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How to Look After Your Financial Situation Better

Business owners with an e-commerce company know that the market is incredibly saturated. Not only is there a lot of competition out there, there is also a growing rise in costs. This means that you need to work extra hard to stay competitive and increase profits. Your business plan should feature strategies that revolve around revenue generation, as well as streamlining processes and operations in order to reduce costs. Here are a few top tips to help you look after your financial situation better.

Get Business Insurance

One of the most fundamental ways to look after your business’s financial situation is by getting adequate business insurance. No matter how large or small your business is, getting it insured can help protect your assets. E-commerce business insurance can give you risk protection, it can help recover costs when faced with damages, and it can help cover costs in case of a data breach. Not to mention, it is often a mandatory requirement for legal trade for many e-commerce businesses. KBD Insurance is an insurance broker that offers different types of business insurance. They provide an array of insurance quotes and can help you find the best rate by comparing quotes from different companies.

Place Focus on Customer Retention

When it comes to running an e-commerce business, many business owners place a lot of focus on customer acquisition. However, did you know that it can cost five times more to acquire a brand new customer than it does to retain an existing one? With this in mind, it makes sense to spend more of your time and money on customer retention if you want to improve your financial situation. Your customer retention strategy should include building a loyal customer base by engaging existing consumers via social media and targeted email marketing. By reaching out to existing customers and making them feel valued, you can increase the probability of customer advocacy too. In turn, your existing customers can help drive new business to your online store.

Do Your Research on Popular Payment Options

Although it is a sensible idea to offer multiple payment solutions, it is an even better idea to do your research and identify the most popular options used by your customers. By narrowing down the number of payment options you offer, you can get rid of excessive monthly processing fees. Many online shoppers possess more than one payment option, so it is likely that they will be affected if you minimize the number of options you make available to the public.

Keep Shipping Costs Under Control

Shipping and packaging expenses can be shockingly expensive, which means that you need to slap on an extra fee to simply provide shipping and handling services to your customers. You can try lowering these costs by doing business with a shipping carrier that provides free boxes and investing in adequate shipping insurance. In addition, you should research shipping costs with various companies and choose the carriers that suit your type of business.

Stripe Payment Methods

Beginning using Stripe involves deciding how you'd like to pay. This guide will take you through the benefits of every payment method provided by Stripe.

Stripe is quickly becoming the most well-known payment processor in the world.

It is currently utilized by a variety of companies across the world. It is the most exemplary model of online payments. One of the reasons it's so well-known is the range of integrations available. It provides a broad range of payment options available from a variety of service providers.

This article will help you in determining which payment options are suitable for your specific company's model or personal needs.

Debit cards and credit cards

A lot of online businesses utilize Stripe to offer the Stripe check-out service. Customers can pay for their purchases directly using credit cards as well as debit cards. The processing of credit cards through Stripe is completely free. Customers do not require an account to make payments using their credit cards.

Many card types are accepted as well as Amex.

Stripe allows you to change the appearance of forms used to check out. You can create a unique check-out that is branded to the business that you represent!

Card Payments are For You If: 

  • You would like to sell digital or physical items on the internet.

  • You can issue invoices

  • Your site can be configured to take credit card transactions

  • You'd like to handle international credit card payments

The following list details Credit and Debit cards that are accepted by Stripe

  • Visa

  • Mastercard

  • American Express

  • Discover

  • Diners

  • Japan Credit Bureau (JCB)

  • China UnionPay (CUP)

Key Features:

  • Regular payments are supported.

  • Instant confirmation of payment from both ends of the transaction

  • Supports Refunds

  • The amount of dispute is high.

 

Digital Wallets

Digital wallets are virtual money bags that are linked directly to the bank account of the person receiving them. It is among the newest payment options. However, they are becoming more well-known. They are suitable for payments in person, which are contactless, as well as online transactions.

Mobile wallets are safer when compared with credit card transactions. They generally require users to enter an identifier or swipe their finger in order to authenticate their transaction online.

Digital wallets are perfect for you If:

  • You are selling physical or digital products and want to increase conversion on mobile devices

  • You don't have an account with a subscription

The following list contains Online Wallet providers who are accepted by Stripe

  • ApplePay

  • Google Pay

  • Click to pay

  • Microsoft Pay

  • WeChat Pay

  • Grab Pay

  • AliPay

Key Features:

  • Helps with regular payments

  • Instant confirmation of charge on both ends of the transaction

  • Support Refunds

  • Have lower rates of disputes than cards.

