Is blockchain’s open financial tools and services an opportunity for entrepreneurs?

Outside of the novelty and consistent price speculation of cryptocurrencies, one trend that has fast materialized is for an open and more accessible financial ecosystem.

With the expansion of regulation and infrastructure, facilitating open financial tools loom large, and while this innovation is for the greater good, many entrepreneurs are stuttering at the scale at which this sector is growing. From open source tools to standardized identity protocols like anti-money laundering, the digital asset market is slowly converging with different economic structures that will help entrepreneurs in the long run.

Open and integrated finance

Decentralized or open finance is a type of interoperable financial system that involves transparency, standardization, financial inclusion, and increased accessibility. This opens the opportunity for financial tools to play a more crucial part. For example, crypto traders are using trading tools and indicators to check the market condition before investing. Tools like BTC Profit System offer the most accurate information of the currencies and their expected behavior by using a combination of algorithms.

This approach has also helped many cryptocurrencies to lower their barrier so that investors can access transfer mechanisms and value storage. The currencies are trying to create a separate class of assets and remove intermediaries that exist outside the existing financial system.

One of the most significant aspects of this movement is the emphasis on different financial tools built on blockchain protocols for digital assets. Since these projects are expanding on the basis of blockchain technology, they are useful to build open financial instruments that offer more transparency to entrepreneurs; something that they had been looking for all this while.

Open financial tools

The introduction of open financial tools is providing secured lending services. This sector has a massive potential to benefit new entrepreneurs as it constitutes the biggest part of the open finance structure. However, other financial systems that are also gaining ground are decentralized prediction markets and security tokens, especially after utility tokens saw a downfall in the last couple of years.

Although the potential of various open protocols is still there, experts believe that the market is highly unlikely to experience a wholesale transition when it comes to financial instruments operating on the blockchain.

What is more likely to happen is the introduction of a hybrid ecosystem involving digital assets and open protocols with integrated businesses and traditional financial systems. It is still early days to consider a paradigm shift from traditional to digital in the next few years. So, a convergence is what everyone expects to happen.

If an open financial system has to exist, it will require a lot of innovation and proper infrastructure in different sectors. Financial and regulatory institutions in the United States are approaching a more mature market before jumping into the concept of digital assets. More startups are shifting their attention from ICOs to regulatory-compliant digital assets and transparent security tokens. Even ICO models are now focusing on anti-money laundering and KYC processes to reduce this transition and regain the market they have lost. So, entrepreneurs can be assured that the open financial tools and services will work in their favor instead of going against them.

5 crucial ecommerce tools for new or established online stores

When you search for ecommerce tools that you can use for your online store, you will find that there are thousands of them available at your disposal.

They range from ecommerce website platforms to those with more specific functions like automation tools and form builders.

With the multitudes present, it can feel overwhelming to select which tools are ideal for your needs.

Just by using the right tools, you can achieve optimum operational efficiency, better customer relationships, and improvements in your sales and conversions.

That said, here are five crucial ecommerce tools you should use for your online store.

There’s no shortage of ecommerce platforms available to help merchants build websites, maintain product catalogues, manage shopping carts, process payments, fulfill orders and market brands. Amid this crowded market, BigCommerce has risen in prominence in recent years, thanks to its embracing of the “headless commerce” trend.

Today’s ecommerce merchants need more than functional storefront websites. You need to offer your products on several digital sales channels, and your site needs to be a media-rich destination led by content, brand and community experiences. By allowing merchants to manage the commerce side of business in one centralized place that’s optimized to sync effortlessly with other channels through plugins, APIs and other integrations, BigCommerce’s headless commerce offering is where it’s at.

To support that experience and raise your income and visibility, you should also be where your customers are, whether that’s with social commerce, mobile apps, blogs, marketplaces or price comparison engines.

BigCommerce can help you with just that. It builds stunning and seamlessly integrable storefronts for Amazon, Facebook, eBay, Google Shopping, WordPress, Instagram and others. And you can do all that while handling products, payments and deliveries all in one place. The platform allows you to develop whatever digital experience you like and link out to a BigCommerce-hosted checkout interface, or to host it all yourself.

