Author Archives: Amy Fischer

About Amy Fischer

Born and lives in Israel. Despite the fact that she is still young, she is a very experienced specialist who is well versed in economics and banking. Also in her spare time Amy shares her experience and interesting news with the readers of Bank Login Lab.

Payment Gateways and Their Role in eCommerce

Posted on by Amy Fischer
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With the convenience of shopping online, most customers prefer to purchase goods from the internet rather than in a brick-and-mortar store. That’s why it’s essential for businesses to have an eCommerce site to boost sales. From the perspective of customers, the online payment procedure may look quite simple. However, the entire process is quite complex.

As an eCommerce business owner, you need to avail yourself of the services of a payment processor too. They will set up your eCommerce merchant account through which you will be able to receive your funds. However, it’s important to note that payment gateway and payment processor are different terms.

If you’re interested in knowing about payment gateway, how it differs from a payment processor, and its role in eCommerce, keep reading this article!  

What Is a Payment Gateway?

A payment gateway is software that authorizes a transaction made by the customer. It creates a safe channel between the bank, the customer, and your store. Therefore, it helps you securely process payments to reduce the risk of fraud for sellers and customers.

It can be integrated with other accounting software, tax management tool, or eCommerce platforms. The most common examples of payment gateway are:

  • PayPal
  • Amazon Pay
  • Stripe
  • Apple Pay
  • Authorize.net

What Is the Role of Payment Gateways in eCommerce?

You need to access the services of a payment gateway to process card transactions. Since it authorizes transactions, you won’t be able to receive funds in your bank account without a payment gateway.

Furthermore, it also accepts and handles online payments. As soon as a customer enters their credit/debit card information while making an online purchase, it temporarily stores the data in a secure way.  

After the customer enters the credit/debit card information, a transit takes place between the banks and payment processors. And a payment gateway will make sure that the route is properly encrypted to keep sensitive info safe from the hands of cybercriminals.

Of course, this will maintain the trust between your business and your customers and prevent your goodwill from tarnishing.

Moreover, the payment gateway streamlines the reconciliation and bookkeeping process for eCommerce businesses by providing in-depth reports regularly.

How Is a Payment Gateway Different from a Payment Processor?

Although both terms are used interchangeably, it’s imperative to remember that they are not the same. Most payment processors (also called payment service providers) now offer the services of a payment gateway for a complete service package.

A payment processor creates a channel between the seller’s and customer’s banks. It will set up a merchant account for you, so you can receive funds in your account smoothly after releasing the funds once they are verified.  

On the other hand, the primary goal of a payment gateway is to streamline your checkout process and provide an exceptional shopping experience to the customers on your eCommerce store by encrypting confidential data and securely processing payments.

How to Choose the Right Payment Gateway for Your Business?

Since there are a wide variety of payment gateway service providers, you need to make sure you choose the one that is right for your eCommerce business because the right one will impact your brand’s bottom line.

Asking about the pricing, terms, features, payment methods, integrations, customer support service, currency options, and flexibility of the plan will facilitate you in making an informed decision.  

5 Ways to Create a Patient-Friendly Healthcare Website

Posted on by Amy Fischer

Having a website is one thing, but making sure that it is efficient is different. In this article, we will talk about making a website patient-friendly. Most parts of healthcare web design are actually really similar in building other websites. Here is a guide that will help you make sure that you are utilizing your website to its maximum potential. The guide is a good way to step up good web design. So if you want to improve your optometry website design by making it efficient you came to the right place.

1. Intuitive and Easy to use.

It shouldn’t feel confusing to use your website. You want patients who view your website to navigate through the pages easily. This is so that they can find the information they need with no hassle. Having a simple layout and functionality also promotes accessibility and inclusivity. You want anyone and everyone to be able to use your website. You can do that here with a website builder like Boxmode.

2. Clear and Complete Information

This is one of the main reasons why businesses and companies have websites, to put out important information publicly. You want your existing patients and/or potential patients to have access to frequently asked questions and information they might want to know. According to a study, patients then go to practices that they know about. So having important info online helps them trust you.

Anyone can make a website these days with the help of website builders software and programs but what does it take to make a good website that actually helps those who are targeted to use it? Some basic information that you may want on your site are the following:

Contact numbers and email

This is in case they have additional questions about your practice or services.

Location of the clinic

For a lot of people location is an important factor. Of course most people tend to choose clinics that aren’t far from their home so that they can go to it easily.

