Author: Min Tang

Categories
Communication Skills

How To Engage Your Clients

For the last 20-plus years, email has become the standard form of communication for reaching out to clients. Ask any marketer for the last 10 years in particular, and they’ll say one of the top things a business should focus on is building their (email) list.

Snail mail is just too slow, and this increasingly-fast paced world makes a classic phone call unrealistic – what, are you going to call each person individually on your list? Or worse, are you going to have an automated bot interrupt their day with a phone call that is devoid of actual communication?

But now, email too is reaching a ceiling. Is your email going to their SPAM folder? Is it going to their “junk” email address that they use to sign up for all the mailing lists? Is it getting lost between an advertisement from their favorite clothing store and a digital copy of their phone bill?

I don’t think it’s time for us to throw away email entirely – especially not when it comes to communicating information to your warm audience – but if you’re really trying to maintain contact with your existing customers, you might want to try one of these increasingly popular options.

Everyone in the B2B world knows about Slack by now – and for a good reason. Slack’s no-nonsense interface is perfect for communicating with all your clients at once, or sending messages to people in specific groups by sorting them into different Channels. If you love the flexibility of list segmentation, you’ll appreciate the functionality of Slack.

I personally like using Slack as my general hub for connecting with my mastermind clients. We have different Channels for asking questions, for sharing wins, and for my team to make announcements that everyone needs to see. I’ve also created private Channels for each member to have direct access to me and my team, for scheduling calls and sharing documents that don’t need to be shared with the whole group.

Even better? Slack can be used three ways: In your browser, in a Desktop app, or with a mobile app.

Facebook Groups

This one has its pros and cons, but it’s definitely a contender worth discussing! While most people choose to use Facebook Groups as a strategy for growing a free community of warm leads – you could just as easily use a Facebook Group as the home of your paid community.

On the plus side, a Facebook Group offers you a lot of different ways to communicate with the people inside your community. Live videos, photos, GIFs, polls, posts – your options are nearly limitless. And with Facebook giving you the ability to create modules and lessons inside Groups, you could easily sell and host an entire group program or online course inside a Facebook Group (saving you hundreds, even thousands, a year in course hosting fees using a system like Teachable or Thinkific).

Of course, the obvious downside of this option is that you have to have a Facebook account in order to join a Group, and your clients may not have a Facebook account. (Give “people leaving Facebook” a quick search – there’s a lot of movement away from the platform right now.)

Telegram and Voxer

These two apps are nearly identical in terms of functionality: They’re both messenger apps that give you the ability to send and receive voice messages in real time, like a walkie-talkie. You can use these like a classic one-to-one personal message, or you can create a group message that includes everyone on one thread.

While Voxer is more basic in its very orange UI, Telegram is going to be the prime choice for creatives and millennials who value personalization and expression.

I personally like using these kinds of apps for communicating with my top-level clients, who get more intimate, personal access to me. They love getting to hear my “off the cuff” thoughts on different things that they’re encountering in their business without having to wait for a formal group call or one-on-one session, and I love getting to share my insights in a quick, efficient way that can also benefit the other clients in this group who may have the same struggles or questions.

Instagram Close Friends

This one might be a surprising choice, but it’s growing in popularity as an alternative to Facebook Groups. You won’t be able to host a course for free on Instagram like you can with a Facebook Group, but you can still create a fun, exclusive place for your customers to stay in the loop.

I’ve seen this strategy work best for digital creators, in particular, such as podcasters or YouTubers. Using something like Patreon to collect membership fees from your audience, you can have each user fill out a quick Google form to get their Instagram handle upon signing up to get access to your exclusive content. After that, you’ll go to your Instagram Settings, tap on “Close Friends,” and from there you can hit the + to add new accounts to your Close Friends list. You don’t even have to follow an account to add them to your list!

This is a fun way to take something you’re already doing (creating content) for an audience who is already there consuming it, and monetizing it!

5 Ways to Engage Your Clients (That Aren’t Boring Emails) [Entrepreneur]

Categories
Online Business

Will The Online Travel Industry Recover?

