Category: Development

Strong Online Reputation Management in Workplace Matters – Know Why

Miley on January 14, 2020

Undoubtedly, today, information spreads much quicker than before. It applies directly to product reviews or service made by consumers and clients. Social media’s growth coupled with the ability to access the net easily irrespective of where one is has produced the requirement for ORM or online reputation management. It is a process to monitor and influence the online presence of one’s business.

The Need for a Strong ORM in Place

Look at the vital steps that throw light on the need for a strong ORM in place

Put the Best Face Forward- The reputation of a company is how the investors, potential employees, and consumers view it. All or any of these can get impacted by a single unfavorable tweet, review, or post on Facebook. So, if one fails in having the right strategy, which includes a prompt reply to such complaints, the image of their brand can be tarnished.

It will indicate that their customer’s response indeed is not vital for the company; this is something no one desires to convey. It is through reputation management services from an ORM company New York that one can put their company’s best face forward. One needs to ensure that they are that go-to company for solving issues within their domain or the top service via overseeing reviews as well as replying to each.

Credibility and Building Trust – the day will arrive when one gets a negative review. Be it on Twitter, Facebook, or any industry-specific website, it is genuinely inevitable in keeping every bad comment at bay. Though unfavorable comments may sway the decision of purchase of a prospective client, yet not reacting or responding to such review can create a bigger impact.

Today people research companies much more compared to before. So, the moment they notice that any company has unanswered complaints, this will act as the red flag thus will be hesitant in doing business with them. Being capable of recovering from bad reviews will help in restoring the confidence that is lost in one’s company and thereby help in regaining trust with their audience. One should show their prospective business partners and customers that they genuinely value their feedback via acknowledging that they have appropriately seen it as well as letting them know of the fact they will mediate or consider the issue.

Analyze the Needs and Wants of Consumers- To check all the reviews will give one an insight regarding what is right and what is not for their business. Consumers surely will point out things which they cannot get enough along with the things which they can do without. Most companies in New York refine their business via spotting such complaints as well as tracking those which appear consistently. That, along with helping them with their bottom line, will also show that their business is adept in adapting the current times and is also innovative.

Apart from these, companies in New York are also putting efforts to maintain their thought leadership. To know more, contact the best reputation management service provider in New York today.

Development Insights Martech

The Guide to Sending Bulk Emails without Spamming

Miley on January 10, 2020

An email is a powerful tool for the modern marketer, but it’s easy to lose sight of its importance when juggling responsibilities. Before you know it, your meticulously-crafted emails can end up in junk folders all over the globe without ever being opened.

What’s worse, recipients may mark your emails as spam. When this happens, your mass marketing campaign may struggle against spam filters of major email providers.

Open rates may plummet, and all that time and effort will go to waste. Not to mention, you may end up with a poor return on investment (ROI).

In this article, you’ll learn how to avoid these pitfalls of email marketing. Instead, we’ll show you how to send bulk email without spamming your readers.

Why do Bulk Emails land up in Spam?

Bulk emails, especially if they contain promotional content have a higher chance of landing up in Spam. This can be due to a number of various reasons. And most common among these is the use of Spam trigger words, which leads to some emails landing up in Spam. Since your bulk email list is probably huge, it’s a good idea to use an email verifier to check for invalid emails as the number of Spam or low engagement rates have a very adverse effect on your IP and sending domain reputation. This can cause your triggered or transactional emails to land up in Spam too. Another reason the engagement rates are usually low for bulk emails is that usually people are bombarded with so many promotional emails in their inbox, they tend to ignore all emails which seem promotional in nature. Using a Bulk Email Service Provider goes a long way in making sure your emails land up in Spam. Also, keep reading to find some interesting tips to craft promotional emails in ways that can be more engaging to your users and get you better ROI on emails.

Here are 5 things you need to keep in mind before sending out Bulk Emails

1. Is your email content useful?

With your audience personas in mind, brainstorm some topics that address their pain points and personal goals.

Look for solutions to their problems, or opportunities to help them in the journey towards their goals. Sending people industry updates is great, but it must be relatable to them.

2. Is your template engaging?

Your templates add as much, if not more value to your emails as compared to the content you have placed in the email. Email templates that are very image-heavy and contain spam trigger keywords are going to land up in spam. It’s a no brainer. However, emails with a simple template having your company logo, containing maybe 1 CTA, are most likely to reach the inbox. Again, here the content you have placed in your email matters the most. If the user identifies your brand as one which is going to give them content that helps them, they will most likely open your emails as soon as it reaches the inbox. Keep your template simple, your content fresh and let the voice of your brand be clearly seen through your bulk emails.

3. Are you delivering on your promises?

As aforementioned, it’s important to set expectations for your subscribers. By delivering emails they weren’t expecting, you’ll deter recipients and lose subscribers.

After you set their expectations, there should be no nasty surprises, which means you can reduce the risk of spam complaints or a drop-off in subscriber numbers.

Just make sure that you follow through with the valuable content they need.

4. Are the emails in alignment with your business goals?

Your goal may be to build a bigger audience, sell a product, or drive more traffic to your website blog. Whatever it is, your emails should be intrinsically linked to your goals.

Every email you send to subscribers should be another step along the buyer’s journey, providing value for them, and also nurturing trust so that you can eventually get them to answer your call-to-action.

5. Are your emails adding value to your business?

You might want more people to sign up to your app, or more people to purchase stuff from your store, or you might be sending out email blasts to your customers just as a retention tactic so that they don’t forget your brand. All these emails serve a certain purpose which is contributing to your business achieving its goals. Email Blasts are not simple to execute, they require a lot of time and resources of your company and creates a brand perception among your customers/prospects. You need to make sure that these people only receive the best kind of email from you, which is beneficial to you as well as to your customers.

