Articles - Page 156

Agentic AI for Agencies in 2026

bmckeiver

In order to be successful in any niche, it’s essential to have an angle that no other business has exploited.
The team behind <a href="http://quadwrangle.com">QuadWrangle</a> believe they’ve done just that, with their bespoke CMS platform that ‘connects alumni to personalized content to maximize engagement – and donations.’
<img alt="Logo.jpg" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/n4LNSuy1xs5Nmjs5_lOTdNGhu3JxFNU1H4IfXSg2hVK8Iw7MgI42CpVq6-ugO2_t9WepyhX5una3XlxF3TdVn-cY74Yo2sfCVWOybrN0Vb-_tI320EVZ_9MkwTQnGvcWRFwvbIwG" />
QuadWrangle are offering potential nonprofit customers an opportunity to turn their existing college alumni network into an alumni database of potential donors.
This new CMS fills a massive gap in the nonprofit market. In a world where consumer media has become the more and more tailored to the individual, QuadWrangle believes that the old university network of connections can be equally personalized and this is what their CMS aims to achieve. In their view, ‘university communications have remained very nebulous’.
They see their CMS platform as a means to end this ‘shapeless communication’ and reverse the 10 year decline they’ve discovered in terms of alumni giving back to their alumni.
QuadWrangle CEO, Nick Zeckets, felt this personally when he discovered that his alma mater had a plethora of needs that he had no idea existed.
QuadWrangle aims to solve a ton of problems by utilizing every alma maters most valuable asset – its alumni.
<h2>So, What Does It Do?</h2>
QuadWrangle aims to ‘connect to myriad sources of consumer information ranging from social data to historical university databases.’ At a glance, this is a hybrid of social media and CMS that looks very interesting.
It does this through four main interlocking products listed on their home page.
<h2>QuadMail</h2>
The QuadMail product seems interesting. It lets you create an unlimited amount of email campaigns that they claim provide ‘quantifiable results’. It also has inbuilt analytics and A/B testing as standard.
However, the real potential here is in their ‘Curated News’ feature. It allows users to display news that’s curated from dozens of university sources into one personalized email. Each story in this email will be tailored to the individual alumnus it’s linked to and it does this automatically. The platform itself creates these emails.
QuadWrangle have utilized a system of dynamic segmentation to ensure that each alumnus gets highly personalized and tailored information.
<h2>QuadWeb</h2>
<img alt="Picture 14.png" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/vb84xv2ZxZbOI0xa8j3IEcyjFnnPrs_r5BQOPBixYLROldIhKGRVtfZGwqRWPGjfTiN6Qesph590iZDfkBgEsogrHlICAIG9qiEoPUTprFSKj7E9c21Nq2fkxGAe6fFhKV-jTuu8" />
The Quad Web product expands on Quad Mail's premise to create a custom, web based, and personally relevant content stream for each alumnus.
QuadWrangle have also included a feature that allows you to manage events through the QuadWeb portal. You can search by Type of Event and Event Location and it also allows you to RSVP and Check-In to see Attendees.
QuadWrangle trademarked Class Ring feature has a lot of potential and it looks like a cornerstone of this CMS. Class Ring was set up to connect grads in every corner of the world – all of whom work in hundreds of different companies in thousands of different roles – and instigate career growth by prompting alumni to ask for help while automatically connecting them to their peers.
<h2>QuadHub</h2>
<img alt="Picture 15.png" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/QY4G_AnwXL5XDfSMXjFD6V42yTqSjoYfm1JZjoLDk5cyRte17Y8iLzprIbgo-_1d6VUXEkkysNa9EQ5BUy3CeULGHOfzNg0OCHfrUFxUuYga9d77v-O3_H18ktqPa8nc6enrMyST" />
The real standout element of this CMS is their QuadHub feature, which allows users to turn the alumni data into information that they can use. Which of your alumni network want to donate? How many of them can give? QuadHub helps you to work that out.
<img alt="Picture 16.png" src="https://lh3.googleusercontent.com/r8G9dNE7Loi7HgHD177NINaRfa-rQjMxLdS2gwGnDcf0jEzRXkhJpE1UR2lcfSPVVc1K_Njpf0twNiPOF-WURIVZI-oUSHIM0kIgbCLnafhF-lQg-HuQRuX-m_7l6FTUkHIVAmVE" />
QuadWrangle believe this section of their service will be of vital use to those looking to maximize their alumni networks potential for donation.
<h2>QuadApp</h2>
This feature bundles all the features of the other three services with a few extra features.
<img alt="Picture 18.png" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/At2TzEqzFECQFTKU5EpwI0Prw2YHl44T6mN8xTDzv24hgAij6o-PXsI76mCjsSdYgWMIkfscYYjMpwok5-B2RLHOwe1syNt-CfiNee6Zva1E_tIJlUYvei_3wxyTHQ34Y30Iy52k" />
The Call To Action feature will be of particular interest to the nonprofit customers it’s targeting. With this feature, custom information is collected through the CMS to drive potential targets for donations.
<img alt="Picture 12.png" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/EtaolHs45paRbzo0gkRnwNwnDKCP8METCLRPPK_O-XOSEPkJ9b4goEHctXDYUpARBpDS5AIsOkhL68Wz9rdsbrFHDT_Wp5wHvII1P5vbm17gHThqphAUcc4xhzV5lpNU7IyEFVYy" />
<h2>Real Potential</h2>
QuadWrangle seems to have a good understanding of the potential of current donors on a personal, human level.
This CMS gives nonprofit organisations the ability to automatically serve each potential donor with the kind of personal content that can compel the donor to engage and give back – both monetarily and otherwise.
Like most content management systems, this newbie will live and die on its UI and its price point. If they succeed in managing these key points, I'm sure QuadWrangle will be around for a while yet. And that's good news for NonProfits everywhere.

