrating with our customers’ most used apps. These include Zoho CRM and Zoho Meeting, which are primarily useful for sales teams, as well as payment integrations and SMS gateways, which are useful for those in the service industry. More integrations are on the way for customer support, recruitment, and accounting tools.

A growing need for integrations

We receive new integration requests every day. We want to do that, but we also don’t want to leave our customers waiting. The good news is, they don’t have to wait. Integration platforms, like Zoho Flow and Zapier, provide a quicker and easier way for customers to get the integrations they need.

Zoho Flow: Customers can use Zoho Flow to connect Zoho Bookings to other apps. When a trigger occurs in Bookings, Flow will initiate an action in the connected app. For example, when a new appointment is made, Zoho Flow can create an online meeting in GoToMeeting.

Zapier: We are happy to announce that Zoho Bookings has integrated with Zapier, the go-to integration platform for many in the SaaS world. You can connect your favourite apps to Bookings via Zapier. Then, set up a Zap to execute an action in the integrated app every time the trigger occurs in Zoho Bookings.

What Zaps can you use with Zapier and Zoho Bookings?

When new appointments are booked in Zoho Bookings

• • • • Create Zoom Meetings
      • Send Google Meet links to customers
      • Create Trello cards
      • Post messages in Microsoft Teams
      • Create records in Salesforce
      • Create Hubspot contacts   
      • Create Pipedrive contact activities
  • Follow up on canceled appointments with Zoho Bookings and Gmail.
  • Send channel messages in Slack when appointments are rescheduled in Zoho Bookings  

What’s your favourite Zap? Try it today and let us know: [email protected]

Availability and pricing

Zapier integration is available in all paid plans of Zoho Bookings. Plans start at $15/month, billed annually, which covers up to four users.. Additional users are $4/user/month.

If you are a Zoho One customer, you have Zoho Bookings in your subscription already. Read our help documentation to get started with Zapier integrations of Zoho Bookings.

Want to try Zoho Bookings? Sign up for a 15-day free trial.

The democratization of marketing technology has made it easy for any organization to deploy tools and platforms that can harness technology to drive business results. However, deployment is no guarantee that businesses will achieve their marketing goals. A business must be able to build a layer of mission-critical insights over its marketing life cycle (MLC).

The following is a simplified version of an MLC. The dotted circle denotes the layer of business insights. This analytics-powered layer enables marketers to define marketing goals in the planning phase, achieve tactical goals in the execution phase, and finally help businesses realize their strategic marketing goals. This analytics-powered MLC works well even in an omnichannel marketing environment, built with multiple marketing and ad platforms.

In this blog, we’ll build a layer of marketing insights for an online retail store that wants to promote its upcoming seasonal sale. This business has a website, and is present on social media. They’ve also decided to run pay-per-click (PPC) and email campaigns to promote their upcoming seasonal sale. Now let’s see how analytics (Zoho Analytics) can power the 3 stages of this business’ MLC to achieve their marketing goals.

Plan

The first step for the marketing team is to define specific goals and KPIs for its campaigns to promote the upcoming seasonal sale. These goals could be something like lead generation, brand visibility, or customer engagement.

Upon defining the goals, marketers will need to identify their audience to tailor their content strategy. Once this is done, the investments get finalized and the campaigns are rolled out across multiple media.

Let’s see how analytics can power this planning workflow with insights, by getting to know more about the audience being targetted for this campaign.

In this custom-built dashboard, we’ve analyzed two crucial digital assets for any business—its website and its social media handle (Instagram).

While most of their website visitors are from the US, their social media followers are largely from the UK. Having learned the geographic distribution of its audiences, this online retail store can now consider adding regional flavor to its campaigns, for better engagement. On the website, the audience is mostly males, aged between 25 and 34. Whereas their social media handle has a relatively younger crowd of followers, aged between 18 and 24.

With these powerful insights, the online retailer can now target the right audience for its upcoming seasonal sale. We’ve previously discussed how analytics can help marketers tailor their content strategy in one of our webinars.

Execute

Having rolled out the campaigns to promote the seasonal sale, it’s now crucial for the marketing team to monitor their tactical goals to steer the campaigns to success. These goals are like checkpoints, to ensure that the campaigns are in line with the goals defined in the planning phase. We call this assessment operational analytics or checkpoint analytics.

Upon defining their tactical goals, marketers need to decide on the relevant KPIs to be monitored. By running a micro-level analysis on these KPIs, marketers can get granular insights on the campaigns’ performance to further optimize them.

Now let’s see how analytics can power this execution workflow with insights, by performing a microanalysis on the KPIs to check the campaigns’ health.

We’ve run a microanalysis on the emailer campaign to promote the on-going seasonal sale, and the insights are presented on this operational dashboard.

The average open rate is 54%. If this is way below the industry standard, marketers can take another look at the emailer’s subject line, as it has a direct impact on the open rates. The total number of clicks (148) can be improved by experimenting on the content of the email, or with a call to action (CTA). Marketers can also take cues from campaign 6, which has the highest open and click rates, to optimize other email campaigns.

With these powerful insights, the online retail store can now understand whether their campaigns are in line with their goals defined in the planning phase. We’ve also discussed how analytics can help marketers keep a close watch over their PPC campaigns in our webinar.

Measure and restrategize

And here are the results! This outcome analysis is a holistic assessment of the marketing efforts intended to promote the seasonal sale. It tells the online retail store whether the promotions have helped them achieve their strategic goals for the seasonal sale.

With the help of analytics, marketers can uncover macro insights in this phase, to help restrategize their marketing efforts.

This custom-built dashboard encompasses the mission-critical metrics that define the success of the campaigns. This online retail store primarily considers revenue, expenses, ROI, ROI%, and NPS as measures of success. We’ve discussed how campaign-specific revenue can be calculated in our webinar.

Marketers may want to deploy ad group 4’s ad strategy, which has the highest ROI% (50.3%) and conversion% (9.4%), to other ad groups, as well. Campaign 6, which had the highest open and click rates, also has the highest ROI% (236.8%). The revenue by expense reports can help marketers identify their investment avenues to optimize their marketing spends.

This wholesale analysis equips organizations with the necessary insights to restrategize their marketing efforts and achieve their business goals.

Summary

An analytics-powered MLC can be reimagined in the form of concentric circles. They can be deployed at a campaign level and also at a strategy level.

However, the key to running a well-oiled MLC to success lies in the capabilities of the analytics platform. If you’re looking to invest in an analytics platform to power your MLC, here’s a quick checklist:

We’ve also discussed these points in detail in one of our webinars.

So now that you know what to do and what to look for, sign up to explore how Zoho Analytics can power the 3 stages of your Marketing Life Cycle, to help you achieve your marketing goals.