Online Business Success

How to create a survey using our new Web Form builder

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:32:00 GMT

We've had a lot of customers come to us asking how we implemented the survey using the system alone. The answer? Web Forms!

In this how-to article, we're going to run through the process of creating a survey on the system, using our new Web Form builder.

Building The Web Form

Step 1.Open up the new Web Form builder

Under Modules > Web Forms, you can get started with the new beta release of our Web Form builder by clicking "Try our new Webform Builder" from the Web Form list view.

Step 2. Select The Question Type

By default, the Web Form will already be set up to collect the title, name and email address of the user - so we'll just be dealing with the custom fields we'll use to collect the survey responses.

In the custom field section of the "Add New Items" window, select the input type for the question. In this case, we're going to create a Likert Scale survey, so we'll select the "List (Radio List)" option. You can use whatever type of input field you'd like, for example, if you want to collect qualitative feedback, use the "Text (Multiline)" option instead.

Step 3. Enter Your Questions

Under "Field Name", enter your first survey question and make sure you check the "Required" box to make answering mandatory.

Enter the list of answers (called "Items" in the Web Form builder) that you'd like the give the respondent to choose from, clicking the plus (+) button to add each new item.

Once you've finished with the question, click Save.

Your new question will appear in the realtime preview pane to the right. Repeat this process for each question you'd like to ask in your survey.

Step 4. Insert The Web Form On A Page

Once you've added your questions using the Web Form builder, it's simply a matter of inserting the form on a page for respondents to fill out.

	You can either: a) Use our 1-Click insert feature by selecting "Add Web Form to a web page" from the action box to the right b) Grab the form markup and restyle it using your own HTML and CSS by choosing "Get Web Form HTML Code" from the action box. Once you've inserted the form on a page, simply direct users to it's URL so they can fill it out.

Read more about our Web Forms feature here.

Gathering The Results

Step 1. Create A Customer Report

Once users have submitted their answers, you need to create a Customer Report in order to export the raw data. Under Reports > Create A Customer Report, click "Create A Customer Report" from the Action Box.

Step 2. Select "Customers & Cases"

Under "Report Type", select "Customers and Cases" so that the generated report will include both customer details and their survey responses. Click "Next" to continue.

Step 3. Select the System Fields You Want To Include

Select the system fields (names, addresses, phone numbers, email addresses) that you'd like to see in your report. In this example, we'll just select "Customer Name with Details" and "Email 1 (Primary)."

Once you've selected your fields, continue to the next step.

Step 4. Include Your Survey Web Form Results

Under "Filter by your own custom CRM forms and Fields", select your survey form from the drop-down menu and make sure that "Display all custom fields in report" in checked.

Step 5. Generate The Report

All that's left to do now is click the "Generate Report" button.

You'll be presented with a table of all the customers who submitted the survey form, and their answers.

Working With Affiliate Programs

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:29:00 GMT

Affiliate Programs enable you to promote your online businesses. After you create an Affiliate Program, you subscribe participants and send them a custom tracking link, which they can distribute via email and on their website to earn commissions.

Every time a visitor clicks the custom link, the system tracks the subsequent activity in the site's database. That way, you'll know which sales came from each participant, so that you can compensate them.

You have complete control over the commission you want to set for each order. The system accepts values from 1% to 100% of the sale that was generated based on a referral. And if you'd like, you can also choose to compensate participants when the visitors who click the custom link perform other activities, such as subscribing to a newsletter, submitting an inquiry in a form, or even just visiting your site (like pay per click). You set the terms and you can edit the message sent to participants explaining the commissions they will receive for promoting your site.

Affiliate Programs are an effective marketing technique because they are based on a "pay for performance model", meaning that you do not incur marketing expenses unless actual results are realized. Some businesses find that inviting participants to Affiliate Programs help them grow their customer base and increase their earnings significantly. And participants enjoy earning commissions by featuring your site in their blog posts, newsletters and their websites, because it is an easy way for them to earn revenue as well.

Strategies for rewarding affiliates

The terms you set and the way you choose to compensate participants for referring visitors to your site is completely up to you. You also get to decide which actions taken by the visitor result in gaining commissions for participants.

When a visitor that uses the referral link to access the site performs the following actions, they are tracked in the database and listed in the performance reports:

Submit an inquiry using a web form
Subscribe to a newsletter
Purchase products in an online store
Request a quote in an online store
Make a reservation for an upcoming event

If you work closely with another business in your industry, you might consider a duel Affiliate Program situation, to help promote each other's sites. By cross linking your sites, you can improve the search engine ranking and drive traffic to both businesses.

Note: Unlike display advertising, Affiliate Mrketing is not easily scalable.

To take advantage of Affiliate Programs and use them to drive potential customers to your site, follow these steps:

Create an Affiliate Program (or have one created for you)
Update the message that is sent by the system with the terms of the program
Subscribe participants to your Affiliate Program
Send each affiliate their own unique tracking link for the Affiliate Program to distribute
Run reports to see the performance of each participant and find out the commissions they've earned
Compensate the participant by paying them their commissions

Every visitor that accesses your site is identified by a bit of unique code (a cookie that is placed on the visitor's browser). When the visitor clicks or pastes a custom Affiliate Program link and uses a browser to view your site, the participant is associated with that visitor's unique ID. The cookie used to store the unique ID has an expiration period of one year, and is renewed every time the visitor accesses the site.

This means as long as a visitor accesses the site at least once a year, the participant will continue to receive commissions whenever the visitor purchases products. If there is a one-year lapse (where the visitor doesn't access the site), then the connection to the participant of the Affiliate Program will be lost.

Creating an Affiliate Program

Choose Ecommerce > Affiliate Program > Create a new Affiliate Program.
The Affiliate Program Details page appears. Enter the name for the Affiliate Program. In this example, the program is designed to promote a catalog that sells T-Shirts, so the Affiliate Program is named T-shirts and the home page of the catalog is set as the landing page. This is the page that will appear when visitors click the participant's link.

