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Technology

The Changing Face Of Customer Loyalty

/ Insights      / The Changing Face Of Customer Loyalty

The Changing Face Of Customer Loyalty

It is a well established business principle that retaining existing clients costs less than finding new ones. The internet has given consumers more choice than ever before, making it harder to retain customers through inertia alone.

In the current marketplace, data and convenience are king; consumers have all the information about your business and your competitors that they could need. Therefore it is crucial to get your business found, and once it is to maximise retention and revenues.

To achieve this, business owners need to find ways of keeping their business in the minds of their customers, in as user friendly and convenient a way as possible.

Technology & Customer Loyalty

One of the pioneers of customer loyalty technology was Tesco. The introduction of the clubcard allowed the company to tailor the offers it sent to the buying habits of individual customers.

This could be used to encourage them to come back, but also to spend more whilst in-store by incentivising certain purchases and creating urgency by putting expiration dates on reward vouchers.

The internet and mobile app technology has only increased the importance of communicating with customers. Firms now use email, text messages, and app push notifications to get their latest products, services and offers in front of their existing customers.

The effective use of these methods can allow businesses large and small to increase customer loyalty and revenues. The impact can be huge even for a one outlet shop. For example, if a cinema can use vouchers, emails, text or app messages to get the person to buy a £10 cinema ticket one more time a month than usual, this can have a substantial impact on income.

This will generate an additional £120 worth of revenue per person before any confectionary or drink sales. Getting your customers to come back and come back more often can be a huge and efficient way of increasing revenues without having to find new customers.

If every customer in this cinema came back just once more a month than before, then the revenue increase could be massive.

Maybe it is time for your business to see how technology can increase customer loyalty and revenues?

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Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Technology

How Dry Cleaners Can Compete Using Technology

/ Insights      / How Dry Cleaners Can Compete Using Technology

How Dry Cleaners Can Compete Using Technology

The UK dry cleaning, and the cleaning services industry more widely, is worth more than £1bn per year, employing over 30,000 people within nearly 4,000 businesses.

An industry report shows that the last five years have been challenging, due to the economic downturn, lower household budgets, and lower demand. Although the number of establishments has declined an online opportunity has emerged.

Demand is starting to recover, however the opportunity lies in adapting to changing consumer habits to craft a customer service that is both cost effective and convenient to the client.

Using Technology To Compete

The internet may not have had a huge impact on the industry in the early stages of the dotcom boom. The last five years have seen a revolution in how consumers research and buy products.

By harnessing this as yet underused resource, dry cleaners can offer click and collect or delivery services to their customers at the press of a button. These kinds of services add convenience to the customer who can order, pay, and even get their clothes collected and returned without leaving their home.

By combining this with text/email marketing with app based push notifications, dry cleaners can maintain regular contact with their customer base, increase referrals, retention and the annual value of each customer.

Apps are popular with the younger generations, making dry cleaning more accessible than the traditional high street shop front, potentially creating an entirely new market for your services.

Creating A Laundry App

Creating a dry cleaning app can be done in many ways, from working with larger providers, to an independent presence. At Aspiring Panda we see the value in helping a business maintain its brand, particularly if it is a longstanding business that has reputation and merit. However, this does not mean that a dry cleaner needs to invest in a bespoke app.

At Aspiring Panda we have a product that we can customise to your business and integrate it seamlessly into an existing website. If a business does not have a site, then we can even create this for you.

If you would like to know more about how your dry cleaning business can compete using a mobile app, just give us a call.

anu_panesar

Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Apps Technology

10 Statistics That Show the Power of Apps

/ Insights      / 10 Statistics That Show the Power of Apps

10 Statistics That Show the Power of Apps

The rise of the smartphone has been largely powered by the influence that mobile apps are now having on the ways in which we work and play. There are apps for every purpose, from games across the spectrum of fun to apps with a hard hitting business application.

Mobile apps are going from strength-to-strength in 2015, with their applications growing from both a business and personal perspective.

