Category: Productivity

Although technology takes a massive role in today’s business world, many shops and other businesses remain with physical stores. So many individuals use the internet to obtain products and services that many of the ways to attract customers take place online. However, you must still think about how to attract customers to your building whether your business is also online or not.

When it comes to physical stores, location is usually everything. If you are in a highly populated place, it may be slightly easier to get people to notice you and come in. If you are hidden away from society in a corner, this may prove challenging and you may have to put additional efforts to be noticed. In this article, we will provide you with effective solutions that will drive more customers to your business, to increase your store’s chances of success.

Remodel the Building

A great idea to attract more customers is to remodel the building. Although this is a big step, your business may lack the necessary appealing features to invite people to come into your store. If you have not done this in some time, perhaps it is time you do it now and make it look modern and inviting. You can completely change the look of the building or simply freshen it up. Adding a few unique decorative features will automatically make people more curious to see what your business is about.

Make Use of Signs

Maybe the location of your business is poor and people cannot see you, or maybe the building is in the middle of bigger properties, which results in people not being aware of your existence. Of course, this will make it difficult for people to come into your building. If you live in Texas, for example, it may be worth visiting a Houston sign company to invest in a sign for your building. There are many different signs you can choose from with a variety of shapes and colors. Displaying a neon sign right above your building will surely capture the attention of potential customers whether it is day or night.

Pay Attention to the Windows

You may have heard the term ‘window shopping’. This essentially entails individuals walking past shops and starting at the windows. This is one of the reasons you should pay great attention to the windows of your store as this is how individuals from outside get the first peek into your business. They should be welcoming and attractive to potential customers as it will increase the chances of them coming in. 

Create a Website

Creating a website is just as important to attract individuals into your physical store. The majority of customers will look up information online whenever they are in need of a service and/or product. They do not necessarily need to be out to find out about your business. As long as you have a good website in place and clearly detail your information, address, and contact details, you should automatically find more customers are coming to you.

Increase Social Media Presence

Again, the online world can greatly benefit your business. Whether you have a website or not, you should increase your presence on different social media platforms. Millions of individuals utilize these to communicate and to find services. One of the greatest advantages of social media that a simple website does not provide is the ability to engage with your customers any time you want. 

This is great if they have any questions about your service or if you want to promote any sales or discounts to incite people to come to visit you. You may want to use different platforms, depending on what your audience prefers or just one if you are sure you can reach your target cohort. We recommend a variety of platforms and having someone manage these for you.

SMS Marketing

Using a range of marketing strategies is an effective solution to drive more customers to your business. SMS marketing is a popular approach as it works wonders when done correctly. The majority of individuals own at least one phone, and this is always in their possession, meaning that you can quickly reach them with one text message. These messages should be kept short and informative and ultimately remind customers of your existence. You can encourage them to come in by giving them a discount if they show the text message when purchasing something.

Create a Sale

A great way to attract more customers to your place is by giving them a reason to come to you. People love a good bargain. When clients think they can get a product for lower costs they will make the effort to come to you. You can use some of the tactics discussed above, such as social media and SMS marketing to let your target audience know that this is happening. A good idea is to put a time limit on the sale, as it will encourage them to come to your business quickly as they will know they want to miss out on the chance.

Encourage People to Tell a Friend

Word of mouth is one of the oldest and most effective solutions to increase the number of customers to your business. You may have a great social media presence and an amazing website as well as a number of positive reviews online from previous customers. However, nothing attracts more people than existing customers referring your business or product to a friend. Most of us trust the judgment of our friends and family more than we trust online reviews from strangers, making this approach highly important. A great way to encourage this is by offering a discount or a free product to a customer if next time they visit they bring a friend with them and the friend makes a purchase.

Attracting more customers is usually the primary objective of any company. Without individuals buying your products or services you will not make a profit. The information on this page should provide you with effective solutions to be more noticeable and attract more customers to your business.

Document360 is a knowledge base creation platform useful for creating and publishing self-help service guides for your customers or employees. The cloud-based SaaS platform is also beneficial for gathering and storing institutional knowledge relevant to employees.

Having a knowledge base enables you to improve your internal operations and support teams’ efficiency, enabling them time to focus on critical issues.

Rated as the #1 knowledge management platform by the Gartner Digital Markets, Document360 integrates with third-party apps to help your teams collaborate efficiently while creating content for the database and even allow you to collect customer feedback.

The best part about Document360 is that the process of knowledge database creation is simplified to allow both technical and non-technical users to interact with the documentation. Without further ado, let us dive deep into its capabilities.