Wrapping Up

Knowing how to send bulk email without spamming is important for all marketers in the current digital landscape. As social media shifts towards being a paid advertising platform, the opportunities for cheap, easy marketing are dwindling.

An email has a lot of potentials, but only if you know how to use it.

Sending out a generic email that offers no value to the recipients will no longer cut it. You should treat all of your email campaigns as a direct extension of both your business and your brand.

Using a conversational tone is great, but above all else, you must be consistent and provide valuable content that your recipients find useful, interesting, and unique.

By setting expectations early, and then following through with valuable emails, you can build a list organically, and avoid being marked spam as people recognize your brand as one that delivers.

Development Insights Martech SaaS SEO

8 Warning Signs of a Bad Website Host Provider

Miley on January 5, 2020

Your web host is one of the most important aspects of your website. Thus, choosing a good web host is recommended to ensure that you can easily optimize your website, as well as provide an excellent user experience. A poor hosting provider not only hurts your search engine rankings but will also cost you a lot of money in the long run. It is because your web hosting can play a significant role in how search engine bots can crawl and index your website. By having a good host provider such as Verpex, you will avoid all of these issues and many others. Fortunately, you can spot the warning signs that will tell you whether or not you have a good web host.

Frequent downtime

While a web host could not precisely guarantee you a 100 percent uptime, it is not a good sign if it is frequently down either. Frequent site downtimes can decrease your site’s overall traffic and conversion, and eventually, your bottom line. You might have to pick another web hosting provider and migrate your site if that is the case.

Poor customer support

No provider in the market could guarantee that your site will not encounter any problems or issues along the way. However, a lousy hosting provider can create issues like having a reduced response time and inadequate technical support. If you cannot talk to anyone in your host’s support team as to why you are experiencing some issues, then it is high time that you switch to another web host.

Slow loading time

The amount of time it takes for your site to load is a determining factor whether or not you will be able to convert more sales. There is nothing more frustrating than having to wait for a site to load. So, if your website is taking too long to load, there might not be enough bandwidth across the host server. Cheap hosting companies will be selling shared hosting to numerous websites. They will bog down the processors and bandwidth across the server. The result? A slow-loading site. So, if your site is taking more than three seconds to load, it might be time to switch to another web hosting company.

Insufficient storage space

The amount of storage space that you need will usually depend on the type of website you are running. So, if, for some reason, your current web hosting provider is unable to meet your needs, you should start looking for a new hosting company. That way, you would not hamper your site’s productivity.

Inadequate security features

Your website should have top-notch security. A cheap web hosting provider will not provide you with security applications, leaving your site compromised and open to being hacked. If your current web hosting company is not offering security features like a firewall, anti-malware applications, and anti-virus software, then you could risk losing that information and get hacked. Choose a web host that will offer you strong security so that all your information and data are safe. Also, if you are running an e-commerce store, your data is not the only thing that is at risk ‒ your consumer’s data as well. Pick a web hosting company that will give you and your customers’ strong security features that will keep your data safe across all servers.

High renewal charges

There are some web hosting companies that will offer discounted rates for first-time customers. But they are also making it clear that they are giving discounts for the first year only. But here is the thing: They are also forcing their customers that have already subscribed to pay exorbitant rates to renew their subscription. In essence, old customers should continue paying for what they initially paid. It is the new customers that should pay for the new rate.

Bad user-interface

The primary purpose of UI is to make it easy for the user to do something on your site. But if they are encountering a lot of errors, and the content of the page does not make sense, then those couple of dollars that you saved with a cheaper host is not worth it.

Lack of features

The features that a web hosting company is offering should be on par with the price that you are paying every month. Being able to implement features like Media Wiki, Joomla, PHP scripts, or b2evolution technology is vital to keep up with the latest trends in the market. Moreover, other features that are common in the most excellent web hosting providers include WordPress, vBulletin, and Drupal. So, if you are working with a web hosting provider that does not have these features, then you might have to install these features on your own.

Final Thoughts

Web hosting is one of the most crucial aspects of your website. When you pick a cheap host, then you are putting yourself at a terrible disadvantage. So, do not rush in setting your site up and picking a web host. You should do your research, do a website hosting comparison, and carefully weigh the pros and cons of a specific web hosting provider. Remember that a poor choice can lead to negative consequences later on.

Development Insights Martech

Growth Strategies and Landmarks for Small and Mid-market Merchants

Miley on January 4, 2020

It takes unflinching determination and a will of steel to be able to start something of your own knowing the risks involved and the immense competition. Cheers to the never say die spirit of entrepreneurs.

Once you’ve set foot in the industry digital maturity is something that you must have planned to achieve considering the heights to which the internet can scale your business. It’s safe to say there would hardly be any small or mid-market merchant not thinking about digital transformation to shift their business to the web.

What are the Growth Milestones for small and mid-market merchants?

The journey of a business need not be accounted in terms of months, years or decades, rather in the milestones that it has achieved in the however limited time it has been running. What are these milestones now? Let’s find out.

The strategies, the working model that works for your competitor may or may not be the right ones for you. Investing enough time and dedicated energies towards your venture will help you get closer to the business model that would bring you success. The business model hence becomes the first and foremost milestone for your budding business.

Prepare your e-commerce business model keeping in mind the importance to stay relevant to your customers throughout the run. Identify your target audience and what exactly are their expectations for better product delivery. You might need to make changes to your model basis the changing needs but that’s alright till you have your finances managed. This brings us to another important aspect of a business model, i.e. financial management. Analyze, from where and how much revenue your business would generate, the part of it that would be utilized in business development and the part that remains as profit.

Source: blog.ibsindia.org

Once the model gets planned next up would be a struggle to find customers. Your first few customers are going to bring immense joy which will be another very important business milestone as a small and mid-market merchant.

Try to make sense of what the audience you’re targeting actually needs when it comes to not just the products but also the overall experience. If you tap the right nerve you’ll never again struggle for customer inflow.