QuadWrangle Enters the CMS for NonProfit Market

grainne-logue

As an eCommerce business, one of your main challenges will be keeping your sales up and finding new revenue opportunities. But there is so much you can do to actually streamline your business processes around maximizing your existing sales and revenue channels.
When it comes to increasing your sales, the secret is to focus on your customers; in simple terms, how can you make it as easy as possible for your customers to make a purchase? How can you give them a positive user experience that will make them feel good about making a purchase, and encourage them to return in the future?
In this article we cover the top ways you can optimize your customers’ experience and increase your conversion rates. We focus both on your customers’ journey throughout your website and how this can be made as seamless and intuitive as possible.
1. Increasing your site’s speed and performance
Nearly 57% of visitors will abandon a page if it takes longer than three seconds to load. If this is the first experience your users have of your site, you are off to a bad start. Ultimately, a slow site could be costing you considerable missed out sales and revenue
eCommerce sites are particularly prone to slower performance due to the many integrations involved in the process of selling products, so it is especially crucial that you ensure your website speed is optimal. Look into your hosting options and upgrade if necessary. Ideally your site pages should load in under a second.
2. Ensuring a seamless user experience
Once your users are on your site, how can you make it as easy as possible for them to find what they need? The easier, the more likely they are to make a purchase. Think of ways to make the user journey as smooth and intuitive as possible, mapping out several alternatives and testing them to determine which one is best. This is an extremely critical, but often overlooked, step of developing a website.
When thinking about user experience also consider your branding: does the entire site and checkout process accurately represent your brand? How can you make your visitors associate the experience of being on your website with their experience of your facility or event?
In addition, is this experience consistent across touchpoints and devices? For example, is the user experience on your site consistent with that of your POS, kiosk and mobile channels?
3. Optimizing for mobile
Part of improving your customers’ experience of your site is ensuring it is mobile-responsive. According to Gartner, in 2017 mobile commerce will equal 50% of all digital commerce revenue, so if your site is not already optimized for mobile you could be missing out on significant revenue. Mobile-first design is no longer a nice-to-have, but a must-have.
Of course, this includes ensuring that the checkout process is simple and mobile-friendly, without excluding any of the capabilities of the desktop design, such as product variants.
Another aspect is enabling digital products, such as eBooks or tickets, to be generated in your customers’ desired format. This may include a downloadable PDF, or a text message with a link. The easier you make it for your customers to save their product or ticket, the more satisfied they will be.
4. Implementing a simple and intuitive checkout process
27% of online shoppers have abandoned an order due to a too long or complicated checkout process. If your checkout process becomes a frustrating experience for your customers, they will leave without purchase.
There are several ways you can make your checkout process as simple as possible:
<ul>
<li>Try and keep the checkout process to as few pages as possible, ideally one.</li>
<li>Reduce the number of form fields customers are required to fill in. For example, allow them to check a box if their billing and shipping addresses match.</li>
<li>Remove any steps of the checkout process that aren’t absolutely necessary.</li>
<li>Allow users to check out as guests if they wish to, rather than requiring them to create an account.</li>
<li>Other things you can consider in relation to your checkout process are payment providers; are you accepting the forms of payment your customers require or desire? Should you look into adding new ones, such as Apple Pay?</li>
</ul>
Finally, when it comes to your checkout process, design is incredibly important. Customers will feel more comfortable making a purchase if the site is well designed and mobile-compatible, as an outdated-looking site will give them the impression that it is not secure. Always ensure that your checkout pages are responsive and have an up-to-date design.
5. Increasing the value of customer accounts
Although creating an account should be an optional step for customers, it does provide a great opportunity to build customer loyalty and encourage return visitors.
The most important thing to keep in mind here is that account creation isn’t geared towards collecting lead data for your sales team. As with every other step of the journey, customer accounts should be ways for you to benefit your customers, not the other way around.
Each customer’s account should be a central hub for them to check their purchase information, find and re-download tickets where relevant and keep track of shipping and delivery.
You could also offer special deals and discounts to account owners, or implement a point-accumulation program to encourage future purchases or other actions. For example, you could award points every time a user completes a review or shares content on social media. These are all incentives that will keep you in your customers’ mind and encourage them to choose you, and not a competitor, for future purchases.
6. Upselling and cross-selling
The checkout process also provides great opportunities to generate additional revenue through upselling and cross-selling. You can do this by encouraging customers to purchase “upgraded” versions of your products, or by recommending relevant products.
Clearly display the upgrade options and recommended products as one of the steps of your checkout process and include positive ratings and “most popular” tags to make them more attractive and give them additional credibility.
Upselling and cross-selling is particularly effective when coupled with personalization, which is the next item on our list. Through personalization you can ensure that relevant recommendations are automatically generated depending on the item being purchased, increasing the chance that customers will purchase them or upgrade.
7. Implementing personalization
Personalization is fast becoming a key element of any web strategy, with marketers reporting a 19% uplift in their sales thanks to personalization initiatives.
A great way of implementing personalization on your site is to include relevant recommended products on each page. You can set up recommended products by assigning categories across your site content and dynamically implementing it on each product page.
Personalization can also be applied to content as part of your content marketing strategy. This is an area where you could take advantage of analytics to help you determine what kind of content is most popular with your target audience, and focus your efforts on that.
By including personalization elements on your site you are effectively tailoring the user experience to each of your customers and pushing them in the right direction towards making a purchase.
8. Providing great customer service
Finally, great customer service could give your users the final nudge they need to make a purchase. Typically, a customer will contact customer service when they are having an issue making a purchase, or when they are experiencing a problem with a previous purchase. In both cases, a positive customer experience could make a huge difference not only to their ability to make the purchase, but also to the likelihood that they will return to your site in the future.
Ultimately your aim here is to delight your customers; even if a customer is experiencing negative issues on your site, a positive interaction with your support team could radically shift their experience from a negative to a positive one.
Another thing to keep in mind is to make your customers’ experience as memorable as possible, to help define your brand and remain in your customers’ consciousness. This includes ensuring that your messaging is consistent across online and in-person communications. Is your website’s design and user journey consistent with that they experience when attending your events?
For more web strategy best practices, visit <a href="http://blog.agilitycms.com/" target="_blank">http://blog.agilitycms.com/</a>.

