Rajeev Bagra

Apr 08 2022

Omnisend: Now you have access to something shiny and new— give it a go!

Source: Omnisend newsletter dated 7 April 2022

Email continues to drive our customers’ revenue, with 29.6% of all orders in 2021 coming from email marketing. So it’s important to send emails that are visually on point and represent you and your brand.

So without further ado, we’re pleased to finally introduce our new Email Builder . It’s another step in empowering our ecommerce merchants to be even more confident in their marketing skills, without the technical complexities.

Keep driving sales send after send with new solutions like:

Branding every template using your company logo, social media icons and colors.
New templates that not only look great, but are also optimized for mobile devices.
Huge content library with pre-built templates, making email creation as easy as one, two, three.
Plus, everything inside the editor now comes with greater flexibility and customizations to move blocks around, realign content, better layout options, increased font choices, and more.

You’ll have the ability to create emails the way you want them, with no time wasted on complicated workarounds!

Customers already using the new Email Builder have an increased happiness rating and are generating on average 1.9 orders per email!

Are you ready to put the new Email Builder to the test?

Create a Campaign with the New Email Builder

Best,

The Omnisend Team

Jul 27 2021

Buying web hosting: Comprehensive options with Liquid Web for large enterprises and sister brand Nexcess for SMEs

Once you decide to start your own blog or a website, you have to take into consideration so many things. First of all, which platform am I going to choose? Will it be open source CMS like WordPress, Netlify, and Joomla or proprietary one like Weebly, Sitecore, and Squarespace. For an ecommerce store, you have open source WooCommerce, Magento Open Source or proprietary Magento Commerce.

If you choose proprietary ones like Weebly or Magento Commerce, often hosting will be provided by them only. So you need not worry about buying a hosting plan as the price includes the hosting as well. Sitecore provides both the option of choosing either their own hosting or launch Sitecore from your hosting space.

Many of us start with the most popular CMS WordPress through wordpress.com which provides a limited version of this open-source tool through their platform. They provide their own hosting. The free version comes with limited functionalities including .wordpress.com as part of your website address making you look amateur. Even the paid hosting plans by WordPress.com that need yearly commitment come with restrictions on which plugins you can deploy. This is not acceptable to many as the same against the spirit of the open-source movement.

It is the WordPress by wordpress.org that provides an open-source WordPress, hosting of which you need to have from a choice of your hosting provider. WordPress which is based on PHP programming language can be hosted on almost any web hosting package, say VPS by Liquid Web. Nexcess has managed WordPress and managed WooCommerce plans. WooCommerce is nothing but WordPress with an additional WooCommerce plugin.

Even if you are using proprietary CMS that provides their own hosting, we still believe owning your own hosting space will help make the best of web technologies. It is usual for businesses to use multiple web platforms with a combination of open source and proprietary software.

The cheapest way to start is shared hosting. The same resource is shared by many. While this may be okay for a small blog or a website with limited pages, not recommended beyond that. Issues such as lack of resources might frequently make your website down, leading to missed opportunities and poor branding.

With over 15 years of experience, 24/7/365 on-site Heroic Support® and 3 wholly-owned data centers, Liquid Web offers fast and reliable VPS, Storm Cloud, Dedicated Server, HIPAA Server within a fully managed environment.

Whether you’re using WordPress, WooCommerce, or Magento, Managed Hosting by Nexcess is one of the best in the industry. They specialize in scalability, security, speed, and support for Digital Commerce, reasons for Liquid Web merging Nexcess with its operation in 2019.

So what we recommend is to go for a dedicated server environment that can be VPS by Liquid Web that will facilitate the launching of all available popular open-source applications through one click using web admin tools like Plesk and cPanel. Or choose managed WordPress hosting, managed WooCommerce hosting, managed Magento hosting by Nexcess.

I should not use shared hosting the way it is used when you buy say 2$ or 3$ per month plans though technically resources are still shared under clustered server environment. These managed hostings come with an optimized server for the specific platform and also include many pro themes and plugins relevant to the platform. So, managed WooCommerce plans by Nexcess come with in-built PDF Invoices & Packing Slips WooCommerce Extension and Stripe Payment Gateway. The server is optimized to handle 500 sales in an hour!

