Advocado

Upsell and Cross-sell with AI-Powered CRM

harshita — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 03:10:01 +0000

It’s no secret that COVID made its mark for the worst, affecting businesses of all sizes – especially small to medium enterprises (SMEs). During this pandemic, businesses had to learn how to regain their footing and adapt to new marketing norms in order to survive. With Phase 2 restrictions suddenly back, footfall to physical outlets have decreased greatly. However, this scenario is not all negative; SMEs now have the chance to digitise even more by directing their footfall and sales to online outlets instead. The future of marketing is here to stay. With years in the making along with months of brainstorming and developing, we have created a sales and recommendation artificial intelligence (AI) to optimise upselling and cross-selling for you. Our solution will help generate more profit from your current customers while increasing customer loyalty during this critical time. Merchants are now able to effectively use their invaluable customer data to its fullest potential with an AI-Powered CRM.

Upselling is a way to get customers to buy expensive items through an upgrade or add-ons to an original product or service – increasing revenue where it may not have been generated otherwise. Usually, it involves spending more time marketing more profitable products or services. However, it can simply be done by exposing customers to other options that may not have been considered in the first place. For example: if a customer is considering buying shoes, the store attendant will recommend buying a similar but more expensive pair instead that is made with better quality material.

On the other hand, cross-selling is another way to get existing customers to consider buying an additional product or service along with the original product bought. For example: if a customer is buying a dress, the store attendant will recommend buying matching earrings to go along with it.

The Cloud Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is an all-in-one system for SMEs to generate more customer visits to their outlets while increasing revenue. Features such as membership enrollments and customised membership programs are now made easy with automatic marketing and real-time data analytics – no cards required. So you can save time focusing on the more important parts of your business.

Over 500 retail merchants have been engaged with their customers with the help of CRM technology. These merchants were not only able to generate more customer visits to their outlets while increasing revenue, but also benefited from an increase in customer loyalty through the gathering of invaluable data. One client, Better Vision, managed to get an incredible 10,000+ customers in just 5 months using Cloud CRM technology. To learn more about the importance of customer loyalty, read our blog on 5 Effective Ways to Retain Customers Who Are Leaving.

An AI-Powered CRM helps SMEs upsell and cross-sell by effectively analysing customer consumption behaviour. Data is gathered via websites, social media, mobile apps, payment gateways and more to create a unified customer profile. Whether from a single customer or a group of customers interacting with individual outlets or a brand – it tracks this data then determines the right products and offers to recommend to the right customers at the right time. Product recommendations are also created by seamlessly segmenting customer profiles, managing multiple sales channel leads, then creating personalised and targeted content – whether that is an upgraded product option or product(s) to buy together with the customer’s original item.

In turn, more profit is generated from your current customers while increasing customer loyalty. Improving customer loyalty and helping you close the gap between your digital and physical sales channels – following customers at every step of their journey.

Merchants can now understand their customer’s buying behaviour inside and out, engage their customers more effectively than ever before, and drive sales 24/7 – no staff required.

By introducing the first-of-its-kind solution, SMEs are now empowered to personalise and automate their customer engagement. Access to cutting-edge technology also helps grow SMEs through digitisation and to scale across Southeast Asia. The intelligent customer experience solution decreases the cost of customer onboarding while increasing customer value for SMEs using our service.

Results written in stone: GameXtreme, a Singapore-based business that specialises in gaming and gadget trade-ins, was turned successful after getting 10,000+ customers just in the first year by using a customised AI solution to automate their marketing campaign.

Advocado also integrates brilliantly with e-commerce platform, Shopify. To read more about our features, click here. Powered by a world-class AI CRM, the solution to more productive upselling and cross-selling has arrived. Schedule a no-commitment call with us now!

The post Upsell and Cross-sell with AI-Powered CRM appeared first on Advocado.

How SMEs Can Scale Their Marketing Strategies In The New Normal

harshita — Fri, 02 Jul 2021 02:34:22 +0000

When the pandemic hit, many businesses had to adapt their marketing strategies in the face of uncertainty. This changed the way small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) market themselves. There are enormous shifts in consumer behaviour: no dining-in, self-collection only, and an increase in online spending habits. Businesses and marketers must constantly innovate and think outside the box in order to stay relevant during this critical time. The importance of free and affordable tools, along with digital platforms to do more effective marketing is recognisable now more than ever.

This post seeks to address how SMEs can scale their marketing strategies in the new normal with the help of Advocado’s 3 key strategies. We’ll also share how your business can do more than just survive but thrive. By conducting an internal business brainstorm and gathering merchant feedback: we have formulated 4 key strategies before the Phase 2 Heightened Alert took place.

Let’s first discuss your current customer satisfaction levels, your business’s image to the public, and current marketing strategies. This knowledge is important in order to have a full understanding of what worked and consumer behavior. Understanding your customer profile will provide you with reasons on what keeps them coming back and to tailor your offers to what they love. Taking a quick glance at your previous email campaigns offers important information: which campaigns were successful and which failed, as well as what were the differences between them?

Firstly, a key strategy we have embarked on to empower SMEs to do more effective marketing is conducting our CRM training to upskill their staff. By conducting online and physical CRM training, we have gotten raving feedback about how useful and engaging our course is in building confidence of business owners, managers, and front-line customer service staff in driving lasting customer loyalty, creating repeat customers, and increasing revenue. This season is perfect for our retailers to continuously push new frontiers and stay ahead of the curve. So when the pandemic subsides, you are prepared with important skills and frameworks to engage customers with a world-class excellence standard. Watch a really cool video here for more benefits of our Cloud CRM.