Features that make Document360 stand apart

The knowledge base software facilitates the contribution and consumption of information that is important for your business. The main features of Document360 are:

1. User management

You can enable role-based user access for better management and data security. Allocate roles to all your users, such as Admin, Editor, Writer, or Reader. Maintain a hierarchy so that the accuracy of the content is not hampered.

2. Feedback and commenting

Document360 allows you to collect user feedback to improve your documentation. You can also gather peer comments before publishing the articles to ensure your content quality is as per reader preference.

3. Team accounts

Segregate teams based on the type of accounts allocated to the users. Under this section, you can view all activities and analytics of each team member.

4. Document versioning

You can manage all the documentation versions and choose to use the updated version or roll back to an older version. This feature is also helpful for auditing revisions made to the documentation.

5. Private documentation

Secure your confidential communication by selecting user accounts who can access specific articles of the knowledge base. Not every department needs to have the same level of authority to access a particular piece of content.

6. Unlimited articles and multiple projects

You can use Document360 to create multiple projects and publish unlimited articles under each category. It allows you to maintain all your documentation — internal and public in a single place. As mentioned earlier, you can leverage its role-based access for users to ensure confidentiality is never compromised.

7. Superfast search

Document360 also offers search functionality to make relevant documents from your knowledge base accessible in real-time for authorized users. The articles are matched with search keywords for relevance and are displayed in the list of suggestions to the user. 

8. Bulk operations

The knowledge base software comes with an in-built capability to perform the same function on several document pieces in a single click. This feature reduces your workload by eliminating the need for repetitive processes.

For instance, if the copywriters in your team have drafted a few articles, they would send them to the editor for review. Instead of publishing their content pieces individually, the editor can do a “Bulk Publish” using Document360.

9. SEO settings

You can customize article metadata and add tags to each article in your Document360 knowledge base. These settings allow you to add keywords related to your products. You can include them in your article title and text to optimize it and increase its searchability on Google, Bing, and Yahoo!.

10. Cloud deployment

Making collaboration among teams easier, cloud deployment of Document360 allows you to preview and edit articles in real-time. The Markdown and WYSIWYG editors are two editing tool options available. The best part is they are dynamic and allow the writer to even preview how a specific article will look live.

Integrations that make the creation of your knowledge database simpler

Document360 seamlessly integrates with your existing tools and any third-party applications popular in the market. Your teams can collaborate among themselves and coordinate with users through these applications without any hassle.

Document360 allows integrations in the following categories:

i. Helpdesks like Zendesk and Freshdesk

ii. Chatbots like Intercom and Drift

iii. Analytics tools such as Google Analytics

iv. Translation Services like Crowdin

v. Commenting tools such as Disqus

vi. CRO tools such as Hotjar and Freshmarketer

vii. Team collaboration tools like Slack and Microsoft Teams

Dynamic pricing for every business

Document360 is priced based on your usage and the features offered. The pricing categories are:

1. Startup — $49 for a month including one project, two team accounts, 5 GB storage for one knowledge base version.

2. Business — $149 for a month including one project, five team accounts, 50 GB storage for two knowledge base versions.

3. Enterprise — $299 for a month including one project, 15 team accounts, 150 GB storage for six knowledge base versions.

4. Enterprise Plus — You can build a custom plan for your requirement and get unlimited team accounts with 300 GB storage for 12 knowledge base versions.

Document360 also offers a 14-day free trial with full access to the platform to help you decide what works best for your business. Check out its pricing in detail here.

Companies using Document360

The user-friendly characteristics and scalability of Document360 have made it a preferred knowledge database building platform for most companies. Major brands using Document360 are Microsoft, Stackify, Harvard University, Warner Brothers, Monday.com, Customer.io, Mambu, Reggora, and many more.

What is not right with Document360?

It offers mostly all features you would need to build your knowledge base portal, but there are some cons too:

1. It does not allow data to be imported from MS Word.

2. Inserting audio files into your articles takes time.

3. Speed may be an issue at times.

4. Creating projects for each product becomes costly and time-consuming for companies with multiple products.

5. Customer support could be improved for immediate assistance round the clock.

Summing it up

Document360 is a great product for businesses struggling with multiple products and their numerous user manuals. It allows you to streamline your product information and efficiently distribute it to your users — both employees and customers.

Improve your team’s self-help abilities and equip them to answer routine customer queries through FAQs while maintaining all your documentation securely in a single place. The software allows you to publish content in different forms for both internal and external uses.