The services that you offer

This is for customers to know if you can work on the problem that they have.

Your background

This will help establish your credibility by discussing your expertise and specialty in your field.

3. Social Media Icons

Make a way to allow your social media accounts to be seen on your website. Make sure that there are clickable icons so that your patients can easily go to your social media accounts. Having a website is actually part of marketing your practice. So utilize it in that way too. But mainly letting your patients follow your social media accounts is to maintain an online relationship with them. You can communicate with them in that way too.

4. Have a Call to Action

If a person visits your website most of the time it’s because they have interest in your service or practice. So allow them to act on that interest. Allow booking appointments on your website etc.

5. Make sure your website is HIPAA Compliant

Make sure your web designer knows about HIPAA in order to ensure HIPAA compliance.

Pinterest Marketing in 2021: What it is and How to Do It

Posted on by Amy Fischer

A registration on Pinterest gives you free access to share and discover interests. It is a social media network focused on visuals of people’s lifestyles, tastes, interests, DIY’s, facts, graphics, exotic locations, and anything that can be visually represented on this planet. Users can share their interesting photographs or videos by pinning them on their boards or on other boards. Pinterest also has a Pinterest lens similar to Google Lens, which allows you to discover ideas related to the thing you point your camera to. With surpassing 400 million monthly live users in 2020, Pinterest is a serious online business platform. So it is valid to think about a Pinterest growth service to grow your business on the third-largest digital network of America. And, Pinterest claiming 459 million users makes it a guaranteed growth destination for creators to reap their online business by Pinterest marketing.

What originated as a visual experience for displaying interest in inspiring arts, cooking recipes, fashion styles in clothing, DIY’s, and other interests of females has gone to the imaginative numbers of interests Pinterest caters to mankind today. From scriptures and arts of the medieval period to the information on the conceptual flying cars, Pinterest offers every kind of interest one can have.

Pinterest marketing potential

The footfall of buyers from Pinterest to the marketer site is very exciting with more than 90% being first-timers. Pinterest claims the male users have reached nearly 50% recently. Pinterest’s fourth-quarter shareholder report of 2020  displayed tremendous growth outside the US. In 2020, global monthly active users showed an increase of 46% from the previous year. In the US alone the increase was 11%, representing 98 million users monthly active in 2020.

The coming generations like Millenials and Gen Z tend to see and understand things more with videos and images, ensuring the value of this platform automatically rises. With features like  Pinterest Lens, users can discover over 2.5 billion objects. Such interesting figures, and 87% of pinners claiming to purchase through the platform, show the humongous marketing potential of Pinterest. So, let’s dive into Pinterest marketing and what you need to succeed.

1.  Create a Business Profile

The very first step for marketing on Pinterest is to create a business profile. Pinterest provides one of the simplest interfaces to backlink your website for people to find more about your products. You can make a business profile by clicking on Join as a business while signing up. Fill in the remaining details and you’re ready for marketing from your Pinterest business account.

2.  Understanding the search

Pinterest is less of a regular social media and more of an image search engine. Like, you can search for a red wallet and a series of multiple pins will appear from the influencers, big fashion brands, retailers, magazines, and other user’s boards. Unlike other search engines where you go to the next page, you can keep scrolling down until you find your preferred pin. Furthermore, writing accurate details in the description of your pins guides your customers better to your linked website.

3.  Pinterest Boards

The boards hold your collection of pins. For your label, your collection of boards helps you organize your pins categorically, so your followers can access and follow their interests. Likewise for a motorbike modification company, creating a board on self-bike repair is a specialized zone for bike enthusiasts. As A Result, these enthusiasts will spend more time on your boards and therefore good marketing is done for your company.

4.  The Pins

Pins are the most essential and founding bricks of Pinterest. Whenever you search for anything on Pinterest, basically all the images displayed are pins. These founding elements are the first thing attracting your targeted customers to this platform and guide them to your web page. Every pin can say a specific thing about an e-commerce online store, a person, or any company. For this reason, it becomes quintessential to make your pins unique and inviting with communicative details.

How to do Marketing on Pinterest

Since you have understood the need and fundamentals of marketing on Pinterest, let’s move ahead to understand how to do it. After setting up a business profile you need to optimize it to imitate your brand value and aesthetics.