Once you start getting your old customers back for new products, consider that you’re doing something right that’s bringing them back. Loyal customers serve as great testimonials for the products, services and the experiences you provide.

Striving hard and building strong relationships with customers is extremely crucial for you to look at success in the near future. Try to tap the right nerve and serve exactly what is required. And, as they say, do your duty and a little more, a small reward or loyalty bonus time and again for your customers would go a long way.

Another most important aspect of your e-commerce business would be to have a positive cash flow in check. A business that too a budding one would begin to struggle for finances without a consistently positive cash flow. Even with a well-paying customer base, stagnant cash flow would start to pose problems. If you have that managed you’ve successfully made your business reach another milestone.

It’s crucial for small and mid-market merchants to have a well-planned marketing strategy chalked out. It not only helps in well-constructed marketing but also ensures effective utilization of resources available at hand.

Source: http://websitemarketing.com.ng

If you’ve not yet come up with one, do it at the earliest. You might need to make changes to your strategy as you go on but that’s inevitable. Prepare the plan keeping in mind your resources and how far you are ready to stretch. Keep your goal in mind to come up with a plan that suits you best and ensures positive results. And, that would be another growth milestone for your business.

A good team consisting of people whose goals align with your business’ is the most important to constitute. Find time to recruit and train employees to understand your niche and the demands of it. Only a well-meaning team will give in their 100% to meet your targets. Would it be anything less than a milestone if you’re successful in constituting one such workforce?

When you’re all set with a business model at hand, loyal customers to seek your services, a marketing strategy at your disposal and even a good team, what comes next is your plan for expansion. If you’re not just sustaining your business but also expanding it however slow the rate be in the initial years you’re moving towards your next growth milestone.

The road to meeting these growth strategies can get somewhat challenging if you’re not following the best practices to mitigate risks and handle growth and expansion. As a business owner, it takes gallons of courage and effort to start your own venture. Take every step carefully to avoid any blunders. Some best practices followed by successful business owners can make your road to success smoother.

What are the key considerations and best practices for your e-commerce business?

Several risks may pose a threat to your business in the initial years. Let’s find out what they are and the prospective solutions for the same.

-Lots of Cyberattacks keep looming over e-commerce business dealings. Stringent security measures must be taken to protect your online website from such cyber threats. Obtaining SSL certificates, using strong passwords, deploying multi-level security and closely monitoring transactions are few ways through which e-commerce business websites could be secured.

-Customer disputes might arise which may need immediate resolution. These issues could be ranging from product quality issues, delivery concerns to clerical errors. Such problems could be dealt with by having a return/refund policy in place and prompt customer support service in action.

-Safeguard your IP and diligent audits performed regularly.

-Also, take care of regular tax payment and maintain consistency in marketing to avoid any glitches and experience the best results.

-Take measures for business growth and expansion from day 1. Make efforts to build a database of customer emails. Stay in touch with them and constantly update on the running deals.

-Choose the right platform and focus on making your website search engine friendly in order to attract traffic organically. Also, leverage the power of social media in the current age.

-Utilizing pay per click options, making your website mobile-friendly, deploying affiliate programs, providing for efficient subscription services are a few other extremely popular methods of keeping your website in the limelight and attracting customers.

Shared above are the key milestones along with the business considerations that you shall not miss. Taking informed decisions is way better than blindly following any popular trend that your competitors might be after. You know your customers and their requirements best. Keep experimenting and utilizing the best practices for amazing results.

About the author

Abhishek Jaiswal is a serial entrepreneur and a co-founder at CedCommerce. He is an e-commerce enthusiast and takes great interest in exploring different dynamics of the industry. CedCommerce is an e-commerce facilitator, founded in 2010 for abling Small and medium businesses to make an easy shift to the web. With over 10,000 satisfied customers to date, CedCommerce is a proud achiever of several industry accolades.

Development

Web Design News Roundup 2019: What 2019 Brought for the Web Design Industry?

Miley on December 28, 2019

The trends in the web design industry are a snapshot of where the industry is precisely heading. The trends that the majority of the designers look up to every year should not just be a reference to be followed blindly. The challenge is instead to come up with amazing features and cutting-edge concepts, entailing creativity and innovation, that ensure users have a better website experience instead of just creating apps and sites that look similar. This is what the best designers in the industry, like this team of web designers Melbourne, will do to stay ahead of the game.

In the past few years, we have seen significant advancements in technology that have undoubtedly helped us connect with new users efficiently. Apart from building secure connections, the industry has also given us some new styles with an emphasis on documentation that have pushed the boundaries to make the web a more accessible and convenient environment for everybody. However, with so many developments in the web design industry, it is now time to slow down and look back at all the trends that will stick around in the subsequent times, so that even better websites could be launched in 2020.

Below are the top ten web design trends 2019 brought for our industry!

The web design, just like other industries in technology, is an ever-evolving field. Thus, designers, as well as developers, need to have their fingers on the pulse of what is trendy and what is expected to occur in the industry. Having said that, as we are about to close the door on 2019, here are some of the trends for your ease that will continue to direct in 2020.

1. Monochromatic and Absence of Color:

Playing with a million colors is cool and fun, but what if you were limited to use one color or no color at all? Well, this might sound a little boring and not so creative, but if done well, the design constraint will not only enhance the overall design but also would be more memorable and easily identifiable.

The fact that you only have one color option for your design will give you a chance to solidify your branding by adding constraints in terms of the flexibility of design. There are many websites on the global web that have used more than two colors, and by using one color or no color at all, you have a great chance to stand out in the market.

Of course, it will be a daunting job to get the whole website done without adding more than one color or only keeping it black and white. But, if carefully thought and planned well, keeping in mind color-psychology, it can be the reason behind your brand’s success!