Note: The landing page can be any page in the site; you can set the site's home page as the Affiliate Program's landing page, if you prefer. To set the landing page, click the square icon to the right of the Landing Page field and browse to select the page.
Enter the numeric value (in percentages) to set the commission in the Commission field. You can set the commission to a value between 1% and 100% (although you enter the decimal value, so .01 is equal to 1% and 1 is equal to 100%). In the screenshot above, .2 is the commission set, which is equal to 20%. That means if the referral purchases a t-shirt for $10, the affiliate participant makes a $2.00 commission. This field is optional, if you prefer to reward participants on a flat fee basis.
Click Save.

Customizing the system message that is sent to participants with the terms of the program

Follow these steps to customize the email with the affiliate program details:

Choose Admin > Customize System Emails.
In the page that appears, click the item named Affiliate Program Details.
The System Email Details page appears with the default message. Edit the subject and the main content of the message with the text you want to send to your invited participants, like the example shown below:
Use the Tag Insert menu to insert the custom link that is associated with the Affiliate Program you just created. For example, place your cursor in the Content pane at the desired location and then choose the first tag, {tag_affiliateprogram, XX} from the list.
Edit the code, updating the XX in the inserted tag to add the unique ID number of the Affiliate Program (such as 1553) to relate the custom tracking link to the specific Affiliate Program.

Note: To find the ID number of the Affiliate Program, choose Ecommerce > Affiliate Program and then hover your cursor over the name of the Affiliate Program in the list. The unique ID number of the Affiliate Program is displayed at the end of the link in the browser's status bar, as shown below:
The HTML tab of the online editor enables you to see the code, so if you prefer you can also customize the appearance of the system message (as long as you keep the email format set as HTML in the menu at the top).
After updating the message, click Save to save your changes.

Subscribe participants to a Affiliate Program

Choose Ecommerce > Affiliate Programs, and then select the name of the Affiliate Program from the list.
The Affiliate Program Details page appears. Click the Subscribers link in the sidebar to add a participant to the program.
A new window appears with an interface to invite participants. Enter their name and email address in the fields and click Subscribe.

Note: Use this form to manually invite participants--you cannot import the data via a spreadsheet into the system.
Make sure the option Email Details to User is selecting. After clicking Subscribe, the customized email you created in the previous section is sent to the email address you entered in the Quick Subscribe fields.

There's no guarantee that the participant you invite will choose to distribute the custom link you send them--so invite as many colleagues and acquaintances as possible to help spread the word about the online business.

After subscribing participants, they will receive the email notification and distribute the custom link that was included in the message. Over time, visitors that received the link (either via email, newsletters, or by visiting the participant's site) will use it to access your website. Any activity is tracked in the system. In the next section, you'll learn how to track the performance of the referrals.

Run reports to see the performance of Affiliate Programs

Periodically, you or your client will log into the Admin Console to check the progress of referrals. Follow these steps to see their activity:

Choose Ecommerce > Affiliate Programs, and then click on the name of the Affiliate Program from the list.
The Affiliate Program Details page appears. Click the Reports and Performance link in the sidebar.
The Affiliate Program Performance window appears. Use the menus and date pickers to select the desired search parameters and then click the Filter button to see a report of the recent activity:
Using the Affiliate Program Performance window, you can sort by all affiliate participants, or choose a specific participant's name using the Affiliate menu to see the referrals generated by a specific participant. The top portion of the window displays data about referrals related to orders. These purchases use the commission values you set when you created the Affiliate Program to calculate the amount of commissions that are owed to the participant that distributed the link to your site.
If desired, you can click the Export Report button to export the details about orders that were generated by referrals. Click the desired document format (Excel or CSV) to generate a file that you can open in a spreadsheet software program, such as Microsoft Excel.

Notice that the top part of the window only lists the orders. These are the only activities that track the commissions based on the numeric value you set. The other activities are listed below; to pay out commissions on subscriptions to newsletters, submission of web forms and other visitor activities, you must manually track the actions, calculate the commissions owed to participants, and send them the resulting rewards on a periodic basis. The system does not track the rate of commission for these actions or the status of the payment for referrals.

Rewarding commissions to affiliate participants

Follow these steps to pay commissions:

Choose Customers > Orders. The Orders page appears.
The orders that were purchased by visitors that clicked the link from an affiliates website display a commission that is owed to the affiliate participant. Click the View link next to one of the orders in the list to see its details.
The Order Details page appears. Click Commissions in the top navigation to see the commissions that were earned for this order.
Click the Make Commission Payments link in the top right corner. A payment form appears.
Since the commission is 20% of the total sale and this order was for $20.00, the commission payment is $4.00. Click the boxes to the right of each field to populate it. If desired, you can enter a note in the Payment Description field.
Click Make Payment. A confirmation message appears, indicating that the payment was applied.
To make another commission payment, click the option to View all orders in the sidebar. Return to the list of orders and select a different one from the list, and repeat steps 2-5.

Note: There is no predetermined turnaround date for paying the participants their commissions. The schedule is completely up to you; you can pay participants after each referral order, once a week, once a month, or whenever it is convenient.

Analyzing overall performance of Affiliate Programs

To get the big picture of how the Affiliate Programs are promoting your site and generating referrals, follow these steps:

Choose Reports > Summary. In the sidebar, expand the Visitors tab and choose Visits by Source from the options:
The main content of the page loads, displaying a graph and statistics about the number of referrals sent to your site by the Affiliate Programs.
Click the View link for the Affiliate row to see additional information. In the window that appears, use the menu in the top left corner to choose the duration of time to run the report. For example, you can choose to see the statistics for yesterday, the last week, the last month, the last 3 months, or the past year, by selecting the corresponding option.
Keep notes including the date you create new Affiliate Programs and when you subscribe new participants. Use the metrics provided by these reports to track trends and see how many new visitors your site gained through the Affiliates Program.

