Increase your work pace and get more done by simplifying and automating your routine tasks with the IFTTT integration for Cliq.

IFTTT works on the conditional statement “if this, then that” to connect various applications or services together.

This integration helps you stay on top of new tweets from any specific user, tasks created in Todoist, your upcoming Zoom events, new responses to your survey on SurveyMonkey, new items added to an RSS feed, your Google calendar events, and a lot more.

With the “if this, then that” statement, we have created 10+ applets for Cliq to help pull all updates from connected services right into your Cliq conversations.

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

Imagine you are out shopping and find a small local shop selling a hand-carved bamboo pitcher that catches your attention. It’s beautiful, it’s handmade, and you immediately imagine using it in your kitchen. Then, like many shoppers in our digital age, you decide to go online to check if you can get it for less.

 As price-savvy consumers, it’s normal to want the lowest price, and most e-commerce stores run on an “unbeatable price” business model. But in this instance, a quick search brings you to the same product, and what you see surprises you.

Bamboo pitcher comparison between Flipkart and Kalpataru Trading, a Chennai-based boutique owned by Bhavani K., who recently took her brick & mortar store online with Zoho.

The same product at the major e-commerce store is actually more expensive than what the local store is charging! So, on the one hand, you’re probably happy the local store is cheaper so you can support them and still save money, but on the other hand, you probably wonder why. Isn’t online shopping supposed to be cheaper than shopping at brick-and-mortar stores? After all, the cost of running a brick-and-mortar store is usually much greater than an online store.

Cases like these may seem commonplace and trivial, especially amidst the increasing dependence on e-commerce during the pandemic. However, the story here is ironically not about the consumer, but rather about the small and micro business owners.

Because of the lack of a digital presence, most micro and small businesses in India rely heavily on selling through large e-commerce platforms like Flipkart and Shopify because of the sheer volume of customers they draw.

However, these small businesses are often unaware of the losses they incur from the drastic price variation, monthly charges, referral fees, and other fees they have to pay based on which services they choose.

According to a recent Reuters report, select foreign e-commerce platforms like Amazon do actively undercut micro and small retailers in India. Fortunately, with technology, micro, and small businesses can now compete with online retail giants through affordable technology and better adoption support.

At Zoho, we’re committed to supporting innovation and opportunity, which means we are also committed to helping small businesses to succeed both online and in our communities.

Debunking digital transition myths

f you’re a small business owner, how many times have you reconsidered a tech upgrade, either fearing the high cost or thinking the digital method wouldn’t work as well as your traditional process? If you have, don’t blame yourself.

Until recently, these have been the prevailing notions among small businesses regarding tech. On one hand, many expect digital transformation to be expensive, complex, and too difficult to manage without extensive tech experience or a programming degree.

On the other hand, cost-effective solutions are often considered a temporary fix, something to tide you over until you invest into “big tech,” which unfortunately illustrates the old saying, “you get what you pay for.”

The perception that you will have to sacrifice quality—unless you come to the table with a lot of money—has prevailed until recently as the COVID-19 pandemic ushered in a rise in techno-optimism.

 As these “high-cost fallacies” unravel, the shift to SaaS has given small business owners access to important technology at affordable costs.

The cost of professionalism

Small businesses often hesitate over a digital transition, assuming that even a straightforward cloud-based operating system might have hidden costs too. This is a valid notion, given that most small businesses in India are accustomed to both legacy systems and large e-commerce platforms known for periodic maintenance investments or increasing annual costs.

 Fortunately, the benefits gained from transitioning to a SaaS e-commerce platform far outweigh these fears.

Let’s look at a local example. Bhavani K, who runs Kalpataru Trading, shifted her boutique from a Chennai-based brick and mortar only to an online storefront in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic with Zoho Commerce. She says, “One of the main elements of shifting online was the cost-effectiveness of the transition.”

After this switch to online, Bhavani K. was also able to convert small orders into bulk orders and integrate Zoho Mail into her business communication, helping her reach a wider audience while retaining the authenticity of her small business.

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

Why modern businesses need a digital CLM    

Our approach to contract lifecycle management    

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

With the rapid digitalization of the education industry, schools must be able to offer the latest management and educational methods available. And once you realize that technology makes running your institute easier and more efficient, there’s no turning back.

 But first you need to find an application that does what you need it to do. With all the options out there, how do you choose a platform that’s just right? You don’t want to spend valuable time and resources on an application that does only half the job.

 Here’s a simple checklist of the quintessential features and tools you need to look for in an education management application:

 1. Online 24/7: One of the most basic features of an app is its availability—it has to be accessible whenever it’s needed. You wouldn’t want the app to shut down while a student is uploading their assignment, or a teacher is entering grades.

 2. Personalized portals: A portal is a great way for an organization to allow its users to log into their dedicated internal system and access important data. Teachers, students, and parents can each have their own login to access the app and view student submissions, assignments, grades, and more.

 3. Payment options: When collecting fees online, it’s essential that your app is linked to a payment portal, for the parents to be able to pay fees, or for admin to buy office supplies. The application must be able to accommodate different payment gateways for this process to happen.

