Category: Zoho

In spite of having all your team’s tools and work processes in place, do you still feel your employees are disengaged and uninspired? A clear and confident leader is one major component of an active, motivated workforce.

When speaking of leadership, it’s useful to note that there are several different types of leadership styles, all with benefits and downsides. One such unique type of leadership style is transformational leadership.

Transformational leadership is a system where leaders work towards creating change and influencing the behavior of their followers through inspiration rather than with rewards, punishments, or other tangible results.

Emergence of the “Transformational leadership” concept

James V. Downton, a sociologist who studied leadership and group behavior, was the first to introduce the concept and even coin the term “Transformational leadership.”The concept was further developed by presidential biographer and leadership expert James MacGregor Burns.

Inspired by Burns’s work, American scholar Bernard M. Bass further researched and developed the concept. According to Bass, transformational leaders possess the following traits, also known as “the Four Is”: Idealized influence, Inspirational motivation, Intellectual stimulation, and Individualized consideration.

Idealized influence is when a leader acts as a role model and leads by example.

Inspirational motivation means the leader sets challenging and achievable goals and inspires the team to move forward towards achieving them with optimism.

Intellectual stimulation occurs when leaders encourage their followers to be open to new ideas and be more creative.

Individualized consideration is the leadership practice of forging and nurturing healthy relationships with their followers. This style often means that the leader is more caring and offers support and empathy.

Who are transformational leaders, and what makes them stand out?

Unlike the transactional leadership, which follows the principle of gaining compliance through rewards and punishments, transformational leaders inspire and influence their team through their actions and motivate them to strive ahead outside of their comfort zone. They work with the team to enhance their morale and help unleash their true potential. These positive changes in turn affect the entire business.

Transformational leaders are also typically more charismatic and easily gain the trust and loyalty of their team members.

Now that you understand the essence of transformational leadership, let’s explore the advantages it can offer a business.

1. Establishes strong relationships

Transformational leaders are conscious of the fact that in order to build a strong business, one must start with building sturdy and healthy relationships.  All strong relationships rely on honest and transparent communication. Forging relationships within a team helps minimize internal conflicts and develop unique talents within the team. Ultimately, transformational leaders help eliminate unhealthy relationships and encourage harmony within the team.

2. Serves as an ideal influence

“ The key to successful leadership today is influence, not authority.” – Ken Blanchard 

Transformational leaders model the behavior that they want their teammates to personify. A transformational leader walks the walk and earns the trust and respect of their teammates.

These leaders quickly grasp the needs of the team and help them achieve their objectives with satisfaction, which on a larger scale enhances the growth of the business.

3. Helps bring enthusiasm and motivation into being

Transformational leaders are also good at analyzing and identifying the gaps in a company’s vision and in formulating a new one when needed. Their charisma helps them bring this vision to their teammates and get everyone on board.

We all know enthusiasm is highly contagious. Transformational leaders are usually eager and upbeat, and in turn, exert the same positive influence on the people around them. They motivate the employees by their behavior and use of effective communication. Effective communication and the ability to motivate go hand in hand with each other. Poor communication is a hindrance to employee engagement.

4. Encourages learning and stimulates creativity

In addition to working towards a unified goal and improving self morale and satisfaction in employees, transformational leaders encourage their employees to continue improving by creating opportunities to face new challenges. They help their teammates discover their own capabilities by bringing them out of their comfort zone.

When an employee’s growth becomes stagnant, it directly affects the growth of the business. Good transformational leaders keep their teammates engaged in their work and open to new learning areas to help them grow consistently.

5. Reduces employee turnover

According to this Bersin by Deloitte study, “The retention of high potentials at all levels has strong links to an organization’s ability to meet and/or exceed financial targets.”

Employee retention is crucial for an organization’s success, partially because finding and training new employees costs so much, and partially because high employee turnover can lower team morale and create roadblocks in work processes.

By boosting employee morale and by helping them achieve personal satisfaction, transformational leaders often are able to retain more employees than other common leadership styles. They usually follow an inspirational process for gaining the trust and loyalty of their team members, rather than treating their role like a dictatorship. As a result, employees admire and trust their leader and find fewer reasons to quit.

 

Tips for becoming a transformational leader:

1. Foster a positive environment and set high ethical standards

2. Model the behavior you expect from your followers and inspire them

3. Provide individual support and attend to the needs of every team member

4. Set challenging goals and focus attention on boosting the motivation of employees

5. Use a persuasive approach rather than a directive approach

6. Promote harmony and build a strong relationship with your team

7. Motivate your employees to look beyond self-interest

8. Share ethical values and pave way for moral development

A transformational leader has the potential to help businesses evolve in the long run by identifying gaps, formulating a new vision and challenging goals, and helping employees embrace change with optimism. When employees become the best versions of themselves by moving out of their comfort zones with improved morale, they in turn directly contribute to the growth of an organization.