Affiliate Programs and non-seamless gateways

The only non-seamless payment gateway that Affiliate Programs currently support is PayPal Standard.

When using PayPal Standard, be sure to check if your PayPal account is configured to accept payments instantly or if it's set to the "Review Payments" mode. If your PayPal Standard account is set to the "Review Payments" mode, you'll need to manually accept the payments in your PayPal account in order to complete the process of recording the commission in your site's Affiliate Program.

How To Send Your First Email Campaign

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:18:00 GMT

Happy New Year!! Hope everyone had a fabulous holiday and that this new year will bring you heaps of new business opportunities!!!

Let's talk about how to send your first email campaign from your site. Email marketing is one of the most cost effective ways to promote a business to a target audience (existing customers and new leads). Every small business can benefit by leveraging the email marketing functionality of this system to send periodic campaigns and newsletters to subscribers.

Preparing a recipient list

Before you can send an email campaign, you'll compile the contact details of subscribers. This set of addresses is called a recipient list. Choose Marketing > Lists to see the interface that enables you to create new recipient lists.

In this article, you'll learn to manually add a few subscribers to your recipient list. When you are doing tests, use your own email addresses or enter your friend's email addresses. You should never subscribe visitors or individuals who have not indicated that they want to receive your messages, as this practice can be perceived as spam and can adversely affect your business. Later, as your site's customer database grows with subscribers who've signed up to receive your newsletter, you can use the list of subscribers instead.

In the side bar, click the option to Create a new list.

Enter a name for the list, such as Friends and Family and click Save. This operation creates an empty list inside the system so that new subscribers that sign up so that new subscribers can be added to it.

Next, click the option in the sidebar to view Subscribers.

The List Subscribers window appears. This interface enables you to enter subscribers names and email addresses. (For example, you may have gathered subscribers at an event by encouraging interested attendees to write their name and email address on a piece of paper... and then you can later create a recipient list named Event Attendees and manually enter their contact information). But for now, if you don't have any subscribers yet, use this area to add the email addressess of a few friends and your own email address. Enter each name and email address one by one using the Quick Subscribe form. Click Subscribe to save each entry.

After you've added the email addresses to the mailing list, close the List Subscribers window by clicking the red X in the top right corner.

Understanding bounced email messages

When you send email campaigns, the message content is sent to the email addresses in the recipient list you selected for the campaign. Usually, the messages are sent successfully, but there may be cases where the subscriber has cancelled their email account and the message cannot be delivered. Other issues, such as the recipient's inbox exceeding its limit, can also cause messages not to be delivered. When an email campaign message cannot be delivered, the error message is returned to the system. These are called bounce email messages.

When the system receives the message that a message bounced due to the following errors, the email addresses are added to the Global Black List for the site:

mail box unavailable
user does not exist

Future correspondence sent to this address is automatically blocked for 45 days unless the user verifies their address in the system before the 45 days elapses by performing a double-opt in.

A double opt-in describes the process when a visitor subscribes to a newsletter or other email marketing messages by explicitly requesting it, and then confirming the email address to be their own. In most cases, the confirmation is performed when the subscriber clicks a link in a subscription confirmation message sent to their email address, which confirms that they can access the email account and they intended to subscribe to receive the messages.

Double opt-in confirmation is always recommended, because it eliminates the chance of spam or abuse where a third-party subscribes using somebody else's email address without their knowledge and against their will.

To learn how to unsubscribe bounced email messages, read Unsubscribing email addresses that have bounced.

Creating a campaign and choosing the campaign type

Once you've created a recipient list, you can create the actual email campaign. Choose Marketing > Email Campaigns.

In the sidebar, click Create a new campaign.

When you send an email campaign, you can choose between two types:

A one-off campaign
A loyalty-based campaign

One-off campaigns are email newsletters that are sent once, on a specific time and date that you set. The messages will be sent to the recipient list you choose. For example, you could create a September newsletter and schedule it to send on September 1st, to your recipient list titled Event Attendees, as a one-off campaign.

Loyalty campaigns enable you to automatically send email newsletters to subscribers on a specific anniversary date, such as the subscriber's birthday, their year anniversary of becoming a member of your site, the anniversary of a service (car tune up, event, pet grooming, etc.) You can also schedule email newsletters to be sent to subscribers when they first sign up to receive your newsletter using the loyalty campaign option.

In this example, the option to send a one-off campaign is selected.

Entering the campaign details

Enter the campaign details by typing in the following fields:

Campaign Name: Friends and Family Website Notification
Email From Name: (Your name or your company's name, to ensure your friends (or recipients) will recognize where the message originated)
Email From Address: [Your own email address] - You may see a red cross here. If you've entered your email address properly, the system will automatically send an email to that address to verify that it's legitimate. This is part of the system's anti-spam policies. After you have opened the verification email, the red cross is updated to a green checkmark, and you can send newsletters with the 'From' address that you entered.
Email Subject: Introducting the new website
Select the time and date that the email newsletter will be sent. If you select a time and date that is in the past, the email will send immediately.

Choosing an email campaign recipient

In this step, you'll learn how to choose the recipient list for an email campaign. For this example, you'll choose the Friends and Family recipient list that you created at the beginning of this article.

Notice there is an additional option to create a new list. You can also optionally choose to send an email your entire customer database. Emailing the entire customer database is great for those periodical emails to keep all your contacts up to date about news, events and special occasions in your online business, but be careful not to send too many messages each month, because too many notifications can make subscribers choose to unsubscribe. Four notifications (or less) per month is ideal.

Select the desired recipient list and click Save Draft to continue.

Choosing a design template

Your hosted site includes professionally designed email newsletter templates. You can use these designs to help you stand out from your competition. Select one of the templates to see how the addition of graphics in your newsletter makes the presentation more compelling.