While we have invested a considerable amount of gas on new marketing efforts; each dollar was deliberate and intentional with its purpose. In critical times like these, Advocado has provided our merchants with a leg-up across diverse industries from F&B, retail, beauty, and more. We have further collaborated on 1-minute style success story videos on how SMEs can tide through this pandemic and develop meaningful marketing strategies in the new normal, learn more here. Our founders have also stepped up marketing efforts to benefit our merchants, focusing on key customer engagement lessons from SME heroes so aspiring merchants can follow in their footsteps. To see more merchant success stories, click here.

Secondly, a key strategy to be focused on is e-commerce. What’s more; the e-commerce platform Shopify integrates brilliantly with Advocado. It’s more than just paid advertising: this integration makes reaching your customer prospects and educating existing merchants easier. For merchants who only have traditional outlets, this is a great opportunity to consider. Click here to find out more. For merchants who sign up with Advocado right now, you enjoy (1) A complimentary social media design or E-Commerce banner tailored for Facebook, Instagram or Whatsapp to share anytime and anywhere. We also specialise in creating automated FAQ robots for your site that operate 24/7, as well as functions such as live countdowns/updates to flash sales.

Lastly, the key strategy in boosting digitalisation of your SME beyond the pandemic is the integration of Advocado Artificial Intelligence (AI). We have developed a sales and recommendation AI model that leverages interactions and determines the right products and offers to specific consumers at an opportune time – irregardless of consumption behaviour and interactions of consumers. Drive sales anytime, anywhere – no staff required. Advocado follows an intuitive approach in listening to merchant’s concerns which helps us modernise and diversify new channels into their once successful business model. A holistic approach has always been part of our work ethic in analysing what each individual company needs. These methods have brought empowerment in offering solutions and invaluable data that are within SMEs reach to truly transform and optimise digitally. Our hard work with Advocado AI has come full circle over the years to benefit over 500 merchants as much as possible.

We believe that AI should be completely accessible and relevant for both merchants and consumers alike. This promotes a personalised retail experience beyond imagination. For more information about our AI partnership with Global ICT provider HUAWEI and AI Unicorn 4Paradigm, click here.

With the implementation of our 3 key marketing strategies developed for SMEs to scale in the new normal, your business will be on its way in creating lasting and effective results. Schedule a non-obligatory session to speak with us now!

The post How SMEs Can Scale Their Marketing Strategies In The New Normal appeared first on Advocado.

Advocado and Verz Design Accelerates SMEs Digitalisation Across SEA During and Beyond COVID-19

harshita — Tue, 22 Jun 2021 08:19:59 +0000

How Can You Grow Your Business through Digitalisation Even During These Tough Times?

Facing lesser dine-ins and lower footfall during these critical times? Your business may already have a website but still find it difficult to maximise the fullest advantage of digitisation. There is an increasing trend of SMEs seeking online outlets to boost their business revenue since traditional business models have been badly affected due to COVID-19. Despite this awareness of the want and need to go digital, an SME Digital Transformation Study reveals that only 40% of SME digital transformations are successful. With the right partners, it’s the perfect opportunity today to not only upskill your CRM, but as well as your Digital Marketing & E-Commerce, so as to bring back happy returning customers and increased profit. Already excited to get your E-Commerce, CRM and Digital Marketing up and running? Click here to learn more.

Owning a Website is an Awesome Conversion Driver For Your Products & Services

It’s a myth that having a website is more costly than not having one. In fact, your business may be losing revenue and a missed opportunity to communicate brand identity without a website. 80% of people research a product or service on the internet before making a purchase. Owning a good website allows you to have a 24/7 salesman and an awesome conversion driver to build desire for your products and services (rather than just relying on word of mouth).

We’ve Got Incredibly Good News For You SME Retailers!

Advocado, leading Cloud CRM for SMEs in Southeast Asia and Verz Design, Singapore’s Top Web & Digital Marketing Agency have partnered to enhance your customers’ Offline-to-Online (O2O) buying journey. Verz Design helps transform visions into reality by cultivating a fair, intelligent, and professionally-sound process to website design and development through an all-star team of professional designers and programmers – setting you up for maximum success. Being an experienced Google Partner will allow you to generate quality leads and increase your sign-up rates exponentially.

Advocado integrates brilliantly with E-Commerce platforms including Shopify, so you can turn your customers into raving fans now! Furthermore, Verz Design has built over 500 websites for brands including Bee Cheng Hiang, OTO, and Spigen with its successful integration with Magento; one of the most popular E-Commerce platforms. Schedule a FREE 60 minute strategy consultation with Verz Design’s seasoned and results-driven marketer at your service!

Taking Full Advantage Of Your Business’s Digital Presence

How can our merchants take advantage of their E-Commerce presence with a supercharged Cloud CRM? Advocado’s Cloud CRM and Verz Design’s E-Commerce solution are both Productivity Solutions Grant (PSG) pre-approved, with up to 80% funding support; helping many businesses boost their digitalisation journey. Take action now to transform your business digitally: by having an E-Commerce storefront made by Verz Design and managed by Advocado’s AI-Ready CRM, your business will be ahead of the curve in an extremely competitive E–Commerce world.

For only a very limited time, Advocado & Verz Design PSG solutions is offering an irresistible deal just for you when you sign up now. Schedule a no-commitment demo with us by filling up the form below to find out more today!

Start Your Own Branded Loyalty Today!

Turn Your Customers into Advocates

Find out how you can

under the Productivity Solutions Grant

If you have any questions or enquiries, Contact us at:

+65 6444 9556

The post Advocado and Verz Design Accelerates SMEs Digitalisation Across SEA During and Beyond COVID-19 appeared first on Advocado.

Offers with Stripe Integration

harshita — Thu, 10 Jun 2021 03:00:44 +0000

We have great news for you SME retailers!

Your business pain point – Always wanted to have a fuss-free payment solution that allows you to take your mind off complicated payment processes and get recurring payouts effortlessly?