2. A Throwback to Retro Design Aesthetics:

The web design industry is just like fashion, as what is old suddenly becomes new and trending. As we have moved beyond the flat design where experimentation literally does not have limits, 2019 made us look back at the retro aesthetics with a hint of nostalgia.

All the designers and developers out there, here is the thing! Experimentation with nostalgia and the retro design can develop an exciting juxtaposition between then and now. What made 2019 an exciting year in this regard is that we saw more retro design styles reflecting time-cycles before websites were even accessible to everyone!

This certainly gives an idea of what we can expect to see – more of these retro-styled websites in the coming year with color schemes and typography that will make us think back to a different era.

3. Organic Design and Elements:

2019 has also taught us that slowly and gradually, we are pulling ourselves away from straight lines that come with a flat design, making the whole process boring and tedious. We have stepped into an era where experimenting with more shapes and lines has become a trend. All the forms that are not the typical straight-sided ones like the circle, rectangle, square, and triangle are called fluid shapes or organic shapes.

We are now accustomed to see these shapes replaced by elements drawn from nature, such as lakes, ponds, and types of forests. In the coming years, we expect to see web designers embracing a splash of natural elements in their designs, using the charm of mother nature to brighten up the screens.

4. Asymmetrical Layouts and Broken Grid:

The Broken Grid has been trending from the past few years and seems to prevail in the upcoming years as well.

In terms of design, the broken grid and asymmetrical layouts are imaginary planes with lines, both horizontal and vertical, that assist layout elements on the screen. Majority of the websites in 2019 had the grid positioned to the left side of the website. For instance, the title, content and logo design line up as the central part of a web design. In case of a broken grid, the items are pushed around on the plane in such a way that makes the layout look less rigid (or broken).

The broken grid design favoring unexpected pushing of boundaries has stuck in 2019 and is used as a technique to set your web design apart from the competitors. Let’s see if it continues to do wonders in 2020!

5. Elevated Image Treatments:

Images have undoubtedly given us various design opportunities when it comes to the web, and this is what we saw in 2019 as well. From graphics in a circle to making them colored (or black and white), designers have used all these techniques to draw attention and enhance the website UI/UX overall.

We not only came across websites that took the image treatment a step further by featuring a single and sizeable hero-style picture that took charge of the whole space of the site, but the year was also about shuffling up the way images were executed by cutting out the subject or adding a pattern on top. Looking at how successful these trends were in catching attention, all these techniques are likely to be more prominent in the industry in the following years.

6. Overlapping Design Elements:

Overlapping design elements can bring great visual appearance to web designs. Falling in line with asymmetrical layouts and broken grids, and making sure these do not touch each other and have their separate spaces, has worn out and become old-fashioned.

Yes, overlapping elements could cause confusion, and sometimes it will frustrate you when overlap in the wrong ways. However, 2019 showed us that if carefully done, the trend of overlapping all these elements on the web page can actually enhance the aesthetics of your site. In the next few years, we might also start more of experimenting with three-dimensional (3D) websites.

7. Header Areas or Reimagined Hero:

The “above the fold” area that often features a large image taking most of the space of the web design with a text on top is what catches attention at the very first glance. There was no experimentation with this area over the past few years, but 2019 changed it to some extent. Many of the websites started to push the boundaries and revised the content present along with minimizing the area comprising of the full-length image to grab the viewer’s attention in an efficient way.

8. Trends in Typography:

Pushing the boundaries of typography on the web is not as simple as it is in print. However, as coding has become more sophisticated in the past few years, experimenting with typography on the web has become a lot more natural.

The typography trends of 2019 were cutting or subtracting parts of words and letters, putting an image or photograph inside typography, animating the typography, and much more. Designers and developers can definitely benefit by keeping in mind this trend to come up with better web designs in the future.

9. Large and Experimental Navigations on the Web:

Navigation is one of the hardest elements that make up a web design. It is a daunting job, more of a challenge, to keep the web design appealing with functional aesthetics. 2019 was a year with a lot of experimentation when it came to navigation. Navigation was seemingly the focal point in web design this year as it occupied a considerable portion for the majority of the websites; instead of focusing on font size, placement on the page, and the layout only.

We can expect designers and developers to come up with even bigger navigations and website homepages in the coming years, or at least that is how sites can be made more sophisticated and alluring for the viewers.

10. White Space, More Than Enough:

The efficient usage of white space is one of the oldest tools in the web design industry. However, making this white space the focal point of attention is not as mainstream as it might sound!

While the white space used in an excessive manner was considered to be a symbol for wastage of space, 2019 has completely changed this idea. Now, it is looked at as a more critical part of the web design that not only enhances the overall looks but simultaneously makes it more noticeable for the viewers.

Need Help with your Web Design?

We live in an era where web design has completely taken over the industry, as even Disney is looking to create a good experience for its junior audience! However, designing the web is not as simple as it might seem. Though we have enough information about the trends in 2019 that can help you sketch a site of your own, we understand that there still is a need for expert opinion.

If you are looking for creative professionals from one of the best web design company, to assist you with your design ABCD, then UptownLogoDesign is the right place for it. Not only will the team of experts at Uptown help you with the basic designing, but you can also get your logos, apps, and other digital stuff crafted from them!

Development Martech

The Technological Improvements Cars Have Seen in the Past 10 Years

Miley on December 16, 2019

Consumers have come to expect that 2020 vehicles will basically have a home computer built into the dash. As technology rapidly advances, it becomes increasingly essential in our cars. Yet it wasn’t always this way.

Today you can easily purchase any car part online, buy second-hand or new cars or book a different services for your vehicle online. Towbar installment? Call Speedy Towbars. Car cleaning? There are a ton of available options!

In the past, upgrades came in the form of improved handling, smart safety features, and more powerful engines. Now, however, we’ve entered the era of the connected car. Things will never be the same.