Your Guide to Crafting a UX That Will Increase Your Online Sales

mike-johnston

Today, <a href="http://www.redpoint.net/" target="_blank">RedPoint Global</a>, a leading provider of data management and customer engagement technology, introduced the RedPoint Customer Engagement Hub™ (CEH) solution, helping enterprises overcome the challenges caused by the gap between ever-changing customer expectations and the actual experience brands deliver. The RedPoint Customer Engagement Hub enables brands to continuously connect with customers in a highly relevant way and ubiquitously deliver the promise of the brand across all touchpoints. RedPoint’s hub optimizes customer engagement by providing intelligent and timely orchestration of customer interactions underpinned by a dynamic, unified customer profile (or golden record), along with the most flexible and scalable real-time decisioning capability available in the market.
Consumers today desire frictionless and meaningful engagement with their brands of choice. However, heavy investments in channel-focused engagement systems and point solutions by companies over the past 15 years have inherently created barriers to achieving consistent and relevant brand experiences. This is due to the fact that point solutions are able to use only their partial view of a customer, their function-specific decisioning rules, and the business processes that have been optimized to support a specific function. In reality, point solutions lock up valuable customer data, making it unavailable for other parts of the enterprise in a timely fashion, and often times generate messages that actually conflict with other point solutions. The outcome of these conflicting systems tends to be over communication to customers with a lack of relevance and, ultimately, less revenue to the enterprise. In fact, <a href="http://www.gartner.com/smarterwithgartner/bridging-the-customer-engagement-gap/" target="_blank">Gartner predicts</a>1 that “through 2020, silos of customer engagement will be one of the top three leading causes of customer dissatisfaction for enterprises across all industry segments.” Exacerbating this situation is the explosion of data and the proliferation of touchpoints which are being driven by new channels and the Internet of Things (IoT). 
“Today’s customers expect that all brands will provide targeted, highly-personalized, seamlessly coordinated engagement. To meet the high-level expectations that customers have for consistent, relevant treatments across all interactions, enterprises need a unified customer view,” said David Raab, founder of the Customer Data Platform Institute. “If the company doesn’t meet the expectation of the customer, the response to their disappointment is to look for another brand they believe will do a better job.” 
The RedPoint Customer Engagement Hub solution combines the power of its market-leading customer data platform to create rich, dynamic unified customer profiles with its real-time customer interaction platform that optimizes customer engagement across all touchpoints and enterprise business functions. With RedPoint, enterprises now have a hub for connecting all of their customer data, driving real-time decisions and intelligently orchestrating engagement with their customers.
“In today’s world, customer journeys are no longer linear in nature, as customers now desire dynamic, continuous, and real-time engagement. In response, brands often fall short of presenting themselves ubiquitously and with relevance at every touchpoint,” said RedPoint Global CEO Dale Renner. “Our clients are achieving fantastic results with double digit revenue increases based on the distinct advantages provided by our customer engagement hub solution. Brands with unified customer profiles and effective cross-touchpoint engagement will outperform competitors, which is where the RedPoint Customer Engagement Hub – underpinned with our customer data platform – will become the new standard in the modern enterprise.”
RedPoint’s Customer Engagement Hub is architected to support an open ecosystem approach, allowing enterprises to leverage legacy and new technologies while reducing the friction across these systems. The hub’s key capabilities include:
<ul>
<li>Connected Data: The CEH’s customer data platform processes and integrates2 any and all types of customer data including first-, second-, and third-party; batch and streaming; plus structured and unstructured data to build a unified customer profile — this golden record is then leveraged in real time for decisioning and analytics.</li>
<li>In-line Analytics: The CEH’s in-line analytics operationalizes machine learning, other advanced analytics, and real-time decisioning to drive next-best actions including offers, alerts, notifications, or other contextually correct and relevant messages.</li>
<li>Orchestration: The CEH orchestrates interactions with individuals (e.g. customers, members, patients, policyholders, accounts) across all digital and traditional channels, touchpoints, devices, and engagement technologies.</li>
</ul>
RedPoint was recently recognized in the Gartner Magic Quadrant for Digital Marketing Hubs, which evaluated the RedPoint Customer Engagement Hub.3The RedPoint Customer Engagement Hub is an evolutionary step designed to reinforce RedPoint’s commitment to helping organizations improve customer engagement as a means of growing profitable revenue.
The solution offers flexible deployment options with high speed to value, including being cloud-deployable on Microsoft Azure and Amazon AWS, in an on-premises private cloud or infrastructure, or as a hybrid option that takes advantage of the scale and ease of use of a public cloud for some functions and on-premises infrastructure for other functions.
The RedPoint Customer Engagement Hub solution is available immediately. For more information, call <a href="tel:(781)%20725-0250" target="_blank">+1 781-725-0250</a> or visit <a href="http://www.redpoint.net/" target="_blank">www.redpoint.net</a>. See RedPoint at the 2017 Gartner Data &amp; Analytics Summit March 6 – 9, Booth # 116.

RedPoint Global Unveils New Hub Solution to Solve Customer Engagement Gap

<a href="http://www.liferay.com">Liferay</a>, Inc., provider of the world’s fastest growing enterprise-class open source portal framework, today announced the launch of Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Edition, a full featured portal platform that enables enterprises to collaborate, build communities, and increase revenues. Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Edition (Liferay Portal 6EE) contains enhanced enterprise social collaboration functionality, a built-in Web Content Management system, rich developer tools, and powerful support features.
“Gartner put Liferay in its leader/visionary quadrant in 2010 for a reason. Liferay 6EE meets the industry's demand for a complete web content management system, combined with social collaboration and portal functionality,” said Paul Hinz, Liferay's Chief Marketing Officer. “With Liferay’s strong mission critical enterprise support, Liferay 6EE is the leading solution for any enterprise looking to build a website, a portal, a collaboration solution, or to replace their aging web portal.”
As part of the launch for this highly anticipated product, Liferay 6EE’s debut will be broadcasted live (www.liferay.com/live), today at 9 a.m. PT, when Liferay founder and Chief Software Architect, Brian Chan will showcase the new features from the stage of Liferay’s West Coast Symposium.
“We’ve been a Liferay partner since 2008 and use their platform to create effective portal experiences for our clients, some of which include Marvell, Qualcomm and Monster Energy. We look forward to the 6EE offering and how it can positively impact the communities of the brands we serve,” said Curt Van Inwegen, VP | Client Services at LEVEL, an independent digital agency that delivers integrated marketing and product development for global brands.
To further engage Liferay’s worldwide community and network, a number of special offers are now available, including a free 30-day trial of Liferay 6EE and a “First Year Free” offer made through the Design with Liferay program to select users who are currently using another enterprise portal product.
What’s New in Liferay 6.0: Liferay Portal 6EE is an enterprise-grade, low cost, and easy to use solution for building web sites and applications.  Combining portal, web content management and social collaboration into a single package, Liferay 6EE adds multiple enhanced or new capabilities such as:
Web Content Management (WCM) – Liferay’s built-in WCM system makes web publishing, editing, building new pages, assigning workflows and developing templates extremely easy for both technical and non-technical users.
·      Powerful web-publishing with one-click page creation and dynamic templates and structures ·      User-defined workflow that can be applied to both Liferay and non-Liferay tools, leveraging an extremely granular system of roles-based authorization ·      Dynamic content sharing and document management with Microsoft Office® integration ·      Localization into over 30 languages ·      Seamless integration with social collaboration features
Enterprise Social Collaboration – Social features are integrated into the community and organization-centric structure of the portal, allowing departments or other user-defined groups to collaborate in real-time. Notable features include:
·      Enhanced, real-time activity tracking of user and group activity ·      Full suite of RSS-enabled and ratable Wikis, Blogs, and Forums ·      Familiar office tools including enterprise chat, a built-in mail client, personal and group calendars, and address books and contacts ·      Collaborative and team-driven content creation ·      OpenSocial support allowing Google Gadgets to run natively in Liferay ·      Full Social API framework with seamless integration with WCM
Design and Usability – Liferay 6EE offers significant usability enhancements for ease of administration as well as tools to help developers to build dynamic UIs with the Liferay platform. Notable features include:
·      New UI metaframework, Alloy UI, that provides a simple API for building web applications across all three levels of a browser: structure, style and behavior. It works with HTML5, CSS and Javascript. ·      Tasteful use of AJAX technology for a faster and more interactive user experienc ·      Simple and intuitive page and community navigation ·      Familiar desktop conveniences for easy end-user adoption
Extensibility and Integrations – Liferay is flexible, easy to extend, and easy to integrate with external applications and systems. It runs PHP, Ruby, Python, Grails and other lightweight scripting technologies within a robust Java framework, with wide standards and web services support. Notable features include:
·      Liferay Developer Studio, a best-of-breed set of Eclipse plugins that expedites and simplifies plug-in development ·      Built-in social API framework for creating customized social networks ·      Built-in scripting frameworks and flexible scripting support ·      Built-in personalization rules engines ·      A new plugin architecture that fosters the growth of a far-reaching ecosystem of plugins and add-ons for the Liferay platform
Analytics and Management – To help administrators optimize resources and monitor portal performance, Liferay Portal provides helpful dashboards, user activity tracking and management, and key performance statistics (hits/page, average time/hit, max time per request, and more). Notable features include:
·      Simple, clean administrative dashboards for portlet, portal and system performance monitoring ·      Enhanced scalability of the portal’s search engine via ClusterLink, allowing administrators to cluster a series of search engines without a SAN ·      Sharding capabilities that greatly improve space optimization and usage of the portal database ·      Liferay Enterprise Support Application (LESA), a new, easy to use enterprise-grade support interface for customers
“With tens of thousands of enterprises facing ‘end of feature life’ for their current portal, enterprises should leverage the ‘Design with Liferay’ program and begin evaluating Liferay 6EE now,” said Liferay’s Hinz.
About Liferay, Inc.
Liferay is the provider of leading enterprise open source portal and collaboration software products, used by companies worldwide, including Allianz, AutoZone, Benetton Group, Cisco Systems, Lufthansa Flight Training, The French Ministry of Defense, and the United Nations. The company offers professional services, technical support, custom development and professional training to ensure successful deployment in the most demanding IT environments.
Liferay, Liferay Portal, and the Liferay logo are trademarks or registered trademarks of Liferay, Inc., in the United States and other countries.