Your customer pain point – Always wanted a way for customers to make quick and easy payment with each offer checkout, anytime and anywhere, without the hassle of heading down to your stores?

Advocado has heard you! Offers with Stripe Payment Integration is the seamless value-add service for your business to be rewarded with timely payouts and your customers to enjoy payment for your services anytime and anywhere.

Sounds AWESOME? – Merchants who onboarded Offers with Stripe Integration regretted not doing more Offer campaigns during Mega Sale Season, as their additional sales channel.

Further spice up your FB Live, Website or Social Media Engagement by using QR Code Paid Offers and allow your customers to check out offers instantly, while you get a 100% visible sales dashboard for each unique offer.

We respect that you want to enjoy the flexibility of payment methods, while trusting that each payment touch point is safe. When your customer purchases Offer(s) with his/her credit card, you can be assured with an ease of mind as Stripe is a validated PCI Service Provider.

We bet you must be feeling all excited and so, we curated this question and answer post just for you.

How do I benefit if I set up Offers with Stripe

The beauty of setting up your Offers with Stripe is that you get to enjoy discounts with our multi-tiered Offer value. The higher the Offer value you set, the more you save for Stripe fees.

You may refer to the Stripe Fee savings table to maximise your savings.

We recognise that there are various considerations and preferences for our Merchants and there’s no one-size-fit all solution. Get into a no-obligation discussion of how you can maximise the benefits of setting up Offers with Stripe.

How do I get Onboarded on Offers with Stripe?

Please find a simple step-by-step process of getting onboarded with Offers with Stripe:

Step 1: Merchants enter their contact details for login & contact purposes

Step 2: Merchants will have to enter details with regards to their business/company for Stripe

Step 3: Merchants will have to provide contact details of their organization representative

Step 4: Merchants will have to enter their bank details for the payout from Stripe

Step 5: Review the details and submit.

You’re all set up to create paid offers!

How soon can I get my Offer payout with Stripe?

A payout is a simple journey! It starts from the buyer (customer) who purchased the offer to transferring that payout to Merchants’ specified bank account.

Payouts to your bank accounts are fast and predictable. They happen on every 7 days, up to 4 times per month. For example, if you withdraw on 6th September, the next time you can withdraw is 13th September.

We also want to minimise your pain of waiting on your first payout to just be one-off. There is a 7-day waiting period from time of first charge to the first payout.

How do I get onboarded on Stripe, create my first offer and understand the payout flow?

Our team is dedicated to ensure your success in creating your first offer and receiving your payouts. A clear video on the end-to-end process from onboarding, offer creation to pay out is on the way, bear with us meantime!

Still unsure how to take advantage of Offers with Stripe Integration?

Don’t wait for any Mega Sale and miss tremendous opportunities! Maximise engagements and sales opportunities on your FB Live, website, social media engagements and more. Schedule a walk through with us on Offers with Stripe Integration by filling up the form below.

The post Offers with Stripe Integration appeared first on Advocado.

6 Effective Marketing Strategies for F&B Businesses in Singapore in 2021

harshita — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 09:39:23 +0000

The Food & Beverage (F&B) Industry is a lucrative and growing one, especially in Singapore with its melting pot of various cultures. Nevertheless, competition is fierce. Even though F&B was badly hit by the pandemic, there was a 96% net increase by the end of mid-2020.

As the more food entrepreneurs turn to social media as the main marketing strategy, a well-designed Food Instagram Account is no longer enough. F&B businesses need to do more to stand out. F&B businesses need strong marketing strategies to constantly gain new customers and grow their loyal fans. In this article, we look at a few simple and effective marketing strategies that can boost F&B Business such as:

· Special offers from time to time

· Birthday Treats

· Loyalty Program to reward your customers

· Customer Relationship Management

· Social Media Promotions

· Gifting or Cash Vouchers

Lets look at these strategies one by one:

1. Special Offers

One of the most common strategy is 1-for-1 Special Offers. In fact, it is so frequently implemented that some Singaporeans expect it and actively search for a F&B’s available offer. When executed well, Special Offers offered at the right time can help drive sales and footfall.

For instance, offering 1-for-1 during off-peak hours can attract deal-seekers and help to increase sales during the off-peak hours. Further, this deal encourages customers to come in pairs, which can potentially help F&B gain new customers.

2. Birthday Treats!

Going out for meals is one of the most popular ways people choose to celebrate birthdays. A simple birthday wish, a gift voucher or a free meal from you creates a positive image of your brand in their minds. A personal touch like this helps you show that you care about your customers, that they matter to you. In return, happy customers tend to revisit your business. This is one of the best opportunities to grow loyal customers.

Birthday meals typically involve huge groups of people. Not only does this help to drive sales during this particular birthday event, it is a great chance for your brand to enrol new customers and turn them into your loyal customers. A simple birthday treat can bring you numerous benefits!

Tip! Use a good CRM system to automate this process. This saves you precious time spent on manually keeping track and sending out wishes.

3. Loyalty Program

Loyalty Programs are designed to help build, retain and grow loyalty amongst your returning customers. Having a reward system in place makes your customers feel important, acknowledged, and cared for, and in return, they tend to return for more.

A popular loyalty program suitable for F&B businesses is a voucher system. This can be done in a various way, depending on your objectives.

For instance, rewarding your customers with vouchers each time they make a purchase can encourage them to visit again. A good strategy would be to offer free membership along with vouchers so that you can have a better understanding of who your customers are.

Tip! To reduce queue-time and enrol customers quickly within seconds, learn more here.

4. CRM

How awesome would it be if you knew your loyal customers’ frequent orders and preferences? You don’t have to manually memorise it for every single customer. With a good CRM system, the tech does the heavy lifting for you to care better for your customers.

