MailChimp Archives - The Latest on Accounting Tech for SMEs

Practice Ignition’s Audacious Plan – to Manage Sales for Accountants

April 28, 2014 by Aimy Chen

Xero add-on program Practice Ignition has greater ambitions than automating letters of engagement to clients. It planned to integrate with more accounting programs and grow into a lightweight sales management program for accountants.

“After June we’re looking to (integrate with email marketing program) Mailchimp and more accounting products such as Intuit,” said Guy Pearson, founder of Practice Ignition.

“We really want to focus on delivering client onboarding, the sales process and being able to give data so that we’re the source such as benchmarking, identifying best referrers and employees, so that you get a better picture of where your business is coming from.”

The Australian startup decoupled from Xero last October and looked to “deep dive into what accountants needed such as payments and a document library”, Pearson, a chartered accountant, said. Coming features included invoice schedules and reconciliation payments into ledgers by June 30.

Practice Ignition created web-based letters of engagement or proposals which automatically assigned jobs to accountants in a practice running Xero’s WorkflowMax Practice Manager. The automation saved a practice eight hours per client each year of admin and partner’s time combined.

“We take care of all the non-chargeable admin duties an admin person usually performs. We have customers who started their practice in the past 12 months who have experienced exponential growth without any admin staff,” Pearson said.

Version 2 was released in December 2013 and allowed accountants to create customised proposals for each client. Features included multiple contract templates, drag-and-drop configuration and the ability to send a copy of the proposal to additional users.

Payment terms on invoices could also be customised.

A release this year added the ability to edit accepted engagements. Accountants updated jobs to the practice management software and updated the next invoice in the accounting solution.

Both the accountant and client could approve the proposal by responding to a message explaining the change of service and billing. Users could comment and ask questions on the proposal screen.

The third feature was duplicating a recurring proposal template and assigning staff updated jobs in the practice management system.

Practice Ignition gained extra seed funding earlier this year and had 700 practices signed up globally, with 50 percent of the market in Australia. New Zealand, the UK and US split the next 10 percent and the rest was in Canada, Asia and South Africa.

The company was chasing accountants in the US and UK – Pearson hoped to set up local teams by sponsoring and attending events such as the Sleeter Group Accounting Solutions Conference.

Why You Shouldn’t Send Newsletters From Your Inbox

January 20, 2014 by Sholto Macpherson

Email works best when it is used for a limited range of tasks. Sending documents or other files, updates, formal or brief correspondence. If the frequency of communication rises past a certain point switch to an instant-messaging app. If responses run over a paragraph, pick up the phone or meet in person.

But what if you’re talking to more than a handful of people?

Cash-strapped small businesses are brilliant at taking tools for one purpose and adapting them for another. But sometimes using a good tool for the wrong task can make your life a lot harder. Sending mass emails from your personal inbox is a case in point.

Email marketing is a staple tactic among businesses these days. Despite instant messaging, webinars and social media, email remains the most effective method for communicating with clients on a regular basis.

A classic small business mistake is to assume that the best way to send your weekly or monthly newsletter is to send a blind carbon copy (BCC) email to every customer in your address book. This is a bad idea for several reasons.

1. Easy to Make Errors

It’s almost a rite of passage for marketing managers or PR interns. Journalists often receive one email press release a week with the names of 100 other journalists in the CC field immediately followed by a second email with “RETRACT” in the subject line.

While it’s mildly interesting to see the mailing-list company you keep, a business that inadvertently broadcasts open lists of its customers would at the least be very embarrassed. Manually pasting in lists of customer email addresses is inviting trouble.

2. Difficult to Streamline

Businesses generally want to send out similar content in the same style at a regular time to a growing list of customers. Email clients require a lot of copy and pasting to achieve this, which invites more errors and is a highly manual, time-consuming process.

3. Strains Your Resources

Once your customer list gets to a reasonable size, emailing 600 people from your inbox is going to slow down things a little. It can also create issues with your email provider if newsletter subscribers lazily mark your email as spam rather than follow the proper unsubscribe process. The last thing you want is for your business URL to be blacklisted for sending out spam.

