As you decorate your brick-and-mortar or online store to win shoppers’ attention on Small Business Saturday, take a moment to appreciate the progress you’ve made thus far. Building a business is no small feat, and we’re happy to see you flourishing. Whether your company has been around awhile or your ribbon-cutting ceremony is scheduled tomorrow, we wish you the best on your entrepreneurial journey. 

While Small Business Saturday can be that big shot in the arm you’ve needed, it’s also important to foster the relationship you’ve made with contacts. Supposing a family dines in your restaurant for the first time, your service coupled with communicativeness could be the catalyst for their next visit. Emails, by their very essence, can help you build successful relationships with your customers. Their simplicity and one-on-one nature means you can reach out to your audience any time in a personalized manner.

To help you maximize the impact emails can have on growing your business, we at Zoho Campaigns are launching a site dedicated to providing email marketing educational resources for small business owners.

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

While holidays spell fun and frolic for some, for others they mean more work. When it comes to email marketers, the holidays are a time to buckle up for increased marketing activity.

Every holiday season tests the nerves of email marketers. Their future can be decided based upon their capability to handle this sudden torrent of buyers. This is when the regular senders try to adapt to changes in the market while seasonal email marketers try to plunge in and tell a story in a short time.

All said and done, you’ll have to make an extra, careful effort to ensure you reap success during the holidays. This blog will discuss methods to make the most of the holiday season and the various avenues you should explore to achieve higher email deliverability and maximum engagement.

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

While Google Hire calls it quits, you’re going to need options. Zoho Recruit is an affordable alternative that is resilient and adaptable. 

Recruitment is unpredictable. Job profiles, hiring processes, assessment cycles, and HR demands are always changing. Meanwhile, competition and survivability among providers of applicant tracking systems (ATS) are changing too. Recruiters and corporate hiring teams must seek a solution that can weather storms and adapt to user needs.

With Google now shutting down its hiring solution, Google Hire, users now have to hunt for an alternative. We believe Zoho Recruit is the answer.

Whether you are a staffing agency or corporate hiring team, Zoho Recruit is the best alternative for your specific recruitment needs. It is an efficient ATS as well as an easy-to-use recruitment CRM and human capital management solution.

Up your hiring game

Zoho Recruit is a complete hiring automation platform that can be fully customized according to your unique needs. Our team of technical experts and solution architects have been making this possible for over a decade. The recruitment functionality that Zoho Recruit offers is super extensive and in-depth when compared to Google Hire.

Keep your Google apps

With Zoho Recruit, you don’t have to lose your favorite Google applications. Sync your Google Contacts and Calendar, and access Gmail from Zoho Recruit to monitor emails and post jobs to Google.

Free migration and licensing 

Switch risk-free from Google Hire to Zoho Recruit and enjoy free migration and onboarding support until 2020. To give you enough time to assess Zoho Recruit and make an informed decision, we are also offering free licenses to our enterprise edition till the end of this year. With it, you’ll have access to our most advanced features and add-ons to date.

What’s more? Over 5,000 companies trust Zoho Recruit’s complete recruitment software and applicant tracking system.

Your search for a dependable hiring solution ends here.

Advertising job openings isn’t just about posting them on career sites or job boards; it’s about putting them in front of the right talent and gain maximizing visibility–whether you’re hiring a full-time iOS developer or a freelance writer.

Today, a lot of search queries are made on Google, making it the first resource for many candidates applying for jobs.

Now, with Zoho Recruit’sintegration with Google Search, we’re bringing them both together so you can find more qualified applicants and get your job postings on page one.

Get a prominent place in search results

Highlighting the roles and responsibilities of job postings is already part of a recruiter’s daily work. Now, Zoho Recruit helps you gain maximum reach through Google’s job search engine.

According to Google, “your postings are eligible to be displayed in the in the new job search feature on Google, featuring your logo, reviews, and job details.”

Bring your jobs into the big picture 

Jobs on Google Search allows applicants to target their search, giving them the opportunity to narrow down jobs by location, job title, and many other criteria making job hunting now as simple as a Google search.