A well-implemented CRM System helps to record all your customers’ information and past interactions with your brand. This allows you to better understand your customers’ behaviour, so that you can make better recommendations to your precious customers.

5. Social Media Promotion

Of course, we cannot forget promotions on social media. One of the best ways to attract new customers is by posting mouth-watering photos of your food online. With how widespread social media is, having delicious looking food online is essential in spreading word of mouth.

You can consider hiring professionals to take high-quality photographs. Or, you can also work with food bloggers to push out visual images of your food to huge number of viewers. A cheaper and more organic way to grow is to re-post or share good photos taken by your customers.

6. Gifting or Cash Vouchers

Another amazing strategy is through the power of sharing. This is an excellent opportunity for your customers to send a birthday gift to their loved ones, or simply express a thank you. You can do this by allowing customers to purchase vouchers and then helping them send it to the recipients. Through this, you deliver more value to your customers while growing prepaid revenue.

Tip! A good CRM system can help you easily implement this. Learn more here.

7. Improve customer retention and revenue

According to Harvard Business School, if your customer defection rate decreases by 5%, you can experience 25 to 85% increase in your sales or profit. Using CRM solutions enable your business to improve the retention rate of your customers, and it often translates to increased revenue. Your business can use CRM to address at-risk accounts and encourage satisfied customers to purchase again at the right time.

Read here to learn about effective ways to retain your customers.

Case Study

Let us tell you the story of our amazing customer COCA. COCA is a 3-outlet Thai-Chinese hotpot restaurant located in shopping malls. We are sure many of you reading this must have had delicious meals at there.

COCA offered return vouchers to the customers. Their challenges were:

· High printing costs

· No way to track which customers have the vouchers

· It was stressful for the staff to give vouchers to every customer

· Less than 5% customers revisit from return vouchers

To manage these vouchers more effectively, they decided to take up a Loyalty-CRM. They started using Advocado, and just within 6 months of the usage, they saw following results:

· COCA enrolled 8000+ new members in their loyalty program just within 6 months

· They saw a 14% increase in new customers on a regular basis

· All the vouchers given to the customers were tracked. The system also sends automated reminders to those who haven’t used their vouchers.

· They now have a more comprehensive loyalty program with a mix of membership, cashback, voucher and special deal.

· It became easier for the staff to just enrol a customer with their mobile number, and the system takes care of everything else.

Take a look at their membership program that brought in these results:

The post 6 Effective Marketing Strategies for F&B Businesses in Singapore in 2021 appeared first on Advocado.

Boost Business Performance with Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

harshita — Thu, 03 Jun 2021 09:08:04 +0000

Customer relationship management (CRM) is the technology and processes a business uses to manage its customers. The solutions are targeted at the relationship with existing customers, finding potential customers, and winning back previous customers. Customer relationship is vital for any business growth, so it needs to have adequate management.

Formerly, CRM was presumed to be beneficial only for large organizations, but now it has proven to be suitable for small and medium-sized business-to-consumer (B2C) businesses. CRM is one of the powerful management tools designed to keep track of and stream your business processes in many ways:

1. Help your business to acquire a solid customer database

Help you gain valuable business insights and make informed decisions
Build sustainable relationships with your customers
Increase productivity of your employees and overall business.
Optimize your marketing effort

6. Improve customer retention and revenue

CRM can boost the performance of your B2C business through the following ways.

1. Help your business to acquire a solid customer database

CRM solutions help you have a well-detailed database of your customers; they give the detailed history and current status of the customers, thereby helping your business better understand its customers. The solutions help create factual information about each customer and are accessible for a consistent interface, irrespective of your location. Some CRM solutions have connectivity to external data sources (accounting system and website) to pick up customer interaction across every touchpoint for a clear and complete picture. The CRM solution can also help you create a solid database for your potential customer, so you know how to reach out to them. Connecting your marketing tools (email, social, and marketing automation) to a CRM solution will give your business a 360-view (complete) of customers and prospects, so you can engage in communication to convert prospects to customers.

Read here to understand why every small business need data.

2. Gain valuable business insights and make informed decision

When you have enough data on your customers, you’ll have valuable business insight through CRM to achieve the following:

Communicate with customers about relevant subjects for the desired period.
Develop valuable offers and plans for your customers and prospects.
Identify opportunities to cross-sell or up-sell.
Figure out customer’s needs.
Build a relationship with each customer.
Personalize customer’s purchase journey.
Boost the engagement level of your customers.

Modern CRM solutions have embedded artificial intelligence (AI) that provide further insight and drives informed decisions. The AI task can include analysis from social media posts, the highlight of customer’s questions in tracked emails, sensor alert from installed customer software, and revelation of trend on customer’s relationship based on the frequency of contact.

3. Build sustainable relationships

A sustainable customer relationship is a key to having a long-lasting B2C business. CRM solution exposes your business to customer’s information so that you can use it to develop a relationship with them. To build a sustainable relationship, you need to do a complete business review from its history to its vision, mission, values, and services. CRM solutions help you find out your business challenges, what matters to your customers, and how you can help. Take note of these customers’ challenges in your CRM system so that you can do a review and develop your strategy.

Once you’ve identified your customer’s challenges, you can recommend appropriate products, services, or information to help them. With CRM solution, you can monitor their purchase and how they use different products or services. It will help you provide them with relevant information. A CRM solution also has a host email template, task reminders and can enable phone calls to help you quickly and easily connect with your customers. This way, each of your customers feels appreciated, and it will boost your business performance.

4. Increase productivity of your employees and overall business

The use of CRM solutions relieves your employees from burdensome tasks (like manual search for customers’ information). It gives them time to connect better with customers and strengthen the business relationship with them. CRM solutions help streamline many business processes, so you have enough time to identify and seize different business opportunities to boost your overall business performance.