Navigation Integration

Early Millennials and Gen-Xers remember needing a map to get somewhere new. Modern cars, however, offer excellent navigational features. They gather real-time data on traffic and directions and provide hands-free directions.

Through Apple Carplay and Android Auto, drivers can enjoy responsive integration with navigation and an assortment of other features, such as the calendar, music and Siri apps.

Cleaner Power

Combustion engines have hustled to keep up with the push for greener cars. In 2018, the U.S. saw the sale of more than 358,000 plug-in electric vehicles — up 79% since 2017. Tesla remains one of the most successful EV manufacturers, in part due to its Model 3.

Electric vehicles don’t create pollution, right? The answer depends on where you plug in and charge. In a state with an unsustainable power grid, you might hurt the environment more by making the switch.

Driver Aids

Manufacturers have been dangling self-driving cars in front of our noses for years. While we hoped 2020 would be the year, we’re still far from fully autonomous vehicles that you can trust in a dynamic environment.

However, in the journey to realize this sci-fi technology, we’ve created some outstanding driver aids. You can enjoy features like lane-departure assist, backup warnings, radar-guided cruise control and more. Plus, turbochargers, standard equipment in modern vehicles, can increase engine efficiency up to 40%, cutting down on power consumption.

The Rise of Four-Wheel Drive

You could get a four-wheel drive for your pickup or jeep as far back as the 1940s. These days, however, it’s not just for cars that go off-road.

Nearly all manufacturers offer some form of commuter car that comes equipped with a four-wheel drive. In fact, it’s a top-selling feature in Alaska, Wyoming, North Dakota, Montana, and South Dakota. It transitioned from a practical feature for tough terrain to a technical one for foul weather. Choose from classics like Mini Coopers, Ford Fusions and even the Humble Mazda 3.

The Best Car Tech Improvements of the Last 10 Years

Technology will continue to take over the car manufacturing industry. Yet what advancements will we see in the future?

Already, we’re moving away from the idea of vehicles as transportation means. Instead, they’re akin to personalized devices, like cell phones. Don’t believe it? Simply ask any Tesla owner. They have to deal with overnight updates to software, which sometimes comes with bugs and technical issues.

Do you want to wake up to your car the way you left it? Then you should probably wait to buy a new vehicle. Yet if you’re ready to experience the perks of technology, from hands-free infotainment systems to backup assist, start shopping today.

Development Insights Martech SaaS

Organizations Failing to Embrace Automation for SOX Compliance

Miley on December 4, 2019

Organizations are required to comply with an ever-increasing number of regulations. In the US, one of the most widely-reaching is the Sarbanes-Oxley (SOX) Act, which applies to all public companies within the US.

The purpose of SOX is to ensure that investors in these public companies are protected against fraudulent activity. In order to achieve SOX compliance, an organization is required to maintain complete and transparent records of all of their financial dealings. The intention of the SOX Act is to ensure that scandals like Enron never happen again, where the company destroyed documents to prevent evidence from falling into the hands of the US Security and Exchanges Commission.

Under SOX, an organization is prohibited from destroying certain types of documents and required to retain them for a certain number of years. Each year, the organization’s CEO and CFO are required to provide a report on the company’s current financial status, and the penalties for inaccurate reporting are steep. As a result, an organization needs a high level of visibility into its financial data in order to generate correct reports for SOX.

Most Organizations Don’t Automate SOX Compliance

All public US companies are required to comply with SOX. However, the law does not specify how they have to perform the data collection and processing necessary to generate their reports. As a result, many organizations are taking a manual approach to data collection and report generation for SOX compliance. According to a recent survey, 47% of organizations are failing to take advantage of the numerous next-generation technologies that can help them to achieve and demonstrate compliance.

In the case of the SOX regulation, the main requirement is that an organization retains certain records for 5 years and ensures that they are not tampered with. Since this data collection and retention is often performed manually, organizations are missing the opportunity to decrease the overhead associated with maintaining compliance and are more likely to make reporting mistakes due to human error.

Benefits of Compliance Automation

The nearly half of organizations that are not taking advantage of opportunities to automate part or all of their SOX compliance activities are missing out on the wide range of benefits of automation. By moving work from manual processes to automated ones, an organization can decrease overhead and better manage their compliance.

Increased Data Visibility

The SOX regulation requires an organization to have a high level of visibility into certain types of data in order to provide a certification that all of this data is correct. Manually trying to monitor and manage all of the potential stores of this data throughout the enterprise puts the organization’s compliance at risk since a simple oversight can result in important data being missed. With automated data collection and monitoring, an organization can be confident that they have full visibility into relevant sensitive data without requiring periodic searches through all of an organization’s network for hidden data repositories. This increased visibility is also valuable for ensuring that all sensitive or valuable data is properly secured.

Lower Compliance Overhead and Costs

When organizations fail to embrace automation for regulatory compliance, this doesn’t remove their responsibility to maintain and demonstrate compliance. Instead, these organizations are forced to manually manage all compliance-related activities. For regulations in general and SOX in particular, compliance reports and the data that they require are fairly standardized. Paying employees to collect this data is much more expensive and time-consuming than automating data collection and just having a human check over the final numbers before sending off the report.

Increased Productivity

The activities associated with regulatory compliance don’t earn the organization any money. The closest they come is to remove the need to pay fines for non-compliance. By freeing up human employees to perform core job roles, strategic automation of compliance activities can improve the productivity of the business and decreases the probability of human error in compliance reporting.

Scalable Compliance

SOX is only one among many regulations that organizations must comply with. As the number of compliance regulations grows, attempting to manually maintain and demonstrate regulatory compliance quickly becomes unsustainable. Many of these new regulations are focused on sensitive data, either retaining it, as in the case of SOX, or protecting it, for GDPR and other data protection regulations. As a result, the same types of data are likely to be needed in multiple different compliance reports, and automating these data collection processes can allow an organization to maintain compliance with a growing number of new regulations and standards without needing significant growth in employee headcount.

