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Creating a Transaction Count Formula
Here’s an example of flexibility of dataKart’s Formula Manager. Of course you can track your business’s health by the overall profit dollars, but you can also track a valuable aspect of those profit dollars - how many transactions did it take to reach that figure? Are you actually increasing the number of transactions you bring in, or are you selling at a higher profit margin? You can track increase or decrease of transactions with a “count” formula that provides you with the number of returned lines of data that match your formula and filter. This can be useful in a number of ways: Take a listen to this short movie to learn how to create a transaction count formula: Questions or suggestions for future postings? Just drop me a note!
The Email Subject - the key to improving your open rate
Here’s a useful article taken from the dataKart Knowledgebase that I thought I’d share with you dataKart marketers out there. Just like a direct sales letter, the subject line of your email can make or break your campaign. If you don’t have a compelling subject line the chance of your email even getting read is slim. According to a recent MarketingSherpa.com survey, 40% of email marketers said testing changes to just their subject line had a high impact on their return on investment (ROI). 45% said subject line changes accounted for a medium ROI and only 15% said that testing changes to their subject line results in a low ROI. For every email you send you’ve got room for no more than 50 characters in your subject line, and today I’m going to share with you 10 tips you can use to increase the open rates of our email campaigns. 1. Test the subject line - Take a look at email campaigns you’ve sent in the past. Which subject lines worked the best and gave you the highest open and conversion rates? You might find that for a particular topic there’s a general trend or subject style that resulted in higher open rates. 2. The subject of importance - Try and put as much important and relevant information into your subject lines as possible. For example, if you’re sending out an email about a special offer make sure the product name and details on the offer appear in the subject line in a clear and concise format such as “$40 off ACME Widget Until - Today Only”. 3. Personalize the subject line - If you have details about your subscribers then use them in your subject line to get their attention. A subject line containing the subscribers first name ALWAYS out pulls one that doesn’t. 4. Avoid spam keywords - Most email servers automatically filter out any emails that contain spam keywords in their subject line - Words such as free, stock, ebay, password, mortgage, etc all trigger spam detection software so keep them out of your subject lines at all times. 5. Trigger curiosity - The best way to improve your open rates is to pique the interest of your subscribers. A compelling headline that entices them to open and read the contents of your email can do wonders for your conversion rate. We’ve been thinking about headlines that trigger curiosity, and if you can work this one into your email campaign we’d like to hear the response rate: “Hi [First Name] - I have a question for you.”. 6. Make the offer clear - If you’re making a special offer to your subscriber then be upfront and include it as part of your subject line. People love bargains and special offers so let them know about it before anything else. 7. Emphasize the benefits - One method is to always use the format of “Company Name Newsletter - [Benefit]”. In your case, the benefit might always be the title of an article contained in the newsletter, such as “dataKart Newsletter - 10 Tips for Better Subject Lines”. 8. Copy what works - Do some research to see what are the best headlines of all time, and pay attention to the emails that you receive that peak your interest and get you to respond. Why not take some of these ideas and use them for your next campaign? 9. Easy identification - Make sure your subscribers know the email is coming from you. Deceptive subject lines can confuse people so always try and including your company name in the subject line. Also, make sure you set the “From” attribute of your email to include your name and your companies name, such as “From: John Smith 10. Exclaim nothing - Avoid using excessive punctuation at the end of your subject lines. Google bans punctuation from AdWords ad’s for a reason - too much hype can annoy and confuse people. Well there you have it - 10 tips for better subject lines in your next email marketing campaign. If you have any tips you’d like to share feel free to post a comment below.
Director of Implementation & Training - dataKart
jack@datakart.net
New Chart Label Functionality
We love to get feedback and suggestions from our customers, and when we hear a good idea that can enhance our product, we like to jump right on it. So when Jackie and Renae Bobbett from Beaver Bark Garden and Gift Center gave me a suggestion about allowing the user to choose to see a product or customer name as a chart label, instead of a more generic and hard to understand number . . . well, we slapped our heads and got to work. In fact our Development Team took it one step further and created a method to allow the user to not only pick the label they want to use, but also a whole slew of other information they can see as well. Turn on your sound and take a look at the flash movie below to see how it all works.