CRM can help improve your overall business performance by improving sales efficiency. It allows your sales team to prioritize customers that have a high chance of patronizing the business. CRM boosts sales team effectiveness by helping them know the highly engaged customers and the right time to reach out for a response. It helps your employee determine the next step to close a deal through a complete customer view.

5. Offer better and personalised customer services

A target marketing study showed that 48% of customers patronize brands that take a personalized marketing effort. A complete database of the customer provided by CRM helps your business know when to reach out to customers. It also determines how to offer the best customer service to individual customers. CRM provides you with customer’s touchpoints, demographics, behavior, and browsing history. You can use CRM to keep track of important dates of your customers, their experiences, and offers that elates them. With your customer’s complete history, your employees can create personalized messages and solutions with the right resources for your customers.

6. Optimise your marketing efforts

Using CRM for your B2C business allows your business to track marketing campaigns. CRM helps you get feedback on your launched campaigns, how customers responded to them and if they are interested. Some CRM tools have features for evaluating the marketing campaigns your customers are viewing. These features will help you develop a marketing strategy in that line.

CRM also enables you to have a well-targeted and cost-effective marketing strategy through email marketing. Using the marketing automation offer of CRM, you can create personalized emails for product promotions. Optimizing marketing using CRM helps improve your business sales and revenue.

7. Improve customer retention and revenue

Read here to learn about effective ways to retain your customers.

Conclusion

Customers are more than sales; they are the pivot on which your business rests. Treating them right and addressing their needs is vital in keeping them, and an effective way to go about that is the use of CRM solutions.

Customer relationship management provides your B2C business with different ways to boost its overall performance; implement it to get your desired business goal and satisfied customers.

The post Boost Business Performance with Customer Relationship Management (CRM) appeared first on Advocado.

Advocado And Web Imp Accelerates SMEs Digital Business Transformation Across SEA Amidst COVID-19

harshita — Fri, 28 May 2021 04:03:53 +0000

How Can You Grow Your Business With E-Commerce Even During These Tough Times?

Facing lesser dine-ins and lower footfall during these trying times of the COVID Pandemic? Are you a traditional SME business that runs physical outlets that has been thinking all along to digitalise your business with E-Commerce and improve your customer engagement, so as to bring back happy returning customers and get more business revenue?

It is truly an unprecedented opportunity to enhance your online presence with E-Commerce to capture the full Offline-to-Online (O2O) buying journey now!

Since last year, there is an upward trend of businesses seeking online refuge to boost their business revenue with the brick-and-mortar model being badly affected. The convenience of online shopping allows consumers to shop with a peace of mind, knowing that they are safe in their own homes. An E-Commerce platform will not only aid you during this pandemic to sustain your business revenue, but also a good opportunity to propel your business further even after the pandemic. Let’s keep our fingers crossed and hope this can all be over soon.

Already excited to get your E-Commerce and CRM up and running? Click here to learn more.

We’ve Got An Incredibly Good News For You SME Retailers!

Web Imp, Pre-approved PSG vendor for E-Commerce and Advocado, leading Cloud SaaS for retailers in Southeast Asia have partnered for over 5 years. Both business teams have constantly accelerated SME digital transformation and allowed our existing SME merchants to enhance their online presence, as an additional sales channel to traditional business retail operations.

Web Imp is a tech firm which enable digital transformation through intuitive UX/UI design, reliable web and mobile development, and cost effective digital marketing campaigns. E-Commerce is one of the many services they provide to clients, which is usually the first step in the marathon of digitalisation.

Advocado is a leading Cloud CRM SaaS for retailers in South East Asia. The goal of Advocado is to help B2C businesses in F&B, retail, beauty and wellness to generate more revenue and regulars through growing, managing their customer base, and bringing loyal customers back again and again with Marketing Automation and A.I.

Today, we are extremely excited to announce that the two firms have forged a stronger partnership, with the mission to provide even more awesome value for our clients, through a powerful and seamless integration of E-Commerce and Cloud CRM SaaS.

How Can You Tell a Great Story and Build Desire With E-Commerce, During and Beyond The Pandemic?

When you have your own E–Commerce website, the journey of brilliant storytelling begins and you attract and build customers’ desire to buy your products and services. Web Imp specialises in building E-Commerce platforms for our clients with the expertise in WooCommerce. Since WooCommerce is an open-source platform, it allows you to have ownership and more control of your E-Commerce operations. With the wide array of plugins available in the WooCommerce community, Web Imp is here to help you build the features you require, at the most cost-effective investment.

Most businesses face the challenge to capture the full value of customers’ Offline-to-Online (O2O) buying journey now. Turning this challenge into opportunity, Advocado and Web Imp have co-developed a seamless plugin solution that integrates various E-Commerce platforms and Advocado Cloud CRM SaaS technology brilliantly. Not only can you now push for the digital business transformation process and results that you yearn for, you will solve two problems, at only at the fraction of market cost: building a strong E-Commerce foundation and rewarding the customers with a fuss-free CRM on the E-Commerce platform you have embarked. It is truly a marvel to go 360 digital with Web Imp and Advocado!

How Can You Take Advantage By Owning Your E-Commerce Presence, Supercharged With Cloud CRM SaaS?

Productivity Solutions Grants (PSGs) have helped many businesses to kickstart their digitalisation journey with huge subsidy support provided by the government. Web Imp’s E-Commerce solution and Advocado’s Cloud CRM SaaS are both PSG pre-approved solutions with up to 80% funding support.

Take action now to transform your business digitally. Having an E–Commerce storefront by Web Imp and Advocado’s AI-Ready CRM, you will be ahead of the pack, despite an extremely competitive E–Commerce world.

For only a very limited time, Advocado & Web Imp will give you an irresistible deal just for you, if you were to sign up for the winning combination of Advocado & Web Imp’s PSG solutions. Fill up the form below now.