Getting Started Automating Compliance

Almost half of the organizations are failing to take advantage of automation for SOX compliance. Like with many other regulations, SOX is focused on how an organization manages certain types of sensitive information. Compliance reporting requires an organization to gather a large amount of information about this data, and this process can be easily automated, providing a range of benefits to an organization.

One major way that an organization can lighten their compliance burden through automation is by adopting a solution that automatically identifies repositories of sensitive or protected data and provides centralized visibility, access monitoring, and vulnerability testing for them. With this type of solution in place, an organization can achieve the visibility needed for SOX compliance with much fewer manual processes, ensure that the data is properly protected, and lay the groundwork for compliance with other data protection regulations.

Development Insights Martech Products SaaS

How to Optimize a Mobile App Performance in 6 Simple Steps

Miley on November 20, 2019

The mobile app market is growing at an incessant pace and considering the billions of smartphone owners around the globe, it only makes sense to put your brand on mobile app stores on the Internet.

It’s true that thousands of mobile apps are released every month but only a few become the glitters in the world of apps. Most of the apps launched in the market fail to keep the users engaged and lose their customer base quickly.

This makes it very important to make the mobile app with the customer in mind. It can only be done if you follow the right steps when you are optimizing the mobile app.

In this blog post, we are going to discuss how you can optimize a mobile app and prepare it for the future challenges it will face from the competition.

So, without any further ado, let’s dive into the content!

Below is a List of Six Easy Steps to Optimize a Mobile App

1. Create an Appealing UI

The user should be mesmerized by the level of simplicity and efficiency provided by the open right from the word go. The moment a user opens the app, he or she should be able to do what he wants to do on the app.

This can be done by designing the app for memorable user interaction. App abandonment can be curbed by making the app easy to use. But, the experience is not just dependent on how well-designed your app looks. The ability to load quickly and zero UI delays can really take your app performance to a whole new level.

The best way to optimize the user interface of an app is to optimize by first determining and then keeping the target audience in mind.

2. Ensuring Apps Performance on Different Devices

One of the most important app performance optimizations you can execute is making your mobile app ready to be run on different mobile devices.

Most of the apps today are designed to cope with different network speeds but fail at optimizing with the mobile devices they are being run on. Apps performance on different devices should be tracked since the modern mobile market is actively teaming up with smartphone brands.

You can take the example of an on-demand food delivery app. If you are building an app for food ordering and delivering, make sure you build it for all platforms. This will enable you to reach a wider audience. You can cater to the requirements of both users; Android and iOS. In addition, you can also enhance the probability of getting expected results in terms of revenue.

We highly recommend you to test the app’s performance on different devices and networks to check the functionality of the OS. The fact that your app will be used on different devices having different operating systems makes it even more important to keep the developers on the edge.

3. Know Which KPIs to Track

Most of the advertisers in the market are focused on the Click-Through Rates produced by the app. But, the time has really changed and the mobile app landscape has drastically evolved.

In order to gauge the performance of the app you’ve developed, you need to know how much value the app is able to provide the users once they have installed it onto their phones. And secondly, the problems your app helps the users with.

According to Digital Authority, you need to create a high-converting mobile app that can only be accomplished if you are able to measure its effectiveness. We highly recommend you to track metrics like customer engagement, consumer insights, and success of customer loyalty.

4. Tune the In-App Activity with Business Goals

What’s the first step in creating a highly effective and well-performing marketing strategy? It’s recognizing the business goals and aligning them in the right order. When you have clearly defined goals in front of you, it will be easier for you to analyze the performance metrics and make useful amendments.

There are various marketing tactics that can be implemented to align the marketing strategy with the goals the success of which can only be realized by optimizing the post-installation activity as per your target audience.

Let’s say you own a restaurant and you want people to order food through the app you have developed exclusively for your brand. To create a high-converting mobile app, you will have lure in the potential customers using hefty discounts and offers and then track the success of the in-app activity to make sure they achieve the business goals.

5. Optimize App Sales Funnel

To know how well your marketing strategy is performing for your mobile app, you need to dive into the statistics produced by analytics.

One way to get a huge amount of data in order to create a solid analytics report is by optimizing the apps post-install events. This can help you analyze the sources that are performing and also the sources that are underperforming.

Mobile analytics solutions available on the Internet can help you track the number of events in the sales funnel like Number of Installs, Conversions Rates, Number of Loyal Users, Average Session, and more.

6. Execute Deep Linking

This is quite similar to how we optimize a website using linkability to improve its online reach; mobile apps also require it for achieving high levels of conversion.

It’s just that the mobile mediums do not use backlinking, but rely on what we call deep links. This is necessary for making the mobile app ready for user acquisition and retention.

Deep linking allows a potential customer to open the mobile app using a standard website. Implementing Deep Linking is a complex affair and you will need a technical person to help you with this.

Over to You

The tips shared above can really help you optimize your mobile app if you follow the instructions properly. You will be able to glean the information about your app and the audience if you optimize the app well.

Overall, optimizing mobile apps is a complex process and it has to be done right from the beginning. Improper execution of optimization strategies can make room for negative results.

Not sure where to start with your mobile app efforts? Check out this list of top companies you could approach to get a mobile app designed.

We hope this piece of content brought great value to you and your business. Good luck with your App project.

Development Insights Products SEO

How to Do Online Marketing for an Adult Webcam Website?

Miley on November 15, 2019

Adult webcam- a business idea to stream live erotica and make money charging percentage cuts from the models. Sounds cool and kind of profitable business niche to make loads of money.

However, if you have been in the adult industry for a while, you know it is easier to know how to start a webcam company, but it’s not that easy to market one. Running a webcam-modeling site is cutthroat commerce and it’s even trickier than many mainstream business activities. It indeed is a money-making machine if done right, but when everyone is trying his or her best to make the most out of it, it’s difficult to beat the heat and take your webcam site to great heights.