1.  Optimization

For this, you should understand that aesthetics is the key here. Having a distinctive and alluring display will hold the potential of maximum conversion through Pinterest. Setting an eye-catching cover image that displays similar pastel colors on your company’s website reflects a singular identity of two platforms. Further, optimizing by following a theme that sync’s all the boards with accurate descriptions on each pin.

2.  Utilize pins

Your visitors should have the ease of saving an image onto their boards. You can install Pinterest’s save button and allow people to do so. For a blogger, pins are the gateways to drive traffic to their website. Similarly, a handmade online shop displaying information and the price of their products is a classic example. You can also use rich pins once you’ve validated your website on Pinterest. Rich pins are linked to your source site. If anything is changed on the source website, rich pins update information automatically.

3.  Pin wisely

You can’t randomly post a quotation or an image with a link and think it is great marketing done for your brand. It’s important to plan out the content strategy to achieve a set goal. Like actively sharing educational content can be a driving force to your business. For example, a pickle company actively sharing guided methods to make homemade pickles with illustrations will educate people on the topic. Resulting in people regularly visiting the company boards and hence increasing the leads and chance of more sales.

Conclusion

Since its launch as a closed beta in 2010, Pinterest has come a long way in building a strong reputation in digital marketing by 2021. As stated by Pinterest, because of the pandemic, usage rose to 36% on their platform to juggle between new part-time jobs. With 95% of the top searches still unbranded on this network speaks a lot about the untapped potential of Pinterest marketing. On this positive note, I wish you to reap by exploring and establishing your digital presence.

Attracting Patients to Your Clinic: Going from Theory to Practice

Posted on by Amy Fischer

One thing about the medical field that wouldn’t be known to the public is that it involves marketing. In fact, it wouldn’t be wrong to see these as coming from two completely different worlds. This may be because marketing is often associated with commercials or flashy ads that highlight product selling points, while medicine is likened to attaining credibility through many years of schooling and practical application. Well, the idea that people will be lining up in front of your clinic just because you have a degree is false. Just as one would scour the internet for reviews for movies, cosmetics, or even food recommendations, it isn’t far-fetched that your potential patients may be scouring through websites for medical doctors right about now. Will they be able to find your practice in the searches? Here are a few tips to ensure that they do:

Spend Time on Social Media

As a medical professional, you have a pretty good idea of what your specialization is, what you can do, and who will best benefit from this. With this in mind, you already have an idea of where to start and where to be. It is important to be present where your patients are and understand how to utilize the platform. According to Social Media Examiner, social media is a driver when it comes to generating business exposure for up to 87% of marketers.

Create Content

Patient Pop defines content marketing as “the creation of content that informs, educates, or entertains your users while indirectly marketing your brand.” This is nothing new for other industries and should most certainly not be anything new when it comes to the medical field. Being able to relate, inform, or entertain your patients while also affirming your and your practice as knowledgeable, credible, and even an expert will surely be a step in the right direction.

Mobile is a Must!

When your patients are looking through websites for medical doctors, they might not actively be thinking about it, but the way your website may look on their mobile phone may very well be the reason they stay or click out of it. With almost two-thirds of all internet users being mobile users, it’s important that your website is appealing, upon first glance. Here are a few characteristics of a mobile-friendly website:

  • Quick Loading: If your website takes too long to load, your prospective patients may very well have clicked out and gone to a competitor’s website instead.
  • Mobile-Friendly Navigation: Being able to go through your website to find the information they are looking for is important for patients. It would be unfortunate to lose a patient because they couldn’t find the button to contact you.
  • Larger and Easier: With people using devices of varying sizes, but mostly smaller than the regular computer, it is important that the information and other content is still readable by your patients.

Relationships and Referrals

While you may be busy trying to continuously grow your practice, it is also important to maintain a good relationship with patients whom you have already seen and treated. Building a lasting relationship with patients may be the key to obtaining referrals from them to friends and family, and of course, retention and regular visits and patronage.

Effective clinic management software can help you maintain good relationships with patients, providers and other medical practitioners. This allows cross-referrals and possibilities for more patients for both practitioners.

While a good social media presence, an improved website, and more patients is always a positive for any business model, it is important to keep at top of mind that in the medical field, being able to provide the best possible care for your patients is the most important and sure way to attract more patients to your practice.