Technology has made our life easier and more comfortable, and it has revolutionized the travel industry. Nowadays, travellers like to plan and book their trips online via a mobile app or website without human interaction.

It is known that travellers are keen to use social media platforms, mobile application and websites to explore their destinations and technology is an important factor in every sector.

It is estimated the online travel industry reached nearly $755 billion in 2019 at a compounded annual growth rate (CAGR) of 7.9 per cent since 2015. Overall, the online travel booking accounted for 63 per cent of the approximately $1.2 trillion the travel industry generates every year. Around 82 per cent of travellers book online using a website or mobile app, and an appropriate 0.27 per cent of the world’s online spending comes from the travel industry.

The COVID-19 pandemic had a negative impact on the online travel industry with a decline from $744.7 billion in 2019 to $595.8 billion in 2020, or 20 per cent. Due to the pandemic, most countries imposed social distancing in place with severe travel restrictions. This was a main reason that all industries—airlines, railways, hospitality and tourism—lost business. However, the market is expected to grow and reach $902.2 billion in 2023 if the pandemic can be controlled and economy recovers.

The online travel industry can recover from the COVID-19 pandemic but it requires owners and entrepreneurs having good strategy, clear segmentation and technological advances, good products which entrepreneurs will offer to travellers. Entrepreneurs also need to provide unique products and assess these carefully.

The travel industry has a lot of comments and feedback from black and Asian American travellers who have experienced racism during their stay abroad. Now with additional concerns of COVID-19, travellers are more concerned than ever about travelling due to feeling like there is a lack of priority care regarding minority healthcare, especially when traveling.

The latest report conducted by both the big consultancy firm McKinsey & Company and Skift Research, highlighted that the travel industry had faced unprecedented turbulence and suggested ways to respond to the pandemic. The report stated “We see signs of latent demand for travel. Customers are interested in and willing to travel again when they are allowed to do so, even before a vaccine is available at scale”.

The report also suggested that rather than outlearning and outcompeting one another at a benefit to no one, the travel industry needs to identify opportunities for complementary, collaborative ecosystem plays that help get the industry back on track. Instead of doing the minimum and seeing what happens, travel has the choice to declare what must be done systemically versus independently. Getting past the fact that working together is better, travel protocols including rapid testing, safety standards, and health passports need an industry champion to lead the way and for others…True, there are complexities in teaming up—legacy systems, fragmented ownership structure in hospitality, to name two. But now is the time to think in new ways to establish bigger, bolder relationships.

That is very useful advice from the big consultancy firm McKinsey & Company for the travel online industry entrepreneurs during the unprecedented turbulent time caused the Covid 19 pandemic. Given very recent significant developments this is an interesting business to watch and invest in for the years to come.

Will The Online Travel Industry Recover? [Entrepeneur]

Categories
Business Trends

Cloud Computing The Next Big Thing

From rapidly transforming consumer behaviors to heavily affecting economies around the globe, the Covid-19 pandemic has created a plethora of challenges and continues to have a multi-sector impact on nations and citizens alike.

With the arrival of vaccinations, 2021 seems to bring a new ray of hope for economies worldwide but the fact remains: This year is going to witness the ‘survival of the fittest,’ implying that businesses that turn digital and adapt to the ‘new normal’ are likely to emerge out of the Covid-19 crisis in better position to succeed.

To begin with, cloud computing is arguably going to remain the staple of leading companies. To give a quick run-through, cloud spending grew by 37% in the first quarter of 2020 itself – ushering in a new era of digitization wherein companies look at cloud computing as the most robust way to tide themselves over during the Covid-19 challenge – at this time last year the world had just woken up to the viral effect of the novel Corona virus beyond China. Capitalizing upon the urgency to drive processes remotely and securely, cloud service providers had an unlikely successful year.

Even as total IT spending dropped by 8%, the cloud market grew substantially. Having worked on a number of cloud implementations, I pick the following three key trends in the post-Covid era.