How to do marketing for a webcam website?

The secret lies in the differences between the businesses that use cutting-edge adult cam software, have thousands of models on-board, and yet don’t have a clarity of their marketing approaches and those businesses who choose the right adult cam script in inclination to marketing prospects that bring revenue. In short, businesses who are making profits understand how to do marketing for a webcam website while focusing on the prominent areas rather than re-inventing the wheel.

Choosing a wrong adult webcam script is just one of the examples. Businesses make loads of mistakes in the early phases that later reflect on their marketing feasibilities, and then on their revenue streams, which shrink due to inevitable limitations in the possible marketing opportunities. The first step in your quest for marketing would be ensuring your website is capable of handling cutting-edge marketing practices.

Admit it! Marketing an Adult Business is challenging than a Non-NSFW business

Online Marketing is a great way to reach the target audience and promote your services. From social media, email, push notifications, search Ads, and banners Ads to video Ads, every business knows how to use these channels for online marketing.

However, online marketing of an adult webcam business is a different resolution. Guides that explain how to start a webcam studio differ from the ones that talk about marketing the same, especially in the mainstream media. For starters, mainstream social media, Google Ads, Bing Ads, YouTube, and many more just don’t allow NSFW promotions. Almost no popular marketing channel is adult-friendly. They would ban you for promoting your webcam business there.

All the same, this doesn’t mean you cannot leverage mainstream marketing channels at all. Let’s admit it; though there are N numbers of adult-friendly channels, we still need mainstream channels to grow an adult business to its fullest. Let me tell you that there are ways to promote adult businesses on mainstream channels if you can be a little careful and harness certain tailored strategies.

Social Media Marketing for Adult webcam platforms

We can classify online marketing of adult businesses through social media into three major categories. Be advised that you should not rely on a similar kind of strategy for platforms but tailor your ways as per the native features and rules on these platforms:

Adult-friendly
Partially Adult-friendly
Not so Adult -friendly

I don’t recommend adult-friendly platforms to promote your business. I know it’s conflicting, but there is a big reason for it. All adult-friendly social media platforms are stand-alone adult businesses. They are more like competitors to you, and most importantly, they are premium. Take OnlyFans for example. This particular platform has models of its own and it almost does a similar kind of business like yours. That’s why it’s difficult to get a chance to promote your business there. However, if you still think you can tweak some ways into it, you should do it.

Your best bet is relying on mainstream social media platforms, which I have classified into partial and not-so-friendly categories. Platforms like Facebook and Instagram are ‘not-so-friendly’. Whereas, Twitter Snapchat, Tumblr, Pinterest, and YouTube are partially friendly, as they allow NSFW with some regulations. You can use both kinds of platforms by simply following their Terms of Service. You can practice creative ways to communicate your messages without using nudity or links to explicit content. The only tip to follow is marking your posts as 18+ or NSWF as per given features on respective platforms. It will ensure your posts reach only to the adult audience.

Reddit Marketing for Adult Webcam business

Reddit is a social media platform but very different from those explained above. It’s well regulated, highly moderated, and house to a massive population of serious people who follow the subreddits as per their interests. Before you know how to leverage Reddit, you should know how not to use Reddit. Know that committing the following mistakes will get you banned:

Self-promotion or posting direct links to your videos.
Driving traffic to your webcam site from Reddit directly.
Indulging into direct transactions and selling on Reddit.
Violating particular rules of specific subreddits.
Posting watermarked content.

Apart from a Reddit profile on your brand’s name, also ask your models to create their individual profiles. Ask them to join your brand’s subreddit and use the following strategies to promote:

Reddit allows NSFW content with certain limitations. One of them is posting NSFW stuff only on NSFW marked subreddits. So, even though Reddit is adult-friendly, you might be banned for going NSFW on non-NSFW subreddits. Hence, the first thing to do would be marking your own and your models’ subreddits as NSFW.

Besides, Reddit functions on “Karma”, which you can only accrue by involving in the day-to-day activities on Reddit. Make some posts; up-votes on them would help increase your overall karma. You need not necessarily participate in only NSFW subreddits to get good karma. Interact with posts made by other Redditors; up-vote, down-vote, comment, just do what a typical Redditor does. This is all about mixing up with the platform and not standing out as a shameless promoter.

Once you blend and have some decent karma, you may now start with in-direct promotions. Use Reddit to push traffic towards your social media profiles. However, be careful of the rules and regulations of the platform and subreddits. Ask your models to ask their fans to upload their photos with a link to models’ social media profiles. In short, it would be easier for models to drive traffic to your platform via their social media profiles.

Press Release and Adult SEO

I have included press releases and adult SEO in the same category as they behave nearly the same. Both boost brand awareness and extend links to relevant sources for driving traffic. While a well-written press release will spread your words and links across multiple sites on the internet, you can rely on adult SEO to improve your rankings on the search engine.

Adult SEO is the same as regular SEO, except you should approach other adult websites for the link-backs. Apart from this, make sure your adult webcam script is SEO friendly and offers all ways to optimize for the search engines: Meta-tags, Descriptions, CMS, SEO friendly URLs, and many more.

If you haven’t started with your webcam site yet, and still looking for the answers on how to start a webcam business, I suggest considering SEO friendly features as the top-most priority. Whether you have just started, thinking about starting or already acquired some good market share, you need SEO at every point in time. Without SEO, you cannot expect your online marketing to be of any assistance in revenue generation. Here are some tips you may apply to rank well on search engines:

Mention keywords.
Link to internal and external pages.
Optimize your adult cam script for faster loading.
Use images with proper keywords in the description and caption.
Update Webpage content regularly and practice content marketing.
Leverage services from an adult SEO company for better assistance.