Redirects as well as Redirects, Bank Debits, and Credit Transfers

Bank debits occur when your client gives you their bank account details and consents to have money directly debited from their account.

Bank redirects add another additional step in the procedure of debiting. The payment gateway sends the client to a web portal owned by the bank that they can access to authorize debit. They don't enter their bank account details directly in the application.

Bank transfers from banks to credit cards are the kind of transfer we are most familiar with. The bank's details are provided to the buyer. They'll process your transaction using that information.

Bank Transfers are perfect for you if:

  • You'd prefer to spend less on processing fees. The cost of transactions starts at 1%.

  • There's no need for immediate payments. Bank transfers generally require 3-5 working days to process.

  • You do have a subscription for any kind of service. 

Key Features:

  • Refunds are supported.

  • Only bank redirects give instant confirmation of payments.

  • You can create automated payments by direct debits. Credit cards aren't able to work as periodic automatic payments.

  • Bank debits are an excellent option to settle disputes, but they have the lowest rate of disputes.

Pay Now, Shop later.

Pay later, buy now options are popular among online retailers. It's quick to credit.

The entire amount is then paid by the finance provider. The customer then is responsible for the installments of the finance company in which the customer has committed to repay the full amount.

Buy Now, Pay Later for You If:

  • You'd like to offer high-end items on the internet

  • You don't have to be concerned about the increased costs of processing

A list of Pay-Now Pay-later Providers that accept Stripe

  • Klarna

  • Afterpay

Key Features:

  • Reimbursements

  • Doesn't support recurring payments

  • Medium dispute rate.

  • Confirming the payment can take a few minutes.

Important Takeaways

The Stripe payment method is part of every pie available online! Select the best payment method and get at your fingertips to shop and assist your company! Stripe can assist you in making transactions straightforward without worrying about your cash! While Stripe manages your transactions allow experts from studycrumb to do your homework and ease your life completely.

5 effective ways to increase awareness of your brand

As a small business owner, you’ve worked hard to get your brand up and running. And, if you want to achieve the success you have in mind, your target audience needs to know all about your work and be able to find you. This is where brand awareness comes into play. 

Brand awareness refers to how many customers recognize your business and what it offers. It’s the most important marketing lever because it has a huge impact on the first stages of your sales funnel and the foundation of customer acquisition. The more brand awareness you can generate, the higher your sales numbers will be. 

So what can you do to increase awareness of your brand? Here are five practical ways to shine a spotlight on your company and attract the right people. 

  1. Regularly publish content your audience wants

Content will act as a visitor magnet for your website. So you must develop a solid and consistent content marketing plan to attract the right customers. 

Content marketing is a strategy businesses can use to engage and retain their target audience using blog posts, videos, infographics  and other media types. This is vital for raising awareness of your brand because it establishes you as an expert in your field and keeps your business in the minds of potential customers. 

But, to get the best results, you need to ensure that you don’t just generate content for the sake of it. You must put together content that your ideal customers actually want and need. Here are some ways you can make sure you’re creating genuinely helpful content that your audience is looking for: 

  • Conduct keyword research to understand what your customers need and how you can appear at the top of relevant search engine results pages. 

  • Visit forums and social media accounts relevant to your niche to see what questions people are asking about your industry. 

  • Take note of the questions your prospective customers have so you can write content to help answer them. 

To give you some content marketing inspiration, let’s take a look at a number of different businesses that always get it right. 

RMIT Online is an online university that does a great job of regularly publishing content that its target audience — mainly consisting of prospective students — genuinely wants. This helps them to reach more of their target clients. 

For instance, they’ve put together detailed articles about what salary a marketing manager can expect to get. This is perfectly geared towards answering common questions their ideal customers are likely to have because pay is a huge consideration when it comes to what you should study and pursue as a career path. 


This piece of content answers all the questions potential students might have about the salaries for various marketing positions, giving a rough idea of what they can expect to find in the job market after graduating. The article also does a great job of discussing other requirements and job duties of the positions to help educate students looking to enter the field. 



Let’s also look at an example from FreshBooks, an online accounting software tool, to understand how to create great content to increase awareness of your brand. Their post on how to write a winning invoice letter offers key information that customers will return to each time they need guidance on this process. 