Simple Ways to Increase Revenue for Your Veterinary Practice

Posted on by Amy Fischer

For those who aren’t animal lovers or don’t have pets around them, veterinarians or even veterinary as a medical field may be something far from their radar. But pet owners will argue that vets are absolutely crucial for giving their furry friends the best life and health possible. But aside from keeping beloved family pets safe, the veterinary practice is also a key contributor to society. This is because vets and other professionals within this field are also in charge of investigating wild animal diseases, securing the safety of companion animals, and even contributing to food and drug developments.

With all of this in mind, one would think that there is a pretty penny to be earned within this medical field and its related industries. But according to Today’s Veterinary Business, veterinarians often came to discover “that their hospitals weren’t worth what they needed to retire comfortably.” While a comfortable retirement may mean different things for different people, being able to earn more would most surely be a positive thing. These days, with a few tips, tricks, and with the help of veterinary marketing services, being able to serve and help animals and making a profit no longer have to be mutually exclusive.

Marketing Matters

While you may be the most experienced of vets, it’s easy to overlook talent when you don’t put any effort into putting yourself and your practice where people will see you. There are several ways to go about marketing, but by far the easiest is making use of veterinary marketing services. There will always be a need for veterinary services, but all these prospective clients may not be aware of your clinic or hospital. Veterinary marketing services help you make your way to the top of search engine results, meaning higher awareness for your practice. Aside from this, there are many other features provided by veterinary marketing services such as improving your website, engaging clients, and even retaining them.

Money Matters

Catering to your clients means offering them the easiest and best ways to experience your practice from finding you to paying you and even until they leave your clinic or hospital. Providing your clients with different means of processing payment may be beneficial in several ways:

  • Clients may be more comfortable with payment options they are most familiar with.
  • You will be able to better interact with your patients and thus retain them due to higher client satisfaction.
  • According to Cleargage.com, providing clients with more payment options may also significantly reduce payment delays.

Aside from providing your clients with comfortable means to pay, ensuring that you are able to meet your clients where they are while also maintaining your margins is a skill that needs to be developed.

There are a variety of services that you may offer. From toys and jackets, to Ultimate Pet Nutrition products, your outer office can provide a steady basis for additional revenue.

By providing your clients with treatments that can afford and will improve the health of their animals is not a one-size-fits-all situation. Offering client financing means you are “tailoring a solution to fit their budget.”

More Matters

According to Practice LIFE, high-density scheduling and efficiency within your clinic will allow you to serve better as well as serve more. Identifying where you are losing productivity and clients means you can pinpoint issues that may need addressing. This will allow you to eliminate such bottlenecks and refocus the effort or manpower elsewhere. Having enough exam rooms and more efficient and well-trained staff members will surely allow you to better cater to more clients in a shorter amount of time. This increased efficiency is not just financially beneficial but is also known to boost morale for employees as well as improved client and patient service. 

What is a VPAT and how is it used?

Posted on by Amy Fischer

The VPAT 508, or a Voluntary Product Accessibility Template, is an important document that explains how information and communication (ICT) products conform to the Revised Section 508 standards for IT accessibility. ICT products include but are not limited to software, hardware, electronic content, and even support documentation. 

It is an important document that allows companies and organizations in the United States to provide a comprehensive analysis of their conformance to accessibility standards set in Section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act. In this short article, we will discuss what a VPAT is, how it’s used, and its importance for compliance to Section 508.

What is a VPAT 508? 

VPATs help federal agency contracting officials and government buyers to access ICT products for accessibility when doing market research and evaluating proposals before purchasing. 

U.S. government solicitations which include ICT will specify accessibility requirements, indicating which provisions are required to ensure the deliverable is accessible. The VPAT is very important because it is a good way to address the accessibility requirements defined in the solicitation. 

Developers or vendors should prepare VPATs for their ICT. This is essential because the VPAT 508 describes how well the ICT product conforms to the accessibility standards of section 508 of the Rehabilitation Act.

What is Section 508? 

Before we go into how a VPAT is used, we will first discuss what Section 508 is. 

Section 508 is a portion of the Rehabilitation Act, outlining standards to address accessibility to ICT. With that, Section 508 requires access to ICT developed, procured, maintained, or used by federal agencies across the United States. Examples of ICT include computers, telecommunications equipment, multifunction office machines (such as printers, software, websites, information kiosks, transaction machines), and electronic documents. 

These Section 508 Standards ensure access for people with physical, sensory, or cognitive disabilities. 

How is a VPAT 508 used?