To highlight the power of mobile apps we have combed the web for the latest statistics around the growth of mobile apps and related industries:

These stats show that the appetite for mobile apps is rising as the world becomes more and more digitally and mobile focused. Although the solution for every business may not be to build an app, businesses should be giving serious thought to the role that apps could play in their business.

Apps and mobile technology are not just the domain of large companies: to compete, businesses of all sizes should be looking at how mobile apps can solve problems within their business. Be that how to generate more customers, retain old ones or improve the customer experience.

Wherever your business is heading, make sure you consider the role an app could play in your business.

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Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Technology

5 Checks To Make Sure That Your Small Business Website Is Fit For Purpose

/ Insights      / 5 Checks To Make Sure That Your Small Business Website Is Fit For Purpose

5 Checks To Make Sure That Your Small Business Website Is Fit For Purpose

The internet provides businesses with an opportunity to make their business accessible to customers anytime and potentially anywhere. In recent years, the concept of a company website has evolved to be much more than just a flyer or poster promoting your business on the internet.

Instead, with the right design, message, and layout your website has the ability to create and convert leads. However, this means that companies must consider the right approach for their business and invest in the development of an appropriate website.

For the small business, budgets for web design can often be tight. However, there are a number of checks you can do to make sure you have the basics covered.

Check Your Website Is Mobile Friendly

With more than 50% of internet traffic now coming from smartphones or iPads, businesses should make sure that their websites display properly on different mobile devices. In April, Google made this a factor in how easy it was for people to find your site using Google search. You can check if your site complies here – https://www.google.co.uk/webmasters/tools/mobile-friendly/

Add an Active Element to the Site

With so many businesses starting and then fizzling out, it can be difficult for people to work out whether or not a business is still operating. Adding an active element to your website – such as a social media feed, blog or booking system – lets people know that you are open for business

Make It Easy to Contact You Using the Site

The purpose of a business website is to either sell something through the site or to get a potential customer to express an interest. It never fails to surprise us when we see attractive and interesting company websites that make it difficult to get in contact and make purchases.

Don’t lose out on opportunities – make certain that your contact information or call to action works or is easy to find.

Check Your Site Is SEO Optimised

Search Engine Optimisation (SEO) is the term for the actions you take to make your site more appealing to the search engine rankings. An important part of this is “on-page optimisation” which is the set up of your website so Google can read it correctly.

Make sure your website is set up properly so those looking for you or businesses like yours can find you

Make Sure Your Site Loads Quickly

The average internet user is impatient: if your site takes a few seconds to load your potential customer may leave without absorbing any information. Test your website and make sure it loads quickly.

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Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Security Technology

What Ashley Madison Hack Reminds Us About Internet Security

/ Insights      / What Ashley Madison Hack Reminds Us About Internet Security

What Ashley Madison Hack Reminds Us About Internet Security

Data security on the internet is a huge issue. Companies large and small spend fortunes creating infrastructures to make our data as safe as possible.

However, there continue to be high profile cases in which the sensitive data of the general public is being compromised and accessed by hackers.

With more and more data about our lives being stored online, data security is a hugely important issue, and it is an area in which public confidence has hit a new low in light of recent scandals. The latest event is a data breach surrounding the hack and subsequent bulk release of data belonging to registered Ashley Madison users.

This sight has attracted attention due to the controversial service that it provides: it was designed as a dating site for people that wanted to have affairs. It still raises serious issues about the availability of personal data.

The nature of the site and the service that it provides does not detract from the fact that users put their data on the internet in the belief that it will remain private.

The fact that hackers can access a company’s records and put them on the internet for everyone to see has rocked confidence in the ability of companies to keep our data secure. Shockingly, users of Ashley Madison had their information revealed even if they had paid the company an additional fee to remove their information.

Keeping your data secure online is extremely difficult: once you put something on the internet it is recorded. Should someone want to find it, then it is very hard to remove it to the point it cannot be found.

Therefore, it is important to make sure you share essential information only with the businesses you interact with online, and that you only put things online that you would not mind your granny seeing.

The internet is a wonderful and often scary place, make sure you are prepared and follow good data practices.