You can also read more about Advocado’s brilliant integration with Shopify here.

Start Your Own Branded Loyalty Today!

Turn Your Customers into Advocates

Find out how you can

under the Productivity Solutions Grant

If you have any questions or enquiries, Contact us at:

+65 6444 9556

The post Advocado And Web Imp Accelerates SMEs Digital Business Transformation Across SEA Amidst COVID-19 appeared first on Advocado.

How Artificial Intelligence Helps Businesses to Transform

harshita — Wed, 12 May 2021 10:22:36 +0000

Artificial Intelligence allows businesses to make use of consumer data to:

Gain market and consumer Insights
Automate tedious and mundane business processes that reduce costs and increase efficiency
Provide a more personalized experience to their customers
Helps businesses to scale

Let’s deep dive into the concept of AI.

What is Artificial Intelligence (AI)

It is an aspect of a computer that targets building systems and processes that can function and react like a human operator. AI is not a replacement of people, but the enhancement of human capabilities and transformation of their working processes. AI works through software tools and algorithms to automate different tasks. Their technologies enable the computer to leverage a large amount of data (structured or unstructured) to perform almost limitless tasks by applying problem-solving, rationalization, and predictive analysis.

Role of AI in Transforming Businesses

1. Market and Consumer Insights

The core of every B2C business market is their customer. As a salon or restaurant, if you don’t have good analyses of your market and what interests your customers, then the business won’t succeed. Consumer insight is the analyzed data that provides a better understanding of customer attitude and preference. Doing a manual market and customer insight can be challenging and full of error.

AI is beneficial to B2C businesses for creating analyzed data. AI technologies help collect data from the business target audience, monitors and scan the keywords to give you an insight into what interests your customers. AI can help a retail business create an interactive customer survey that allows for analysis and modification of the services rendered.

AI makes market insight quick, accurate, and free from biases. With AI insight technologies, a retail business can be innovative, competitive, and satisfy its customers. For market insight, AI also uses competitive intelligence to collect and analyze information about a business’s current and potential competitors. The organization can track everything the competitor does, from products or services to their customer base and marketing strategy. The aim is to use the information to make informed decisions about reaching and satisfying your customers.

2. Automation

Automation is vital to the success of any business. It involves using technology to streamline complex business processes to simpler processes, thereby improving service quality and delivery and increasing revenue. AI is the best technology for the automation of digital and physical tasks (like administrative and financial activities).

Robotic Process Automation (RPA) technologies is a form of AI that has intelligence that enables it to perform tasks for retail businesses like;

Data transfer from email and call systems into recording systems. For example, a salon trying to update address, mail, and contact changes on their customer’s file can perform the task fast with RPA.
Replacing lost credit or ATM card information on the system.
Solving the problem of failing to charge for service by extracting customer’s information from online records.
Extracting provisions from legal and contractual services using natural language processing.

AI can be incorporated in customer relationship management (CRM) processes for automation. It assists businesses with frequent, relevant customer data and updates. AI also automates business marketing, including content creation, digital campaigns, and email marketing.

3. Personalised Customer Experience

With increased access to digital services, customers have high expectations of products and services. A B2C business that cannot meet up these expectations will fade out of the market fast. AI helps these businesses improve their customer experience and stay relevant in the industry.

AI helps businesses identify their customer’s needs or challenges using CRM, then creating personalized services for them. For example, based on a customer’s data, a restaurant owner can find out more about his customer’s choices. Using CRM, he can send a personalised message to the customer giving them options of their favourite food items on the menu. This brings back the customer, as the customer is motivated to eat their favourite food. AI allows you to specify the qualities of customers you want to target, like age, gender, purchase, and online search. This information can be beneficial in providing services for them.

4. Helps the Business to Scale

Scaling up a business means anticipating opportunities and leverage on them to expand your business potential. AI offers many expansion opportunities. It helps with information that can boost the creation of products and services. AI can be used by businesses to scale up content ideas (using content optimization tools) that will be beneficial to their customers.

With AI, a business does not need to worry about data privacy, digital transformation, and compliance with the regulation. The organization can flow with the industry trends without breaching any laws. If you have the right automations in place, they take care of mundane jobs with more efficiency and almost zero errors. This allows the businesses to focus more on other tasks like strategy & planning, innovations and expansion.

AI is Not the Future - It is the Present

Some retailers see AI as fiction that cannot be implemented now. AI is a reality that is not only for tech and large industries but also for B2C businesses like grocery stores, cafes, spas, gyms, and many others. AI is already transforming the world, and it is becoming part of our everyday lives. If you don’t adopt it now, the business world will keep expanding, and you will be lost.

There are different AI technologies available today that will be useful to any B2C business, irrespective of its size. Technologies that help with single vendor strategy, hyper-personalization, data cleansing, and innovative marketing are available for any business. You need to be open to the concept of AI and let it make your business processes easy.

Conclusion

Artificial intelligence is not an optional tool for business; it is a tool that every organization must implement to make their processes easy and gain customer satisfaction. It allows a business (no matter the size) to be innovative and creative, and in the long run, it enables expansion. AI is not here to take over the business world; it is here to enhance and reshape businesses’ performance.

Your business is not too small for Artificial Intelligence implementation.

The post How Artificial Intelligence Helps Businesses to Transform appeared first on Advocado.

7 Effective Marketing Ideas for Hair & Beauty Businesses in Singapore

harshita — Tue, 11 May 2021 02:24:19 +0000

The beauty industry has always been a profitable one. Hair and beauty businesses are now seeing an increase in the men’s world as well. It is not anymore just the ladies who invest in good hairstyles and other beauty products. Since the demand is high, the competition is also at its peak in this business.

