Categories
Human Resource

4 Ways Business Leaders Can Assist Overworked Employees

All business leaders want to get the best from their employees. Indeed, whether you’re a CEO or an office manager, it’s always a good thing to try and inspire your team to reach new heights and to push themselves to achieve their full potential. However, overworked employees will struggle to perform at their best. Worse, when employees constantly feel stressed out,  morale, company culture, customer service, and retention rates may suffer as a result. With that in mind, today we’ll review several key ways that business leaders can help out their employees during particularly busy or frustrating times. Check them out here: 

Get in the Trenches

Some of the most effective business leaders rarely get involved in the day-to-day activities of their employees. Yet, if you know your team is struggling with a problem, it can be beneficial to directly involve yourself in the work. Employees may not always feel comfortable asking for help, which means that business leaders should monitor their needs closely. Stepping in to help out with a project ––provided you can offer meaningful assistance –– can be a great way to earn employee trust. 

Call in the Cavalry 

Just because you as a business leader may not know how to solve a problem, it doesn’t mean you can’t provide your team with any support. Rather, savvy business leaders know when to outsource certain tasks. For example, a head administrator at a medical facility may decide to contact a company like Provider’s Choice Scribe Services to help out with healthcare documentation. Or, an office manager may be able to hire a freelance web designer to help their team make website updates. A little outside help can go a long way toward getting your team out of a jam! Note also that you may decide to hire new, full-time employees if your business often relies on freelancers. 

Set New Expectations

As a business leader, you often have the power to move back deadlines or to reshape consumer expectations. If you see your team is overworked and running on fumes, don’t be afraid to talk to clients about pushing back deadlines or seeking alternative solutions. At the end of the day, most customers will be willing to work with you so long as you’re open and honest with them. 

Adjust for the Future

Sometimes, businesses simply experience very busy and difficult times. While they may be unavoidable to some extent, business leaders can and should adjust their internal structure to ensure employees aren’t overwhelmed time and again. Talk to your team about how you can make their lives easier and what changes you can make that will help your business succeed moving forward. In the end, running a thriving business is all about making adjustments and learning from your mistakes.

Categories
How-To Guides

Using Venmo For Business

What is Venmo? Venmo is a digital wallet. You’ve heard of Venmo, and may use it.

the Venmo that’s for business isn’t the same thing. What’s more, if you use both, you’ll easily be able to keep personal and business transactions separate.

And this is new – Venmo for Business now accepts cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.



What is Venmo?

Venmo is owned by PayPal and as such, you can use Venmo through PayPal. The original Venmo is an active community enjoyed by more than 60 million users. PayPal existed for 11 years before launching Venmo.

Using Venmo as a digital wallet, friends could easily make and take payments from each other, friends to friends or within a family. In addition to sending money to and from each other, they could use Venmo to make payments for all kinds of services, as another payment option. They could also get cash into an account instantly, using e check. The instant cash feature was a hugely popular service.

Venmo vs. Venmo for Business: What’s the Difference?

When Venmo launched, users were accepting Venmo quickly. Articles about its ease of use flooded the internet, and even more, people became to pay with Venmo – and not just to friends who use Venmo. That led to more articles, and more people accepting Venmo.

Company owners saw how easy it was to pay with Venmo, and tried to use it for their operations. But the “personal use” Venmo wasn’t a fit.

The Venmo for businesses shares features that Venmo has, but adapts the platform specifically for small business owners.

Using prompts an owner sets up a business profile. From the profile, the typical business transactions can take place. Venmo for Business can handle online sales on point of sale touchless sales. It can be linked to credit cards, debit cards and banks.

Can You Use Venmo for Business?

Once you set up a Venmo business profile, you can start to accept Venmo transactions for your business. You can accept payments from customers online or at a brick-and-mortar location.

As a payment option, it’s faster than credit card processing. You don’t need a credit card processor.

You can also use the business version of Venmo to purchase supplies or inventory for your business. This way, it will be easy to organize your taxes. The “business” Venmo will be separate from your personal Venmo.

Here’s a big advantage to the business profiles. Customers can search the business profiles. This is a way for more customers to find you.

How Does Venmo for Business Work?

Let’s say you already use PayPal when customers make a purchase. How is Venmo for Business different than PayPal? Which one should you choose?