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Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Apps Technology

Does Your Business Need An App? – Three Ways An App Can Create Business Opportunity

/ Insights      / Does Your Business Need An App? – Three Ways An App Can Create Business Opportunity

Does Your Business Need An App? – Three Ways An App Can Create Business Opportunity

Smartphone technology has become a daily part of our personal and business lives. With more than 46m smart phone users in the UK, there are huge opportunities for businesses to use technology as a means of generating growth. One way of accomplishing this is by using mobile apps.

Because of the huge potential of this technology, one of the most common questions we get asked is “does my business need an app?”

The answer to this question can usually be broken down into three more specific areas that will depend on the nature of the business and its customers:

  1. Can an app be used to improve the customer experience?
  2. Can an app be used to drive customer retention and revenue?
  3. Can an app increase efficiency within your business?

If the answer to any of these questions is positive, there may be potential to develop a bespoke app for a business that will meet their unique requirements.

Can an app be used to improve the customer experience?

Apps that are most regularly used by customers are those that improve the customer experience. A great example of this is Uber. By making the ordering of a taxi simple – and often cheaper – the app significantly improves the customer experience, making the app indispensible to the user.

Can an App Be Used To Drive Customer Retention?

Apps can also be used to tell customers about special offers or products, to drive revenue, and to retain customers.

This is achieved with the use of a piece of functionality called a ‘push notification’. These notifications can keep an app relevant and drive usage by pushing a message from your app onto the home screen of a users device. If an app can help increase revenue from existing customers then it may provide value to a business.

Can an App Increase Business Efficiency?

Apps can also be useful when used internally by a business. As most members of the UK workforce possess a smartphone, mobile apps can be used to keep business owners up to date on activities within a business, or to make processes more efficient.

An example of this could be financial management software that is available via an app, or a mobile app that can track the progress of an order through a factory.

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Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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SEO Technology

Simplifying SEO For Businesses

/ Insights      / Simplifying SEO For Businesses

Simplifying SEO For Businesses

The term SEO for businesses is enough to make owners and marketing managers shudder and think about anything else. SEO – or Search Engine Optimisation – has long been considered one of the dark arts of the internet.

Something that businesses have to outsource and pay a shady company a lot of money in order to rank highly on Google searches, unsure of what they are really paying for or whether it will last.

Change Has Come To SEO for Businesses

This is no longer true: SEO is no longer about building backlinks and “gaming” the system. Google have changed things and put a focus on creative content and social media.

This means that there are now two important aspects to the SEO of a business website: the on-page optimisation, and the content and social media.

What is On-Page SEO Optimisation?

On-page optimisation is the way in which a business website is set up to appeal to search engines. These factors can include setting up the right website keywords, making your website easily crawlable (searchable) by search engines, provides a good user experience, and that all content is unique and adding value.

See Moz and their great blog about on-page SEO

Content and Social media SEO for Businesses

Otherwise known as off-page SEO, content and social media are about encouraging businesses to visit and share the content on your website. Traditionally, this involved getting websites to link to yours, and whilst this is still important it has to be organic or you could get penalised by Google.

Creating engaging and shareable content is now key to ensuring that you have a website that Google wants to rank on its search results.

For a good blog on this see this by Digital Media Role

How Do I Improve The SEO for My Business Quickly?

There are a number of different free tools for analysing your site including www.semalt.com, who offer a basic review for free with options to upgrade. There are no simple fixes or cheats to rank your website well, just the right website format and great content.

If we can help you get your head around this then give us a call.

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Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Technology

The Value Of Effective Digital Training

/ Insights      / The Value Of Effective Digital Training

The Value Of Effective Digital Training

In any discipline the right training at the right time can be the difference between success and failure: this is true of your digital content.

Once you have a well built and lead generation optimised website, you need to create content and use social media to generate leads and ensure your site ranks well on search engines such as Google.

One of the main challenges for businesses when it comes to digital media is getting the right knowledge and skills in a field that is strange and new to them. At Aspiring Panda, we recognise the power of having the right digital marketing knowledge and have seen clients’ confidence and results grow over time.

Whilst it may not be natural at first, mastering the basics of digital marketing will give business owners the power to drive their vision and target internal and external resources effectively.