Enter the email message content

Use the WYSIWYG HTML editor to enter your campaign content. The editor is similar to the interface in the Admin Console used when editing web pages. In the example below, the Latin placeholder text was deleted and replaced with a simple message encouraging my friends to visit my site. You can use tag attributes to personalize the message. Tag attributes enable the system to customize the email it sends to each of your recipients:

{tag_recipientfirstname} is replaced by the actual name of the recipient
{tag_unsubscribe} is replaced by a link to an automatically created page that allows the recipient to opt-out of receiving future emails from you
{tag_siteurl} is replaced by a link to your site

Preview the message and send it to recipients

Before sending an email campaign, always preview it first to make sure you are satisfied with the email message and there are no misspellings or other issues.

It's a good idea to click the button to Email Me. This causes the system to send a copy of the email campaign to your email address, so you can receive it in your inbox and confirm how it looks in your email client.

Note: You may want to try sending test email campaigns to several addresses, to compare how the message looks in a browser-based email client (such as Gmail or Yahoo mail) as well as how it looks in an email product, such as Outlook, Entourage, or Mac Mail.

Once you've confirmed that the campaign is ready to be sent, click Save and Send to view the confirmation screen. Review the settings to double check that all of the details (send time/date, subject line, recipient list, etc.) are accurate. You can also use this page to review a final preview of the campaign.

Click Send to send the campaign (or to schedule the campaign to be sent if you entered a send date that is in the future).

Close the window to finish the operation.

Creating sales opportunities from customer inquiries

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 11:08:00 GMT

This tutorial is designed to give you an understanding of the Opportunities classification of Customers within the system. By the end of this tutorial you will be able to use opportunities to help you manage your sales.

Opportunities are used to track the potential value of a pending or hoped for sale to the customer. You would use Opportunities to assist in tracking and reporting on your sales pipeline.

When you pitch to a customer you should create a new opportunity for that customer. You should then manage the opportunity as it progresses through the various stages of sale.

By using Opportunities in conjunction with the Forecasting features built into the system, you can ensure a holistic view of your company's sales performance.

How to use the opportunities feature

Navigate to the applicable Customer record, and then select Customer sales Opportunities.....

Create a new opportunity by clicking on the Create New link.

Enter the opportunity's name under Opportunity, and specify its Type, Stage and Description. Enter the probability of closing the deal, as well as the value of this opportunity.

Once the deal is either won or lost, you should update the close date. Click Save & Finish to close the opportunity record.

Creating custom reports to analyze customer data

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 10:38:00 GMT

This topic covers the creation of customer reports. You will learn what customer reports are, how to create them and the different types of customer reports you can build.

What is a customer report

A customer report is a list of customers that is pulled from your built-in customer database, based on the criteria you select. As your customer database grows, it becomes hard to find certain customers or groups of customers by looking at your entire database at once - just imagine trying to sift through 10,000 customers to find the customers who have made a purchase over $100.

Your online business allows you to build a Customer report. This means that you set certain conditions and then see a list of customers that fit that condition. You can then export that list of customers to a spreadsheet, or you can add those customers to an email list.

Example uses of customer reports

You can use Customer reports to extract all sorts of information about your customers.

Find out how many customers have spent over $100 in your online store.
Find out how many customers have submitted a particular web form.
Find out how many customers are named "Rumpelstiltskin"
List all of a web form's submissions - i.e if you were running a survey
Find all the customers who have made a booking to one of your events
Find all the customers who have made a purchase in your online shop in the last week.

Creating a customer report

To Create a Customer Report, we start by going to Reports >Create a Customer Report, then clicking "Create a new Customer Report".

Now, choose your report type. Each report type will result in a list of customers. However, each different report type will also enable you to set extra criteria and export extra information based on the report type you choose.

Contacts Only is for a report whose criteria and results are purely based on contact records
Companies Only is for a report whose criteria and results are purely based on company records
Customers(Contacts & Companies) is for a report whose criteria and results are based on both (or either of) company and contact records
Customers and Cases is for reports whose criteria and results are based on customers and the web forms they have submitted, known as cases. This can also be used purely for reporting on the results of web form submissions, or web form reports.
Customers and Orders is for reports whose criteria and results are based on customers and their ecommerce orders. It can also be used purely for order reports.
Customers and Opportunities is for reports whose criteria and results are based on customers and their sales opportunities in the CRM.
Customers and Bookings is for reports whose criteria and results are based on customers and their online bookings. It can also be used for booking reports.

Important Each report type is slightly different. We recommend you explore each type to understand the differences fully.

Tutorial: Reporting on web form submissions with customer reports

First create a customer report as described above. Now select "Customers and Cases" as your report type, and click next.

Remember that each report type is slightly different. "Customers and Cases" allows us to extract or export information based on customer information and on the web forms they have submitted (known as cases).

Select the data to show on the report

In this step, we select exactly the information to display on the report. You don't need to choose to display a field if you are going to use it as a criteria - you only need to choose the actual fields you want to show.

We will choose the following:

Customer Name
Case Subject - this will, in general, be the name of the web form the customer submitted.
Case Create Date - this will, in general, be the date the web form was submitted.
Email 1 (Primary) - so we can see the customer's email address.

Once we've chosen these, click Next.

Select the criteria using filter fields

You can filter by up to 5 fields. "Filtering" means to include (or exclude) some customer records based on some critera that you set. Some example filters would be:

Customer Name ... equals ... "Bob" - All customers whose name is Bob.
Case Subject ... equals ... "Contact Us Form" - All cases whose subject is "Contact Us Form". This will show the web form submissions for the webform called "Contact Us Form"
Case Create Date ... greater than ... 12-8-2008 - show me cases which have ben created after 12th August 2008.
Customer Name ... does not contain ... "McGee" - All customers whose name doesn't have the "McGee" in it.

Select special fields

Once you've selected your regular filters, you can also filter on special fields - in particular, the fields associated with Web Forms or CRM Forms, or other special fields.

Generally if you just want to show all the web form results, choose your web form from the drop down and select "Display all custom fields in report".