Thanks Jackie & Renae! Keep ‘em coming!
dataKart Tips & Tricks - creating a formula to find sales to customers with an email address on file
One of the key ingredients to email marketing is having visibilty of your sales to customers with email addresses on file with you. As you begin to implement your email marketing strategy, you want to see the number of these sales increase as you actively work to increase you collection of customer emails. Here’s a brief movie that shows you how to quickly create a formula that will isolate your sales associated with email addresses.
dataKart Tips & Tricks - creating a formula to sales of zero cost items
Welcome to the first installment of our dataKart Tips & Tricks series. I will regularly post new information for our users to help you get the most our of your dataKart experience. There is so much that can be done with dataKart that it can be challenging to A common problem with point of sales systems is keeping your inventory information up to date and having a price and cost associated with all items. If you don’t have these correct in your system, then you can’t calculate accurate profit or margin information. Just click on the link and then click on the play button to start, and be sure you have your speakers or headphones on! Jack Blovits Director of Support/Training
take the bits & pieces that can help you quickly. We’ll try to provide short examples to show you things that might excite you, and get you diving into your dataKart to play around.
“dataKart Debut” - CENTS Show 2008 - Booth# 8040
After a year of planning and development - here we come! For those of you who may not have met one of us or had the opportunity to learn about our product - My name is Dave Coursen and we’re dataKart! From left to right: David Drill - VP of Sales | Richard Shirey - CFO / Partner | Eileen Coursen - VP of Operations | Jack Blovits - Director of implementation & Support Wow, we couldn’t have gotten any closer with the booth. Time was tight, and design as always, a nightmare. Nate Slavik with Thompson Kerr was patient and helpful in making sure the booth got where it was supposed to be and how it was supposed to look - 24 hours early :). Turns out that’s only half as great as their response was to some minor issues we had. I’d recommend them to anyone in need of booth design services. www.thompsonkerr.com I think it looked great! What a cool little hand out - M&M’s with our name and “Unleash your POS” text printed right on there. Eileen paid careful attention to make sure people took the hand out cards with them by using glue dots instead of staples, and considered sizing so they fit in the pocket - they were a huge hit! We essentially gave our visitors our M&M info card as a starting point and asked them, “If this is 28 M&M’s in your hand, then how many do you think are in that jar?” (Thanks Grammy and brother Zack for bagging 1100 handouts for your M&M devouring pleasure - Whew….) We offed the M&M guessing game to create a little excitement - but we had no idea it would be such a big hit. Everyone had fun. I’ll tell you, some of those landscapers have some unique ways of estimating. We had over 450 entries and everyone’s dying to know - Just how many M&M’s were in the jar…. CONGRATULATIONS! Cindy Petitti of Petitti’s Garden Center. She guessed exactly at 3140 M&M’s - Way to go Cindy. We had many interested visitors who stopped to watch our demos, discuss our product and industry mission (of course they took a guess at the M&M’s - you know who you are). Overall show attendance was down over 2000 less then CENTS projected, but there seemed to be a constant buzz around the dataKart booth. Here David Drill our VP of sales discusses the product and email marketing with some show attendees. It was all hands on deck, and frequently the overflow from our booth spilled over into the empty booth to our left. We really slowed down the aisle as more and more people came to see what all the excitement was about - (That’s me in the white - Dave Coursen - Someone had to take the booth shot above) In many ways this moment has been a finish line for our development team, but in actuality, it’s only a starting point. We are so excited to explore where dataKart can take us, as we believe it has the power to revolutionize the industry. By simplifying the process for users to send out emails based on real sales data from their existing point of sale systems, dataKart has the potential to help our independent retailers easily and effectively handle their marketing campaigns. One person can handle the job of a marketing team, in a fraction of the time. As we enroll vendors to supply marketing content through dataKart, your communications will be simple to create as you easily plug in care sheets, images, videos, or other media provided by your vendors. Your vendors benefit from the opportunity to provide their marketing information directly to the end user via your marketing emails I’ll post soon on the benefits of our dataKart initiative, and how dataKart will help us organize and define our industry as experts and innovators. Thanks to all of you who stopped by to see us, to take a guess or just eat our M&M’s at the show. We had an incredible time and I think we made just more then a little ripple with our message.