Having a brilliant idea is no longer enough to be the best man at your job. Creating an innovative PowerPoint presentation goes hand in hand with delivering your business ideas. Whether you are creating a construction plan for your company or you are carrying out a systematic approach to study a new compound medicine, a PowerPoint presentation helps to structure all your thoughts as well as your findings in a single descriptive document slide. 

If you have ever created a slide from scratch, you must be aware of the time it takes to collect all the necessary data. On the contrary, using a Timeline Template of PowerPoint presentation can save you a lot of time and trouble.

PowerPoint presentation templates come with all the amazing features of adding relative attachments such as pictures, clips, charts, or different kinds of web links. They contain dedicated ‘Text and Attachment’ boxes already arranged in their perfect patterns to enhance the appearance of your presentation. Although you can create a slide right from the very first blank page, using a template is just simpler, easier and so much more fun.

If you haven’t given a try to the templates, here’s why timeline templates are very useful to easily create perfect presentations.

Better Public Impression

Creating a presentation slide from scratch may be a choice that you can act upon but it is never recommended. Who in his right mind would choose to start preparing a slide from a blank page when you can easily use a ready-made timeline template. Also, if you are new at creating slides and you want to take pride in “doing it all by yourself” you should probably consider all the possibilities. Like the fact that you can easily mess up your office presentation by being a DIY. Is it worth the trouble? On the contrary, if you use a ready-made timeline template, your chances of making errors are lowered by a good 80-90%. That’s a lot to ignore when you’re doing a professional job that involves making impressive presentations.

Life And Time Savers

Using timeline templates is an effective way of saving your precious time that you can use to finish several other tasks. Imagine getting stuck in designing a creative presentation slide on your daughter’s birthday. Can you risk missing out on her special day? Wouldn’t you trade being there by her side for anything in the world? Or would you rather be doing the official presentation in some old-school fashion way? I bet you’d look up a nice slideuplift.com template to create your slide presentation and catch the next bus home. It’s easier and better. Also, It saves you from a lot of trouble. All-in-all, you can say the timeline templates are a lifesaver.

Unique In Their Ways Of Creativity

It’s a no-shocker that every timeline template is unique in its way. The timeline templates that you use to create your presentations are all designed with detailed care. They are innovative, chic, decent, sophisticated, eye-catching, classy, lovely and all shades of unique. You can never get bored of using timeline templates as they’re highly engaging and user-friendly. There are so many font styles and calligraphy designs that make the insertable text unique from the other templates. Then, there come the background colors and sideline borders. Not to forget the pictorial representation that adds so much more to the templates.

Never Ending List Of Templates

The presentation topics vary from field to field and make up a giant list of all the possible scenarios. You’ll be surprised to know that you can find timeline templates for almost every possible scenario. There are countless timeline templates already designed to comply with your presentation topics. Whatever your requirements are, you can easily find a timeline template that fits perfectly to your given topic. 

Whether it’s related to business or research, medicine or media, education or lifestyle, plants or animals, you can find a template about anything that you can think of online. There are so many categories to choose from when you’re creating a presentation slide.

Given all the advantages, do you still think you should be creating presentation slides from the very beginning? I bet you have already started typing your required category to find a suitable Timeline template to create your presentation slide. You can even find templates with specific desired features if you search hard enough. It’s all a win-win for you.

Having a personalized calendar isn’t only practical and functional, in fact, it is a great way to celebrate moments from your past and anticipate everything that awaits you around the corner with joy. Not to mention they are fun, decorative, stylish, and original. 

There is a variety of designs to choose from – from classical to minimalistic or eccentric appeal. Make sure you find the one you love and find inspiring. Building your own unique calendar can be very imaginative and fun. Staying organized is important, but staying organized in style gives you a unique experience. So, it’s time to purchase your custom-made calendar, perfect for your tabletop or wall display.

Keep Track Of Holidays

We all know when to celebrate Christmas or New Year’s Eve. But there are so many fun holidays you don’t know about. For example, have you heard of Chocolate Fondue Day, Make A Friend Day, or Tell A Fairytale day? This useful list of quirky and fun holidays will put a smile on your face and your whole family will enjoy it. We guarantee the kids will love Pretzel Day, Batman Day, Hamburger Day, and Scavenger Hunt Day, while you may enjoy Lovers Day or Poem In Your Pocket Day with your partner. 

You can find printable calendars with all these holidays online and add more positivity and creativity to your life.

Keep Your Favorite Memories Close All Year Round

It’s the beginning of the year and the right time to start keeping track of all the events that will happen throughout 2021. Being organized is very important, especially if you are working from home, due to the COVID-19 pandemic. All the stress and lockdowns can make everybody feel lethargic and uninspired. If working from home is your new normal, a fun-looking, personalized calendar is a great way to help you stay on track. 