Using the results of the report

Now click the "Generate Report" button to see the results.

Once you have your results you can:

Add your customers to a list, give them access to a secure zone, or add them to an affiliate program
Export the results into a spreadsheet
Save your report so you can come back to it later (click Next)
Admire the results in stunned silence

Save the report for later

Now you can save your report. Click Next, and then you'll able to enter a meaningful name for your report.

And next time you go to Reports->Create a Customer Report, your report will be waiting for you!

Additional topics

Analyzing email campaign reports to measure and improve performance

Sun, 27 Mar 2011 10:37:00 GMT

In this article, you'll learn how to use the Reports and Performance section of the Admin Console to manage and track your email campaigns. Once you've sent out your email campaign (in HTML format), your business can track what happens to each of the emails that has been sent. You can find out how many email addresses it reached, how many it bounced from, how many people have opened the email and so forth.

Note: Email campaigns sent in plain text are not tracked in the system.

Viewing the results of email campaigns

You can only view the Reports and Performance for email campaigns that have already been delivered for one-off email campaigns. For on-going anniversary or loyalty campaigns, you will be able to view the results after the first email has been delivered with the report results changing for each subsequent email that is sent. To review the statistics, follow these steps:

Choose Marketing > Email Campaigns.
Select the name of the Email Campaign you want to view.
The Reports and Performance page appears. You can also always access it by clicking the option in the sidebar: Reports and Performance.

Campaign summary and actions taken

The campaign summary gives you an executive overview of your email campaign. Please keep in mind that this level of reporting is only available for emails sent in HTML format. You will see:

Total Recipients: This was the number of email addresses that the system attempted to send the email to (from the mailing list)
Customer Opens: This is the number unique customers who have clicked on your email within their email client
Customer Actions: Number of actions that were a direct result of receiving this email and clicking on a link within the email. Actions include making an online purchase, filling out a webform, making a booking etc a customer can make more than 1 action
Bounces: This is the number of email addresses that rejected your email
Unsubscribes: In accordance with CAN-SPAM, your email you continue an 'Unsubscribe' link and your Online Business measures how many people unsubcribe from receiving further email communications from you as a result of this email.

You can click the links to the reports associated with each email. These reports open in a new window. These contain detailed listings for the statistics described above.

Beneath the campaign summary you'll see graphical representations of your statistics for your email campaign rates and customer actions.

Open Rates, Bounce Rates, Top 10 Links, Top 10 Actions

At the bottom of the page you'll see some more statistics. Click on any of the 4 graph types beneath the graph to see the data:

Opened Rate - shows how many people open your email on different days. This is particularly useful for on-going loyalty and anniversary email campaigns. For one-off emails, most recipients will open within the first 3 days.
Bounced Rate - shows when emails are being rejected. Again this is only useful for on-going loyalty and anniversary email campaigns.
Top 10 Links - if you put hyperlinks within the content of your email campaign this shows which ones are generating the most clicks.
Top 10 Actions - the system is also able to tell you what users are doing on your site when they are referred there by links within your email (hint: always make sure you have a link to your site from your email campaign)

Cleaning up bounced email addresses

After every email campaign, you should clean up your bounced email addresses from your mailing list. It's important to do this on a regular basis as bounced emails arise from:

misspelled or bad domains
'spam' email addresses being used to sign up for your email campaigns
incorrectly entered email addresses and
inactive email addresses

ISPs are looking for emails being sent to these addresses and could block your emails (blacklist your domain) if you have too many bounced email addresses. To unsubscribe the bounced email addresses, click the Email addresses that bounced link.

Select the checkbox for the email address you want to unsubscribe or choose select all, then use the Actions menu to choose unsubscribe.

For more information about unsubscribing bounced email messages, read Unsubscribing email addresses that have bounced.

Detailed listing of customer actions

Another report to review is the Actions Customers Took report. It is the most direct measure of the ROI your email campaigns are producing. You can see who's purchased products online so that you can follow up with people who've submitted a form to send an inquiry, knowing they've read the content in your email.

Using feedback to improve your email campaigns

All of this reporting is designed to help you improve your email campaigns. Open rates can tell us alot about the 'Subject' and 'From' fields in your email. Is it clear who the email was sent from and the was subject enticing enough to open? For people who sign up for a monthly email newsletter without purchasing a product we find that good open rates range from 20-30%. For people who've previously bought a high value from your shop before open rates can range up to 70%.

If you find the Actions-to-Opens too low, you should be looking at the calls-to-action within your email. Do you have links to lead people back to your site? Is there something compelling that they should be clicking on to go to a landing page?

Unsubcribe rate is high? This warrants a closer look at the content you're sending out. Is it spammy? Is it too laden with sales cliches? A lot of material has been written on email marketing on the web, your Online Business is about providing you the tools to send email campaigns and the tools to measure the performance so you can improve in subsequent email campaigns.

To learn more, read Segmenting your customer database to create mailing lists and Using email campaign tags.

Note: For anti-spam measures, if a recepient of a campaign marks the email as 'spam' in their email client, this contact will be opted-out from receiving newletters from your site. Similar to the unsubscribe process.

How To: Sync Your Online Business with Facebook using RSS

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:21:00 GMT

Using our RSS Channel feature, you're able to syndicate the majority of content from your Online Business via RSS feed. You can syndicate blog posts, web pages, literature items, announcements, FAQs, Web App items, bookings and new products you've added to your online store.

In this article, we'll show you in just 3 easy steps how to sync your Online Business with Facebook using RSS feeds, helping you better promote your business and keep loyal customers in the loop.

Step 1. Set up your RSS Channels

Before getting started, you need make sure you've created an RSS Channel and added items to it.

Creating a new channel is easy - simply click Website > RSS Channels, then select "Create a new RSS Channel" from the Action Box to the right.

If you're syndicating a blog, make sure the "Syndicate this blog" checkbox is ticked under the Website > Blogs, then the individual blog you'd like to stream via RSS.