So what do you use instead? The practice of sending a customer newsletter falls under email marketing. There are a range of high-quality, cloud-based applications in this area with names such as MailChimp, AWeber and Campaign Monitor.

Apps which can plug into CRMs include Salesforce.com’s ExactTarget and iContact. MailChimp and the like have integrations to pull customers from a CRM database into their own, but there’s obviously an advantage to working from the one database.

There are several advantages to using an email marketing app instead of your email client to send a newsletter.

1. You Can See Who Opens It

Not only can you see which customers open your newsletters, you can see which links they have clicked within it. Several newsletters down the track and you can tell which customers are the most interested in what your business has to say. I’d be giving them a call first at the beginning of the next quarter.

2. Say it Once, Say it Right

Email marketing apps have tools that make it easy to create beautiful newsletters. Set up a template and you can just refresh the words and pictures. If you have a blog you can automatically send your newsletter every month without the need for any manual updating.

3. A Professional Postie

Email marketing apps don’t just store your database, they also look after the transmission. That means issues such as bouncebacks, delays, out of office replies and spam avoidance are no longer in your hands.

The overall quality of your newsletter should improve and you will know more about your customers by switching to an email marketing app. And your inbox can get on with looking after directly addressed business emails.

This post is part of the Master your Email stream in the Future of Work series sponsored by Salesforce.com.

Which App Should You Choose to Store your Contacts?

December 4, 2013 by Sholto Macpherson

In last week’s post in Cultivate Your Contacts we looked at why it’s important to centralise contacts from various sources into a single list. In a nutshell, contacts equal potential sales so storing them in different programs makes it harder to convert more contacts into customers.

If a central list is the goal, which is the app to hold it? This week we will look at which app is best suited to the task.

Email Address Book

The classic default for most businesses, the email address book is useful in that so much of work these days involves email-based discussions. While a comprehensive list of your email contacts, address books aren’t set up to capture contacts from other sources so it’s not easy to create a complete picture. (There are integrations and add-ons for Gmail that make this a little easier, but Microsoft Office 365 and Microsoft Outlook don’t have many good options.)

The other problem is that address books can record the email address of every email you have received or replied to. This includes no-reply company emails, one-off interactions and so on. It’s difficult to work out which contacts in an address book are the most important as it only records basic contact details.

Email Marketing App

Email marketing apps are really useful because they can collect contacts from several sources and store them in one list. They can also show useful things such as how the contact was added to the list, how often the contact reads your newsletter and how often they click on a story or product (this is known as the level of engagement).

By sorting customers or subscribers based on their behaviour (opening emails and clicking on links) you can find out which ones are the most active participants in your marketing campaigns.

MailChimp and Campaign Monitor are the two most common email marketing apps for small businesses. Both can collect newsletter sign-ups from your website or import a contacts file from your email address book.

They are also useful for collecting names and details from events. MailChimp’s Chimpadeedo mobile app turns an iPad into a sign-up clipboard you can use at a trade show to record visitors’ details directly into the marketing list. Both apps can connect to Eventbrite, a cloud service for promoting and selling tickets to events.

Email marketing apps can hold a very large number of contacts because marketing is by definition one-to-many communications. This list should be much longer than your actual sales list, but it’s not always easy to pull out genuine customers from prospects in an email marketing app.

Marketing Automation App

These are usually aimed at larger businesses but are included here for completeness. HubSpot, Eloqua, Marketo, SiteCore and the like cost from $1,000 to over $10,000 a month and can track the interaction of prospects with specific pages on your website.

These programs are very powerful and draw details from webinar software, newsletter sign-ups, social media, sales landing pages and so on. They then integrate with sales software by identifying and sending across the best leads for a sales team to follow up.

Entry-level CRM App

A wide range of customer relationship management (CRM) apps exist for small businesses. Popular software includes Capsule CRM, HighRise and BatchBook. They can import contacts from cloud-based email address books, Eventbrite (the event management app), webinars and other sources.

Nimble, a relative newcomer, does quite a good job of finding social media accounts by searching with a contact’s email address. If a customer has signed up to LinkedIn with their work email, for example, Nimble will ask whether you would like to add the information from that LinkedIn profile to the contact details.

