Monday, April 29, 2013

Managing Your Time Wisely




Running a successful business makes it important to effectively manage your time.  If your business is does not manage the office time wisely, how can customers rely on you to help them get their jobs done in time?  Here are a few ideas how to make managing time less stressful and more productive:

Create a written to-do list.  Write down everything you need to complete for each project or daily activities.   Try not to create a mental list since this may add to being overwhelmed when items are forgotten mid-day.  Crossing tasks off as they are completed will help you feel a sense of accomplishment. The crossed off tasks can give you a status overview of your day or a project.

After the to-do list has been created, rearrange the tasks by priority.  Put the time-consuming and most difficult tasks as the first items.  People tend to be more efficient in the morning.  Your time will be managed better by completing the most difficult or time-consuming tasks before you start to feel fatigued later in the day.

Some people work better with deadlines.   If you fall into this category, move your deadline time up by 30 minutes to 1 hour.   This gives you a time to strive for and gives you a little freedom if you need extra time without missing the deadline.

Limit your urge to multitask when in stressful situations. Mistakes can happen if trying to multitask, focus on finishing one to-do task before starting another task.

 On the days you don't complete your list, try to identify what was holding you back from completing more items on the list.  Was the priority order wrong,  too many phone call interruptions or issues out of your control?   Stay calm and figure out how to fix these distractions for the following day.

Managing your time will help your business operations run smoother and customers will notice and appreciate the good service.

Tuesday, April 23, 2013

How to Handle Charitable Donation Requests


Donating your services or products to a charitable organization is a good way to give back to the community and effective way to build your company's relationships.   As you would like to say yes to all request, it is just not possible.   Here are a some ways your company can handle these request:

Create a dedicated page on your website to handle charitable contribution request.   You can direct visitors to a specific page to submit a form request.  This form allows you to setup an automated response email for every submitted form request. 

This dedicated page can also contain your step-by-step procedures for handling charitable donation requests.   For example, once a form is submitted, it goes to a committee for review and then the organization will be notified whether or not their request can be fulfilled.

This page is a good place to highlight all the charitable organizations and events you have already sponsored.   Include testimonials from the organizations you have supported on this page.   Showcasing your contributions will show the community how supportive and involved you are which will strengthen your brand and reputation. 

Tuesday, April 16, 2013

Getting people to talk about your business offline


Social media is an essential way to get customers talking about your business.  Word of mouth is still an effective way to keep your business on customer’s minds.  Here are a few ideas to create buzz around your business:

Since MarketMailPrint offers free delivery and pickup, we try to engage with our customers when dropping off a business card order or customer brochures.  Customers have a busy schedule and appreciate staying at the office to handle their day-to-day operations instead of driving in busy traffic to pick up an order at MarketMailPrint.

Tell a story about one of your staff’s accomplishments, achievement or recent trip.   Feature this story  in your business window or front counter.  The story does not need to be very personal but make it interesting to spark conversation.  A table tent may help to make the display even interesting.

Put a guestbook on the front counter or by the receptionist desk.  The presence of a guestbook with help the staff focus on customer service.  Encourage customers to sign in and to write their thoughts about their experience with your business.  Leaving colorful markers or pens by the guestbook may get more customers to participate in signing the book.

Take some of these ideas and incorporate what works best with your business.

Tuesday, April 9, 2013

What is a Landing Page?

What is a Landing Page?

A landing page is a specific page on your website that is dedicated to a product or service.  Landing pages are created to help online users/customers to find what they are searching for without navigating through an entire website.

Create keywords for these landing pages for SEO so that when a user searches on those keywords in a search engine, the return result will be a link to that specific page on your website not your Home page.   This takes the user/customer to the product or service their searching for.

Landing pages have to be structured well to get the attention of your audience.  Make these pages visually interesting and not complicated.   Focus on one product or service per landing page.  Your content should be easy  for anyone to understand and relate to.   Try to keep your content to a computer monitor length.  Avoid too much text which causes the user to scroll. 

Add a clear call to action comment for the user to take.   Adding a simple statement  such as "call us" or "like us on Facebook" will get this user one step closer to becoming a potential customer.
Tracking these landing pages by analytics will help you see how many visitors came to that landing page and what they clicked on.   This gives you valuable information about your website and landing pages on which ones work well and which ones need improvements.

We, MarketMailPrint, created a landing page that list all our product categories.  This allowed us to create another landing page for one specific product so when clicked, the user is taken directly to the product page not the Home page.  See a sample landing page for MarketMailPrint business cards.