Once ticked, the Blog will automatically have it's own RSS Channel created and appear in the list under Website > RSS Channels.

Step 2. Locate your RSS feed URL

Once your feed is set up, you'll need its unique URL in order to add it to Facebook. To locate the URL, click through to the individual feed...

...and select "Preview in new browser" from the Action Box to the right.

Your feed will open up in a new browser tab or window and you should be able to see your unstyled items displayed. Go to the address bar, highlight the feed URL and Copy (CTRL+C) it to the clipboard - we'll need this later.

You can also use this URL with a variety of third-party feed readers such as Google Reader or Feed Burner, to keep track of what's being added to your feed.

Step 3. Import the feed to Facebook

The next step is to import the feed into Facebook, so it adds your new RSS items as "Notes". Once you're logged in to Facebook, click the "Account" drop down menu from the upper-right of the interface and select "Application Settings".

Scroll down the list of applications until you find the "Notes" app. This application should already be present in every Facebook account. Click "Notes".

To the right of the page, you'll see a "Notes Settings" box. If you're not currently importing any blogs, then it will give you the option to. Select "Import a blog".

You'll be taken through to the "Import an external blog" tool. While this option is primarily used to import blogs, it will accept any standard RSS feed.

In the "Web URL" input field, Paste (CTRL+V) in the feed URL you copied earlier, then click "Start Importing".

You'll be taken to a confirmation screen with a preview of the items in your feed it will import initially. Click "Confirm Import" to finish the process.

Check the results

Your existing RSS items should be automatically imported as notes and appear on your wall as updates.

Every time you add a new blog post, announcement, online store product, or update the content you have syndicated as part of your RSS feed, Facebook will automatically post the new item as a note on your wall for others to view, like, or comment on.

How To: Implement A WYSIWYG Editor for Customer Submitted Web App Items

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:22:00 GMT

Using our customer submitted Web App feature is a great way to build database driven, interactive websites. If you want visitors to be able to format their text before it's submitted however, you'll require something more powerful than the default HTML text area.

In this article, we'll show you in just 4 easy steps how to implement a fully-featured WYSIWYG editor that submits text as formatted HTML instead!

Step 1. Set up your Web App

Firstly, you need to make sure your Web App allows customers to create new Web App items.

Go Admin > Build Web Apps and select your Web App

To enable this feature, tick the "Add New Items" checkbox under "Can Customers Create Web Apps?". If you'd also like customers to be able to edit and delete their existing Web App items, tick the appropriate checkboxes.Read more about customer submitted Web App items at the Online Business Wiki.

For this example, we've kept our Web App basic by collecting only the standard Name / Description system fields.

Step 2. Upload the jHtmlArea files to your site

A WYSIWYG editor that plays nice with BC is jHtmlArea. You can download it here.

Once you've downloaded the file, extract its contents and locate the following files:

jHtmlArea.css
jHtmlArea.png
jHtmlArea-0.7.0.min.js
jquery-1.3.2.min.js

Upload these files to your site using either FTP or our built-in File Manager. For this example, we'll upload all 4 files to the root directory of our site.

Step 3. Place the submission form on a page

Now we need to create a page to place the customer submission form on. We'll go Websites > Web Pages and click "Create A New Page"

Give the page a name and URL. For this example, we'll call it "Submit", with a friendly URL of /submit.

Using the Module Manager, select Web Apps then "Web Apps Input Form for Customers".

Choose your Web App from the drop down menu then insert it on the page.

The form will be inserted in HTML format for easy editing.

Step 4. Insert the script

Switch over to HTML view and insert the following code at the top of the page.

Click here for a version you can quickly Copy and Paste.

If you uploaded the files to a directory other than the root, make sure you change the code to reference their correct paths.

Save and Publish the page.

Check the results

Switching over to the live page, our description field's text area has been converted to a friendly WYSIWYG editor and even includes a handy HTML view.

Once the customer enters their text, formats it using the editor and hits the submit button, it will be submitted as formatted HTML.

4 Points To Improve Your Email Marketing

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:12:00 GMT

4 Points To Improve Your Email Marketing

On the subject of email, one of the most powerful features within the BC system is Email Marketing. Used properly, it's a cost-effective push marketing channel that small businesses like yours can use to reach past customers and prospects who've opted-in to receive communications from you. You can read and learn all about email marketing at our Online Business Wiki buthere's 4 points I want to highlight to help you become a better email marketer -

1) Keep Your Mailing Lists Clean

As an unfortunate part of life on the internet, you will get people and automated spambots signing up for your email newsletters with fake or temporary email addresses. It's important to remove these from your email recipient lists on a regular basis. Repeatedly sending emails to invalid or expired addresses will result in ISPs flagging your legitimate email marketing efforts as spam.

Thankfully, it's now easier than ever to keep your mailing lists clean with BC:

Once you've sent out an email campaign you can automatically remove all bounced emails from your mailing list with one click just by going to the 'Email Addresses That Bounced' option in 'Reports and Performance' for your campaign and clicking Unsubscribe Allunder the Actions tab.
Email Newsletter sign-in boxes now come standard with a CAPTCHA field when you use the Module Manager to place them on webpages or templates to stop automated spambots from signing up with fake email addresses.

2) Let Your Recipients Use Their Browser Instead

When you send out your email campaigns, you're reaching a vast ecosystem of email clients out there; various versions of Outlook, Apple Mail and Thunderbird floating around and webmail clients like Gmail and Yahoo Mail too! Although it's good practice to test on all the major clients to see how the images and layout of your HTML email are rendered there's what I call the 'just-in-case hyperlink' that you should put in the header of your emails.

It's the 'View-in-browser' link and all you have to do is insert { tag_viewinbrowser } in your email header or footer. When your recipients click on it, the email will be opened in a browser where you can be sure the images will download and the layout will be rendered as you intended therefore increasing your readability.