Meet Sally, an applicant looking for a Full Stack Developer job in an IT firm. She types “Full Stack Developer” into a Google Search and gets a list of jobs matching her query. This is how her screen will look. 

The job listing shows when the job was posted, whether the position is full-time, where it was posted, and much more.

And the best thing? It is mobile optimized too!

Closing with an Open Question

As the recruitment landscape continues to shift, isn’t it important for hiring managers and recruiters to stay flexible in their ways of attracting candidates?

We’re constantly looking to improve this integration—and more—with your feedback.

Try it out and see how it works for you. Questions? Comments? Feedback? Write to us in the comments section below or drop an email to 

support@zohorecruit.com.

Resumes are never scarce if you’re a recruiter. While candidate applications flow in from everywhere, sorting through them manually and ranking them based on their qualification for a job opening isn’t always as rewarding as you want it to be.

Traditionally, the resume-filtering process used to be automated using keyword matching (like SEO), a method that proved to be unreliable because it gave way to various loopholes and hacks candidates would use to exploit the filtering process.

This exploitation hurt a firm’s brand as hundreds of job searchers would be unhappy with the hiring process, and resumes that made it past the initial screening wouldn’t represent great candidates.

AI automates recruitment

With the arrival of artificial intelligence (AI), there was suddenly a surge of technological advancements being incorporated into recruitment solutions, giving process automation a new meaning. Initially, a wave of chat bots, web bots, and automatic video tools took candidate engagement to a new level.

Although these solutions were one-dimensional, they proved to be a blessing for recruiters around the globe as they could converse with candidates and source information without actually having to talk to them.

However, these enhancements to candidate engagement and information sourcing weren’t enough as resumes were still piling up, and all recruiters had to manage this issue were outdated and unreliable screening methods.

On the bright side, AI solutions were escalating and getting smarter, to an extent that it slowly became a part of our day-to-day routine.

From language translators and face recognition in photo apps to email spam filters and online product recommendations, we hardly notice how much we use AI in our daily lives. You could even call it the “AI epoch.” This advancement in technology and the demand for increased AI adoption in recruitment solutions gave rise to the modern resume screening method.

The age of machine learning 

Thus began the age of machine learning—a machine’s ability to learn useful functions from manually classified past examples.

Today’s AI solutions are so smart that they scan and rank a candidate’s qualifications and skills in order to grade them convincingly. With the use of machine learning, recruitment solutions were able to use the previous actions of recruiters to become smarter and infallible.

Moreover, this enhancement brought down time-to-fill by almost 75% compared to older methods, reduced time spent on manual tasks significantly, and also help recruiters rediscover past candidates.

Recruiters were then able to concentrate more on tasks that weren’t successfully addressed by AI—those that imply cognitive skills and emotional intelligence. Meanwhile, recruitment systems were getting smarter using their actions and were able to:

• Learn to find the right candidate.

• Filter job applications better.

• Retain top talent and dismiss unqualified candidates from the talent pool.

Along with resume screening methods, AI has also improved areas where recruiters urgently demanded automation be implemented, like web bots that extensively search for passive candidates and prescriptive analytics that help recruiters understand their candidate pool better in order to find the best course of action for a given situation.

All this talk about AI must have got you wondering about what’s next for Zoho Recruit, right? Your brilliant question is about to be matched with a fitting answer.

Candidate matching with AI

Finding the perfect candidates for a job opening is now more straightforward than ever thanks to the evolution of AI matching.

Recruit uses Zia, an AI assistant built for the business world, to consider candidates based on their whole career rather than just scanning for certain words in a resume.

This enables her to find “the perfect match” for your job openings by matching their experiences, skills, and proficiencies with your requirements and grading them accordingly.

Assume you have 100 eligible candidate records in your Zoho Recruit accounts for five active job openings. Going through every candidate record and vetting them can be wearisome and repetitious.

With Zia’s help, you’re able to match and associate the right candidates exponentially quicker because she presents you with a list of candidates that are graded and ranked based on how much they match with the job requirements

AI candidate matching helps you be insightful, one step ahead, and ready to recruit.

If you think AI and candidate matching will help transform your recruiting process, try the completely overhauled Zoho Recruit today.