Salons need to have a strong marketing strategy to attract customers to their business. It is necessary to stand out among the other salons. In this article we go through marketing ideas that can boost the hair and beauty business, such as Loyalty Programs, Special Offers, Engagement via SMS, Referrals, Birthday treats, Social Media Promotions, making use of a robust customer relationship management system, etc.

Towards the end of this article, we also have a surprise testimonial of one of our customers’ who will share more about how they made use of these strategies to overcome the business downtime during the COVID-19 pandemic.

Let’s get into the details of these:

1. Loyalty Program

The customers are the reason why the business runs successfully. Loyal clients are the ones you want to retain and therefore it is important to appreciate their loyalty. One great way of doing so is the loyalty program. Offer special discounts to the returning customers, inform them about new products before the official release, or hand out free merchandise on special occasions.

Know all about Consumer Loyalty programs here.

2. Special Offers

Right special offers at the right time can help increase the footfall dramatically. What you want to offer depends on your objective, and what results you want to achieve from these offers.

For example, if your objective is to get more return visits from your existing customers, you can run a member-only promotion. If your objective is to expand your customer base by acquiring more new customers, you can have a special one-time offer for new customers only.

You can play around with the special offers such as complimentary head massage, or facial, or 3 services at the price of 2. You can also offer a package that includes a haircut, pedicure, manicure, etc. During the off-peak times of the year, you can entice customers with special gifts or some extra hours of foot massage.

3. Engagement via SMS

It is a great technique to involve people in your promotional campaigns. Keep the customers notified about discounts, new products, new services, and other exciting offers via SMS. The response rate is close to 50% for SMS marketing which makes it an effective strategy even in the era of social media.

4. Refer a friend

This is an effective way to retain loyal customers and also gain new ones. Customers who refer their friends and family to your salon can be rewarded with some discounts or points that can be redeemed. When the reference comes from a close one, people trust and do visit the salon in most cases. Therefore, referral programs are a smart way to get new customers via your trusted customers.

5. Birthday Treat

The majority of the people tend to go for self-grooming on and around their birthdays. Just a simple birthday wish from you will keep your brand in their minds. This is an excellent chance to bring smiles to the faces of your loyal and loving customers. This way, the customers feel valued and return to the business.

If it’s trouble for you to manually keep track and send wishes, you can use a CRM system to automate the process.

6. Promote on Social Media

Facebook, Instagram, and other social media platforms are great for branding your business, and directly connecting with your customers. You can post information and pictures that your target audience would find appealing.

Social media is the best visual medium to showcase your work and makeover stories. Pictures engage 120% more than text-only posts. In today’s time, it’s a very high chance that your customers will visit your social media page before visiting your salon. Hence, treat your social media page as a mini-website, keep it updated and very engaging.

*Bonus Tip: You can create special offers for the customers visiting your social media page for the first time. You can link this offer to a QR code that the visitors can scan, and come down to your salon to redeem it. (You can thank us later)

Check out Advocado’s features to see how can you implement this.

7. Customer Relationship Management

For the beauty industry, it’s very important to know your customers and their choices of products and services. A good CRM system will help you record all your customer’s information and will tell you more about their likes and dislikes.

Imagine your precious customer walks in, and you greet them with their name. You know which treatment they did last time, and based on their choices you propose what can they do next. This will be so powerful, that your customer wouldn’t want to go away from you.

Case Study: 99Percent Hair Studio

We are very humbled to share the story and testimonial of our precious customer, 99Percent Hair Studio. When the government announced Circuit Breaker back in March 2020, all the hair and beauty salons were closed and out of operation. 99Percent hair studio made a very smart move by selling ‘Special Offers’ via Advocado.

This was a win-win for everyone:

99Percent Hair Studio’s Customers: They got pre-booked their beauty services with their favourite brand at discounted prices
99Percent Hair Studio’s Staff: They were happy as they made extra sales, despite the pandemic, and could provide for their families.
99Percent Hair Studio: Not only they were able to keep their staff meaningfully engaged during the Circuit Breaker, but they were fully booked as soon as the businesses were permitted to re-open.

This is a testimonial in their own words:

Conclusion

We understand that it gets overwhelming to run your salon business and keep up with the marketing and promotions at the same time. The key here is to delegate and automate. Most of the strategies shared above can be automated with the right technology and systems.

The post 7 Effective Marketing Ideas for Hair & Beauty Businesses in Singapore appeared first on Advocado.

Advocado Partners HUAWEI CLOUD And 4Paradigm AI To Roll Out First-of-its-Kind AI-Enabled CRM For SMEs Across SEA

harshita — Mon, 03 May 2021 11:22:05 +0000

Pictured from left to right (Mark Chen, Head of Asia Pacific, 4Paradigm; Nicole Lu, General Manager, HUAWEI Asia Pacific Partner Ecosystem, Cloud and AI; Joval Gan, CRO and cofounder of Advocado; and Eric Chia, CEO and cofounder of Advocado)

Singapore, 20 April 2021 – Global ICT provider HUAWEI, AI unicorn 4Paradigm and Singapore-based startup Advocado today announced a landmark partnership to launch a first-of-its-kind AI-enabled CRM solution.

By integrating 4Paradigm’s Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology and HUAWEI CLOUD capabilities into Advocado’s existing CRM software, a new smart solution, AdvocadoINSIGHTS will empower small and medium-sized enterprises (SMEs) and retailers across Singapore to personalise and automate customer engagement. This will also help businesses to digitise and scale across Southeast Asia (SEA) by providing them with access to next-gen machine-learning technology.

Already excited to get your AI-Ready up and running? Click here to learn more.

Making AI Accessible For Singapore’s SMEs

Launched in 2016, Singapore-based startup Advocado is the leading SaaS provider of CRM software for SMEs in the city. Advocado has served over 1.5 million customers in 800 outlets across the island, with traction in Thailand and Malaysia.