Aspiring Panda Digital Training

At Aspiring Panda we have a dedicated digital training space which can accommodate up to 20 delegates at a time for workshops, seminars, and presentations on a range of different topics.

Our inaugural event saw our partners Dowsocial deliver a masterclass session. Their Managing Director Kristian Downer delivered an excellent presentation on how to develop an effective social media strategy for your business.

Over the next few months we intend to run a number of different presentations on different digital topics to businesses in the London area. These will be designed to help businesses get the skills they need to be successful in the digital age, and cover a number of related topics.

Potential topics could include: web design; social media; SEO; and graphic design. The session will be delivered in our state-of-the-art training room. If you would like to find out more about the training sessions we are running or would like to discuss using our training space, give us a call.

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Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Technology

The Difference Between Generic & Bespoke Mobile Apps

/ Insights      / The Difference Between Generic & Bespoke Mobile Apps

The Difference Between Generic & Bespoke Mobile Apps

The rise of smart phones as the dominant mobile technology has unlocked thousands of potential practical applications to both the general public and the business community.

The ability to build and host software applications that are tailored to the phone (mobile apps) has led to large companies and independent developers publishing more than 1.4 million apps each on the Android (Google) and IOS (Apple) platforms.

The majority of these apps are developed for the mass market, with the goal being to get as many downloads as possible to the target audience. As the market has developed and become serious business, the apps have become valuable products in their own right.

It is now common to see mobile applications – from both a practical and gaming perspective – being advertised aggressively on and offline.

The Difference Between Generic & Bespoke Mobile Apps

Generic Apps are developed with the target audience in mind. Market research and testing may take place before launch to refine things, but ultimately the app is not developed for the individual or the business.

This can be a limiting factor, particularly for businesses that want to use mobile applications to streamline and optimise their operations.

The alternative is to have apps developed to solve a specific problem that an individual or company has. Typically these are commissioned by companies due to cost but it is not unfeasible for an individual to get a bespoke app built.

Why Use A Bespoke App For Your Business?

A bespoke mobile app is designed to meet the specific requirements of you ,the end user. It can take into account the unique aspects of your business and what it needs to achieve.

The advantages of getting an app made for you is that it can help solve unique issues, give you control over the software that you are using, and generate a unique asset IP for the business.

The downsides mainly involve the cost and the need to ensure that you capture your requirements. But, if you find the right company, these issues can be managed and mitigated effectively.

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Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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Technology

Is Your Website Active Or Passive?

/ Insights      / Increased Cloud Usage During The Pandemic

Increased Cloud Usage During The Pandemic

Does your website work for you? Does it generate revenue even while you are snoozing, after a hectic day?

If the answer is NO, then our answer is Active website! With the amount of consumer traffic that occurs online, it is no secret that your business needs a website to embrace the times. But it doesn’t end there. Making sure that your website is active can put you leaps and bounds ahead of your competitors.

 

With the advent of digital technology your website is like a shop window, and if you cant engage customers then you loose them. The simple way of engaging them is adding interactive elements on your website like Image galleries, videos and product catalogues. These not only make your website look attractive but also allow visitors to spend more time on your website thus providing more value for your brand.

 

Secondly, Capture Leads!!! Yes, your website can capture leads. By providing interactive elements for the customer to contact you easily, it generates leads for your business. A simple pop up asking for their email-id opens up opportunities for future business transactions and a channel to showcase your products and engaging the prospective customers.

 

A truly active website is capable of reaching your customers beyond the realm of simply advertising to them. Through various add-on features available for your website, you can actually have your website perform basic customer service duties for you. For example, if you own a restaurant, you could implement an online booking system that allows customers to reserve a table at your venue.

 

Go on then, tweak and turn your passive website to a sassy active one!!

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Anoop Panesar

Business Development Manager

Digital marketing and tech specialist Anoop is a well-known figure in the Harrow and North London community. Currently the Operations Director for Aspiring Panda, the company uses cloud and development expertise to solve some of the toughest business challenges – which has recently included consulting with East African nations to provide sustainable farming.

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