Here is our relevant article: Nexcess of Liquid Web brand for Managed WordPress and WooCommerce Plans with features that justify premium pricing.

VPS by Liquid Web or managed plans by Nexcess?

VPS (Virtual Private Server): Power of a dedicated server and the flexibility of cloud hosting. Ideal solutions if you require the control of a dedicated server but need to keep your monthly costs down. With VPS, you can have WordPress, WooCommerce, Magento, and any other open-source applications under one umbrella. Managed plans by Nexcess starts @19$ per month. For small businesses, you may need to take a call if to go for managed WordPress/WooCommerce/Magento hosting by sister brand Nexcess or VPS with introductory pricing of 15$ per month (360$ billed for 2 years).

If you are planning to launch multiple applications, we suggest going for VPS as with one hosting, you can launch WordPress/WooCommerce/Magento and all open source web applications and also custom applications powered by HTML, CSS and programming languages including PHP, Python, C, C++.

Managed WordPress or Managed WooCommerce even when you intend not to have an e-store?

If you intend to launch one WordPress site, I would suggest going for Managed WooCommerce instead of Managed WordPress. WooCommerce is nothing but a WordPress plugin that can be used even for displaying affiliate products, selling your in-house services. With Managed WooCommerce, you get a host of pro addons that can be handy not just for online stores for which WooCommerce is specifically built. This changes for more than one website. WooCommerce is priced 79$ for three sites against five sites for Managed WordPress.

Liquid Web plans for large enterprises

Starting with VPS (Virtual Private Server), Liquid Web has these packages for large enterprises:

Nexcess is focused on managed hosting services for small businesses. Now, even their starter WooCommerce managed plan can process 500 orders per hour. When I use the term small business in the context of Nexcess, this is rather to distinguish from the enterprise-level hosting (Fortune 500 company’s website) provided by Liquid Web to the likes of Eddie Bauer, Home Depot, National Geographic, Porsche, and Symantec. See stories, testimonials, and benefits of hosting with Liquid Web from companies like the Home Depot and Hotwire.

Jul 12 2021

Accounting software: QuickBooks for brick and mortar business owners and FreshBooks for freelancers

Both QuickBooks and FreshBooks are popular online accounting software based on double entry system of book keeping.

As per this review by Hubspot, QuickBooks can be a better choice for brick and mortar business owners while FreshBooks for freelancers. Features like time tracking make FreshBooks useful for freelancers.

Both FreshBooks and QuickBooks have starter plans priced 15$ per month.

Both QuickBooks and FreshBooks are used worldwide. However unlike FreshBooks, QuickBooks comes with an edition for India that is GST compliant.

There is 30-day free trial for both QuickBooks and FreshBooks that does not need credit card details.

Apr 28 2021

Thinkific goes public

Source: Thinkific newsletter dated 28 April 2021

On behalf of the whole team at Thinkific, I am excited to share that as of today, Thinkific is a public company on the Toronto Stock Exchange (TSX)!

This is a huge milestone, and we couldn’t be more proud. We’re so grateful to our customers, partners, and team who all continue to be part of this incredible journey.

When we started Thinkific, we set out with a simple idea to make it easy for anyone to create, market, and sell online courses. As entrepreneurs ourselves we saw the opportunity to help people build and grow sustainable businesses by educating others. Today we are awed and humbled by all that our course creators have achieved. There are now over 50,000 course creators actively building and growing their businesses on Thinkific. In 2020 alone, they’ve taught over 21 million students and earned over $275 million USD in revenue from direct course sales on the Thinkific platform.

In many ways, this journey is just beginning. Today we’re helping more than 50,000 active course creators — and in the future, we can help millions. Read more about what’s coming up next in my blog post.

Read the blog post

In closing, I want to thank everyone who has been a part of this journey to date. To our customers and community, thank you for choosing to trust us with your businesses and lives. This incredible milestone is only possible because of you, and everything we do is grounded in helping you succeed.