3) Let Your Recipients Tell Their Friends About You

Want a quick-win for expanding your email newsletter readership especially if you're sending some exclusive high-value content on a regular basis? Put the{ tag_tellafriend } tag in your header or footer and the recipients who love your newsletter can click and sign-up their friends to read your newsletter as well.

4) Let Your Recipients Unsubscribe

Inevitably, people will want to unsubscribe from your email lists for whatever reason and it's important to provide them with this option otherwise they might just click on the 'Report Spam' button instead which will red-flag you with their ISP. Did you know you have 2 different kinds of unsubscribe options you can give them by inserting these respective tags:

{ tag_unsubscribe } - the standard unsubscribe link which opts the recipient out of all communcations from you.
{ tag_unsubscribelist } - sometimes people might want to unsubscribe from an monthly or fortnightly email series rather than all communications from you in which case you would useUnsubscribe. When they click on this they are only removed from the email list that was used to send them the email campaign but are still opted-in to receive other communications from you.

You Can Become a Email Marketing Power User

With those 4 tips, I hope you've gained some knowledge to fine-tune your email campaigns. Not quite at the power user level yet? That's ok - try these email campaign tutorials on our Online Business Wiki and give Email Marketing a test-drive on your BC Free Trial!

Tutorial 4 - Sending Your First Email Newsletter
Tutorial 4.4 - Using Email Campaign Tags
Email Campaign Reference Guide (the extended version)

WebFolio North American Data Center is Now Life

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 15:43:00 GMT

North American Data Center Online

We're proud to announce that our North American Data Center is now up and running. What this means is, you'll be able to choose where to host your site.

If you're based in the US you'll see a faster response and improved usability from your OBB sites and more importantly, your US customers and visitors will benefit as well.

Choosing Your Own Data Center - You can choose where to host your site depends on the locality of who's going to be using it and who's visiting it.

Free Trials will be hosted on the server that's closest - if you're setting up sites using the WebFolio 30 Days Free Trial then the system will automatically host your site on the data center that's closest to you.

WebFolio's October Newsletter

Tue, 10 Nov 2009 09:01:00 GMT

Hello all,

Welcome to WebFolio Business Success for October. This is our monthly newsletter to keep you updated with the latest WebFolio news, system improvements and Online Business articles.

New Blog Editor Beta

We've just released a beta version of our new blog editor for you to take for a test drive.

The refreshed UI includes a range of enhancements, allowing you to more intuitively create and manage your blogs.

Exciting New Features

Custom, SEO-friendly URLs

Using the new UI, you can set your own custom, search engine friendly URLs for each individual post.

By default, the URL follows the format: yourdomain.com/_blog/Blog_Name/post/Post_Name

Easy Category & Tag Management

Categorizing and tagging your blog posts has never been easier!

Simply tick the categories or tags that match your post, or add new tags in just seconds.

Centralized Comment Control

From a single interface, you can view, moderate and delete comments assigned to a specific post.

Try It Out Today

Testing out the new blog editor is easy - from the "Blog Posts" view, simply select the post you want to edit and click "Edit with new UI."

So why not give it a try? We'll keep you updated on the final release date via the "What's New" panel in your Admin Console.

Editor's Choice - The Best Articles on Web Design and Online Businesses

If you're busy like me, chances are you don't have the time to keep updated in latest web design news, tips and tricks piling up inside your RSS feeder. Let me make life easier by recommending 3 must read articles in every issue:

15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design from Smashing Magazine

"Selling online can open up huge new markets for many businesses. When your store can be open 24/7 and you can reach a global market without the costs of mailings and call centers, it can be a huge boon to your business. But there are plenty of things to consider when designing an ecommerce site. It’s not as simple as throwing up some shopping cart software and plopping products into a database.

There are tons of mistakes that online retailers make every day, all of them avoidable with a little careful planning. And even if you’re already committing some of these mistakes, most of them are easy enough to fix. Avoiding them will greatly improve the experience of your customers. "

The Sideways L: How to Use Misdirection to Make Your Readers Laugh from Copyblogger

"Making your readers laugh can be a great way to capture attention, create word of mouth, and develop a terrific relationship with your audience.

A lot of writers may think you can’t teach people how to write humor, but I don’t buy it. In fact, here’s a simple technique you can use to get a few laughs of your own."

5 Techniques to Style Buttons using Images and CSS from Queness

"Learn all the common ways to style a button. This tutorial will show how to create a search engine friendly, customizable, and expandable button and also style buttons with CSS sprite."

That wraps it up for this issue of WebFolio Business Success, until next time!

Regards,
The WebFolio Team
Ensuring Your Online Business Success

4 Easy Steps to Embed A Twitter Widget on Online Business Buddy

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:23:00 GMT

In this tutorial, we'll generate and insert a simple Twitter profile widget in the site-wide template of our site in just 4 easy steps!

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4 Steps To Embed a Twitter Widget

Step 1. Generate the code

Go to: http://twitter.com/goodies/widget_profile, enter your Twitter username and click "Test Settings" to see a live preview of the default widget.

From this page, you can also customize the behaviour of the widget, it's appearance (the background and font colors), and it's size. If you know where you're going to insert the widget, customize the colors so it matches the look and feel it's surroundings.

For this example, we'll customize the color scheme to match that of our site-wide template, where we'll be inserting the widget.

Step 2. Grab The Code

Once you're finished customizing, click "Finish & Grab Code" to see the code that renders the widget on your HTML page.

Highlight the code then "Copy" it to your clipboard (CTRL-C)

Step 3. Paste The Code In Your Template

You can place the widget on any page, but for this example we'll place it in the sidebar of our Site Wide Template, so that our status updates are displayed on every page of the site.

Under Admin > Manage Site Wide Templates, select the appropriate template and switch to HTML view.

Paste (CTRL-V) the copied code where you'd like the widget to be rendered.

In this example, we'll place it inside our sidebar div container so that we can control it's position using CSS.