The purpose of a VPAT is to help ICT buyers make an informed decision before purchasing a product. These include:

  • Understand a product’s level of accessibility compliance
  • Compare compliance of similar products
  • Choose a product that best meets accessibility standards and the organization’s functional and legal requirements
  • Plan ahead for equally effective access when an accessible ICT product is not available

It is then highly recommended that vendors procure a VPAT for any ICT that is intended to be marketed to the U.S. federal government. There is a VPAT template from the Information Technology Industry Council (ITI) website. 

How does one get a VPAT? 

VPATs are prepared through accessing the current VPAT template from the ITI website. Vendors should generate a VPAT for any ICT. They should also make it easy to find each ICT product’s VPAT on their website, such as by linking it on the product description page. This way it will be much easier for interested buyers and clients to assess the product’s accessibility and compliance to the revised Section 508 Standards. Otherwise, the VPAT is only provided once requested from their sales or support contact. 

Keep in mind that VPATs developed before 2017 may be out of date if the product has been updated since then. (Make sure to get the VPAT 2.0 or higher).

The VPAT is highly relevant to anyone who is a provider of ICT or even electronic and information technology (EIT) that can or will be used by federal workers. Since Section 508 mandates that any product or technology used by federal employees must be accessible, it is a good business practice to be Section 508 compliant. Otherwise, providers are losing business opportunities by not being compliant or even by not providing a VPAT that properly outlines the compliance.  

Why Consent Management Platforms Have Already Surpassed Marketing

Posted on by Amy Fischer

How businesses handle customer data is a growing concern, and regulations have been put into place to ensure customer data privacy is maintained. Compliance with GDPR gives consumers control and choice on their data collection, uses, and makes it possible for them to consent. The consent management platform is a vital business tool that enhances transparency in data collection and usage concerning GDPR and CCPA. It also ensures that the consumer still has the right to opt-out data collection.

How consent management platforms work

CMP has become mandatory for audience data handlers. Using a consumer’s data without their consent is illegal, and businesses can avoid data privacy issues by first seeking personal data consent from consumers through a consent management platform. Through cookies, a marketer can access consumer data and use it to analyze the target audience. That makes it possible for brands and various organizations to send personalized ads to the target customers and other digital marketing options.

A CMP will give visitors to online sites and platforms options to give consent for data collection. They may either accept or deny the use of cookies or other permissions that the publisher may seek. Giving consent for use of your online identity in digital marketing ensures that the marketer can use the data for online marketing purposes and comply with the GDPR and CCPA.

Reasons consent management platforms have surpassed marketing

1. Illegal use of personal data can be costly

Lawsuits due to the use of personal data in marketing or other purposes could lead to monetary loss and reputation risk. Violating GDPR and CCPA could cost an organization a lot of money and taint its brand name. Getting customer consent before collecting and using their data helps prevent such incidents. Through a CMP, it is possible to filter consumer data for those who do not consent and ensure that the data an organization stores regarding consumers are for only those who have given consent.

2. Highly customizable

Through a consent management platform, marketing directly to the target audience is possible since the visitors who have given consent regarding their personal information have shown interest in your products. Analysis of several visitors and those who permit data usage is easy and makes planning and strategizing for business growth easy.

3. Leverage audience data for online marketing across all online platforms and apps

Monetization through audience data, segmentation, and data extension for various other uses are vital for every business entity. Using audience data legally across all platforms and online avenues can help build a brand reputation and enhance its popularity for higher returns. CMP makes it possible for businesses to leverage potential customers using their data legally.

4. Enhance consumer relationships and build trust

Loyalty in business can help enhance the profit margins due to networking and repeat sales. Potential consumers trust a brand that asks for personal data consent and can trust you enough to buy products and campaign for your brand.

CMP makes it possible for businesses to target the customer base in advertisement and also ensures compliance with privacy rules; hence, it is a more effective way to reach your market niche to generate more sales.

How Does Social Media Affect Your Body Image?

Posted on by Amy Fischer

Nowadays, you will find social media apps on everyone’s device. Social media is an interesting platform for sharing the latest photos, videos, and various kinds of posts. People interact with virtual communities and networks. The trend of gaining YouTube subscribers and Facebook followers is spreading because people have started sharing content publicly and this content now can reach millions of people. 

Social media is not an ordinary platform. The users also get awareness about the current situation happening around them and gather knowledge. Other benefits include the generation of leads and sales for the business. That’s why the fad of social media is on the mind of youth.

Influence of Social Media

Sometimes, some pictures and videos went viral on social media that give fame positively or negatively to the person behind the content. The present-day situation attracts not only young minds but people of any age group to use social media. 