SMEs and retailers on Advocado’s CRM platform can now look forward to data-driven and intelligent customer experience solutions, enabled by 4Paradigm’s AI and machine learning systems. 4Paradigm’s fully automated (close-looped), integrated customer data and AI services will reduce customer acquisition costs and increase total customer lifetime value for businesses across SEA.

Bespoke machine learning models are created for each client in partnership with 4Paradigm. Currently, Singapore-based businesses like 20-outlet bed linen chain Linen Gallery by Epitex have already adopted custom AI solutions to automate their marketing campaigns.

“Epitex has been leveraging AI to enable our digital transformation, gain insights into consumer behaviour and create personalised customer experiences. With the implementation of Advocado’s AI-driven Electronics Direct Mail (EDM) campaign, we have seen a 3 times increase in click-through rate. We are pro-actively exploring ways to scale our business, especially as the pandemic hinders physical footfall to our outlets,” says Judy Zhang, CEO of Epitex.

“At Advocado, we believe that AI technology isn’t just reserved for billion dollar companies – it should be within reach of businesses, big or small.” said Eric Chia, Founder and CEO of Advocado. “Our new AI solution offering, AdvocadoINSIGHTS, and our robust cloud CRM software will empower SMEs and retailers to build better customer engagement processes and boost their revenue. We are committed to serving Advocado’s customers faithfully, especially in these trying times.”

Integrating AI With Retail

This partnership marks another successful foray for 4Paradigm into the SEA marketplace. The China-based AI Platform-as-a-Service (PaaS) provider has been hailed as the leader in the AI space, and is best known for its end-to-end industry-grade AI platform 4Paradigm Sage.

With 4Paradigm’s integrations into AdvocadoINSIGHTS, retailers can segment customer demographics, manage omnichannel sales leads, and create personalised and targeted content like automated product recommendations on Advocado. 4Paradigm’s integrations can also create a unified customer profile based on data collected via websites, social media, mobile apps, payment gateways and more. These integrations improve customer retention rates and help businesses bridge the gap between digital and physical sales channels.

4Paradigm has the number one AI platform market share in China according to IDC MarketScape, and its retail clients include the world’s top enterprises, such as YumChina, Zegna, DHL, Budweiser and KÉRASTASE. Having just raised US$700 million in funding in a Series D funding round earlier this year, 4Paradigm now intends to herald its regional entry into SEA with Advocado to spearhead the digital transformation of businesses in Singapore.

“Today, 3 out of 4 consumers expect a fully personalised and immediately satisfying customer experience journey when they walk into a store. Unless you have AI that can iterate next steps for your business based on a large set of data, it will be difficult for any business to capture consumer interest,” says Mark Chen, Head of APAC, 4Paradigm. “4Paradigm’s machine learning solutions provide SMEs with a no-fuss way of optimising their CRM strategies, in collaboration with Advocado.”

Accelerating Cloud Adoption Across SEA

As Covid-19 accelerates digitisation, the rise of “Cloud 2.0”, where governments and enterprises are facilitating the large-scale shift of data and digital services into the cloud, has become the new norm. HUAWEI CLOUD is leading this shift as the fastest growing Infrastructure As A Service (IaaS) provider in the world, and the 6th fastest in the global market. The Chinese tech giant is actively incorporating SMEs into its cloud services, with SMEs in the SEA region joining their European counterparts through the tripartite partnership with Advocado and 4Paradigm.

By supporting the regional ambitions of Singapore’s SMEs, HUAWEI CLOUD’s service enables SMEs to accelerate digitisation and scale at speed. Advocado’s entry into the HUAWEI CLOUD Partner Network (HCPN) will allow businesses to develop AI and CRM tech solutions that leverage HUAWEI CLOUD Elastic Cloud Server (ECS), Elastic Volume Service (EVS), Elastic Load Balance (ELB), Relational Database Service (RDS) and Object Storage Services (OBS) services.

“As HUAWEI CLOUD continues to expand presence in SEA, we will empower small businesses across the region to grow rapidly. We have faith that this venture with Advocado will empower SMEs with the capabilities to supercharge their digital transformation and bolster their market expansion,” says Nicole Lu, General Manager, HUAWEI Asia Pacific Partner Ecosystem, Cloud and AI.

HUAWEI CLOUD is now available in 170 countries and has launched over 210+ cloud services and solutions. 3,500 applications are available on the HUAWEI CLOUD marketplace, with offerings from over 18,000 partners and three million clients, who are developing cloud services with the tech giant.

-End-

About HUAWEI

Founded in 1987, Huawei is a leading global provider of information and communications technology (ICT) infrastructure and smart devices. We have more than 194,000 employees, and we operate in more than 170 countries and regions, serving more than three billion people around the world.

For more information, please visit https://www.huawei.com/en/

About 4Paradigm

4Paradigm is an AI platform and technology services provider. With machine learning technology, 4Paradigm helps enterprises to realise intelligent transformation. 4Paradigm has the number one AI platform market share in China according to IDC MarketScape and has been named as one of the 50 Smartest Companies by MIT Technology Review.

4Paradigm has been promoting the rapid and scaled industrial application of AI relying on its technology and enterprise-level AI PaaS platforms and AI technology including AutoML and transfer learning. Currently, 4Paradigm has extended the AI application in over thousands of cases in the fields of finance, retail, manufacturing, energy, healthcare, the internet, media and more, facilitating every industry with AI innovation.

For more information, please visit https://www.4paradigm.com/

About Advocado

Advocado is a leading Cloud CRM SaaS for retailers in South East Asia. We help B2C businesses in F&B, retail, beauty and wellness to generate more revenue and regulars through growing, managing their customer base, and bringing loyal customers back again and again with marketing automation and AI.

For more information, please visit https://advocadoapp.com/

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