When we talk about work culture, we generally address a plethora of things, from office decor to management principles, without clearly understanding what it means. Work culture is simply the reflection of the ethics of an organization. In simpler words, if your workplace were a person, their beliefs, ideas, and character would be their “work culture.” The ultimate goal to achieve through a positive work culture is productivity.

Apart from the obvious factors that influence the environment in which we spend most of our time—like communication, leadership, and work ethic, to name a few—there is one more element that we almost always fail to address: team collaboration.

Team collaboration is as the name suggests, an alternative term for teamwork. Everyone can agree that teamwork is necessary in an organization, but how many of us know just how necessary teamwork is to foster a positive work culture?

Let’s break it down:

Why team collaboration is essential for a positive work culture 

Teamwork makes the dream work

The phrase isn’t far-fetched from the truth because a joint effort is always beneficial and effective in getting any work done. It is found that team collaboration can improve an organization’s productivity by 20-25%. There are many tools to facilitate collaboration and bring about these results. Zoho Cliq, team communication software ensures that you’re always connected to your team, has many features to help you stay on top of your tasks and work together. 

Removing the monotony

Imagine you’re going to work on a Monday. You get to the office and the first thing you do is get yourself a cup of coffee and settle down at your cubicle to start the day. You go about minding your own work, not really bothering to get up from your seat because work comes first, after all. When it’s 5pm, you pack up and leave promptly.

Now, imagine the same routine repeated for all the 365 days in a year.

While monotonous work can be a little relaxing every now and then, having the same routine over a continuous period can be draining. Staying connected with your team ensures that you always have someone to interact with and don’t fall prey to boredom at work.

Always on the same page

Often we find ourselves feeling like we’re falling behind in our work while everybody else is cruising through, without even knowing what it is that everybody else is actually doing. The best thing about team collaboration is that you work together and not just beside each other. Having your teammates work together with you at the same pace brings in the urge and the courage to push harder so that everyone gets their work done better and faster. What better motivation than joint effort?

Staying healthy

According to Harvard Business Review, a workplace characterized by humanity leads to employee happiness. Collaboration between employees builds that sort of culture. Instead of the competitive workplace that we’re all so accustomed to, it builds a workplace that is characterized by understanding and respect. In other words, humanity. A happier employee is also a healthier employee. In essence, if your working environment encouraged positive interactions with each other, you can pretty much say goodbye to all stress-related ailments for good.

Brainstorming innovation

When you work together as a team, there’s bound to be a mingling of ideas and strategies, and this can lead to unexpected innovation. When it comes to say, sales, involving more collaborators leads to a larger pool of ideas for consumer satisfaction. Studies suggest that teams of six or more people generated concepts that performed 58% better with consumers in pre-market testing. A workplace resonating with great ideas resonates positivity as well.

To conclude…

From the listed points, evidently the key that all of it boils down to is one thing: employee happiness.

If anything, that should be the ultimate goal that every organization must strive to achieve. A positive work culture promotes happiness among the workforce and employee happiness is vital to success because happy employees are 31% more productive.

In conclusion, team collaboration reduces work stress by allowing people to share the load rather than carry it all on their shoulders, and it is therefore essential to create a positive work culture that encourages employee interaction.

Now is the time to reflect. Does your organization promote healthy interaction among its employees?

Always on the phone but not productive?

Zoho Assist mobile app to the rescue

We have an update for the iOS version which teams up with Siri to make actions in the app quicker and easier. Now you don’t even have to press a button or tap on any action. Just talk to Siri and get her to do the work for you.

There are multiple ways to simplify the actions you regularly do in the application. After all, everyone works a little differently. Choose which Siri shortcut you’d like to have on hand and customize according to your convenience.

There are also new options to simplify your tasks, for both remote support and unattended access. Your frequently used actions will show up automatically when you use your search bar, and you can search the spotlight to perform particular actions. Also, use the 3D touch to access home screen shortcuts and perform vital operations such as search, starting a session, scheduling a session, and connecting to recent computers.

Zoho Assist Features

Siri

With Siri shortcuts, you can set up a prompt word which you can then use to instruct Siri to perform an action. Easy and simple is the mantra.