Thank you,

Thinkific founder — Greg Smith CEO & Co-founder, Thinkific

Turn your expertise into your own thriving business.
Secure your 1-month free trial* of Thinkific’s Pro + Growth Plan today

Mar 27 2021

OptinMonster: Smart Tag in the context of personalized content

AI is being used for underwriting, claims assessment, propensity for sale/renew and personalisation through pre-approved offers (PASA).

What is Smart Tag?

While sending mass emails, we know that by mail merge feature, we can attach personalized content such as name of a person after Hello for each receiver. Smart Tag is an OptinMonster feature (available with Pro or higher plan) which too offers customized content to your website visitors based on variables like gender, name, location, day of the week.

So, you can greet your visitors in a number of personalized ways such as based on their city of residence. In other words, Smart Tag adds unique dynamic text to a campaign to each visitor based on the data (name, gender, email, phone, location, past purchased products, and so on) stored about them.

Smart Tag Format

Start and end with 2 curly braces.
The first value should be either a predefined smart tag or the name of a custom variable you have defined.

You can optionally use a pipe character (|) followed by text to use as the default in the event that the tag information cannot be found.

How to add Smart Tags?

In the Campaign Builder, add or edit a text element.

To ease the process, there are already a number of predefined Smart Tag. Select the { } curly braces button to choose a predefined Smart Tag.

Choose the one by clicking and the same will be added to the text field editor.

You have an option to add a default value in case the Smart Tag cannot find the relevant information. For instance, you can set a customized message as “Hello, Mr. X, how are you doing today!” And in case the Smart Tag cannot find name (might be only email id is known for the user as the form submitted by him or her included only email id), message displayed can be, “Hello, how are you doing today!”

Once completed, press Save button. Smart Tag will now be replaced with the dynamic value once the campaign is set live.

Custom Smart Tags

For advanced users/developers, there is Custom Smart Tags defined by you and contain any particular type of data you want.

There are three ways Custom Smart Tags can be defined:

Query Argument: Using query arguments to define your custom smart tags. To target a custom tag called “name” you can add a query argument to your URL, like http://yourwebsite.com/?name=Thomas (defined a query argument with the key of fname and the value of Thomas). OptinMonster will inspect this URL and if it finds a match, it will replace the Smart Tag with the value of query argument.
Cookie: Similar to query arguments, OptinMonster will search for a cookie named fname and replace the Smart Tag with the value of the cookie.
Javascript Variable: Make use of OptinMonster’s Javascript API. Dtr object will give access to Smart Tags Methods.

Suppose you have a special offer for subscribers. You can send them a link which when clicked will take to your website and a popup or welcome gate will show that will greet subscribers by their name.

Suppose you decide to address subscribers by first name. In case name not available, then ‘Hey there!’.

Add {{form_first_name}} merge field to the popup, by clicking on the merge field button and selecting {{form_first_name}} from the dropdown:

Define the “name” variable. Add the subscriber’s first name to the URL as a query argument. For instance: http://yourwebsite.com/?name=Thomas.

Adding this URL manually to each individual email is not a practical thing to suggest at a time when automation is the way forward. Email providers today use merge tags to insert variables, like a first name.

Use merge tags when adding the link in your email. For example, if you use ConvertKit, their first name merge tag is {{ subscriber.first_name }}. So when drafting your email in ConvertKit, your link would look something like this:

http://yourwebsite.com/?name={{ subscriber.first_name }}

Moosend, which we ourselves use, has this tutorial to refer: What is a personalization tag and how can I use it?

When the campaign loads on the page, the text will show the customer’s name:

When the name not available, here is the output (Hey there):

Way forward with learning

To know elaborately about OptinMonster’s Smart Tags including Predefined Smart Tags and Custom Smart Tags, refer How to Use Smart Tags in OptinMonster.

For learning about WordPress per se, apart from the official site WordPress.org with its workshops and lesson plans, forums, consider WPBeginner. To learn all about digital marketing, you get free access to OptinMonster University with any of the paid OptinMonster plans. Just to reiterate that OptinMonster works on all popular web platforms and not just WordPress.

Are you someone comfortable working on WordPress with its plugins and themes but intend to build your skill on programming/coding part as well? So that you can work comfortably developing customized web applications with Javascript! Here is the free resource to learn the essentials of the JavaScript programming language to advance your skills in the lucrative field of web development.