People get to know about new brands and products mainly. Social platforms are time killers and keep entertained with the most viewed content and post. It keeps your mind involved in a unique way that makes you feel that you are participating in the current situation happening around you.

How Body Image Is Affected?

Social media have positive impacts in various fields. But nowadays the use of social media is reaching the peak of usage. Several surveys found that people overuse social media and that has a negative influence on them.

When it comes to how people’s body image is affected by social apps, there are various influencers and celebrities who keep on posting regular content related to it. Some posts affect youth greatly which makes them compare themselves with the character present in the image.

Some people use these posts to influence and motivate themselves. But in most cases, youth are discouraged after watching their body and financial achievements. They start to compare their body type with their peers and even celebrities. Also, they start to stalk their profiles all day and demotivate themselves by seeing those attractive posts.

After gazing at those glamorous posts, people start to focus more on their body looks. Several pictures are edited using software and apps to make them appear eye-catching. Many people aren’t able to distinguish between real and edited pictures, so they start believing blindly in pictures and put stress on themselves. 

People start to follow unnecessary routines and put pressure on their families as well. We can observe a slight change in their behavior. They start to live in frustration, stress and talk rudely because of their constant thinking. They don’t accept their real version and pretend to be some other personality. 

Conclusion

If social media is used in the right way then it is the best thing. You need to ensure whether you are following the right page or not? Because these accounts and other related accounts’ posts influence your lifestyle extensively. You get a chance to learn something new every day. Don’t forget to follow your daily routine while scrolling posts. 

People on social media present themselves attractively so that they can get good views. It might be possible that without your willingness these kinds of posts stick on your feeds. Simply you can reduce your time to use this platform and live a realistic life by accepting your original personality.

The Most Useful Software for Startups in the SaaS Sector

Posted on by Amy Fischer

Every startup is an adventure. It promises even more challenges for a software-as-a-service (SaaS) startup due to the revenue model’s peculiarities and severe competition in the industry.

Luckily, the market abounds in software that can help emerging companies address those challenges and manage their growth. These tools help with the critical business areas of product development, communication and collaboration, marketing, sales, payment processing, customer support, and tracking SaaS KPIs (key performance indicators).

This post shortlists ten essential SaaS startup software. Whether you are about to enter the game or are an experienced player, you may come across a tool that will help improve your existing processes and boost your business.

Internal Team Communications

You will find Slack in every top-10 of startup software. This cloud-based tool makes communications among the team members more comfortable, transparent, and efficient. Its plentiful customizable notifications, direct messaging, audio and video calls, conversation archives, and file-sharing features facilitate collaboration. Slack has mobile apps for iOS and Android and can be integrated with your Trello or sales CRM to provide your team with automated notifications about the deals. You may even set up a Slack bot for your office Spotify account and manage your music playback from it.

Project Management Software for Startups

In the area of product development and management, three startup tools are recommended:

  • Basecamp helps every team member stay on the same page and become more organized and productive. It empowers teams to communicate better with fewer meetings. They can assign tasks, collaborate on projects, track each one’s milestones, manage deadlines and workload, receive notifications, and share files from one platform.
  • JIRA’s flexible infrastructure and ease of configuration were designed for Agile technical development teams. The system helps manage the software development and testing cycle, centralizing all tasks and documentation and streamlining the tracking of issues and bugs. Its low cost and cloud-based deployment suit startups perfectly.
  • Trello adheres to the kanban system and facilitates task prioritization, project planning, task assignments, and progress tracking. Trello boards may act as your internal product road map, your customer-facing product road map, content marketing planning tool, and more.

Marketing Tools

Newsletters will be at the core of every SaaS startup’s marketing efforts: emails are a great way to update customers on their news and features. MailChimp is arguably the most effective email marketing service, particularly praised for its ease of use. The software helps create smart marketing campaigns and offers plenty of ready-made and customizable newsletter templates to create appealing emails. It’s free until the company has over 2,000 contacts.

Social networks provide another excellent channel for conveying your product’s message and connecting with the audience. Buffer is one of the best tools to help SaaS startups maintain an active presence across Facebook, LinkedIn, or Twitter. They can centralize multiple platforms, pre-schedule social media posts and presences, and view the analytics of their social media activities.

