1st Apr 2022 | Autoresponder, Charity, Consultancy, Email, Event Bridge, General Information, Salesforce, Support, Training
Finding support can be difficult… so that is why we have launched our support portal.
The idea is that people will be able to help themselves before checking in with us. For many people, this ‘instant result’ saves them a load of time.
However, there will still be many times when you do need our personal support, so, for our customers, it is possible to raise new cases.
But… won’t that mean learning ANOTHER username and password? Fortunately, that answer is ‘no’.
As long as you have your own Salesforce instance and we have you as a contact in our system then you don’t need a password at all.
(For those of our customers who do not have Salesforce, we can still set you up, but you will need a username/password.)
The portal is at support.cloud-genius.com
Here is a video on how to access the Knowledge articles:
Access Knowledge Articles
Here is one on how to log in (without a password), raise and monitor a case.
Raising Cases
This is a new venture… so while we have been having our techies check everything out… I am sure you will find some things that could be improved. I would love to hear from you!
27th Sep 2021 | Email, GDPR, General Information
It’s not going to work the same.
One of the go-to methods for contacting many clients is mass-email.
Here we use Campaign Monitor, but there are many others including the venerable MailChimp.
All of these systems allow you to track whether someone has opened their email, where they were when you opened the email and many other features. (Whether you do track these things should be reflected in your privacy policy and whether a client allows you to track these things.)
These things are all going to break with the way Apple is changing the way it connects to email services.
This is to give your clients (and you) more privacy. So, it is a good thing.
It will impact your mass emails.
Here is a great video from Campaign Monitor, detailing the changes.
https://www.campaignmonitor.com/resources/webinars/navigating-an-evolving-privacy-environment/view/
2nd Sep 2021 | Business Ownership, Consultancy, Email, General Information, Salesforce
It is always a great joy to hear Amanda Beard-Neilson speak. Amanda is organizer of one of the best Salesforce conferences in London. OK, I think the best.
I have always found her an inspiration.
Here she is on project management – something she absolutely aces!
Amanda’s article
Did I mention that she also has a great sense of humour?
2nd Aug 2021 | Customer Engagement, Email, General Information, Salesforce
Do you ever look at a friend, who you think has been the same for for many years, and suddenly think… they look older/fatter/thinner/different? For so long they look the same. You see them every day. They always look the same. Then you notice that there has been a huge shift. It has happened over many years, but you notice it as a single jump?
Well, I noticed that with my emails. For many years we have been sending out our Customer Satisfaction (CSAT) questionnaires through Salesforce Classic templates. They do the job, but they are ‘transactional’. Meaning that they are just barely good-looking enough to be sent to clients. It is possible to create anything with them, as they are HTML, but at some effort and expense.
On the other hand, we send out our ‘marketing’ emails through Campaign Monitor. This has a lovely editor that makes producing beautiful emails a joy. However, they are marketing emails, so if people have not given us permission they do not receive them. For many years, Campaign Monitor has had ‘Transactional Emails’, but the coding to get them to work seemed to be a lot of effort.
Then, like noticing the change in a friend, I noticed that the integration we use has a feature called ‘Smart Emails’. This gives the ability to use Campaign Monitor for our transactional emails EASILY.
In a few minutes, I created a Campaign Monitor template and replaced our outdated CSAT email. A thing of beauty! Even better, it registered a task against the client every time one of the questionnaires was sent out. Instead of a horrible link to click, the client is presented with a beautiful button.
Our CSAT response rate has improved since switching to the new transactional emails
As everyone knows, with emails response rate is one of the most important metrics.
Techy bit: even mapping fields from Salesforce to the emails is a cinch!
Our transactional emails now look as beautiful as our marketing emails!
If you would like to find out more (and use Salesforce and Campaign monitor, or would like to), let me know on this form
16th Apr 2021 | Business Ownership, Customer Engagement, Email, General Information, LinkedIn
When I searched for ‘Create a Buzz’, this photo was not what I was after. On the other hand, it is fun so it will probably get you to engage.
There is a problem on the internet. How do you get people to engage and follow you?
Well, a friend of mine has come up with a brilliant idea.
It is a party.
What sort of party?
Fancy dress? Come as you were?
No!
It is a LinkedIn Party. A group of you get together. (OK, you all share a WhatsApp conversation.)
You all post on LinkedIn.
You all copy the link to the post into WhatsApp.
You then open all the posts of the other people, react to them (on LinkedIn) and reply (on LinkedIn).
Just do it for an hour a week, all at the same time.
You will have created a Buzz.
Now, if only this idea were mine, but it isn’t.
This great idea is another fun and effective technique from Adam Brooks of SkineeRino.
Pop over to his website and find out more of his brilliant madness!
27th Apr 2020 | Consultancy, Defeating spam, Email, General Information, Web Hosting, Websites, WordPress
Most web hosters won’t admit it, but email from websites is a NIGHTMARE.
It used to be really easy and cheap to set up email to send from a website, for instance when a form is filled in on the website inform the owner of the website.
As it gets more complex, many hosting companies take a set it up and keep fingers crossed approach.
At Cloud Genius, we monitor that even this aspect of your website is working.
In the old days the web server sent out the email.
The problem is that spammers used to use servers to send out millions of spam emails in a day.
So, web hosting companies have gradually clamped down on this.
Even if you do send an email from your web server, the chances are that the recipient will block it… assuming it to be spam.
What is worse, if someone else on your shared hosting is sending out spam all YOUR emails will be treated as spam, too.
Your emails will not be received and you won’t know!
For this reason, we send our webserver emails via the client’s Office 365 account.
This gives them the same reputation as if they came from the client’s normal email. (Google for Business works just as well.)
This process is slightly more complex.
At Cloud Genius, we monitor this connection so that if it starts to fail we get a message via Slack to tell us which of our clients is in difficulty.
Part of our service that puts us above the rest.