3D Touch

Sometimes, talking to your phone is not what you prefer. Use 3D touch to access the shortcuts if that is more your style. Our team ensures that there are multiple ways to get your work done.

Widgets 

Use widgets to access your scheduled sessions in remote support and recent computers in Unattended Remote Access. Drag the widget you want to your screen and start using! It is as simple as that!

We have unravelled all that can happen in the latest version of Assist iOS mobile app. Now go ahead and experience the magic firsthand. And do not forget to tell us all about it!

Here’s a blog piece by Izabelle Hundrev from G2, a B2B review marketplace for software and services. She specializes in sales, marketing, and real estate content. After earning a degree in Journalism from the University of Missouri, Izabelle moved back to her hometown of Chicago, where she currently resides.

Expert Diaries from Zoho Campaigns connects avid email marketers to the experts in this space, and help them learn some best practices and tips. We’re kickstarting this with some thoughts on how to liven up the your efforts over the next half of this year, helping you perform #SmartEmailMarketing.

Email has proven to be an effective marketing tool for decades. It helps brands drive traffic, nurture leads, and, ultimately, drive sales.

But now more than ever, buyers in the digital age are flooded with messaging across all applicable channels. Marketers face a new challenge: how to cut through the noise.

As we’re rounding up the first half of this year, there’s no time left to waste. Over the next six months, it’s important to look at email marketing through a different lens and focus your efforts on strategies that are proven to deliver measurable results.

An effective email marketing campaign can take many forms (newsletter, nurture campaign, etc.) but should have a strong tactical foundation. In this article, we’ll cover five email marketing strategies to implement that will help you push the envelope and convert more buyers into paying customers.

Audience segmentation  

Email allows you to cast a wide net and connect with your audience in an easy and accessible way. But that doesn’t mean you should target all of your subscribers with the same messaging. Think about it: different people value and care about different things. Someone who just started their own small business has different problems than an executive at a Fortune 500 company. While both of these personas might fit within your target audience, you need to speak to them differently.

This is where audience segmentation comes in. By segmenting your audience into different email lists, you can still reach a lot of people at once, but the messaging will be more relevant to them. How you decide to segment your audience will ultimately be up to you. You can build out email lists based on demographics, level of engagement, or even what stage of the funnel your prospects are in.

Personalization  

The reason audience segmentation is so effective is because it makes an email campaign more personalized. Everybody wants to feel special, and if a brand is able to make you feel like you’re not just another email on their list, you form a stronger connection to that company and their message. 

There are a lot of ways in which marketers can make their email marketing campaigns more personalized. Small touches like switching up the subject line to include the recipient’s name or including a name in the “from” field can make a big difference. Show your subscribers that you value them as individuals and not just for their wallets.

Send-time optimization  

Unless your business only serves a local market, there’s a good chance that your audience doesn’t live in the same time zone. After all, what’s the point of sending a carefully-crafted email if your recipient is asleep when they receive it?

If you check existing research about the best time to send an email, you’ll notice that the results are varied. The truth is there isn’t a universally accepted time that will ensure your email is opened and read. The workaround is that you can test which times work best for your specific audience.

First, start with timezones to make sure you’re hitting your target audience during daytime hours. From there, it’s best to conduct A/B testing to determine which times of the day and days of the week will yield the highest open rates.

Optimize email content for mobile  

The days of having access to email only on a desktop are long gone. Nowadays, most people use their smartphone to keep tabs on just about every aspect of their daily life. If the content of the emails that you’re sending isn’t easily readable on a mobile device, you might have a major problem in your hands. To be frank, it’s just bad email marketing.

Luckily, this is easily preventable. When looking at an email inbox on a smartphone, you’ll notice that each message has three major components: the name of the sender, a subject line, and pre-text. There’s a good chance these elements are the only thing the recipient will see before they decide to click on your email or delete it altogether, so you’ll want to make sure they’re optimized to fit the mobile experience.

Another factor to remember is the size and formatting of your email once it’s opened. If the reader is enticed enough to open your message, you don’t want them to delete it because it’s too difficult to read on their phone. 