Cost optimization was always a priority before the pandemic. However, disruptions afterward have further elevated its stature in the priority stack. Today, start-ups and enterprises are seeking intelligence to deploy flexible cost models, particularly those in pay-as-you-go services. As expected, the OpEx versus CapEx solutions debate has once again intensified.

In the pursuit of normalization, controlled costing is the first step. With OpEx, businesses can get the total of their costing parameters while achieving scalability with products & services. PwC, in its latest survey, found that 75% of finance decision-makers use OpEx cost modeling and are deferring CapEx for at least another year.

Cloud ecosystems assure total flexibility and scalability in developing and managing key enterprise processes. Using OpEx as a cost model and cloud as a deployment model, enterprises can:

  • Achieve faster installations, upgrades, and on-demand flexibility. Given the lesser time of approval in OpEx, businesses can leverage frequent product upgrades.
  • Cloud systems mean negligible maintenance hassles and site visiting. The OpEx model allows for seeking cloud hosting services that cover uninterrupted networking infrastructure and enterprise-grade security.

Entities, both government and private, are likely to upscale their infrastructure capacity in 2021. At the same time, they want to keep costs in control. Therefore, hybrid cloud systems backed by OpEx cost models will set the narrative for data storage and monitoring.

Rise of native clouds – containerization and serverless computing

In order to recover from the pandemic hangover, MSPs – Managed Service Providers, would want to enhance their Customer Experience (CX) quotient while keeping costs in check; exactly what native cloud computing delivers. Native cloud technologies through containerization empower digital transformation strategies for enterprises across the spectrum. Since Azure, AWS and Google Cloud have raised the green flags, at least 60% of service providers will offer containerization on public cloud platforms.

At their core, container management repositories perform workload transportation between multiple verticals such as on-premise, edge, and the cloud. Subsequently, platforms like Kubernetes, that lessen the complexity in container management, should gain explosive acceptance in 2021-22. In addition, serverless computing that was among the top five Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) cloud services in 2020, is still likely to be a preferred paradigm for multi-cloud developments.

Edge computing gaining the edge

To put it simply, edge computing brings storage and processing closer to the geographic location of data consumption. Besides ensuring faster response times, it saves bandwidth (and infrastructure) while empowering the service providers to serve their customers locally.

There’s no doubt that Edge computing will grow stronger in 2021. Cloud service providers will experiment with new business models beyond humongous data centers and central control of public clouds. Nonetheless, it still seeks the innovation of computing in traditional clouds while enhancing business agility. Edge computing allows enterprises to improvise upon their real-time analytics and make smarter business decisions. Since predictive analysis in CRM and other ERP verticals is growing, edge computing will have a greater role in the process.

Per IDC research, by 2024 25% of organizations will look forward to using cases that integrate edge data with apps already hosted in the cloud. 2021 will also see a series of partnerships between traditional cloud and edge computing service providers. Also, telecom service providers will have a key role in driving these hybrid ecosystems.

Going forward, devices and applications closer to the consumer’s location will play an important role in the larger fabric of the Internet of Things (IoT) and hybrid cloud models.

Opportunity is in the eyes of the beholder

The cloud was already a dominating force. The pandemic only proved that most enterprise processes can be managed remotely if the right cloud implementation is backing them. Therefore, it is not incorrect to believe that cloud service providers are sitting on a gold mine of opportunity.

Cloud Computing Will Be a Goldmine in the Post Covid-Era [Entrepreneur]

Categories
Business Trends

Paypal’s Vision For The Future

PayPal CEO Dan Schulman recently spoke to Bloomberg about the company’s growth last year and its ambitions for the future.