Liferay Launches Liferay Portal 6 Enterprise Edition at the Liferay West Coast Symposium

Many business owners and executives have only recently began hearing terms like ‘Web Experience Platform’, or ‘Enterprise Web Content Management’. These platforms allow businesses to build and manage their websites and mobile apps in a central location and make content edits/updates. They also provide robust digital marketing, lead capture, automated email marketing, site analytics, e-Commerce, amongst other features and functionality.
Maybe you have no idea what a “CMS” is. Maybe “Digital Experience” means nothing to you. It’s probably because your web development or ad agency – or whoever manages your online presence – doesn’t want you to know. Why not? Because they want you to continue believing that only they can do what they do.
It’s difficult to explain web content management to people who are so used to having little to no control over their online presence. It’s like explaining the concept of the telephone to a 19th century Western Union messenger. It's commonplace that if an employee wants to edit content their website they would have to call corporate and the IT department’s turnaround time can range from that day of to several months. With a CMS or it's more evolved counterpart, the Web Experience Platform, you can login yourself, make content edits, build applications, web pages, and mobile apps, all on a permission-based system. This is such a relatively new concept in the mind of businesses that despite this offering, they still hold onto the legacy vendors they’ve used for so long, even though a CMS or <a href="https://www.solodev.com/" target="_blank">Web Experience Platform</a> negates the needs for all of those vendors.
That’s because it sounds too good to be true but in this rare case — it’s not. The irony is this, whatever you’re going to pay those other vendors for can be built or integrated with a single CMS platform. Once you have a robust CMS platform, you don’t need any more vendors or agencies.
So let’s break it down to its most elementary level:
TRADITIONAL MODEL
<ul>
<li>Hand coded websites which need to be manually updated by developers and graphic designers</li>
<li>Use of multiple agencies (website agency, design agency, SEO agency, ad agency, print agency, email marketing vendor, video agency, etc.) to maintain your online presence</li>
<li>Multiple websites to update one at a time</li>
<li>Poor mobile experiences on phones or tablets</li>
<li>Huge expenses to multiple vendors to maintain online presence</li>
</ul>
NEW MODEL
<ul>
<li>Mobile responsive beautifully designed websites</li>
<li>Multi-site management through a single login and interface</li>
<li>Direct content edits and updates without the need for the IT department</li>
<li>Singular expense for CMS that handles websites, digital marketing, and ecommerce and all that encompasses</li>
<li>Ability to serve up different content to different customer segments (web experience platform only)</li>
</ul>
In the traditional model, there was much more money to be had in our industry as software vendors could charge based on list items, services, huge annual license costs, private label offerings with inflated margins, misquoted hours, all of which piled up when there are dozens of vendors you barely know who don’t communicate with one another. Just to maintain your online presence you’d pay a dozen vendors a fortune every year without any way to track your return on investment. Agencies told you what you “needed” and then charged you for it month in and month out, year in and year out. When you wanted to swap out a logo you'd have to call someone and wait weeks for it to happen, let alone getting the logo made in the first place and paying the price for a color change. So many vendors carrying so many different responsibilities made it nearly impossible to accurately track Key Performance Indicators (KPIs).
The traditional model made it very difficult to maintain a strong online presence with a unified and powerful digital brand behind it using the traditional model as many companies do, some out of complacency, some because of lack of understanding and most for fear of change. The new model is a dream for executives, middle management, marketers, content authors, and the foot soldiers of Corporate America. With a Content Management System, your company can now have control over their entire online digital experience from A to Z without dozens of vendors. Imagine the possibilities.
<h3>About the Author</h3>
Shawn Moore is the founder &amp; CTO of Solodev and the driving force behind the Solodev Web Experience Platform. A visionary leader, Shawn has strategically grown Solodev from inception to a successful company that services clients across the nation and has been named to the Inc. 5000’s fastest growing private companies for the past two years in a row.
Winner of several industry awards for Best CTO and CIO, Shawn Moore is changing the content management landscape with Solodev. With over a decade of executive experience serving as CEO of Solodev and COO for software company Helium Flash, Shawn has the industry knowledge and product passion that continues to drive the development of the Solodev Platform. He is a graduate of Stetson University and often speaks on IT related trends and topics at conferences and universities across the state.

Inside the Machine of the Digital Experience

Sitecore released their online marketing suite and since doing so, have had a major impact on the CMS market with their new capabilities. Today, we're going to take a look at the power of this application and what it can do to help your business.
So what exactly does the OMS do?
Real Time Site Personalization
So what does this mean to you? Well, in a nutshell, the system lets you set up variables that change the content and layout of your website based on those variables.
Sound complicated? It's not. Here's an example.
Let's say you have a page on Sports and you decide that if visitors to your site click on a certain link related to hockey, then you want the site to restructure the main page around Hockey and put less focus on the other sports. It will do all of this, in real time.
What it does is show a different type of site, based on the different type of visitor you receive, increasing your ability to target your site towards the different groups of visitors you receive. Anyone who knows marketing knows this is a powerful tool.

Do you ever ask yourself the following questions: What are my visitors doing? How are they navigating my site to get the content they need and is there a better way I can restructure my site to help them find that content quicker? That's where the new advanced analytics come in to play.
Advanced Analytics
You'll know the sources they came from, what they searched for on and off site, the goals they reached and content they consumed.