Use technology to your advantage  

The final piece of the puzzle is finding the right technology to help you execute. If you pair these email marketing strategies with the correct software tools, you’ll be on your way to converting email subscribers to loyal customers in no time. 

Email marketing software plays a big role in running a successful email campaign. Users can create email lists, make custom templates, and send emails in bulk with the click of a button. In addition to helping you be more efficient, an email marketing solution will provide you with valuable data to track your campaigns and their performance in real time. You can track bounce and click-through rates, as well as the number of users that unsubscribed from your campaign. These insights are valuable when it comes to deciding which campaigns to keep and which ones to get rid of.

Final thoughts  

There’s no silver bullet when it comes to email marketing, but you can do your best to find out what works for your brand and audience. By following these five email marketing strategies, you’ll be able to fully maximize your efforts in no time.

If you’re running a subscription business, tracking metrics like MRR, ARPU, and net revenue is critical to growing your business. Having a powerful analytics software like Zoho Analytics comes in handy, as it not only integrates with popular subscription apps like Stripe but also comes pre-packaged with 75+ subscription analytics reports and dashboards to help you leverage your subscription data.

In our previous post on Stripe subscription analytics, we looked at some of the vital metrics you need to track to evaluate the health of your subscription business. In this blog post, let’s dive deeper and learn more about some of the key metrics you should be tracking from the revenue overview dashboard.

Revenue growth this year vs last year

MRR is one of the great means by which you can track your business health. Solid revenue growth can unlock new opportunities for your company, like expanding to new locations, increasing marketing spend, hiring new talent, and building new products. If you’re an organization that’s a few years old, consistent growth is critical. You may be heading towards a slow death if revenue growth stagnates.

The above chart shows you the running total of MRR in the current year and the previous year. This will enable you to determine how far you’ve come as a business, and how close you are to reaching your revenue target for the current year.

Plan-based revenue

Subscription businesses devise pricing plans to optimize revenue and maximize profits. And SaaS companies have the advantage of modifying their pricing plans whenever needed, based on business and market conditions.

This report shows the distribution of revenue generated based on pricing plans. Using this report, you can gain insights and experiment with different pricing plans, identify the ones that bring in more revenue, which you can then use to build strategies for converting more users and eventually increase revenue.

Churned MRR

MRR churn, to put it simply, is the monthly recurring revenue you lose from the customers who unsubscribed from your service. It is a known fact that your existing customers are more valuable than your potential customers. A minimal drop in churn can increase your customer retention and revenue, but your business is in a critical state and requires immediate attention if your churn rate keeps increasing.

The Churned MRR chart gives you the recurring revenue you’ve lost from customers in each of the pricing plans. We’ve discussed the importance of churn, MRR, and other vital subscription metrics in our previous post. Tracking these metrics will help you assess the performance of your pricing plans, and set up plan-specific action items to tackle churn.

Average Revenue Per User (ARPU) per month

ARPU is a crucial SaaS metric which communicates the average revenue you acquire from your customers. Monetizing your customers more efficiently drives higher revenue to your business. The more you retain your customers, the higher the ARPU, and the greater the growth.

This month over month (MoM) ARPU report allows you to measure the effectiveness of your pricing experiments and understand the value proposition your product delivers to your users.

One of the ultimate indicators of your business growth is your revenue increase. Regularly measuring and acting upon your revenue trends and customer retention goes a long way in shaping the progress of your business.

This is just a glimpse of what Zoho Analytics can do to help you analyze and improve your subscription business. If you are a business owner who needs more personalized information and deep analytics, you can as well build your own reports and dashboards to track the metrics that matter the most to your business.

Set up Stripe Advanced Analytics now!

Email marketing is seen as an integral element of engagement for most of today’s digital businesses. While sending emails still takes the primary focus for most of us, delivering emails successfully to recipients’ inboxes is catching up the top position too.

So it’s not just sending an email campaign that can ensure a place for it in a recipient’s mail folder. There are other methods to make your emails “smart” and “intelligent” in a way that they not only land safely but also don’t get lost in the long trail of other emails in your contacts’ inboxes.