First, let’s talk about similarities with PayPal. Both have a platform that uses IOS, Android and the Web. Both have payment methods that can use a credit or debit card, or bank transfer. The fees for credit card transfers are similar, 3% for Venmo and 2.9% + .30 for PayPal. A lot of individuals and businesses use either to make donations to non profits.

Here’s where they’re different. With Venmo, the debit card fee is zero; with PayPal it’s 2.9% + .30. The transfer limit for Venmo is $4,999.99; for PayPal, it’s up to $10,000 for a single transaction.

Using Venmo for Business

So should you start using it? For some business owners, the transfer limit is a deal-breaker. For other business owners, the pre-existing familiarity of the name – remember that community of 60 personal Venmo users – is a deal maker.

Can’t decide? Thinking about going to an app for in-person, touchless merchant transactions? Venmo recently added a QR kit. The QR kit makes it easy to get set up to do business transactions that way.

Using Venmo for Online Stores

You can connect your account to you most-commonly used Apps and websites.

Using Venmo for a Business App

You can accept online orders or do touchless business transactions.

Using Venmo In-Store with Approved Point of Sale Systems

You may already have a QR but if you don’t, Venmo for Business has a QR kit. The kit will lead you through the steps of setting up your unique QR code for customers to scan.

How to Set Up a Venmo Business Profile

It’s easy.

  1. Find the Venmo for Business App.
  2. Tap the profile pic.
  3. Tap Create a Business Profile.
  4. Customize your profile, adding details about the services or products you provide.
  5. Publish your profile.

How Much Does It Cost?

Well, you knew there would be some processing fees. That’s common with payment processors. The first 30 days are free. Here’s how this one works:

  1. No fee to sign up, no monthly fee, no fee to send money.
  2. No charge for moving money from linked bank account or debit card. These transactions normally take 1-3 business days. If you want the option for an instant move, you’ll pay a 1% fee.
  3. A 3% fee for moving money using a linked credit card.
  4. After the 30-day free period, the fee per transaction is 1.9% + .10.

The Best Features of Venmo for Businesses

  1. No fee for debit cards.
  2. Quick money transfers are possible.
  3. The single transaction ($4,999.99) limit is a fit for many businesses.
  4. Name (branding) familiarity with personal Venmo users.
  5. The QR kit makes it easy to add this service for business purposes.

Advantages of Using Venmo Payments for Businesses

  1. Someone can search businesses and find your business profile. What business owner doesn’t like that?
  2. Easy to send and receive money from Venmo personal or business users.
  3. Venmo now accepts cryptocurrencies, such as Bitcoin.
  4. Money can be moved instantly (with a 1% transfer fee) between bank accounts.
  5. Typically faster than credit card processing.

Disadvantages of Accepting Venmo Payments for Businesses

  1. Some businesses don’t accept Venmo because they see the transaction limit ($4,999.99) as too low.
  2. You can’t pay with Venmo overseas. The service is currently only available in the US.
  3. Some companies don’t yet accept Venmo.

Alternatives to Venmo

You have options when choosing websites like Venmo as a payment processor for your company. There are all kinds of ways for customers to make payments for goods and services.

Which one should you choose?

The checkout option you choose must fit your company’s needs, and also be the payment method preferred by the people who use businesses.

  • PayPal: The PayPal checkout is fast and seamless. PayPal checkout can be used internationally.
  • Apple Pay: Works with all Apple devices. The way it can be used include online, in stores and thru Apps.
  • Braintree: Used by merchants in 45 countries, and can service payments of 130+ currencies. Braintree is a top choice for those who conduct business internationally. Braintree is the top pick for those businesses.
  • Google Pay: A mobile payment app which replaced Android Pay and Google Wallet.
  • Zelle: A digital payment network owned by Bank of America, JPMorgan Chase, Capital One, CitiBank, Wells Fargo and others.

Why do some people say you shouldn’t use Venmo for your business?

People who say Venmo isn’t for businesses to use were most likely those who tried to use the original version for business. Someone had an issue with payments trying to use the original Venmo, which wasn’t set up for businesses. Venmo users shared the experiences citing problems with payments.

Which wasn’t fair, since the original version wasn’t structured for merchants payments. In development, the Venmo strategists for the venture looked at what merchants said in complaints and fixed the process.