Step 4. Save & Publish!

Save & Publish the template, then visit the front-end of your site to view the changes.

With some knowledge of CSS, you can quickly customize the look and feel of your Twitter widget. You can also edit the variables inside the code at any point in the future, without having to re-generate the widget.

What Visitors Will See

On the front-end of your site, a profile widget will be dynamically generated and display your most recent Tweets.

This is a great way to spice up your static pages and keep visitors up-to-date with the latest news surrounding your business.

Streamline Your Business Using Workflows

Thu, 22 Jul 2010 17:23:00 GMT

Using Workflows to Streamline Your Business and Keep Your Customers Informed

Workflows are representations of your real-life business processes within your Online Business. As an example, you might have a simple 3 step online sales process as outlined below:

Did you know you can build a workflow inside your Online Business to automatically send notifications to the various people required to remind them to complete their step of the sales process. Not only do you email them but you can send an SMS as well. Your accounts department is notified to confirm the order, then your warehouse can build the order and finally, your shipping department receives a note to dispatch the order to your customer! Tick the 'Must Approve' box so each workflow step must be marked as completed by the person responsible before it progresses.

Workflows can be initiated automatically for webform submissions, order submissions, bookings and web page edits.

How Do You Use Workflows?

Workflows are located in your 'Admin' menu where you can click on 'Manage Workflows'. Here you'll be able to create workflows to model your business processes such as your Order-to-Dispatch process described above. For each step you'll need to specify how much time is allowed before escalation, who is responsible for the workflow, and who the workflow is escalated to if there is a problem. There is a detailed guide to setting up Workflows on our Online Business Wiki.

Send the Workflow Notification To 3rd Party Email Addresses

Notifications are by default sent to the Online Business users assigned to the workflow step but by ticking the 'Also Send Workflow Notification To' box you can send the notifications to 3rd party email addresses. This is useful if you have people in your organization who don't have Online Business logins but need to be informed that they have tasks to complete.

Keep Your Customers Informed As Workflow Steps Are Being Completed

As well as notifying your own employees you can tick the 'Send Workflow Message to Customer' box to send emails to the customer as their orders pass through the different steps of being fulfilled. For each different step you'll need to enter different custom content e.g when the goods are shipped and a 'Thank You' note is sent.

As your employees complete each step of the workflow they can click on 'Quick Add' and then 'Approve Task' to send an automated notification to the customer that their order has progressed through the business process!

Customize the Automatic Notification Email

Don't forget you can customize the look and feel of the notification emails going to your customers by going to the 'Customize System Emails' option in the admin menu and clicking on '3rd Party Workflow Emails'. This is where you can create your own HTML email template complete with your own logo and branding.

Use Workflows To Make Sure The Right People in your Organization Are Being Notified

Keeping your workers and customers informed at every step of your business processes means you'll be providing more timely and transparent customer service. Using Workflows, your business will be better organized and your customers will be more satisfied that they know the status of their order or inquiry all the way

Online Business Success

How to create a survey using our new Web Form builder

Building The Web Form

Step 1.Open up the new Web Form builder

Step 2. Select The Question Type

Step 3. Enter Your Questions

Step 4. Insert The Web Form On A Page

Gathering The Results

Step 1. Create A Customer Report

Step 2. Select "Customers & Cases"

Working With Affiliate Programs

Strategies for rewarding affiliates

Creating an Affiliate Program

Customizing the system message that is sent to participants with the terms of the program

Subscribe participants to a Affiliate Program

Run reports to see the performance of Affiliate Programs

Rewarding commissions to affiliate participants

Analyzing overall performance of Affiliate Programs

Affiliate Programs and non-seamless gateways

How To Send Your First Email Campaign

Preparing a recipient list

Understanding bounced email messages

Creating a campaign and choosing the campaign type

Entering the campaign details

Choosing an email campaign recipient

Choosing a design template

Enter the email message content

Preview the message and send it to recipients

Creating sales opportunities from customer inquiries

How to use the opportunities feature

Creating custom reports to analyze customer data

What is a customer report

Example uses of customer reports

Creating a customer report

Tutorial: Reporting on web form submissions with customer reports

Select the data to show on the report

Select the criteria using filter fields

Select special fields

Using the results of the report

Save the report for later

Additional topics

Analyzing email campaign reports to measure and improve performance

Viewing the results of email campaigns

Campaign summary and actions taken

Open Rates, Bounce Rates, Top 10 Links, Top 10 Actions

Cleaning up bounced email addresses

Using feedback to improve your email campaigns

How To: Sync Your Online Business with Facebook using RSS

Step 1. Set up your RSS Channels

Step 2. Locate your RSS feed URL

Step 3. Import the feed to Facebook

Check the results

How To: Implement A WYSIWYG Editor for Customer Submitted Web App Items

Step 1. Set up your Web App

Step 2. Upload the jHtmlArea files to your site

Step 3. Place the submission form on a page

Step 4. Insert the script

Check the results

4 Points To Improve Your Email Marketing

4 Points To Improve Your Email Marketing

1) Keep Your Mailing Lists Clean

2) Let Your Recipients Use Their Browser Instead

3) Let Your Recipients Tell Their Friends About You

4) Let Your Recipients Unsubscribe

You Can Become a Email Marketing Power User

WebFolio North American Data Center is Now Life

North American Data Center Online

WebFolio's October Newsletter

New Blog Editor Beta

Exciting New Features

Try It Out Today

Editor's Choice - The Best Articles on Web Design and Online Businesses

15 Common Mistakes in E-Commerce Design from Smashing Magazine

The Sideways L: How to Use Misdirection to Make Your Readers Laugh from Copyblogger

5 Techniques to Style Buttons using Images and CSS from Queness

4 Easy Steps to Embed A Twitter Widget on Online Business Buddy

Contents

4 Steps To Embed a Twitter Widget

Step 1. Generate the code

Step 2. Grab The Code