For your online store to give customers a stellar brand experience, sell where they are, and generate more sales, you need a headless commerce tool like BigCommerce.

Engaging with your customers through direct messages is essential to the success of your online store. If you can accommodate your customers’ inquiries instantly, you will make them feel valued, and they’re more likely to patronize your products and services.

To make that happen, you can use a tool like Crisp. It automates chatting with your site visitors when pre-set triggers are prompted. This makes for more personalized and highly interactive customer engagement.

It allows you to send files, documents and images – and to connect your live chat with social networking sites like Messenger and Twitter.

Scheduling calls with your customers is also more convenient with Crisp. Instead of using a third-party communication software, your customers can enjoy video and audio calls right through Crisp.

Plus, if you have customers speaking a different language and you’re worried you can’t converse with them, you can breathe easy. Crisp can translate both your and your customers’ messages automatically so you can still interact in real-time.

With Crisp, you can foster customer relationships through live chat and significantly improve your conversions.

Did you know that when it comes to purchasing decisions, 83 percent of consumers trust their peers’ recommendations more than advertisements? Moreover, if they see people patronizing a product, they are likely to consider it as attention-worthy. This reality is called “social proof,” and if you haven’t leveraged it yet, you should now, because it can increase your conversions by 15 percent.

To make that happen, you need a tool called TrustPulse. When you install it on your online store, visitors can see real-time and recent activities such as sign-ups, purchases and product demonstrations.

Such notification creates a “fear of missing out” (FOMO) in your visitors and prompts them to participate, just as the others have. And if you want to see how your conversions and pages are doing, TrustPulse can provide you analytics and reports.

Additional tip: aside from TrustPulse, you can also leverage user-generated content (UGC) such as testimonials for social proof. Testimonials will help convince your prospective customers that your products are worth it. Not leveraging UGC is one of the biggest branding mistakes online retailers can make, mind you.

When you’re running your online store, one of the basic things you’d want to be doing is monitoring your ads performance and conversions from specific products.

You do this by inserting tracking codes and scripts of appropriate plugins into your website. To organize and manage these codes efficiently, you need a tool like IntellyWP.

With it, you can see all your tracking codes and scripts on one page. You can also opt to display them on the whole website or in particular pages or posts only.

If you ever fret losing your previous tracking when your website theme is updated, fear not because that won’t happen when you use this tool. With IntellyWP, you can manage pixels for tracking your ads, codes, and conversions in a more organized manner.

Imagine this. Your shoppers browse through your product list on your ecommerce site and add items on their virtual carts one after another.  Suddenly, when they’re about to hit checkout and seal the deal, they leave without making any purchase.

Is this a common scenario in your online store? If so, then you need to win your sales and shoppers back using strategies and a powerful tool called Sumo.

Sumo is built to help you supercharge your ecommerce sales and conversions. It has a neat pop-up feature which helps you gather emails and regain lost revenue. In this way, Sumo decreases cart abandonment and increases your average order value.

Here’s what happens when you wield abandoned cart popups using Sumo:

• Sumo recognizes signs of shoppers who want to leave the site.
• It launches an attractive exit intent pop-up form to bring shoppers back to the purchase funnel immediately – or at a later time through its autoresponder email.
• Using the popup, you can present irresistible discounts or value offers when shoppers try to click away or desert their carts.
• Sumo delivers an exclusive discount code in the success message and the auto-response email.

Sumo’s abandoned cart pop-ups help online store owners to recover sales from potential buyers who don’t make a purchase.

Wield these tools

These tools are well-known in how they have significantly improved the performance of many ecommerce websites.

If you have not used these tools yet to achieve the best possible results for your online store, it’s about time you do.

Photo by Igor Miske on Unsplash

How digital marketing teams can cut costs

When a marketing budget is bursting at the seams, it can be tempting to make big changes, but these are more like knee-jerk reactions than strategic decisions.

It may be that cuts are necessary for some areas, but before you make any drastic cuts to your team’s resources or consider losing staff, try not to panic. It’s likely that several smaller changes will add up to a more significant saving than you might think.