Using the original platform, individual people, often family members, could send and receive money amongst themselves. They could make purchases, and often shared reviews of the purchases and buying experience with other Venmo service users.

The For Business version is all geared to facilitate each step of the customer to merchants’ experience. The business profiles are a way to boost your company presence. And the services and fees included are designed to facilitate the payment process for a company, both accepting and remitting with seamless transactions.

How can Venmo be used for business?

You already know this – few people are writing checks. Credit card processors – as a single piece of equipment – are replaced by processors that can handle credit and debit cards.

When a company is accepting payment or making a payment, having a speedy process is a benefit to all. As an option for a payment, the Business version is a great choice for merchants.

How do I open a Venmo account for my business use?

It takes just a few steps before you get acceptance for a business profile. Go to the Venmo App or site. Using the prompts, create a business profile. You can use a profile pic and a background pic. Add you details. Accept the terms and user agreement. You’ll need to include your email address. That’s it! Publish your profile.

Is Venmo better than PayPal for small businesses?

Each business is different, depending on the goods and services offered. The option you choose may depend on the typical amount for the payments you receive. Is that number for average payments greater than $5,000. Then it’s PayPal for those goods and services.

How to Use Venmo for Business [SmallBizTrends]

 

About Our GE Network Expert - Min Tang

Categories
How-To Guides

How To Increase Conversions On Your Landing Page

It is not easy to rank your pages on the first page because Google loves helpful content more than sales campaigns. But it is no surprise to find landing pages ranking high when you search for an SEO guide. Moreso, if your product will solve someone’s problem, why would it not rank high?

If you want to get more conversions from your landing pages, here are some techniques to give your landing page a boost.

But there’s one thing you should know. It is always easier to triple your conversions than to triple your traffic. This article is about optimizing your landing page to get targeted traffic to your landing page; traffic that converts.

What Should Your Landing Pages Do?

For whichever campaign you are running, create a landing page to push your visitors down the sales funnel. Your landing page should focus the visitor’s attention on your irresistible offer and guide them to click the call-to-action (CTA).

Optimizing Your Landing Page

Analyze Your Landing Page Performance In Detail

While most landing page builders come with analytic tools, you can complement your landing page analytics with Google Analytics. Before introducing any changes to your landing page, study the analysis report.

Look at the page views and the source of traffic. Look at the conversion rate. See the type of users who convert. Why do they convert? These are the ideal buyers you should target.

Also, look at users who leave your landing page without taking any action (bounce rate). Why do they not click the CTA? Are they your ideal buyers? What was the source of this traffic?

All the data you collect from your analytics tools help you strategize.

Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

SEO helps search engines to find your landing page and serve it to the people looking for your product. It ensures that people actively looking for your product land on your page. They are the easiest to convert.

Your landing page’s search metrics (like click-through rate and organic traffic) show you the keywords with the highest conversions. Use the keywords on your page’s meta description, the headline, and the rest of the page copy. Essentially, do SEO on your landing page like you would your website.

Create A Landing Page For Each Buyer Persona

If you have one landing page for all your audience, try specializing. Create a landing page for each of your buyer personas. For example, if your audience includes work-from-home moms and dads, have one landing page for moms and another for dads. Make sure that the landing page addresses your persona’s specific problem.

Alternatively, use dynamic landing pages to personalize the landing page copy. Dynamic landing pages change the message based on the keywords searched by the user or location or other metrics.

Design Your Landing Page For Conversion

For your visitors to follow through with your Call-to-action, ensure these landing page best practices:

  • Optimize the headline. Use keywords in your headline and highlight the benefit(s) that your visitor will get.
  • Add a subheading that adds more context to the headline.
  • Optimize the page copy. Use the page copy to show that you understand the reader’s pain points. Avoid marketing your business. Since your visitor landed on your page from a marketing campaign, they want to see how your product will solve their problem(s).
  • Use multiple CTAs (that achieve the same goal) If your landing page is longer than a mobile phone page. You can switch the labels for the CTAs with “sign me up,” then a “yes, I’m in,” then a final “send me my copy.”
  • Add social proof to your landing page. Talk about the number of users, show social media mentions, reviews or testimonials.
  • Remove all distractions like unnecessary words that don’t give your prospect any more reason to click your CTA. Also, remove navigation to other pages.
  • Design your landing page to be easy to skim through and get the message in 3 seconds. Keep your design simple, captivating and use colors wisely. Keep the color-blind users in mind.
  • Ensure your landing page looks good on different screens and loads quickly. Keep the mobile phone users in mind. Statistics show that over 50% of website traffic comes from mobile devices.