Communication: a major requirement

One important trait of a transformational leader is the ability to communicate effectively. Companies with disengaged employees have a turnover rate of 34%, according to a study by Harvard Business Review. For transformational leaders to motivate and inspire employees, they must master the art of communication.  Communicating effectively is of utmost importance because the majority of their strategies can be implemented and achieved only when communicated properly. Building and maintaining healthy relationships, motivating the workforce, improving the morale of employees, and so on are much easier when leaders understand the value of good communication.

Under flexible work conditions or uncertain situations like the current COVID-19 pandemic, which has led us to adapt to remote working culture, the need for an intuitive communication tool is predominant. It’s impossible to communicate and inspire a team without having the means to communicate in place. So, provide your leaders will tools that help them communicate transparently and collaborate effortlessly with their team.

With the proper communication software, all of these benefits of transformational leadership will help a business grow by improving its bottom line. Increased and growth of employees positively impacts the growth of a business, which in turn results in elevated profits.

Nurture an engaging workforce and reach greater heights with the help of transformational leadership.

For an organization to stay consistently productive, it’s important to give employees the tools they need for effortless collaboration, efficient task management, and effective communication. One way to improve these factors is with useful integrations.

In this post, let’s take a look at powerful new integrations in Cliq that will make your remote workflow more efficient and smooth.

OneDrive

• Share your files using the /onedrive command
• Upload your files using the action menu
• Star your important files to keep them accessible

One of the most important factors in effective communication is contextual collaboration. With One Drive you can forget the hassle of switching between tabs and the time you spend searching for a file, especially when you need to share a file with your coworker urgently. The OneDrive’s integration for Cliq can be your all-in-one solution for timely collaboration over shared files.

With OneDrive’s extension for Cliq, you can share your files by simply entering the /onedrive command in any chat and your file will be posted as a message card in the chat as a response. The file recipient can use that message card to view, share, and upload the file to OneDrive directly from their chat.

GoToMeeting

• Be informed about your upcoming meetings
• Start a conference using the /createmeeting command
• Invite members from outside your organization

Integrations with apps like GoToMeeting can help keep your team stay connected and drive productivity. With the GoToMeeting integration for Cliq, you can instantly create meetings by entering the /createmeeting command in any chat. You also have options to customize your meetings securely by setting up passwords, audio mode, meeting type, and more.

One significant challenge in virtual meetings is keeping track of your upcoming meetings and inviting people to it. We got this managed for you as well, From the GoToMeeting bot in Cliq, you can check your current meetings, upcoming meetings, and meeting history by simply clicking on the Meeting bot menu action, and all your meeting details are listed categorically with options to invite, share, edit, and start meetings directly from your Cliq window.

Twitter

• Tweet, retweet, and follow the latest feeds
• Follow trends from the Trending tab in widgets
• Set up Twitter favorites in Cliq to get instant updates on their tweets

Can’t stop scrolling through your Twitter feed? If you’re constantly waiting for your break to grab your phone and check your Twitter updates, our Twitter integration for Cliq is just for you. This integration brings your Twitter feed into your Cliq window to create a workspace where both your social media and work apps can coexist.

Twitter’s integration for Cliq allows you to create, like, retweet, and favorite a tweet directly from your Cliq window. From the Twitter widget, you also can choose to categorically view the tweets from a particular country of your choice or worldwide feed. The feeds from your selected country can be viewed from the Feeds tab and the Trending tab will keep you in sync with all trending updates in that region. You also have options to favorite your top three twitter accounts so you never miss any updates from them.

COVID-19 Bot

• Get screening question reports displayed in the bot or in the channel of your choice
• Get insights on global and country-specific stats from the Covid-19 widget

In the current pandemic, the COVID-19 integration in Cliq provides essential information to keep your organization informed and aware of the COVID-19 cases worldwide. This COVID-19 bot in Cliq provides daily screening questions for employees, as well as country-specific reports and status updates.

You can use the COVID-19 integration to schedule daily screening questions for your employees and map channels to receive your screening reports, or you can access the reports on-demand with the help of the Get Report action menu in the COVID-19 bot.

Additionally, Cliq offers a COVID-19 widget to provide you with detailed stats about previous cases, new cases, number of tests conducted, recovered, affected locations, and more for a selected country or worldwide.