With Zoho Campaigns, you can create and send emails that are personalized in both content and time of delivery, interactive, tested for open rates and clicks, spam-compliant, and extremely relevant and consumable to every contact who receives them.

Let’s look at some ways you can perform smarter email marketing and how Zoho Campaigns can make this process easy.

Testing that’s impact-driven and not imperfectly driven

It’s common wanting to run an experiment to test different versions of your email, but it’s important to list your reasons before you do. Ask yourself the following questions:

• Why do you want to run this experiment?

• What variables are you comparing?

• What is the end goal and which is this the winning version?

A/B testing for emails is the best way to find out which type of email has more impact on your audience. Where people get A/B testing wrong is by not running a test at all before sending an email (when it’s highly required) and running imperfect testing by comparing wrong attributes (when it’s not recommended). Don’t forget that A and B are just versions that need to differ by the same attribute. A meaningful result will only come when you try to compare relevant versions.

With A/B Testing from Zoho Campaigns, you’re able to test emails for different attributes like subject line, sender address, and email content. With the ability to pick your own decision criteria for selecting the winning version of the email, you can have the entire experiment run under your control without being data-blinded.

Sending emails when a recipient is most active

What if every email you send is opened instantly by your recipient? It sounds like magic, but it’s really just metrics! Understanding your recipients’ prime open times will help you deliver emails that get noticed.

Time calibration plays a key role in estimating the time during which a particular email that you send will be opened by a contact who receives it. Your contacts may have subscribed to multiple brands and are likely to receive a sizeable chunk of emails every day. What can differentiate your email from the rest is when you choose to make that email appear in their inboxes.

Using Zoho Campaigns’ Send Time Optimization, you can make sure to send emails to your mailing list contacts at the exact time each of them will be active. This time will be unique for each contact, so, in simple terms, you’re now able to personalize the time of email delivery!

Safeguarding your domain reputation with email splitting 

All of us are aware of this simple science—the more air filling a balloon, the more chances of it bursting. Imagine the same scenario but with your mail server in the place of the balloon. Sending bulk emails is fine, but what matters more is how you’re handling the bulk. The bulkier your email sending gets, the riskier your sender reputation becomes.

Sending too many emails at the same time can strain your server and make your domain look inauthentic. The best way to prevent this is by splitting your huge email numbers into smaller batches and sending each batch at periodic time intervals.

Zoho Campaigns’ Batch Send option helps you conveniently split your mailing list—and your emails—into multiple batches, as well as letting you define the time period between the delivery of each email batch. This also gives you room to study the performance of each set of emails and optimize them further for the next set.

Handling of bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints

The health of your mailing list and the overall performance of an email campaign depends on three primary metrics: bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints. These terms are as crucial as other performance measuring units like open and click rates.

A high bounce rate clearly indicates the inability to deliver your emails, which in turn shows that your mailing list is unhealthy and doesn’t contain contacts from authentic/trusted sources. Unsubscriptions happen due to a variety of reasons, the most common being a lack of interest in the brand, irrelevant engagement, spam experiences, change in reading preference, and so on.

Similar to unsubscribing from a list, people can also mark emails as spam. When the unsubscribe process is complicated, recipients tend to mark specific emails as spam with the expectation being they won’t receive any further emails from the sender. A holistic maintenance of all these three metrics is essential for smooth email delivery.

Zoho Campaigns provides automatic handling of bounces (soft and hard bounces), unsubscribes, and spam complaints so you don’t have to stress about managing these for every email campaign. Also, when a sender is exceeding their bounce rate or spam complaints, we automatically notify them in order to help them get back on track with some best practices.

Seeing emails the way your recipients would 

Today’s online buying process has been revolutionary, but it hasn’t given up on one thing—the catalogue. Buying decisions are still based on product images. Buyers still want a sneak-peek at what they can expect from the product.

It’s the same case with your emails. Previewing emails before sending them to recipients helps you not only proofread the various email elements, but also get an idea about how your email will look in the their inboxes. This will reduce human errors as well as help you seamlessly deliver emails across multiple email clients, devices, and browsing platforms.