Post and promote on Adult Tube sites

Adult tube sites get massive traffic because of the free content they offer. You can tap on the tube sites like Xvideos, Pornhub, Youporn, xHamster to drive traffic to your site. Not just traffic but you can also make additional money by simply uploading some of your content. Just like YouTube, adult tube sites also share ad-revenue with the uploaders.

Create channels on popular tube sites, put your brand logo as channel logo, upload a channel banner image promoting your brand, and start uploading watermarked videos with links to your site in the description. This way, people viewing your videos will not only know about your brand but will also visit your site to watch videos like those.

To Sum it all

These marketing channels are fundamental and one must leverage essentially them for online marketing. Overlooking the strategies around these channels will not only drive away a plethora of traffic but will also give your rivals a better stand over your business. These are non-negotiable ways to online marketing of your webcam site. Apart from this, you can also use several other channels and strategies to support your fundamental marketing campaigns. To name a few, you can rely on model affiliate programs, paid Ads on tube sites, email marketing, influencer marketing with adult stars, etc.

Development Insights Martech

How Video-on-demand Industry Will Be Like in the Next 5 Years?

Miley on November 15, 2019

Do you remember when was the last time you tuned in to your cable TV to watch a random series? If you don’t remember, do not worry, you are not alone. Soon the number of people owning a TV subscription will rapidly decline, thanks to video-on-demand.

Currently, over 70% of the young population watches TV shows and movies on the Internet. This clearly shows how important it has become for viewers to have control of what they watch when they watch, and how they watch it. This is the evolution of TV and the current scenario as we head into 2020. The Internet and modern technology have opened the door to video-on-demand.

However, have you ever wondered how the video-on-demand business will look like in the next 5 years? Let’s look into some future predictions on how video-on-demand business will look like in the future.

The era of game streaming

The majority of Internet users worldwide are familiar with Netflix and its video streaming offerings. In fact, it is obvious that Netflix is a current synonym for video-on-demand in general. That is the case of entertainment. When it comes to online video games, this type of entertainment has only started to evolve towards subscription-based services.

However, the industry holds huge potential for a “Netflix for video games”. With the online gaming industry growing more rapidly than other tech sectors, it is clear that big changes are going to be brought by the shift of gaming to the cloud. If you are thinking about how to start a streaming service like Netflix, focus on the gaming industry as the era of online gaming is already here.

The new cinema

Video-on-demand platforms are dramatically changing how we consume entertainment. It gives us enormous choices, the ability to watch movies in the comfort of our home provides us with the pleasure of binge-watching and whatnot. VOD services like Netflix are giving us many options to explore like some great originals and exclusive series. If you want to build your own Netflix, ensure that you offer a new viewing experience for your audience by offering unique content that is worth spending time on.

However, going to the movie theatre to watch a film along with friends and family is a personalized experience greater than the film itself. Nevertheless, what will happen if video-on-demand services offer the same experience right in the comfort of your own homes? That is what the next point is all about- Co-viewing?

Co-viewing for all

The future of on-demand video will be co-viewing where people will be watching, TV series, movies, and sports events remotely with their bunch of favorite people. The initiatives for the same have already begun. For example, a low-cost streaming platform Philo facilitates co-viewing to allow viewers to watch movies and shows together in real-time.

Philo offers this feature through synchronization technology where users can share links to invite their friends to watch shows with them. Nevertheless, it is not the very first initiative. YouTube has already launched its own experimental co-viewing app called Uptime. Facebook is also working on the same feature to bring in co-viewing for all. If you are looking for different ways on how to start your own streaming service, co-watching is one of the excellent features to add to your service.

Immersive branded experiences

Screen-based interactions are changing into connected experiences in our everyday lives. YouTube has already started offering immersive branded experiences in-display ads. Augmented reality is a powerful tool for brands to narrate richer and engaging stories about their products to customers. YouTube has introduced AR beauty try that allows users to virtually try on makeup while watching YouTubers for product reviews, tips, and more.

All credit goes to AR technology and machine learning developments; it provides virtual product samples that suit all types of skin tones. The feature is made available through Famebit; Google’s own branded content platform. MAC Cosmetics is the first brand to collaborate with FameBit’s beauty to try on campaign initiative.

With that said, 360-degree experiences to display ads will rule the industry in the next 5 years. The display format Swirl that allows zooming in, rotating, playing an animation, etc. will become a standard format in the coming days.

Accurate analysis

The major benefit of video-on-demand services is that it offers real-time data on who watches the content, how they watch it, their feedback and a lot more. In the next 5 years, the accuracy of analytics will be more precise. Businesses will gain better insights about identifying their niche audience, their behavior, preferences, mobile viewing, viewing trends, etc. with powerful analytical tools and features. The right analysis of user data also makes it possible to optimize ads in a way ultimately to win them over as customers.

Video-on-demand services will continue to rise

Fast forward to the next 5 years, you will see more video-on-demand services launching in the market. In short, there will be more rivals to services like Netflix and YouTube. As you might already know, Disney and Apple are all set to launch their video-on-demand platforms to grow equivalent to Netflix. With more corporates focusing on how to start a business like Netflix, the competition will be fierce in the next few years. The challenge is not just for existing video-on-demand platforms, but from traditional cable TV networks as well, to survive in this changing landscape of modern technology.

Wrapping up

The digital space is undergoing a revolutionary transformation and so is the entertainment space. The video-on-demand industry is still in its evolution phase and has a long way to go. In the next 5 years, we will see the VOD platform adopting future technologies like AR and VR reshaping the entertainment industry.

With the rise of VOD services, the viewing patterns and expectations of viewers have changed and it will continue to change in the next 5 years as well. Though the VOD trend has increased cord-cutting, businesses have to offer more in terms of service and values to establish themselves in the market. With competition becoming fiercer as years pass by, there will be a lot more coming in terms of user experience.

Let’s tune in for the upcoming changes that make it easier to satiate our entertainment requirements online.