Making your current processes more efficient and giving employees the tools they need to improve productivity can have significant benefits. Here’s how digital marketing teams may be able to cut costs in simple but effective ways.

Embrace Automated Marketing

A big drainer of time in marketing is the small tasks which eat into your day and prevent you from focusing on the activities that result in profits. Luckily, there are lots of tools now which take a lot of the administration away from your day via automation. There are plenty of social media scheduling tools available, and these can manage your communications and publish content at the best time.

There are also chatbots which can respond to frequently asked customer questions. Mailchimp and Marketo enable you to create and send email campaigns to a schedule and feedback the key statistics so you can analyze its success. Automation and artificial intelligence is not a replacement for humans, but it can definitely take the strain off and give your staff more time to focus on what makes the business profitable.

Don’t Work Harder, Work Smarter

This is particularly relevant to marketing agencies, but it’s also a good lesson for any marketing team. Make your interactions with clients as meaningful as possible by ensuring both you and them are working towards the same objective and tracking the same measures of success. When you do meet to discuss progress on a specific project, you need to be on the same page and can understand exactly what matters to your client from the outset.

In terms of team communication, try to reduce the number of trivial emails by introducing instant messaging tools like Slack, which will streamline inboxes and keep projects flowing.

Find Cheaper Office Supplies

Even digital companies need office supplies, and all too often, we spend too much on the products we use. It could be because we are convinced certain brands are better than others simply because they charge more, or it could be because we have been with the same supplier for a long time and just accepted the price increases. It’s always worth taking some time to shop around and see if you can find a better deal. Visit www.cartridgepeople.com to see if you could be paying less for paper, ink, toner, computer accessories, and stationery.

Target Your Strategy

You could spend a fortune on marketing and generating sales leads, but if the people you’re attracting to your business aren’t likely to buy from you, you’re going to be wasting money. You may be targeting an audience which is too broad, so consider looking at more concentrated, smaller segments. Your audience research should be based on data and not assumptions, but make sure you’re looking at more than age range or professions.

Customer insights should also include buying habits and lifestyle information such as the TV shows they like to watch. It will enable you to create a more bespoke marketing campaign which is more likely to return new customers. Consider using online surveys and customer interviews to gather this information and use it to create customer personas. You will be able to increase your customer understanding on a deeper level.

Lose What’s Not Working

Not every marketing channel is the right fit for every business. For example, many companies spend a lot of time working on creating content for social media platforms when, in reality, this is not where their target customers will be found. You may be spending a week or two collating a monthly email newsletter which doesn’t actually result in any extra business or engagement.

Take an objective look at all your channels and see which is most profitable. That’s where you should be investing your time. You don’t necessarily need to stop using the underperforming channels altogether, but you should make sure you’re using your time and money wisely.

Use Free Marketing Tools

Digital marketing is simply bursting with new online tools and platforms designed to help both agencies and companies to improve their operation. This could be a tool for keyword research like answerthepublic.com or an email marketing platform. Some tools require a subscription fee to open up all their functionality, service support, and intuitive interfaces, but there are lots of free tools out there too.

If you are paying for subscription-based tools, do some research to see if there are any free tools which offer a similar service. Try the free tools for a while to ensure they provide all the features you need, but you may find that you can save a lot of money by using simpler versions.

Go Remote

While remote working isn’t right for every business, it can offer some great benefits to modern teams. It’s never been easier to communicate from email and video conferencing to online instant messaging. By enabling team members to work from home or premises, which are more convenient for them, you are giving your team more flexibility, which is great for morale.

It could also reduce your overheads as you won’t need to furnish, rent, heat, or cool a workspace. You can set specific weekly meetings when the whole team comes together in a virtual meeting space.

Measure Your Performance

If you are spending chunks of time on specific tasks and you have no way of tracking whether or not the time has resulted in new customers, you need to rethink. This also goes for all the cost-cutting changes you’re about to make. You need to be able to test whether or not what you’re changing is having a positive impact on your business. Marketing teams are well-used to A/B testing, so make changes gradually and only rollout those which are proven to be a success.