4. Integration: Your application should be able to integrate with other third party vendors and services, such as Google, Paypal, WordPress, and more. For example, you can integrate your education management application with other core apps, like an employee database to retrieve student and faculty details. These integrations can enhance your application by grouping various services all in the same place. This feature greatly aids you when you want the benefit of handling transactions through your app, or if you wish to send SMS notifications and emails to parents or students.

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

We are back again with yet another edition of What’s New in Zoho People, and this time we have some useful features that will further improve and simplify HR management.

Here’s a quick summary of all the updates introduced in Zoho People in February:

• Validate your employee’s identity with facial recognition, now available in Zoho People’s web application

• Organize pre-course activities and post-course activities with our LMS to measure employee proficiency before and after they take a course

• Create similar courses in no time with the course cloning feature in our LMS

• Allow employees to better manage their tasks with our Task Watchlist and Task Notifications

Read more information about how each of these features works in our HR Knowledge Hive. 

You’ve probably Googled “What’s the best day to send my email?” before a high-stakes email campaign and found that most results say Tuesday is the best day.

You’ve also probably seen these claims backed up with different kinds of data. However, as an email marketer, you should consider the sample size and the industries contributing to the data. Extrapolating the findings of a different industry to your industry might not yield the best of returns.

So if you haven’t completely studied the behavior of your target audience, but you believe that Tuesday is the gold standard, it’s safe to say that you’re entertaining a myth.

In this article, we’ll discuss why the Tuesday preference exists and some tools for cracking the best-time-to-send-email code.

The human psychology factor

Every email marketer wants their emails to arrive in their recipients’ inboxes when they’re inclined to open them. Unfortunately, there’s an element of presumption in predicting how people react to different days of the week.

With Friday being the last day of the work week—when most people are preoccupied with the weekend—and Monday being the getting-back-to-work day, most marketers overlook them. As a result, Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday become the natural choices for sending emails. Since Tuesday is followed by two more supposedly high-productivity days, it’s assumed that it will garner higher open rates.

While this theory looks reasonably good on paper, open rates ultimately come down to the sensibilities of your audience. For example, a mobile-savvy person can check (marketing) emails any day, anytime—while waking up in the morning, standing in a queue for their coffee, catching a ride, and more.

In summary, opening an email is a subjective process, and you’ll have to do some testing to identify the optimal sending day and time for your mailing lists.

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

BACKSTAGE

According to most event industry reports, there will be a significant increase in the number of in-person events hosted in 2021. Even our own data here at Backstage supports this consensus. In a January article on our blog, The Green Room, we mentioned that around 1200 onsite events have already been scheduled on Backstage for this year. The number has been steadily increasing since then.

Of course, the chief focus of all in-person events, at least for the foreseeable future, will be safety and hygiene. Here are some ways Zoho Backstage can benefit you in your goal of providing a safer, socially-distanced onsite event experience for attendees.

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

Drip emails are a series of emails that are sent to follow up with subscribers. They are linearly set up with different send times. Once the defined time arrives, based on the action of recipients, they’re automatically sent to the subscribers by your email marketing platform. To learn more about drip campaigns from a very general point of view, read our article that explains the 7 ways to maximize your drip marketing efforts.

Considered one of the most effective ways to engage subscribers, drip emails are a natural fit for the ecommerce industry given the time visitors often take to make a purchase. Today we’re going to take a look at some highly personalized types of drip emails you can create if you have some data about your visitors and subscribers. These emails will be a great way to boost sales during the post-holiday season.

Clearance sale

This is a type of email customers expect to see after the holidays, so it’s good to fulfill those expectations. You can sell your remaining products to the right customers simply by setting up drip campaigns that show them items they’ll be interested in that are on sale. One way to do this is to segment customers who were active during the holiday season and show them items based on their previous purchase patterns. Your email should also indicate that there are only limited quantities left. This will give the email a sense of urgency, hopefully inspiring some of your recipients to go ahead and purchase a few items.

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com

Employees often know when there are easier ways to be performing their routine tasks. Not only does manual work drain morale, but it also distracts employees from their other important activities.

Understanding these concerns, we have introduced Zoho’s AI chatbot, Zia, in Zoho People to help your employees automate their everyday tasks. Here’s how Zia can be useful for your employees:

• Performs the complete leave application process on behalf of your employees. Your employees just have to input the date, leave type, and reason.

• Fetches the list of upcoming holidays and leave reports.

• Provides a complete list of all your pending tasks within Zoho People.

• Raises requests and inquiries for employees through the case management module.

• Helps employees “Check-in” and “Check-out” for the day.

Read more about how Zia can be useful to your employees in our HR Knowledge Hive

Here’s an interesting piece of trivia. IBM once reported that 2.5 quintillion bytes of data are created everyday, worldwide. However, nearly 90% of that structured data goes unanalyzed. This data is known as dark data.

Now let’s switch gears to your business. A sizeable volume of data flows in and out of your business everyday. But is your analytical infrastructure helping you harness the power of that data, or does it remain dark?

Even a marginal drop in the dark data percentage can unearth powerful insights for a business. But for this to happen, it’s vital for businesses to have a robust information ecosystem.

The dumbbell model is a simple framework that describes the key attributes of an information ecosystem:

The dumbbell model is made of five components—and in this blog, we’ll learn how KPI dashboards are instrumental in building these 5 components to create a robust information ecosystem. For this, we’ll be using Zoho Analytics. 

To read the full article please visit Zoho.com