You can also setup and structure campaigns around this data:

You can also help your sales staff by providing them with advanced analytics, alerts and more using the new Sales enablement features.
Sales Team Alerting with Prospects
I could try to describe this myself but the Sitecore team does it in a way I can't really reword better:
<blockquote>
The Online Marketing Suite transforms your website into an extension of the Sales team by identifying new and active prospects on the site, detailing the experience in understandable terms, and immediately providing this intelligence to Sales. With our GeoIP tracking abilities, your sales team will know the lead's Country, State, City, and potentially their Company name. You'll get quick notification, well scored and qualified leads, and have insight into your website visitors' experience on the site.
This can be integrated into leading CRM systems, so you can leverage and control this new information in your familiar environment.
</blockquote>

This video explains it best and gives you a good rundown of the Sitecore CMS features (Warning: 75 minutes in length):
<a href="http://vimeo.com/12339525">Sitecore CMS</a> from <a href="http://vimeo.com/user2149662">mike johnston</a> on <a href="http://vimeo.com">Vimeo</a>.
After watching the video, if you aren't convinced that this is revolutionary and a must have for your CMS, then I must be missing something.
Learn more at <a href="http://www.sitecore.net">Sitecore</a>

Sitecore Review: Sitecore online marketing suite.

Spoonlabs is proud to announce the arrival of 4.5 version of Vivvo, its flagship news content management platform, featuring over 140 enhancements and improvements and presenting a new paradigm for profitable and effective online news publishing.
The new version offers a range of important features and significant usability enhancements, including tight integration with Google™ Analytics (GA) – a truly amazing service for marketers that will bring an important edge in evaluating the success of formats, news stories and other featured content.
Furthermore, Vivvo 4.5 is introducing a range of improvements and features including: –   Memory-based caching, bringing dramatic improvements to site's speed and content delivery; –   Content Versioning (revisions) and Content Scheduling; –   New concept of topics, giving publishers the ability to provide semantic relations to the content, cross-post across different sections, and control homepage and other sections of website with incredible ease; –   Trashbin/soft delete function, which not only keeps articles from accidental deleting, but allows publishers to precisely manage control over who can delete articles and also to set automatic purge periods.
These important instruments in a content management process will give busy webmasters, developers and entrepreneurs tools that up to now have only been available to large media organizations and will enable them to extract new sources of revenue from online readers and advertisers.
With the version 4.5, Vivvo CMS retains its leadership position as the most cost-effective package on the commercial open source market; prices start at only $295 and $999, for the professional and the developer/server license, respectively.
More about Vivvo CMS
Vivvo is a news content management system (CMS) atop a powerful framework, empowering thousands of industry leading online newspapers, magazines, portals and media agencies. Localized to over 25 different languages, including Arabic, Chinese, Persian and Spanish, its continually growing community of webmasters, developers, design studios, entrepreneurs and technology partners testifies to its effectiveness as an online news publishing solution. You can start evaluating Vivvo 4.5 instantly by signing up for a free trial account hosted on our servers for 21 days: <a href="http://www.getvivvo.com/" target="_blank">http://www.getvivvo.com</a>
For more information about Vivvo CMS and the new version, please visit us at: <a href="http://www.vivvo.net/whatsnew/" target="_blank">http://www.vivvo.net/whatsnew/</a>

Spoonlabs Launches Vivvo 4.5, a New Version of Their Flagship Content Management Platform

SEATTLE, WA – Ingeniux Corporation, a leading provider of web and social content management software, today announced the release of Ingeniux CMS Version 7. The updated version of Ingeniux CMS elevates usability for enterprise web content software and delivers a robust set of integrated website management capabilities.
The enhanced Ingeniux Universal Client changes the paradigm for managing and updating web content. A new In-Context Editing feature enables both HTML and well-formed XML content to be edited in Preview Mode, while taking full advantage of content reuse and component-based XML content.
The overall client experience has also been redesigned. New accordion panes organize key features and content items, ribbons have been added to streamline the user experience.
A new Application Manager delivers the power of an app store directly within Ingeniux CMS. A wide range of Ingeniux certified App Modules and third-party solutions enable web managers to easily enhance their sites with valuable business solutions and powerful site management capabilities.
Site management enhancements include integrated analytics for Google and other providers; built-in 301 redirect management and vanity URLs; and enhanced URL system to support extension-less URLS and other formats.
Key Features Released in Version 7.0 include:
<ul>
<li>In-Context Editing: supports structured and unstructured content</li>
<li>Analytics: provider model supports built-in Google analytics</li>
<li>Asset Management Enhancements: multi-file upload and image editing</li>
<li>Redirects Module: create 301 redirects and custom URLs</li>
<li>Scheduled Content Notifications: set reminders for content updates</li>
<li>Redesigned Universal Client: accordion pane, new tool bar, ribbons and tertiary menu</li>
<li>Application Manager: a built-in app store with key business solutions and web applications</li>
<li>International Client Localization: Spanish, French, German, Italian, and Chinese language packs and localization reporting for site definitions</li>
</ul>
“With Version 7.0 we continue our pursuit of both power and usability.  Too often web content management software sacrifices one to get the other,” said Jim Edmunds, Ingeniux President and CEO. “Our user's expect enterprise CMS software to be as intuitive as their personal blogging solution, but with a lot more features and functionality.  With Ingeniux CMS 7.0 customers' get the best of both worlds: secure, powerful, and modern web CMS software delivered in a familiar and easy-to-use web interface.”
For further information or a demonstration of Ingeniux CMS 7 please visit <a href="http://www.ingeniux.com">http://www.ingeniux.com</a>, email <a href="mailto:info@ingeniux.com">info@ingeniux.com</a>, or call 1-877-445-8228.