Pipedrive

• Track your deals with the Pipedrive Bot menu action
• Create deals from the Pipedrive integration in Cliq
• Add activities and view your open deals from Cliq’s interface

Pipedrive is a powerful integration to help get your sales and deals up and running. By integrating the Pipedrive bot with Cliq, you can not only create deals from the comfort of your Cliq window, but also track and be notified about the pipeline stage changes, activities, and deals assigned to you with the help of the Pipedrive bot.

Use the /pipedrive command when you need to view the details of a deal from the list of deals available. With the Pipedrive integration for Cliq, you can leverage transparency and control schedules, as well as get activity reminders to keep you on top of all activities and deals all from within Cliq.

ScrumBot

• Easily create sprints and view your teams responses
• Set up custom questions to for your team to answer
• Get notifications and manage tasks with ScrumBot in Cliq

The success of any project lies in how efficiently you plan and execute your milestones. The ScrumBot integration for Cliq can be your go-to integration when it comes to meeting your team goals. ScrumBot helps you manage your team by breaking your project into short-term goals and setting up sprints to manage their tasks.

With the help of ScrumBot, you can schedule standup meetings, assign work to your team members, and set up questions to ask them on a specific day. Once these questions are answered, they’ll get posted in the channel of your choice, allowing you to track every step and keep your team informed of work progress in that sprint.

GitLab

• Map the GiLlab Bot to a Cliq channel to get notifications
• View updates and issues directly from Cliq

If your team works on projects asynchronously, it’s very important for you to have a platform with all the tools you need in one place. The GitLab integration for Cliq is an efficient platform with a wide selection of the DevOps tools you may need during the SDLC lifecycle.

The GitLab integration for Cliq allows you to connect to your GitLab projects, map relevant channels to receive project updates, get notifications about latest updates, and view issues with a simple click on the View Issues bot action menu.

GitLab also has the /gitlab command to help you to pull your list of projects with categorical information about your merge requests, branches, and commits. With the GitLab Bot for Cliq, you can keep yourself and your team up to date on all developments, dependencies, and requirements for your project.

GoToWebinar

• Easily create webinars using the /createwebinar in any channel or group
• Stay informed about your upcoming meetings with bot menu actions
• Track and view statistics for all your past webinars

Want to host professional webinars on the go? The GoToWebinar integration for Cliq can help you position your expertise, make sales without selling hard, qualify leads, and keep your audience engaged.

With the GoToWebinar bot menu action, you can create a professional webinar in no time and map channels to receive timely updates whenever you receive a new webinar registration. With this integration, you can view your upcoming meetings, edit, view, and share their registration details in a specific channel, maintain a record of all your past webinars, and more directly from your Cliq window.

GitHub

• You can view your repositories, content, commits, and issues directly from Cliq
• With the help of the simple /github command, you can view the list of all repositories related to your account

With the GitHub integration for Cliq, developers can now manage their code from inside their Cliq window. The GitHub bot simplifies your workflow and bot menu actions allow you to view, connect, and disconnect the connection to your GitHub repository.

Once you set up connections with GitHub integration in Cliq, you can view the list of all your repositories, commits, and issues using the YourRepo bot menu action or alternatively use the /github command for the same task. The bot menu actions also have capabilities to set up notifications on issues, commits, and more.

Todoist

• Create tasks and view all tasks and comments in your projects directly from Cliq
• Easily view your tasks with the /todoist command in your Cliq chat

The first step to getting your work done is planning on how to go about it, and what better tool than a Todoist to efficiently manage your plans?

The Todoist integration for Cliq helps you organize your tasks and projects comprehensively in a single application. With the Todoist integration, you can view your task lists and projects and review your progress regularly. Cliq offers efficient bot menu actions to help you view your projects, tasks, and comments. You can also convert a Cliq message into a task and prioritize it as Very Urgent, Urgent, Important, and Neutral.

To view all your tasks at hand, all you have to do is enter the /todoist command in your Cliq chat. All your tasks, along with their due dates and details, are listed. Use Todoist in Cliq to help achieve your goals and complete your tasks efficiently.

Each of these Cliq integrations can help make your work easier by providing you with tools for easy collaboration and task management so that no matter where your employees are located, you can make sure team collaboration and workflows are never interrupted.

The above are some of our new favorites, do let us know your favorite Cliq integration that helped you simplify your workflow in the comment section!

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

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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.

We have an exciting announcement in store for you: we proudly present an early access of the revamped Zoho Mail Admin Console. This faster, cleaner, and much more intuitive update, packed with loads of new features and enhancements, is sure to make your email admin’s life much easier.

 Why a revamped Admin Console?

 We know managing an entire organization’s email environment and setting up the policies and access controls that work just right for your entire organization is no simple task. That’s why we’re always on the lookout for ways to make this experience better for you. Our revamp is meant to simplify an admin’s day-to-day operations by giving the console a fresh look and more streamlined interface.