This can be a quick and effective way to add biographical details to a contact which can be very useful in making a sale or creating a more rounded image of the person.

Full-service CRM App

At the top end of the list are the more mature CRM programs which can do much more than track your customers. Salesforce.com and SugarCRM, the two best known programs, have marketing apps for collecting contacts from a wide variety of sources; they then funnel in to the sales app proper, where more detailed notes can be made next to a contact as it progresses towards a sale; and the services app forms a third component to ensure customer satisfaction with the product or service sold.

These programs are very comprehensive and can scale from a small business up to an enterprise, so fast-growing companies are a great fit.

You should also check out the developer community which can provide lots of useful plug-ins and tools to the CRMs. A great example is Ecquire which integrates LinkedIn with Salesforce.com. Not only does it bring across LinkedIn profiles, but it can import email conversations occurring on LinkedIn’s internal email platform.

The ideal place to store and manage contacts are in a CRM as it is specifically built to centralise prospects and customers into one list, or database. It is also the most effective way to share access to those contacts among many people within a sales team, or (with the larger apps) among the marketing and support desk teams too.

This post is part of the Cultivate Your Contacts stream in the Future of Work series sponsored by Salesforce.com.

Three Signs You Need to Automate Your Business

June 27, 2013 by Jeff Pearlman

As a small business owner, one of your most precious resources is time. Research from BRW magazine shows that 70 percent of small-medium businesses are still processing most of their data manually, resulting in hours of wasted time better invested in activities like growing your business or spending time with family and friends.

So how do you know if you’re one of those 70 percent who are wasting precious time manually processing data? And more importantly, how do you get into the 30 percent of businesses who are operating efficiently and leading their industries?

Connecting your cloud programs can save you precious hours by automating the tasks you do regularly, freeing you up to focus on activities that grow your business.

Here’s a list of indicators that you need to automate your business as well as some tips on how to do it.

1. Entering sales data

Manually entering sales data into your accounting program is not only significantly time consuming, it can invite errors. It also makes your accountant hate you as they usually have to spend hours trying to find and fix discrepancies or holes in the data.

If you are still doing this, stop. There is a better way.

With the rise of cloud software, many of the applications you use to run your business can now be seamlessly connected using online integration platforms so that data flows freely between them. Online retailers can automatically convert sales from your online store into invoices in their accounting program. Or sales teams using CRM sales management software can easily convert closed deals into invoices.

2. Sending invoices and chasing payments

Research from RBS Invoice Finance shows that small to medium businesses spend on average 130 hours every year chasing payments, and that small businesses wait on average 30 days longer than their agreed payment terms to receive money. Not only is that time business owners could be spending growing their business, but it is also a significant contributing factor to the cash flow problems plaguing small businesses.

If you are still manually creating and sending invoices and then chasing payments, you are wasting more valuable time.
To rectify this, small businesses can use billing and invoicing management software such as those offered Freshbooks‎ and WHMCS.

These applications can automate the process of creating and sending invoices as well as send late payment reminders and even automatically add late payment fees to invoices. Once the invoices have been paid, they can be automatically synchronised with your chosen accounting program using OneSaas.

3. Updating customer details

CRM tools and email marketing software provide an excellent way to maintain regular contact with your customers and track your interactions with them. This software is now available on a small business budget (some, such as Highrise and Mailchimp, are even free).

However, if you are manually inputing or updating your customer details in these programs it may not be worthwhile.

The good news is that you can automate the process of getting customer details out of a master system and into all your other systems and effectively maintain one customer database.

Online retailers can have all the customers from your shopping cart seamlessly synchronising with your email marketing or CRM. If you maintain your customer contacts in your accounting package, you can sync them with your preferred email marketing or CRM system.

If you are making any of these mistakes, it’s time to automate your business and get ahead of the competition. Aside from the significant time savings, automating your business in the ways described above can also help you maintain better accounting records, get paid faster and builder deeper, more profitable relationships with your customers.

This article first appeared on the OneSaas blog.