Ingeniux CMS 7 Elevates Usability for Web Content Management

Best Video Experience

Give your audience the best video experience

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Welcome to the July edition of our new monthly recommendations posts. This edition focuses on recommending a number of products based on the types of requests we've seen come through from companies and individuals in the market for a CMS. Hopefully, you will find the right product for your needs by reviewing these recommendations lists.
Of course, should you find yourself needing additional assistance, you can <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/contact/">contact us</a> and we'll be happy to provide you some consulting for a low hourly rate, or, if finances are a problem, comment here and we'll do our best to respond.
On with this month's edition….
I receive a lot of questions from people who are looking for an easier way to manage their existing web pages and are interested in adding them to a CMS. Some of the main reasons for wanting to do this are:
Rest assured there are many solutions on the market that can help you accomplish this goal. Today, we're going to take the time to introduce you to some of these solutions.
There are numerous systems that are available for the integration of existing websites that were designed before CMS' started to become more and more popular. One of the best solutions to really take this to the next level, in our opinion, is <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/surreal-cms" target="_blank">Surreal CMS</a>. Surreal offers what we feel is one of the easiest and painless ways of integrating multiple sites into one simple and easy-to-use CMS interface that we've seen to date.
Instances when you would use this type of CMS:
<ol>
<li>You would like to hand off the maintenance of the website to someone with little or no HTML knowledge or background.</li>
<li>You would like to add some additional security to your site by making it more manageable from a centralized interface with usernames and passwords.</li>
<li>You find it frustrating and more difficult than you feel it should be to add content to your site quickly and easily.</li>
<li>You have clients that have, or you have, multiple websites that need to be integrated into a single CMS.</li>
</ol>
SurrealCMS does this all, with ease and with a nice interface that will make your clients and you smile.
Don't believe us? Check out this video showcasing how simple it really is:
Interested? The basic package is free, can't beat that with a stick. Check it out at the <a href="https://www.surrealcms.com/">Surreal CMS</a> website.
The second most common question we've been getting a lot of lately has gone a little something like this:
I need a system that makes it easy for me, as a non-designer, to really come up with something special and unique for my website. I want to be able to do this myself or with very little training. I would also like something that takes care of the whole SEO thing for me and last but not least, I want it hosted (SaaS – Software as a service).
Fortunately, there are plenty of solutions out there that fit this bill. Unfortunately, they aren't always obvious to people, so let's make a list shall we?
In order of my personal preference:
<ol>
<li>Squarespace – recommended by many an SEO expert, Squarespace has probably one of the nicest and most feature-rich platforms for designing a website, period. It contends with some of the more prominent CMS platforms that cost far more and it has built-in (and nice) analytics. You can try it for free at their website.  Did you think we'd make you learn about it all by yourself? Heck no, we went ahead and did a review just for you. You can check it out here: <a href="/squarespace-review-the-long-awaited-commerce-solution/">Squarespace Review</a></li>
<li>Gutensite – Gutensite, like Squarespace, takes the complication out of setting up a CMS. It's a beautiful system with a ton of power. Its only fault is that there is so much you can do that it can get a little bit overwhelming. This, however, also makes it quite powerful and because we love you so much, we reviewed it to: <a href="/meet-gutensite-a-platform-for-creating-beautiful-and-powerful-business-websites/">Gutensite Review</a>.</li>
<li>LightCMS – LightCMS has slightly fewer options than the above two but wins big points for customer service. They have an amazing response time and a system that is not at all overwhelmed with features. It's easy to use, cost-efficient, and generally pretty. You can check it out at <a href="http://www.speaklight.com">LightCMS</a> (we haven't got around to reviewing this one yet, sorry!)</li>
</ol>
Ok. That takes care of the most common questions we received for June 2010. Please add to the mix in the comments below and we'll answer your questions there and who knows, we may even add them to next month's edition.
As always, Happy CMS'ing.
The CMS Critic Team.

CMS Critic Recommends... - July Edition

We’ve written a lot about CMS, CRM, and Marketing Automation platforms here at CMS Critic, but are all of them essential?
For a big brand chasing global or even regional dominance, I think the answer is a resounding yes.
<img alt="Screen Shot 2015-12-20 at 22.01.07.png" src="https://lh4.googleusercontent.com/B2fW-HQK5xiQzeif91KFPqfJswNMn0GI_hC-rKU1gw5rv9MpcBZfxCL6pZxmWGfDpmI3KPgY1ttnqoVC49Yl-R8Is1a_fi4H_bXyWO0_sN12b5kII8_i6G-eNhQPkg3NXzFEHDr1" />
<h2>Combining CMS, CRM &amp; Marketing Automation Software</h2>
Here are a few key benefits of combining these platforms:
<ul>
<li>
Improved forecasting and reporting
</li>
<li>
Combined customer information and insights
</li>
<li>
Increase in qualified leads
</li>
<li>
Real-time personalization
</li>
<li>
Increased efficiency
</li>
</ul>
Without the seamless integration of your CMS, CRM, and Marketing Automation platforms, you’ll end up wading through mounds of useless reports and inaccurate data – and no-one has time for that.
By thinking of your marketing system as a whole, rather than dividing these three components, you can ensure that you gain the best possible results from your sales and marketing.
Let’s break it down and talk about what each component in this integrated marketing system should look like.
<h2>1. CMS</h2>
Most businesses understand that your content management system should make it easier for you to edit and post content. But that’s not all it should be doing.
A good CMS should:
<ul>
<li>
provide useful audience insights
</li>
<li>
allow you to influence the prospects buying process with CTA’s and relevant content
</li>
<li>
assess what types of content are most popular with your audience
</li>
<li>
provide both macro and micro analytics – i.e. data on your website and your audience
</li>
</ul>
<h2>2. CRM</h2>
Your CRM is your business intelligence hub. At the moment, CRM systems are seriously misunderstood. There is no uniform process in place and many businesses are unsure of how to actually get the most out of their CRM system.
Because of this, CRM systems aren’t being utilized to their full potential and these advanced customer management tools are simply becoming ‘organizers’ for salespeople.
A good CRM should:
<ul>
<li>
assign your leads and opportunities into separate databases – e.g. cold/warm/qualified
</li>
</ul>
<ul>
<li>
document what stage of the buying process each prospect is in
</li>
<li>
show how each lead arrived on your site
</li>
<li>
provide relevant background info on each prospect – such as previous contact and their activities on your site
</li>
</ul>
You can view our Top 10 CRM Systems <a href="https://www.cmscritic.com/top-10-crm-systems/">here.</a>
<h2>3. Marketing Automation/Email Marketing</h2>
Marketing Automation and Email Marketing are very closely aligned, so I’m going to combine them for the purpose of this post.
A good marketing automation or email marketing system should:
<ul>
<li>
track which users receive, open, read, and click on your marketing emails
</li>
<li>
allow you to create custom fields to search, segment, and organize your email lists
</li>
<li>
have the technology to bypass spam folders and ensure your marketing messages are received
</li>
<li>
analyze site visitor behavior and activity and use lead scoring to determine their value.
</li>
<li>
assist you with moving prospects along the sales funnel by delivering tailored marketing messages based on their stage in the buying process
</li>
</ul>
When these three components are combined, you’ll have a seamless process in place to manage all of your sales and marketing activities.
<h2>Content Publishing and Distribution</h2>
<ul>
<li>
With your CMS, optimize your content for SEO and post it to your site
</li>
<li>
Assign a custom CTA to invite users to signup to receive more content
</li>
<li>
Create a draft marketing email and share this content via your marketing automation/email marketing system
</li>
<li>
Share this draft with your sales team via your CRM (because it’s so awesomely integrated)
</li>
<li>
Share the content via social media
</li>
</ul>
<h2>Lead Capturing and Closing The Sale</h2>
Once your CMS captures a conversion – e.g. an email sign up, your marketing automation will identify them as a ‘hot’ lead.
This information will be delivered to your CRM for the attention of your sales team, who will then follow up with the lead, thank them for signing up to the newsletter, and have a chat with them about their specific business needs.
This should lead to a sale – if your sales team are up to scratch (hey, technology can’t do everything).
<h2>The Bigger Picture</h2>
By integrating these three marketing platforms, you can give yourself an even clearer overview of your customer journey from start to finish and put efficient actions in place to increase conversions.
The insights you’ll receive into the customer lifecycle will allow you to identify customers who would have previously flown under the radar, and enable you to present them with right offer at the right time. Having this level of business intelligence is crucial for today’s marketer and it’s something that you really can’t afford to ignore.
Is your brand benefitting from an integrated marketing system? Let us know how it’s working for you in the comment below.

