Media training 101 for small businesses

-
Image
Great news: you just scored a big press interview to promote your business. The story will expose your brand to the perfect new audience and drive meaningful traffic to your website. So…don't blow it. Yes, just as quickly as the excitement for the opportunity arrived, the realization that you now have to do an interview sets in. I get it—press interviews can absolutely be intimidating. The resulting coverage represents a significant opportunity to acquire new customers, drive sales, or raise awareness, and you want to be sure to represent your brand well and really compel the audience to check out your company. On top of that, you have to contend with adrenaline and nerves in the moment. You may be thinking, "So many other business owners are so polished and articulate in their interviews. How am I going to pull that off?" Deep breath. A successful interview is usually the result of good media training: preparation and practice in advance of an interview. I've tr...
1 comment

How a marketer built an eCommerce business that runs almost entirely on automation

-

Justin Blase has always been fascinated by automation.

When he first started using Zapier for a previous employer over five years ago, he realized it would be a game-changer for him. With a background mostly in marketing, he didn't have coding skills. But he realized that the combination of Zapier and other tools like Airtable would allow him to build things that were never possible before without paying a developer to build and manage them.

After becoming a Zapier power user, and eventually a certified Zapier expert, Justin wanted to see if he could build an eCommerce business that ran almost entirely on automation—but he didn't want to sacrifice the quality of the product or the uniqueness of the business.

Justin was interested in print on demand services: he knew he could automate the fulfillment process via a dropshipper, and he loved the idea of not holding any inventory other than digital image files in the cloud.

"I tested a number of products in the print on demand space, and then one day, while looking for a vintage map print for my office online, I decided I would make the print myself," he told us. After spending some time digitally restoring an old map scan of Sioux Falls, South Dakota from the 1800s, he sent it to a dropshipper and received his beautiful print less than a week later.

On that day, Ted's Vintage Art was born. Since then, Justin has sold over 5,000 vintage map prints of cities, counties, and states all over the United States.

The home page for Ted's Vintage Art

How Ted's Vintage Art runs on automation

Justin is a Certified Zapier Expert through his business Blase Media, and he uses Zapier as the backend of most of his business processes. He has dozens of Zaps—our term for automated workflows—running in the background. Here are a few examples.

Automating the creation of all product and social sharing images

When a team member from Ted's Vintage Art uploads a map image to Google Drive, Zapier automatically sends that information to Cloudinary, which creates over a dozen variations of the image to be included on product pages and listings. Here's what that Zap looks like.

Then, with Cloudinary, Zapier, and Airtable, Justin is able to automate custom zoomed images, images optimized for each social media channel, and images with text overlaid. This task alone saves him over an hour per product. With over 3,000 products, it adds up.

Managing product data with Airtable

"The very first time I realized you could trigger a Zap by having a record appear in a custom Airtable view, my head about exploded."

Justin relies on database tool Airtable as the hub of all his business data. He has tables for managing product inventory, real-time sales data, product metadata, UPCs, customer data, reviews, and other items—and many of his Zaps center around Airtable.

Justin's Airtable database

One key feature of his Airtable and Zapier setup is the ability to automate the creation of product listings. When a new product is marked as "ready to list" in Airtable, Zapier will create new records in another table, which then creates the CSV import files for Amazon, eBay, WooCommerce, and Etsy. The team then easily uploads these CSV files to the respective marketplaces to batch upload the newly created product listings.

Automating the post-purchase and shipping processes

Justin also automates the post-purchase processes. For example, whenever a purchase is made in WooCommerce, Etsy, Amazon, eBay or Houzz, the customer is added to Airtable, where they store customer data and order details.

Justin's Zaps in Zapier

Additionally, Zapier sends the customer information to ActiveCampaign, which Justin uses for drip marketing email sequences and email newsletters. Here's an example of one of those Zaps.

Additionally, when purchases are made across any platform, Zapier automatically sends the order via Shipstation to Printful. Printful is Justin's third-party printing partner that prints the art and ships it to the customer on his behalf. The app also works with Shipstation and all their storefronts to update the order status and add shipment tracking for the customer.

With the 20+ hours a week Justin saves with Zapier, he's able to focus more on marketing efforts like SEO and social media promotion. His goal of creating a mostly-automated company has become a reality, and he has time to focus on the parts of his workflows that require his creativity and passion.



from The Zapier Blog https://ift.tt/38gZl67

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

If Time-Tracking Apps Don't Work for You, Try a Productivity Journal

-
Image
Monitoring how you spend your time leads to a wealth of useful information: It can tell you what time of day you're most productive , help you create better estimates for how long tasks will take, and show you what activities you'd have to cut to focus your energy on a new idea or project. The most precise way to monitor how you spend your time is to use a time-tracking app . But these apps require a lot of overhead. You have to diligently log your hours (or make sure your app is logging them correctly) and sort your tracked time into categories. You have to pause after every task—no matter how brief—to capture time spent accurately. If tracking your time at such a granular level sounds like a punishment, but you still want insight into how and where you spend your time, consider the less menacing sibling of time-tracking apps: a productivity journal. What Is a Productivity Journal? I kept a journal as a preteen, though in those days I called it a diary. Snoopy and Woods...
Read more

The 25 Best Productivity Apps for iPhone in 2018

-
Image
The best productivity apps for iPhone make possible something that would otherwise be impossible, or they make something you need to do simpler and faster. Imagine being asked, unexpectedly, for a copy of a tax form from last year as proof of address during an important appointment that you traveled many miles to attend. In fact, it happened to me, and thankfully I had a copy of the document I needed saved to a file syncing application, which meant I could pull it up on my phone and show it to the gracious Customs and Border Protection officer who demanded to see it. If that's not productivity by way of efficiency, I don't know what is. Perhaps a more routine example is keeping track of time spent in an off-site meeting so that you can claim it as an expense later. If you have the right time-tracking mobile app, you can record the time on the spot rather than having to estimate it and remember to record it later. The use cases for productivity apps are infinite, and sometimes...
Read more

What's the difference between the Wiki and OneNote tabs in Microsoft Teams?

-
Image
It's easy, in a team chat app, for key points to get lost in the ongoing flow of conversation. That's why every channel in Microsoft Teams has a Wiki page, where you can store things like meeting notes or outline the current state of a project. You can also add a OneNote tab to every channel for similar purposes. The Wiki and OneNote tab are pretty overlapping features, so you might be wondering which one you should use. My answer, unhelpfully, is "it depends." Here's a quick overview: The Wiki is fast and simple but only works inside Teams. OneNote offers more features and can be used outside Teams. My advice: if the Wiki works for you, that's great. Use it. If you want more out of your note-taking, and the ability to reference notes outside of Teams, use OneNote. Let's go over both features with more detail, so you can choose the tool that works for you. The Wiki is fast and functional—but only exists in Teams You can probably find the Wiki in ...
Read more