Monthly Archives: May 2017

How ACT! Contact Management Software Can Build Your Business Credibility

Uncategorized, , , , ,
20170518

Customizing Your Messaging Through Personalization and Segmentation

What helps your business attract customers? Chances are that based on your industry, your company has a very specific value proposition. But ultimately, that value proposition is worth little without a degree of credibility for your brand in the eyes of your audience.

In other words, your brand messaging needs to be both believable and authentic. When your potential customers comes across as less credible than one of your similar competitors, their choice will be easy. To prevent that from happening, you need to make sure your messages are relevant. It’s UnMarketing in action: promote your business subtly, not obviously.

Fortunately, building your credibility is far from impossible. To make it happen, though, you need a software that allows you to gather and organize enough customer and lead data to build more relevant messaging. In other words, you need ACT! Contact Management Software.

The Benefits of a CRM

At its core, ACT! is a CRM – short for customer relationship management system. The benefits of CRMs for businesses across industries range widely, but tend to come back to organization. Put simply, a platform like ACT! allows you to gather as much information as you can about potential customers in a centralized space.

The results, in many cases, are increased productivity and better marketing-sales symbiosis through a singular system. But at the same time, don’t underestimate the potential for increasing your credibility through the same functionality, as well.

Building a Reliable Lead Database

Through ACT!, you can build your lead database. You might have heard about inbound marketing, a promotional philosophy that has taken the internet by storm. It emphases organic lead generation by offering valuable content in exchange for signing up, rather than purchasing or sourcing leads for money.

Of course, you need a place in which to store your new leads. Given that only a quarter of the leads entering your database are actually sales ready, your CRM acts as more than just a pool for new leads. It’s the system through which you can slowly nurture them to become customers.

Customizing Your Messaging Through Personalization and Segmentation

At the core of ACT!, much like many other CRM platforms, is email marketing. You can easily send beautiful emails to every contact in your database. For the sake of your credibility, though, you shouldn’t. Instead, use the features available for you to maximize the relevancy of your messaging. You can increase your messaging relevance in two ways:

  • Personalize your emails. Use the software’s integrated personalization tool to substitute individual details about your leads into each message. From first name to company size, personalization will maximize your engagement rates.
  • Segment your audience lists. Instead of treating every potential customer the same way, consider segmenting them into relatively homogenous lists based on common characteristics. Now, you can build more relevant messages targeted specifically toward that segment’s needs and pain points.

Through this type of customization, your credibility will maximize. Put simply, a potential customers who signs up on your website expects messages that are not promotional, but relevant to their individual needs. A company who can deliver on that expectations quickly and effectively will incur significant goodwill.

Get Started in Implementing ACT!

To build your credibility, especially among new leads, you need to increase your relevance. The authenticity and quality of your messages also matters, but personalization and segmentation are vital first steps.

That, in turn, requires a CRM platform specifically optimize to accomplish your credibility goals. And as it turns out, that’s exactly where ACT! enters the equation. Through its contact management and email tools, you can build a marketing strategy designed to increase your credibility and grow your business. To learn more about implementing the software and optimizing your marketing efforts, contact us.

Backup Disaster Recovery and Proactive Workplace Strategies

Data Backup, , , , ,
20170504

Is your business as secure as it could be?

Nowadays, are enough businesses as secure as they could be? After all, even though many businesses do invest in protection and cybersecurity, they might not update it as regularly as they could. On the other hand, you also have companies who are too laid back and assume their business isn’t susceptible to threats. This is especially true when it comes to small businesses, who are often a much easier target for cybercriminals.

With that said, this is why you need to keep your business secure, and use risk management in the process as well. By definition, risk management is defined as the process of identifying, assessing and controlling threats to an organization’s capital and earnings. With that said, one of the biggest reasons that you need to remain secure in the workplace, is because threats can be very unpredictable. Even more so, it’s time to start taking a proactive approach in dealing with threats, as opposed to a reactive approach. If you’re not familiar with these terms, it’s time to look a little more into what they mean. On top of that, we’ll also look at one of the best proactive workplace strategies out there.

The Difference Between the Two

First of all, what is the major difference between proactive and reactive? For the former, you’re preparing for threats and taking action before anything even happens. With a reactive approach, on the other hand, you don’t take action until after a threat occurs. The latter is why so many businesses have their data compromised regularly. As a common business practice, you need to actively work toward taking action even before something occurs. With that said, here are some of the best proactive workplace strategies.

#1. Backup Disaster Recovery

One of the best proactive approaches to securing your business, is through backing up your data on a regular basis. Aside from using a USB flash drive, always make sure to invest in cloud computing as well. A storing method that backs up all data over the Internet, you don’t have to worry about the data on your hard drive. Besides, all your data is stored virtually. Not to mention you can access this virtual data via any device with an Internet connection.