CMS, CRM & Marketing Automation: Why Your Brand Needs All Three

Upland Software, Inc. (Nasdaq: UPLD), a leader in cloud-based Enterprise Work Management software, today announced it has acquired Adestra Ltd., a leading provider of enterprise-grade email marketing, transaction and automation software. Adestra's cloud solution enables over 400 leading brands to understand and engage individual customers with relevant, timely, and effective communications. Adestra will be combined with Upland's mobile messaging, customer engagement, and knowledge management solutions to create a powerful product suite serving the $5.9 billion CXM market which is forecast to grow 23% per year to $16.9 billion by 2022.1 The acquisition adds approximately $18 million in annualized revenues and will be immediately accretive to Upland's Adjusted EBITDA per share.
The acquisition of Adestra adds a fundamental component to Upland's CXM Solution Suite, which now includes multi-channel messaging and email, automated mobile conversations via SMS, MMS, and RCS, mobile wallet functionality, Voice of Customer (VOC) and Voice of Employee (VOE) solutions, advanced knowledge management, and marketing automation and personalization. Upland will continue to buy, build, and integrate additional components to this CXM offering in order to enable more personalized customer experience, enhanced multi-channel engagement across the customer journey, deeper process automation, sophisticated analytics and reporting, and coordinated services delivery with CXM expertise.
“Adestra broadens Upland's product portfolio, strengthens our CXM solution suite, and builds our sales capacity and footprint,” said Jack McDonald, chairman and CEO of Upland Software. “Moreover, the transaction is immediately and meaningfully accretive to Adjusted EBITDA per share and takes Upland to an approximate $190 million annualized revenue run rate,” he added. “As this transaction demonstrates, our acquisition pipeline is robust, and we are actively pursuing additional opportunities.”
“Sophisticated enterprises need multiple intelligent, inter-connected communications channels that integrate with key platforms to meaningfully engage across the entire customer journey at scale,” said Jed Alpert, SVP of Customer Experience Management Solutions at Upland Software. “Adestra's established presence in restaurant and retail, travel, media and publishing, and nonprofits, enhances our existing strengths in these industries, and the addition of their technology to Upland's Customer Experience Management suite will enable our customers to deliver consistently personalized, multi-channel experiences across their entire customer lifecycle.”
The purchase price paid for Adestra was $56.0 million in cash at closing, net of cash acquired, and a $4.2 million cash holdback payable in 12 months (subject to indemnification claims). Upland expects the acquisition to generate annual revenue of approximately $18 million, of which approximately $16.7 million is recurring, subject to reductions for a deferred revenue discount as a result of GAAP purchase accounting, estimated at $0.1 million for the remaining half of December 2018. The acquisition is within Upland's target range of 5-8x pro forma Adjusted EBITDA and will generate at least $8.0 million in Adjusted EBITDA annually once fully integrated. The acquisition will be immediately accretive to Upland's Adjusted EBITDA per share.
In connection with the acquisition of Adestra, Upland amended and expanded its credit facility from $358.9 million to $400 million. Specifically, $61.1 million of new term debt was drawn, taking Upland's gross debt outstanding from $223.9 million to $285.0 million with debt, net of cash on hand, now at approximately $265 million at a maximum interest rate of LIBOR + 400 basis points (currently at approximately 6.3%). Further details regarding the transaction can be obtained in the Form 8-K filed on December 13, 2018.
Business Outlook
Upland today also announced that it has raised its full year 2018 guidance to reflect the Adestra acquisition, raising revenue, recurring revenue, and Adjusted EBITDA guidance ranges. The increase in 2018 revenue guidance below is net of an estimated $0.1 million reduction for a deferred revenue discount as a result of GAAP purchase accounting and all guidance adjustments are prorated for a closing date of December 12, 2018.
For the quarter ending December 31, 2018, Upland expects reported total revenue to be between $42.5 and $44.5 million, including subscription and support revenue between $39.4 and $40.6 million, for growth in recurring revenue of 62% at the mid-point over the quarter-ended December 31, 2017. Fourth quarter 2018 Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $15.6 and $16.4 million, for an Adjusted EBITDA margin of roughly 37% at the mid-point, representing growth of 64% at the mid-point over the quarter-ended December 31, 2017
For the full year ending December 31, 2018, Upland expects reported total revenue to be between $147.2 and $149.2 million, including subscription and support revenue between $134.2 and $135.4 million, for growth in recurring revenue of 58% at the mid-point over the year ended December 31, 2017. Adjusted EBITDA is expected to be between $52.0 and $52.8 million, representing growth of 73% at the mid-point over the year ended December 31, 2017. The transaction will be immediately accretive to Upland's Adjusted EBITDA per share.
About Upland Software
Upland Software (Nasdaq: UPLD) is a leading provider of cloud-based Enterprise Work Management software. Our family of applications enables users to manage their projects, professional workforce and IT investments; automate document-intensive business processes; and effectively engage with their customers, prospects and community via the web and mobile technologies. With more than 4,000 customers and over 450,000 users around the world, Upland Software solutions help customers run their operations smoothly, adapt to change quickly, and achieve better results every day. To learn more, visit <a href="http://www.uplandsoftware.com/" target="_blank">www.uplandsoftware.com</a>.