Their approach includes publishing blog posts that outline step-by-step instructions for processes that are essential for their target customers. This content educates and positions the brand as the go-to source for information about handling your finances and ensuring clients can pay you quickly and easily. Since the content addresses the needs of the company’s audience, FreshBooks will draw new customers to their site and this can build brand awareness among those looking to buy accounting software in the future. 

You can use the same approach in your content marketing strategy by creating content that your target audience is searching for. This will help you appear at the top of relevant search results and build brand awareness among potential customers. 

Finally, another great example of content marketing comes from Helix Hearing Care, a hearing aid provider. They have a fantastic and comprehensive guide to hearing aid maintenance that’s sure to prove very useful for their target customers. 

It does a great job of explaining all aspects of hearing aid maintenance, and it addresses common questions that potential and current customers are likely to have about their hearing aids. This will help build brand awareness for the company as potential customers are likely to find the page when looking for tips on how to maintain their hearing aid devices. 

The content is optimized with relevant keywords in its headers and it dives into everything from what cleaning tools to use to how to replace a hearing aid battery. This type of in-depth content will help the brand rank for competitive keywords, and build brand awareness as a result.  

You can implement the same strategy by thinking about common questions that your customers have and then creating content to address them. This approach will help you rank higher for relevant queries and build awareness of your brand over time. 

  1. Invest in PPC advertising

Pay per click, or PPC, marketing is a strategy that involves paying a fee when one of your ads is clicked on. 

PPC advertising tends to be relatively cost-effective since you’ll only pay for ads whenever someone clicks on them. You’ll need to take steps to get the most out of your PPC ads, though. Here are some strategies you’ll need to use: 

  • Keyword bidding: If you want your PPC ads to appear on relevant search engine results pages, you’ll need to bid on the keywords you would like to target. It’s important you choose these wisely, looking at metrics like their search volumes and levels of competition. 

  • Write engaging PPC ads: You need to ensure, when putting together your PPC ads, that your copy will really connect with your ideal audience. Consider factors like their pain points and priorities to ensure they click through and buy. 

  • Optimize your landing pages: The job of a landing page is to get your audience to convert, because it’s where customers will land when they click on a PPC ad. So, you should make it easy to convert with simple forms or other ways for your audience to contact or buy from you. 

PPC campaigns can also help raise general awareness of your brand.. Even people who see your ads but don’t click on them may be hearing about your company for the first time and may circle back to see what you have to offer. It takes some time, but PPC marketing is a great way to raise brand awareness. 

  1. Turn customers into brand ambassadors with referral incentives

If you want to turn existing customers into loyal brand ambassadors who spread the word about your brand, you may want to provide them with incentives. This means that, when someone recommends your products or services and it leads to a sale, they will receive some sort of compensation for their actions. 

This could be done through a structured affiliate marketing program, offering discount codes, or even free products. You could also generate traffic with influencers by offering them incentives for incorporating your products into their content to further extend the reach of your brand and establish more awareness of what you do.

Referral incentives can help you drive new business for your company. They offer an essential type of social proof that will make new customers feel more secure in their purchases. Take the time to think about your target audience and what incentives will work best for your company’s bottom line while also building awareness of your brand.

  1. Build a strong presence on social media 

There isn’t a more powerful tool for raising brand awareness than social media. The more active you are across multiple social media platforms, the more likely the right people will hear about your business, products, and services. 

Effectively engage with your audience on social media by maintaining a constant and predictable presence. Post content at peak times when your target audience is most active and use a scheduling tool to make sure your output is consistent. It’s also important that you monitor your analytics to ensure your posts are performing as they should. 

For example, LinkedIn marketing tools can help you scale your marketing efforts and identify precisely what techniques will help to build the most awareness around your brand. This is a great way to streamline the engagement process and ensure your social media efforts get results by targeting the right people with the right message and at the right times.

You can also engage with your followers by responding to their comments and even sharing their posts that relate to your brand. This approach helps build a relationship with your audience, which can grow your presence over time. 

  1. Reach your ideal customers on search engines with SEO 

Search engine optimization, or SEO, is the practice of enhancing your online presence. The goal of this is to help your site rank highly on relevant search engine results pages, or SERPs, which can help boost your brand awareness. SEO also tends to be a very cost-effective way of building recognition for your brand because it can provide a fantastic ROI by driving relevant traffic to your site over time.