By storing your data on a regular basis, you’re actively preparing for any incidents that could occur. Speaking of which, cloud computing is also important, because it’s a great backup disaster recovery method. As an example, let’s say that your computer became infected with ransomware or any virus which threatens your sensitive info. Despite the threat of losing all files on your hard drive, recovering all your data would still be a cinch. Just access a non-infected device, and open your virtual files from there. Having all files erased on your hard drive, means nothing if there are copies stored elsewhere. This is why a proactive approach is important, if a business owner was reactive in these situations, they would wait until they were infected before taking any action.

#2. Anti-Virus Software

Anti-virus software is also a proactive approach to dealing with threats and incidents in the workplace. Though complex in nature, how the software operates is as basic as it comes, easily neutralizing any threat that infects your computer. On top of that, anti-virus programs are also actively involved while you’re surfing the web, even giving you warnings about which websites are dangerous. McAfee has a feature that tells you turn back if you visit an unsuspecting website, and Kaspersky monitors the search results of each web browser. The safe websites are marked in green, and the dangerous sites have a red notification.

#3. Educating Your Employees

Considering that being proactive means that you’re actively involved in making sure threats are neutralized, it would also make sense that you educate your employees. That way, you’re keeping the business even more secure. It’s one thing if a business owner is preventing threats before they happen, which is definitely important. However, imagine the possibilities of every employee working from different angles to ensure the business is completely secure. It’s not just enough that you educate them, either, but make sure they are actively taking action.

Between backing up your data, the use of anti-virus software, and educating your employees, these are some useful tips that will lead to your business being more proactive. Don’t wait for the threats to come to come, but be prepared at all times.

For more information about backup disaster recovery, as well as other useful proactive workplace strategies in the workplace, feel free to contact us today at SystemsNet. We look forward to hearing from you, and assisting you in the best way possible.

The 10 Best Benefits of Virtualization Using VMWare

Manage Service, , ,
20170427

Increase the agility of your IT team

With most servers using only around 10% of their processing capabilities, turning to virtualization through VMWare–that is, using a single server or computer to provide the computing power for multiple virtual machines–is an obvious solution. If you’ve been considering virtualization with VMWare for your system, now is the time to make the choice for your organization. These ten key benefits of virtualization will help you make the choice.

1. Decrease your hardware expenses. It’s considerably cheaper to maintain a single machine that holds multiple virtual environments than it is to maintain all the machines your employees need in order to complete their daily tasks. There’s less hardware to deal with, which means lower upfront cost and lower replacement expenses over time.

2. Decrease power and cooling costs. Servers aren’t just expensive to set up. They’re also expensive to maintain. The more physical machines you have running, the greater your power and cooling costs will be. When you opt for virtualization with VMWare, your power and cooling costs will decrease substantially.

3. Decrease the space needed to keep your servers operational. Servers take up a huge amount of physical space. Many offices have entire rooms dedicated to them–and that means space that can’t be used for other purposes. With VMWare, you’ll discover that you can regain much of that physical space, repurposing it for other tasks in your office.

4. Decrease the amount of time spent on software upgrades. The more machines you’re running, the more software updates you have to deal with. By opting for virtualization, you decrease the amount of time your tech team has to spend dealing with those upgrades.

5. Decrease your downtime. With virtualization through VMWare, you can keep the most important components of your business up and running when you need them most. Decreased downtime means happier customers, happier workers, and greater workplace efficiency.

6. Increase the agility of your IT team. When you opt for virtualization with VMWare, your IT team can react more quickly to a variety of problems, solving them quickly and getting your system up and running again fast. This also means less employee downtime waiting on issues to be resolved.

7. Improve your ability to recover from a disaster. Virtualization helps reduce the odds that you’ll store critical data in a single location. When you opt for virtualization, you improve the business’s ability to recover from a data disaster–or even prevent potential problems from being a disaster at all.

8. Increase the lifespan of old applications. Many businesses have at least one application that they rely on that simply can’t be updated anymore. It’s even possible that the company that created it no longer exists! By choosing virtualization with VMWare, you can use that application more easily, extending its lifespan without having to run an ancient machine that no longer meets modern standards.

9. Move running virtual machines with no downtime. There’s no need to undertake a complicated shutdown process. Virtual machines are simple to move, which keeps your business running more smoothly.

10. Make a move to the cloud easier. At some point, you may decide that a move to the cloud is the most efficient decision for your data and servers. By opting for virtualization now, you’ll discover that this move is far easier in the future.

Virtualization is one of the best options for increasing your business’s efficiency, decreasing costs, and keeping your machines up and running when you need them most, rather than having to deal with expensive downtime. If you’re ready to opt for virtualization using VMWare for your company, contact us today to learn more about how this tactic can benefit your company, give you the tools you need, and reduce your operating costs.