Introduce Changes, Test Results, Repeat. (A/B Testing)

Introduce a significant change, like rewriting the headline. Then track the landing page’s performance for weeks. Even after achieving your expected results, keep the test running longer. Sometimes flukes fool you into believing that you solved your problem.

You can run multiple tests simultaneously. Just make sure that you are introducing big changes, not small, timid changes. Create plans on the tests to run and your key performance indicators to measure success. Try the following tests:

  • Reduce the landing page copy by 50% or more.
  • Change the Call-To-Action. Try different compelling CTAs.
  • Switch the images.
  • Target different keywords.

Go into landing page marketing with the will to experiment. You gain the highest value from running tests and tracking the results. Your results and user habits will give you insight into how to optimize.

Landing page optimization will never end. You keep doing it over and over because your competitors never sleep. Run your tests, track the results and make big decisions. If your landing page is stuck at a conversion rate of 2%, despite your best efforts, invest in a digital marketing consultant.

Categories
Starting Up

Skills To Master Before Launching A New Business

Launching a business is hard. Launching a business before you’ve done the legwork to determine your market and identify your challenges is nearly impossible. Similarly, if you’re becoming the head honcho without mastering some important skills first, you may find success harder to come by.

Here are some of the most important skills any entrepreneur should know, and where to learn them. All these courses are on sale for Memorial Day, so make the savvy business decision and take advantage.

1. Microsoft Excel

Microsoft Excel is one of the most important programs in business today. It’s far more than just a spreadsheet software (although that’s a valuable use case, as well). Excel helps you with data analysis, financial forecasting, and many more things that are essential to running a data-driven, solutions-oriented business.

2. Public Speaking

Entrepreneurs must be able to sell their product or service to others. Whether you’re pitching to investors, employees, or potential customers, public speaking will be a significant asset. With great public speaking skills, you’re more likely to inspire people to see your vision and get on board with your company.

3. Developing Business Plans

Naturally, every entrepreneur needs a business plan. This course is led by an award-winning business school professor and offers a 13-step methodology to creating a business plan. It even comes with 50 business plan templates and 25 business presentations made specifically for startups.

4. Data Science

Data drives everything in business. As an entrepreneur, if you can successfully model and understand data, you’re already a few steps ahead of the pack. Not only will you save money by not having to hire analysts, but you’ll also have the skills to make informed business decisions right out of the gate.

5. Facebook Marketing

Facebook is the second-largest advertising platform on the planet, meaning it’s a key tool for any entrepreneur starting out. In this course, you’ll learn how to reach and engage with new audiences on Facebook. Hitting the ground running with a Facebook marketing strategy can go a long way for your business.

6. Search Engine Optimziation

If you don’t have a ton of capital to work with when you’re just starting out, paid advertising may not be for you. Search engine optimization (SEO), however, is often free and just requires a technical understanding of how to make content stand out online. This course will show you how to get your web pages to the top of Google’s search pages.

7. Copywriting

Great copywriting sells products. You can outsource your marketing and sales content to third-parties, or you can handle it yourself. This guide will teach you how to write copy that sells so you can save money and generate more income from the get-go.

8. Quickbooks

QuickBooks is the top accounting software on the market. When you can use QuickBooks effectively, you can handle all of your business’s financial and bookkeeping needs, thereby saving money on accounting services. It’ll also help you track inventory, vendor payments, invoices, and much more.

9. Generalist Skills

The best entrepreneurs never stop learning. With that in mind, check out Big Think Edge. This library is filled with lectures from Ivy League professors and world-renowned experts like Elon Musk and Malcolm Gladwell, covering some of today’s most important topics.

10. Project Management

Project management is all about finding the most efficient and least wasteful way of doing something. For entrepreneurs who are likely strapped for cash after launch, that’s extremely important. This training will introduce you to several top project management methodologies, including Scrum, Agile, and PMP.