Upland Software Acquires Adestra

Finding the right CRM for your business can take a lot of time and effort, so it’s important to ensure that you get a return on your investment.
Thankfully, there are a range of CRM add-ons and integrations on the market which are designed to help you to get the most out of your CRM. And it’s definitely worth checking these out, rather than launching ‘straight out of the box’.
<img alt="Screen Shot 2016-01-02 at 03.39.22.png" src="https://lh5.googleusercontent.com/HCSVNFV0_-jw7s5vc71lc9AD3u_yaUaiMbh2oaWilgEGechSQdVIJF5-57crPUCHay4w29mDanMEPeSf6KlrKWe2oXyQqPFS4eHY8QjfvXsWU6GFP6QAb2EK_uEBJtkKUitl_DZk" />
Whether you’re a small business owner or running a large scale enterprise, there’s a CRM integration out there that was made for you. To give you a headstart, I’ve put together 8 of the most popular CRM tools around at the moment.
<h2>1. Woopra (Analytics)</h2>
Woopra is a web analytics tool that is designed to help businesses to better understand their customers.
Using Woopra, your sales and support teams can monitor real-time user activity from directly within your CRM. Within seconds, you can find out how a user reached your site, where they went when they got there, what pages they viewed, what browser they used, what device they used, and what country/city they live in. Your team can even initiate a live chat with potential customers as they navigate your site.
Woopra creates unique profiles for each customer based on their behaviours and site activities, which are then used to produce a number of key reports such as funnel analytics, custom analytics, and more.
Find out more about Woopra <a href="https://www.woopra.com/">here.</a>
<h2>2. MailChimp (Email Marketing)</h2>
MailChimp is extremely easy to set-up and use and it’s one of the more well-known email marketing tools on the market.
MailChimp’s comprehensive free plan makes it perfect for small-medium businesses and newcomers to email marketing. The ‘free forever’ plan allows for up to 12,000 emails and 2,000 subscribers on a monthly basis, which is great for startups or businesses with a limited budget.
Premium and Pay-As-You-Go plans are also available for larger businesses who need more advanced features.
Find out more about MailChimp <a href="http://mailchimp.com/">here.</a>
<h2>3. Pardot (Email Marketing)</h2>
Whilst MailChimp is a great choice for SMEs, a larger business may need a more feature-rich marketing automation tool – and that’s where Pardot comes in. This email marketing tool is really best suited to businesses with a large email marketing list and it’s not ideal for smaller startups.
Pricing starts at $1000 per month for the standard package, and features include:
<ul>
<li>
Prospect tracking
</li>
<li>
Lead nurturing and email marketing
</li>
<li>
Lead Scoring
</li>
<li>
ROI Reports
</li>
<li>
Real-time Alerts
</li>
<li>
Standard CRM Integration
</li>
</ul>
Pardot is a subsidiary of Salesforce but also integrates with other CRMs such as Microsoft CRM, SugarCRM, and Netsuite.
Find out more about Pardot <a href="http://www.pardot.com/">here</a>.
<h2>4. Hootsuite (Social Media Management)</h2>
Hootsuite is a popular social media management tool that allows users to manage all of their social media accounts from one easy to use interface.
Hootsuite makes social media management much more efficient by allowing users to auto-schedule social media updates to share on multiple networks. It also offers some impressive reporting features but you may need to upgrade to a paid package to really get the most out of these. Hootsuite operates a freemium pricing structure, with paid plans starting at $10 per month.
Find out more about Hootsuite <a href="https://hootsuite.com/">here.</a>
<h2>5. Marketo (Engagement Marketing)</h2>
Marketo is a cloud based engagement marketing platform which offers tools such as email marketing, lead generation, and inbound marketing to help businesses to acquire new customers.
Marketo integrates seamlessly with Microsoft Dynamics CRM, NetSuite, Oracle and SugarCrm and Salesforce. The Salesforce integration is its best partnership though – with a real-time sync that refreshes every 5 minutes, making it even easier for users to build and automate their campaigns.
Marketo is best suited to medium companies and it’s strictly for B2B businesses only. There are 3 marketing automation packages available and pricing starts at $895.
Find out more about Marketo <a href="http://www.marketo.com/">here</a>.
<h2>6. Stripe (Payment Processing)</h2>
Stripe is an online payment processing system that allows merchants to take payments via their ecommerce sites.
It’s free to set up an account and you won’t have to jump through hoops to do it either. The fees are also pretty straight-forward with a flat fee of 2.9% + $0.30 per transaction.
Find out more about Stripe <a href="https://stripe.com/">here.</a>
<h2>7. PandaDoc (Document Sharing/Management)</h2>
PandaDoc is a nifty document sharing and management tool that allows users to send, track, negotiate, and sign documents online.
Using your CRM data, your team can quickly create and send documents to seal the deal on their latest sales within minutes. This freemium model allows 3 initial free documents for each user, which is topped up by a further 3 every time they refer a friend to the app.
Find out more about PandaDoc <a href="https://www.pandadoc.com/">here.</a>
<h2>8. Slack (Online Messaging App)</h2>
Slack is a popular online collaboration tool that’s become especially popular with the rise of remote-based employees. This online messaging app allows teams to communicate in real-time and makes it simple to upload and share files in one central place.
Other key features include public and private channels, third party integrations, and an indexed search.
Slack is a freemium service and it has more advanced features which can be accessed if you upgrade to a paid package, but to be honest – the free version has everything you need.
Find out more about Slack <a href="https://slack.com/">here.</a>
<h2>What’s Your Go-To CRM Tool?</h2>
What tools do you use to get more out of your CRM system? Let us know what your go-to tools are in the comments below.

8 Tools to Supplement Your CRM

In this article, I’m going to tell you how to improve your SEO without the usual gimmick, and in a way that actually works wonders for your business and its data security, too.
Let’s begin with a rhetorical question.
What’s the point in having technology to secure and optimize your business if you don’t have enough business to make it worthwhile?
It’s difficult to answer this question in a way that refutes it: On average, nobody will disagree with the statement that the question poses.
The term “SEO,” stands for search engine optimization, and its goal is to increase the amount of money businesses can make on the web through advertising their business, in either organic or paid means.
At one point, when SEO experts discussed technology that improved businesses’ SEO, they were talking strictly about things like hyperlinking, managing a CMS (content management system) or structuring analytics to measure their digital marketing efforts. Sometimes they would even use SEO plugins to optimize on page factors.
But this method of web optimization is dead. Little if any evidence exists to suggest that putative SEO strategies themselves are truly successful in demand generation.
The subject of this article will be entirely different as it’ll pertain to technology that doesn’t just help your SEO, but also your security, client satisfaction, and revenue, and in a very literal sense, regardless of what industry your business is in.
This cloud based technology is often referred to as a web portal, but <a href="http://www.efilecabinet.com/securedrawer/">eFileCabinet’s is called SecureDrawer</a>. Web portals are used to share sensitive information securely. Although SEO and security are the foremost benefits of these technologies, they concomitantly assist organizations in not only sharing a large number of files at once (and quickly), but also sharing files of any size.
Professionals in the financial services and accounting fields are learning to rely on web portals for assistance, as they’ve discovered sending email attachments with sensitive client data is no longer a safe practice, as this information can be breached.
This web portal improves a small business’s SEO (which is extremely important for small businesses, especially ones just getting started), by adding a custom branded URL to your business website’s domain.
For instance, if you were a SecureDrawer user, and your business was an online retailer for outdoors equipment (myoutdoorstore.com), the URL for the web portal page on your site would include SecureDrawer and some variant of your domain. There are two monetary benefits to this. One from an SEO perspective, and another from a client impression perspective.
The Benefit of the Web Portal from an SEO Perspective
For your clients to use the web portal service for sensitive file sharing, they’ll have to pay a visit to your website domain. The more people visit your domain (and the longer they stay on the domain), the greater your organic traffic will become from the search engines.
The Benefit of the Web Portal from a Client Impression Perspective
eFileCabinet customers who use SecureDrawer find that their clients are so impressed with the web portal concept (even prior to using it), that they’ll pay an additional fee to our customers to use it.
This has a more direct and tangible impact on revenue for our customers, but it’s only compounded by the SEO traffic they gain from a stronger organic presence on the web.
Credibility: An Indirect Way the Web Portal Benefits Users
Although less tangible than the previous two benefits, customers using a business’s web portal are likely to give credibility to the organization, and refer their friends to the same business. Using a web portal shows clients that you care about the safety of their information in an age of data breach, identify theft, and malicious cyber threats.
What’s more, the power in the web portal comes from the fact you can share information through it without even removing it or sending it anywhere, just like you would use a normal vault.
Rated best in the web portal business by <a href="http://www.cpapracticeadvisor.com/article/12165783/2016-readers-choice-awards">CPA Practice Advisor</a>, the SecureDrawer website is worth it, particularly if you work in healthcare, financial services, insurance, accounting, manufacturing, law, property management, or real estate.
However, it also is a great bet for any company working in a compliance-centric industry with strictures on how customer information is handled: the SSL and bank-grade encryption (256-bit) that SecureDrawer harnesses for information interchange makes it a paramount feature for client safety.

How Cloud-based File Sharing Technology Improves SEO for Small Businesses

Weglot - The easiest way to translate a website

The easiest way to translate a website

#18164c

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