Here are a few ideas! Create an original poster calendar and tack it to your bulletin board. Purchase a desk calendar and add your favorite photos to make it more personal. Create a small calendar in your journal and keep track of not only your work but other plans, as well. For example – your workout schedule, eating habits, water intake, sleep patterns, etc. Your work is important, but try not to forget all the other aspects of your life. Write down when you plan to call your parents, have coffee with your friends, or organize a date-night with your significant other. 

Many people use calendars to write down what they are grateful for that day. Psychologists recommend writing at least three gratitudes per day. It doesn’t have to be anything huge. You may feel grateful because your partner cooked a nice dinner, or you talked on the phone with your friends. When you write about those positive feelings you can always return to them and re-read them to feel better. Remember that this way you will keep your memories forever. 

Read Inspirational Quotes Every Day

If you thought that personalized calendars are for photos strictly, you are wrong. Inspirational quotes might give you the spark you need to be productive and have a positive attitude in your day-to-day life. You can always choose a simple style but don’t be afraid to go overboard. Get creative and choose different colors and fonts, add pictures, and go for a bright background. 

Here are some of the most popular inspirational quotes people put on their custom-made calendars:

• Today is a new day. 
• When it’s dark look for the stars.
• If you can’t change it, change the way you think about it.
• You are amazing.
• When it rains look for rainbows.
• Remember – if it went wrong, at least you tried.
• If not now, when?
• Believe in yourself.
• Every day may not be good, but there is good in every day. 

We are living in difficult times and stress is literally around every corner. Sometimes we just can’t avoid it, no matter how much we try. Surrounding yourself with inspirational quotes is an innovative way to feel better and handle the pressure. Everybody needs inspiration from time to time, so why don’t you try adding positive vibes to your work calendar?

Calendars aren’t only great for helping us be productive. Yes, they make us stay on our work tasks but also remind us when to take a break and relax. This is the reason why personalized calendars work the best for most people. They don’t remind you of difficult, boring chores, but give liveliness and positivity to your day. Make sure you get a custom-made calendar for yourself and don’t forget that it can be an amazing gift for your loved ones as well.

There are many channels in which you can grow and improve your business. Within these different channels, there are more strategies and prospects to consider. If you evaluate the processing and shipping part of your business, one of the methods you can help your business improve is through a franking machine. Ideally, a franking machine is used to weigh or measure your outgoing items such as parcels, packages, letters and cover the appropriate postage. With a franking machine, businesses get to prepay their postage costs, insert dates, and bind a customized business image before having the mail dropped off at a local post. You can reap many benefits by introducing a franking machine into your business. Please read on to find out how.

1. Time-Saving

In most cases, stamps will run out at the most ill-timed period; this is how it is. Making several trips to your local post for more stamps is time-consuming and inconvenient. Finding an ideal franking machine for your franked mail will help bring order and convenience to your business. You become more efficient with your day when you cut out regular trips to the post office. Ideally, a franking machine can be topped up 24/7, and it only takes less than a minute. Even when your local post office is shut, you’ll never run out of postage. Also, processing outgoing mail becomes less of a detestable task.

2. Gives Your Business a Professional Image

Did you know putting your brand on your mail can boost open ability by over 250%? Sending your mail this way shows professionalism to your business partners and customers. What’s more, you can customize the ink stamp to your business’s brand logo so that it carries your business image on it. Also, the stamp can contain messages. This comes in handy when you have anything you need to promote, such as discount offers or promotions. You can also add promotional texts or other business messages. For this reason, investing in a franking machine provides significant marketing advantages to your business.

3. Cut Back on Courier Costs

There are many ways to lower costs with a franking machine outside of the regular costs. If you limit the number of trips you take to the post office to buy stamps, you save money on business expenses. Such expenses could include saving on gas from operating costs. It could also be eliminating the cost of having to hire couriers or delivery companies to transport and ship your packages. All these savings will likely impact your overall operating fees and expenses. Over time, this provides you with high-profit margins. This can be helpful for small businesses where every expense counts.

4. 24/7 Accessibility

Topping up a franking machine is a fast and easy process. Even better is that you can do it online. This means you can be franking mail 24/7. This is extremely helpful, especially when you’re dealing with urgent jobs or unplanned mailouts. Also, post office queues can be avoided. This saves time for your staff to focus on other crucial business activities.