10 Skills to Master Before Launching a New Business [Entrepreneur]

About Our GE Network Expert - Min Tang

Categories
Business Trends

Making Machine Learning Work For Your Business

Demand for machine learning is skyrocketing. This growth is driven not only by “middle adopters” recognizing the vast potential of machine learning after watching early adopters benefit from its use, but by steady improvements in machine-learning itself. It may be too early to say with certainty that machine learning develops according to a predictable framework like Moore’s Law, the famous precept about power that has borne out for nearly 50 years and only recently began to show signs of strain. But the industry is clearly on a fast track.

As machine-learning algorithms grow smarter and more organizations come around to the idea of integrating this powerful technology into their processes, it’s high time your enterprise thought about putting machine learning to work, too.

First, consider the benefits and costs. It’s quite likely that your could leverage at least one of these five reasons to employ machine learning, whether it’s taming apparently infinite amounts of unstructured data or finally personalizing your .

1. Taming vast unstructured data with limited resources

One of the best-known use cases for machine learning is processing data sets too large for traditional data crunching methods to handle. This is increasingly important as data becomes easier to generate, collect and access, especially for smaller B2C enterprises that often deal with more transaction and customer data than they can manage with limited resources.

How you use machine learning to process and “tame” your data will depend on what you hope to get from that data. Do you want help making more informed product development decisions? To better market to your customers? To acquire new customers? To analyze internal processes that could be improved? Machine learning can help with all these problems and more.

2. Automating routine tasks

The original promise of machine learning was efficiency. Even as its uses have expanded beyond mere , this remains a core function and one of the most commercially viable use cases. Using machine learning to automate routine tasks, save time and manage resources more effectively has a very attractive paid of side effects for enterprises that do it effectively: reducing expenses and boosting net income.

The list of tasks that machine learning can automate is long. As with data processing, how you use machine learning for process automation will depend on which functions exert the greatest drag on your time and resources.

Need ideas? Machine learning has shown encouraging real-world outcomes when used to automate data classification, report generation, IT threat monitoring, loss and fraud prevention and internal auditing. But the possibilities are truly endless.

3. Improving marketing personalization and efficiency

Machine learning is a powerful force multiplier in marketing campaigns, enabling virtually endless messaging and buyer-profile permutations, unlocking the gate to fully personalized marketing without demanding an army of copywriters or publicity agents.

What’s especially encouraging for smaller businesses without much marketing expertise is that machine learning’s potential is baked into the top everyday digital-advertising platforms, namely Facebook and Google. You don’t have to train your own algorithms to use this technology in your next microtargeting campaign.

4. Addressing business trends

Machine learning has also proven its worth in detecting trends in large data sets. These trends are often too subtle for humans to tease out, or perhaps the data sets are simply too large for “dumb” programs to process effectively.

Whatever the reason for machine learning’s success in this space, the potential benefits are clear as day. For example, many small and midsize enterprises use machine learning technology to predict and reduce customer churn, looking for signs that customers are considering competitors and trigger retention processes with higher probabilities of success.

Elsewhere, companies of all sizes are getting more comfortable integrating machine learning into their hiring processes. By reinforcing existing biases in human-led hiring and promotion, earlier-generation algorithms did more harm than good, but newer models are able to counteract implicit bias and increase the chances of equitable outcomes.

5. Accelerating research cycles

A machine-learning unleashed in an R&D department is like an army of super-smart lab assistants. As more and more enterprises discover just what machine learning is capable of in and out of the lab, they’re feeling more confident about using it to eliminate some of the frustrating trial-and-error that lengthens research cycles and increases development costs. Machine learning won’t replace R&D experts anytime soon, but it does appear to empower them to use their time more effectively. More and better innovations could result.

If the experience of competitor businesses that have already deployed machine learning to great effect is any guide for your own experience, the answer to this question is a resounding yes.

The more interesting question is how you choose to make machine learning work for your businesses. This prompts another question, around what operational and structural changes your machine learning processes will bring. These changes, up to and including reducing headcounts in redundant roles or winding up entire lines of business, could be painful in the short run even as they strengthen your enterprise for the long haul.

Like all great innovations that increase operational efficiency and eliminate low-value work, machine learning does not benefit everyone equally. It’s up to the humans in charge of these algorithms to make the transition as orderly and painless as possible. It seems there are some things machine learning can’t yet do … yet.

5 Reasons to Make Machine Learning Work for Your Business [Entrepreneur]

About Our GE Network Expert - Min Tang