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

Salesforce CRM software enables startups to do everything under one roof: partner management, opportunity management, sales data management and forecasting, and marketing automation complete with a contact manager to aggregate the information and assess leads. The contact manager module covers all essential customer information like the company’s history, social status, reputation in the market, and communication details. The reports and dashboard feature facilitates in-depth analysis. Salesforce excels on pipeline reporting and campaign management, and their customer experience management solution also finds out information about the competition and provides deal-tracking functionality.

Financial Reporting

Baremetrics offers metrics and engagement tools for SaaS businesses. This powerful software allows SaaS startups to follow their Monthly Recurring Revenue, Net Revenue, Average Revenue Per User, Customer Lifetime Value, User Churn, Active Customers, and other critical business metrics. The revealed insights will help the leadership make profitable decisions and plan and strategize for growth years down the road.

Customer Support

Customer support can make or break your SaaS enterprise. The cloud-based Zendesk is arguably the most popular help-desk solution. It’s easy to deploy and implement, integrates with a company’s email, website, and social media, and can handle thousands of tickets daily. Accessible on desktop and mobile devices, it provides a handy and flexible solution for small businesses that have a home-based, freelance support team.

Customer and User Feedback Software

Customer feedback is one of the SaaS KPIs: you will need to continuously collect customer feedback, monitor the customers’ behavior, and get actionable insights for enhancing user experience and increasing conversions.

Hotjar is an all-in-one analytics, conversion rate optimization, and feedback tool that visualizes your users’ behavior and helps understand your customers’ concerns and requirements. The tool’s heat maps and screen recordings will show you where your site visitors are facing issues, the site areas popular with users, and what catches their eye. Features like conversion funnels, creation and distribution of surveys, and form analysis will provide additional insight into your users’ behavior.

Final Thoughts

For a SaaS start-up business, software choices largely determine the enterprise’s success or failure. Nowadays, these tools are almost indispensable for day-to-day management, monitoring product and customer success, boosting growth, and strategizing a startup’s future.

This post presents only a drop in the ocean of economically viable and useful Saas Companies to try. The key to success is to research, pick the ones that meet your business needs best, and use them regularly and for a long time. In that case, they will tremendously improve your business processes, boost the teams’ efficiency and effectiveness, and help the entrepreneurs focus on growth.

Where to Start Data Privacy Planning

Posted on by Amy Fischer

If you are an organization and you have a lot of data to protect, then you have to implement a data privacy strategy and ensure that your data is secured all the time. This may not necessarily mean that it is an easy task. However, with the correct planning and strategy from the best data securing companies around, you should be assured of the best data protection. Your company should therefore acquire the best data privacy software so that you can rest assured there will be no data breaches.

What Is a Data Privacy Plan?

A data privacy plan is a directive of an organization, and it states how that organization will protect the personal data of its clients and customers. This is more so an internal document that is meant for the consumption of the organization. This is unlike a data privacy policy that is a description of how an organization collects and uses data from external sources.

Steps A Company Needs To Follow When Starting Data Privacy Planning

A data privacy strategy has to be planned for it to be successful. For your company to implement a successful data privacy plan that will work for the long term, here are brief steps that should be followed for this purpose:

1.    Gather the support of the upper executives of the company. This issue of data collection and storing cannot work without the right support.

2.    A Data Protection Officer (DPO) should be appointed to make the process much formal and smooth. However, this will be guided by the size of your organization.

3.    Know the data you need to collect. Once this is clear, a team should be formed to create a data inventory of the company.

4.    Know your data requirements. What kind of protection requirements does your data need? What sort of data will the company be storing and processing?

5.    Analyze the privacy risks of the data you have. What are its vulnerabilities, threats, and possible impacts of such risks?

6.    The next step is creating a Data Privacy Policy. This is a document that has guidelines formulated after you have analyzed all the external and internal factors that can affect the plans, operations, and objectives of the company.

7.    Implement the right data privacy controls. Your risks should be organized according to the impact they may have on the company. Set data controls based on this.

8.    Initiate data privacy awareness and training for all people involved. Some staff may require advanced training on the handling of certain data. Ensure this is done.

9.    The last step is monitoring and compliance with the data. However, data monitoring and privacy is a continuous process and there need not be the last step as such. In this regard, data that is processed and stored by the organization should be checked all the time. Ensure this data is protected all the time and that all people comply with the data requirements.

In conclusion, data issues are legal issues. As such, when handling data privacy management for the company, ensure you are always following the rules that govern data collection, processing, and dissemination.