 What’s new in the Admin Console?

 A new signup flow

Signing up is one of the first and foremost processes you’d experience when you make the move to Zoho Mail. To make your switch seamless, we’ve streamlined the signup flow by bringing it all to one place, so you won’t have to switch between multiple screens as you configure your domain with Zoho Mail.

 Fast, simple, intuitive interface

The old interface worked just fine, so why change it?

As the needs of our customers have evolved, we upgraded our product accordingly. Instead of continuing to add to the existing, we’ve revamped the entire interface to simplify common operations and make them much faster than before.

 Central Dashboard

The dashboard is an entirely new addition, offering you an overall glimpse of all the important data related to your organization’s email use. Security details, user activity reports, email traffic, and useful shortcuts—you can view it all from the dashboard.

 Advanced search capabilities

The Admin Console is your answer to any user, group, or organization management functions. With its wide array of functionalities, finding just what you’re looking for in this ocean of options has never been easier. Simply search for users, groups, or domains to perform any actions.

Not sure where to find the specific feature that you’re looking for? Worry not! The Quick Access feature has you covered.

Extensive organization reports

Admins might have to view their org’s email statistics, group statistics, and more. We now have a dedicated Reports portal that helps you generate the report that you want in a matter of minutes. For example, if you need a report on a select group’s incoming email traffic for the last seven days, simply generate the report and export it in the file format of your choice. 

Other additions and enhancements

In addition to these changes, we’ve also added multiple new features and enhancements that our users have been requesting. These include:

 Custom Roles to add admins for specific roles, such as anti-spam admin and help-desk admin.

Welcome email and signature template to add an organization-wide welcome email and signature template.

Self moderators option to let users manage their quarantined emails by themselves. 

We’re excited to see what our users think of our new Admin Console revamp, and in addition to these features, we have a lot more cooking. Watch for more feature updates and enhancements here.

P.S.: We are rolling out early access of the new Admin Console to users in phases. Once we’ve given you access to the new interface, you’ll see the “Try new version” button in your Admin Console. Give it a try and let us know what you think by leaving a comment below.

We’re excited to introduce new innovations in Doc Scanner as a part of the recent iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 update.

A new look

Experience a new Doc Scanner with a completely modified look. We’ve been meticulous in our design, paying attention to every detail. With more options to apply filters and modify the document before saving, as well as our improved auto-detect feature for documents and table scanning, using the new Doc Scanner on your iPhone or iPad can greatly help to improve your productivity.

App Clips

With App Clips, you can scan your documents on the fly without having to install the Doc Scanner app. Once you’ve scanned what you need, you can crop, rotate, annotate, filter, or share as a JPEG or PDF file.

To try App Clips without downloading Doc Scanner:

1. Open the Camera in your iPhone or iPad.

2. Scan this QR code:

3. Click the banner that appears at the top of your camera screen.

4. That will bring up a window like this:

5. Click Open to open the Doc Scanner App Clip and scan your documents. If you like the convenience of scanning from your phone, download the free Doc Scanner app when you’re finished.

Detect data tables

Scan data tables in 18 languages using Doc Scanner and export them as HTML tables. Doc Scanner intelligently identifies scanned data tables and allows you to edit and export them as HTML tables through email, messages, and other apps.

Widgets

We’re introducing a wide variety of widgets to add to your home screen and perform quick actions for common tasks.

Documents Widget: Quickly view and access your documents using this widget. Configure this widget to switch between recent, signed, and reminder documents.

Scan Widget: Quickly initiate a scan from your home screen using the scan widget.

Search Widget: Quickly search directly from your home screen using the search widget.

Pin a document as a widget: You can pin any document as a widget for quick access. Long press a document and tap Add to Widget to pin that document to your homescreen as a widget.

Scribble with Apple Pencil

Writing is more comfortable with Apple Pencil, and Doc Scanner’s Scribble function makes it even easier. You can now scribble using Apple Pencil to edit recognized text from your document. Don’t worry about scribbling in lengthier documents. We’ve provided a scribble pad to easily edit larger text documents. You can drag and drop to place the scribble pad anywhere on the screen.

PencilKit Enhancements

Use Apple Pencil to its fullest potential when you annotate your documents. In addition to underlining and jotting notes, you can now draw shapes using Apple Pencil.

All the extras

We’ve updated the Doc Scanner app with new iOS 14 interface components like the menu and date pickers. We’ve also fixed a few bugs to ensure the app runs smoothly on iOS 14 and iPadOS 14.

Update to iOS 14 and iPadOS 14 today and experience the all-new Doc Scanner on your mobile devices. Please let us know your feedback about the new Doc Scanner in the comments below or write to us at [email protected].