When you have a comprehensive SEO strategy, it helps to increase your brand reach by driving consistent traffic with content that answers questions and addresses the pain points of your audience. Be sure to conduct keyword research to find relevant terms that your audience uses when searching for your products, services, or content online. You can use tools like Ahrefs or SEMrush to find keywords with high search volumes and low competition to drive the right people to your site. 

Once you have a list of keywords, you can build your website copy and content like blog posts and how-to guides around those terms. Use them in your titles, headers, and content to help ensure you get discovered through search engines. 

Summary

You want to build brand awareness the correct way to reach the right people. Think about your target audience and keep an eye on your competitors. Take your time and make choices that will set your business up for long-term success. 

As your brand awareness grows, you’ll find yourself facing more and more opportunities to attract new customers and make sales. So it’s something that’s well worth investing some of your time and digital marketing budget into. 






SaaS Security Risks: What You Need to Know In 2022

In 2022, SaaS will be the primary delivery model for enterprise applications. As a result, organizations must pay close attention to the security risks associated with this new way of doing business. 

Don't worry, we are here to help! In this blog post, we will discuss SaaS security best practices for secure customer data storage. We will also outline the new risks that businesses face in 2022 and how to overcome them. Finally, we will ask the question: Will SaaS security measures slow business?

What Is SaaS?

It is a type of software that is delivered over the internet, instead of being installed on a local computer or server, often using a thin client such as a web browser.

Thanks to the growth of high-speed internet access, SaaS has become a popular delivery model for many business applications, including customer relationship management (CRM), enterprise resource planning (ERP), and human capital management (HCM).

What Are SaaS Security Best Practices For Secure Customer Data Storage?

There are several best practices that organizations should follow to ensure the security of their customer data:

  • Use strong encryption methods to protect data in transit and at rest.

  • Implement access controls to restrict who can access sensitive data.

  • Conduct regular security audits to identify vulnerabilities.

  • Use a secure development lifecycle to ensure that applications are built with security in mind.

What Are New Risks In 2022?

The rise of SaaS has created new risks for businesses, including the following:

  • Data breaches: Because customer data is stored in the cloud, it is more vulnerable to attack than data stored on-premises. Because SaaS applications are hosted online, they are vulnerable to data breaches. Hackers can gain access to customer data if they can penetrate the security defenses of the provider.

  • Compliance issues: Organizations must ensure that their SaaS applications meet all relevant compliance requirements.

  • Vendor lock-in: Once an organization commits to a SaaS solution, it can be difficult and expensive to switch to another provider. This can lead to vendor lock-in, which can limit an organization's flexibility and increase its dependence on the SaaS provider.

How To Overcome The Risks?

Fortunately, there are several steps that organizations can take to overcome these security risks:

  • Educate employees about security risks: Employees should be aware of the potential risks of using SaaS applications and how to protect themselves from them.

  • Conduct regular security audits: Regular security audits can help identify vulnerabilities in SaaS applications and ensure that they are properly addressed.

  • Use a secure development lifecycle: When developing SaaS applications, organizations should follow a secure development lifecycle to ensure that security is built into the application from the start.

  • Implement security controls: Organizations should implement security controls such as encryption, access control, and auditing to protect their data.

  • Select a reputable SaaS provider: Organizations should carefully select a SaaS provider that has a good reputation for security.

  • Use encryption: Encryption is a process of transforming data into a format that cannot be read by anyone who does not have the appropriate decryption key. This ensures that data is protected in transit and at rest.

In addition, the use of SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions means that companies are reliant on third-party providers. This can create vulnerabilities if the provider is not adequately protected. As a result, it is important for companies to be aware of the new risks associated with SaaS solutions and to take steps to protect themselves.

Will SaaS Security Measures Slow Business?

No, SaaS security measures will not slow business. They may even improve business efficiency by reducing the need for IT support. Additionally, SaaS providers often offer their customers an SLA (service level agreement) that guarantees a certain level of uptime and performance. This means that businesses can have peace of mind knowing that their applications are always available and running smoothly.

While SaaS providers must take steps to protect customer data, these measures will not slow down the business. Many of the security measures that SaaS providers use are invisible to users and have minimal impact on performance.

Conclusion

So there you have it! These are the things you need to know about SaaS security in 2022. We hope this blog post has been helpful.