5. Under Stamping

In the past, Royal Mail used to charge the sender if the postal items were under-stamped. Today, things have dramatically changed. Now they will dispatch the item to the recipient’s receiving office and ask the recipient to pick up the item. The recipient also pays the difference plus a handling fee. If you accidentally under stamp mail, this can cause inconvenience to your customers, and it could cost them money. With a franking machine, it’s easy to get accurate postage each time. This helps avoid the embarrassment of under-stamping.

6. Inventory Check

When you have a franking machine, you never have to worry about stamps. This is not just in the financial sense but in other ways. You don’t need to worry about recording stock or inventory for your postage. You also eliminate the need to think about replenishment always. It might seem like a minute benefit; however, it contributes to time and energy for business activities.

7. Expense Accounts

Any transaction made with a franking machine can always be traced and tracked. With this, you can monitor each postage cost at the touch of a button. This allows your business to stay within a specific postage budget. Additionally, you can also make adjustments when necessary.

A franking machine provides immense benefits to business owners. As your business operations expand, you will need to consider strategies to improve your business operations. Having a franking machine is one of that equipment that provides you a multitude of benefits. This is critical for small businesses that are searching for ways to improve in various aspects.

With the change in global workplace culture, it is now more common to have scattered teams working from different parts of the world. This has immensely benefited many organizations as they get to work with experts in the industry regardless of their location.

Remote work became the new norm due to the sudden onset of the pandemic and managers had to resort to virtual meetings and online communication tools to manage work effectively. Virtual meetings are easy to schedule, inexpensive and give you full control over who you want to include.

But this does not mean that hosting a productive virtual meeting is free of challenges. When compared to an in-person meeting, the online communication feels disintegrated and managers often find it difficult to get everyone to contribute. In this article, we’ve listed top strategies to conduct an effective and productive virtual meeting.

Find the right tool:

Much of the credit for seamless communication goes to the tool that you use for a virtual meeting. The correct online meeting software will streamline the process and make it easy to share information amongst team members. Make sure it has an easy-to-use interface that employees can quickly navigate.

While every meeting will have a different purpose, you need to ensure your online meeting software supports high-quality audio and video. It is necessary for virtual meetings to be conducted on a software that can easily accommodate other collaborative tools.

Prepare in advance:

Entering into a virtual meeting unprepared is as bad as walking into a room not knowing what to speak. When you schedule a meeting, you need to have an agenda and ensure that it encompasses everything that you need to discuss in the meeting.

Not only do you need an agenda for yourself, but also to let everyone who is a part of the meeting know what the topics for discussion are. This will help them stay focused on the topic and ensure a productive outcome.

Make sure to check your technology and an internet connection to avoid any technical issues during the meeting. Additionally, it’s essential to create visually appealing presentation materials to keep your audience engaged. Before the meeting, take time to practice your delivery and pay attention to your posture, tone, and body language to make sure you are projecting confidence. To take your virtual presentation skills to the next level, consider enrolling in executive presentation coaching programs and workshops that offer personalized feedback and guidance on your speaking and visual aids, helping you to build confidence and develop a polished delivery style. Properly preparing your speech and presentation, you will be able to effectively communicate your message and leave a lasting impression on your virtual audience.

Involve everyone:

To have a truly successful virtual meeting, it is important to include only those who are important for that very discussion. Moreover, you need to ensure every meeting participant is involved and contributing to the discussion.

Managers need to be proactive and put in the effort to make everyone comfortable so they feel involved in the conversation. A good strategy is to take pauses to get everyone’s suggestions and approvals after every important topic on the agenda.

Keep in mind different time zones:

When managers are handling distributed teams and need multiple team members to collaborate over a discussion, it is crucial to keep in mind the time difference. To involve everyone from various time zones in a virtual meeting, look for a time slot that can be adopted by everyone.

Expecting team members from a certain time zone to always make adjustments is unjust and must be avoided. If you need to conduct meetings often with teams scattered globally, you can rotate meeting times so as to be fair to everyone.

Eliminate multitasking:

Often employees are running on tight deadlines and have very limited time on their hands. When managers schedule a meeting in such a situation, it is not surprising that employees would attempt to multitask in order to achieve multiple things within the given time frame.

Managers must take efforts to ban and eliminate multitasking completely because it can actually turn out to be counterproductive if employees do not pay full attention during the meeting. They may end up missing out on valuable information that can lead to mistakes in the future.

Conclusion:

While basic etiquettes are still applicable, hosting effective virtual meetings requires a very streamlined approach to ensure everyone’s time gets utilized well and you get the most out of it. The above strategies should be incorporated to ensure virtual meetings are meaningful and successful.