Here’s what you need to know:

  • PayPal processed $936 billion in total payment volume (TPV) in 2020 and says it’s on track to reach $1 trillion a year. Digital payment usage surged during the pandemic, with 43% of US consumers saying they used mobile apps like PayPal and Venmo more in 2020, according to a report by CouponFollow. To meet that demand, PayPal launched new products like Pay in 4—its buy now, pay later solution—and its cryptocurrency service. PayPal also expanded Xoom, its remittance business, into more countries to make it more widely available. These efforts may have bolstered TPV by tapping into new demand
  • The payments giant expects to reach 400 million global users by June, but it’s setting its sights on one day reaching 1 billion. In 2020, PayPal added72.7 million net new accounts to reach a total of 377 million accounts globally, a 24% increase from 2019, when net new accounts increased by 37.3 million. Merchants were a driving force behind PayPal’s user growth thanks to its core products, from its one-click online checkout button to in-store innovations like its QR code payments, which helped meet consumer needs during the coronavirus pandemic. Indicative of merchant growth is PayPal’s merchant services volume, which grew 33% YoY, up from the 27% YoY growth it posted in 2019, suggesting that these offerings likely brought in new sellers.

PayPal is hoping to become a super app as it explores innovations that’ll help morph it into a “one-stop shop for all consumer financial needs.” PayPal is already moving beyond its existing offerings and inching toward other financial services, such as crypto, which it noted as a key growth area in 2021: Schulman recently said that PayPal’s new dedicated crypto unit will focus on helping increase the utility of digital currencies. PayPal has also expressed interest in expanding into banking and stock trading. These could be the logical next steps for the payments giant considering that Square, a major competitor, is reaching into the space with new stock trading options and recently debuted its industrial bank, Square Financial Services. Doing so could aid PayPal’s one-stop financial services shop ambitions and perhaps help the company increase its user base and volume.

 

PayPal CEO talks company growth and its vision for the future [E-Marketer]

Categories
Entrepreneurship

The Rise of Social Enterprise

The rise of social enterprise

The pandemic has inspired a new wave of social entrepreneurs developing business ideas to support their Covid-stricken communities. Here, Kevin Marquis, Social Enterprise Manager at the North East Business and Innovation Centre (BIC), explains how entrepreneurs are shaping communities and changing the world.

Since the outbreak of the virus, we’ve noticed a marked rise in demand for our business advice services. More and more people are realising that the social enterprise model offers the perfect way to run a business that is not only profitable but also has social purpose at its heart.

We’re receiving enquiries from individuals preparing to start-up new businesses aimed at making a difference to local people and places, as well as from existing enterprises with plans to expand everything from counselling services to food co-operatives.

As with all crises, the pandemic has brought out the best in a lot of people and has inspired them to take collective action to consider how they can best support others.

People are thinking more about their social objectives and their own accountability and responsibility to their communities. They’re turning to social enterprise as this is the best model to support those objectives.

Creative Minds – run by North Star Counselling CIC is a fantastic example of an ambitious social enterprise that is rising to the challenge of Covid-19 to help its community.

Working closely with our team, Creative Minds secured grant funding to help them reach more people reeling from the impact of the pandemic. The counselling team has adapted the way it works to provide free online and telephone counselling sessions and workshops, as well as a range of programmes specifically focused on suicide prevention, grief and the mental health of young people.

Bishopwearmouth Co-operative CIC in Sunderland provides day care, training and employment opportunities for some of our most vulnerable adults. Previously a City Council service that has externalised, it is a business that uses horticulture to provide day care services, training and employment for those with learning difficulties. The fully commercial, retail garden centre has significantly increased turnover, profitability and opened up many new opportunities for the business.

Building on the success of the garden centre, they raised £200k from social investors to acquire the adjacent cemetery house to convert it to a café / restaurant to serve the Garden Centre. This will further increase retail sales and delivery on their social objectives – expanding the range of services, training and employment opportunities for their care customers.

The evidence suggests that social enterprises will play an increasingly important role in our economic recovery. At the latest count, by Social Enterprise UK’s State of the Sector report* in 2019, there were 100,000 social enterprises contributing £60bn to UK GDP. Despite the challenging economic climate of 2020, a total of 183 CICs were incorporated to the start of November 2020. This accounts for 19% of all CICs in the region.

We are preparing the way for even greater numbers coming forward for support -from both new social entrepreneurs and traditional businesses looking to explore this business model and we’re expecting to see many new and exciting social innovations in 2021.

The rise of social enterprise [B DailyNews]