Wednesday, December 20, 2017

The all-new Zoho Campaigns is here!

Email marketing is no longer a simple, one-message-fits-all activity. Today it is a complex exercise which requires understanding your subscribers’ behavior and interests in order to see results. Targeted, relevant, and personalized messages are the way to make every subscriber feel unique.
We developed the new Zoho Campaigns with this in mind, and it is available for all users starting today.
Email marketing automation software - Zoho Campaigns
Here are some of the highlights:
A fresh new look.
This is the most obvious change that you will notice when you switch to the new version. Our polished interface is designed to improve the user experience and help you achieve your goals faster.

Drag, drop, and deliver.
The design of email templates is one of the primary factors that determines its success. The new editor allows for complex, responsive template designs through a simple drag-and-drop interface. The template gallery is also loaded with a number of new designs for almost every occasion.

  • Preview designs on multiple devices: We have teamed up with Litmus so you can see how your templates look on various devices and systems before sending your campaign.
  • Design to improve engagement rates: Adding pre-header text, attachments, and links to social media profiles is easier than ever now.
  • Template version: Each template iteration is saved so that you can seek the history behind your final design.
Personalization at the time of open.
Personalization goes beyond just the first and last names. More subscribers will engage with your email if your messages feel like they are written specifically for them. Dynamic content shows different sections of your template based on the information that you have about your subscribers.

As a marketer, you can craft multiple messages for different users, and Zoho Campaigns shows the most relevant content for them, right when they open their email.
Automation that works for you.
Effective automation is a huge time-saver for marketers. We have added a number of customizable autoresponders that put email campaigns on auto-pilot. The new version has a lot more triggers and workflows that allow you to send follow-ups based on audience behavior and actions.
Trigger emails based on subscriber actions
Reports to help you plan your next move.
Performance reports are most effective when they guide your actions to increase conversions. Whether it is your mailing list health or subscriber engagement, now you see detailed reports at every level of a campaign. Once your campaigns are running, the customizable dashboard shows you a summary of your email marketing performance.

Email marketing that follows the rules.
Zoho Campaigns has always provided tools that allow marketers to conduct successful permission-based email marketing. In this latest update, we are introducing email limits that can control the number of emails that any subscriber receives in a particular period. You can set this based on what works best with your audience.

Become more organized.
Our updates were designed to make the marketer’s life as easy as we can make it. The new version lets you get your work done as quickly and accurately as possible.
Create custom roles for your users
  • User roles and privileges: Now you can set permissions for different types of users working on your campaigns and define roles for each team’s unique needs.
  • Folder and Favorites: Lists, campaigns, and reports can now be grouped so that you see only relevant information. Favorite your most frequently used page in your account to reach them in just a single click.
  • Managerial Approvals: If you have more than one person working on your team, you can add managers make final decisions on your email campaigns.
There is a lot more to explore in this updated version and plenty more to come in the days ahead. We hope you like what we have built, and as always, we would love to hear your feedback!

Wednesday, December 6, 2017

How to properly set Subforms in Zoho Creator Part 3

The first step is to have the Subtotal or Total field value in the Order Form. Normally this would be a currency field or decimal field if you need to consider 1 or more decimals into your calculations. If not you can also set it the field as a Numeric value field. Our example uses a currency field.

Second you need to think about the places where the script to aggregate the rows needs to occur. in our case there are several places. On Add Row, On Selecting a new Product, On Changing the Qty amount or the pricing. Its important that all scenarios are considered otherwise your calculations may not be properly aggregated if it encounters a scenario that you have not considered in your scripting yet.
Last but not least, the script below is ready for you to copy and paste into your application. Assuming of course that the field names of your Order Form are named exactly as our test application.


if ((row.Price  !=  null)  &&  (row.Qty  !=  null))
{
    row.SubTotal = (row.Price  *  row.Qty);
}
t = 0.0;
if ((row.Price  !=  null)  &&  (row.Qty  !=  null))
{
    for each rec in Item_Details
    {
        t = (rec.SubTotal  +  t);
    }
}
input.Subtotal = t;
Do not hesitate to contact me if you have any questions. I would be more than glad to help you buil an amazing online database application with Zoho Creator.

Monday, December 4, 2017

Every Zoho application you need to run your business on the Cloud


Sales & Marketing

Give your sales team the perfect set of apps to help close more business deals in less time.


A good CRM gives you insights into running your business. A smart CRM gives you the information you need in a way that you can use it. An ideal CRM offers you a solution to simplify your processes from day one. Zoho CRM includes the good, the smart, and the ideal in an enterprise-ready package.


Create and share online forms, receive email alerts, and get your team involved to manage your data—it's easier done than said with Zoho Forms.


A complete digital signature app for business signatories. Create and send documents for signatures anywhere, anytime, and on any device. Sign approval forms, NDAs, sales contracts, invoices, and more in any document format with no fuss.

Social media management software for growing businesses and agencies. Manage multiple social networks, schedule unlimited posts, monitor keywords, and collaborate with your team — all from a single dashboard.
Zoho Sales IQ
Hassle free live chat software re-imagined for business growth.
Start proactive online live chat with your website visitors and provide live customer support. Increase the ROI on your content, SEO, Adwords and email marketing efforts. Get started now to connect with real time visitors.

Zoho Contact
Contact management software, refreshingly simple.Zoho ContactManager is an online contact management software that lets you organize contacts, tasks, and deals in one place. Managing your business contacts just got easier.

Zoho Inbox
Think inside the (in)box.Turn unopened emails into closed deals with the only email client built exclusively for salespeople.

Business Process

Simplify complex business processes with apps that will make your team's work easier.

Create custom apps for your unique business needs.
Automate business processes, manage data, and make your work easier with custom applications. Streamline business process and collaborate online with your team.

Zoho Reports
Transform raw data into valuable insights.
Zoho Reports is a BI and analytics solution that allows you to create insightful reports and dashboards. It assists you to visually analyze your business data, and to take informed decisions.

Zoho Site24x7
Monitoring Availability and End User Experience Made Simple. Performance Monitoring Solution for DevOps and IT Operations. Monitor the performance of internet services like HTTPS, DNS, FTP, SSL, SMTP, POP, URLs and APIs from 90+ global locations (or via wireless carriers) and those within a private network.

Email & Collaboration

Empower your workforce with apps to collaborate and transform the way they work.

Take Control Of Your InboxExperience email that provides a clean, ad-free, minimalist interface alongside features geared for business and professional use. Get started with up to 50 free users.

Zoho Docs
Bring your office to Zoho Docs. Store, share and manage all your business files on the cloud.Run your business more efficiently with your personalized workspace in the cloud. From documents to images, spreadsheets to presentations, and even your music, movies, and pictures, carry all your files with you wherever you go. With everything stored in a centralized location, now you can conveniently share your files with your friends and colleagues.
Zoho Projects
Project management, as effective as it gets.  Plan, track, and collaborate using the preferred project management software of more than a million businesses. Plan your project activities, assign work, manage resources and collaborate with your team better to get things done on time.

Finance

Accounting software for growing businesses. Zoho Books is an easy-to-use, online accounting software designed for small businesses to manage their finances and stay on top of their cash flow. Stay connected to your business, no matter where you are. Send out quotes, track time for projects and also get critical insights about your business on the dashboard of your iOS, Android or Windows device.

Zoho Expense
Expense reports, the easy way. 
Zoho Expense is an online expense reporting software, tailor-made for businesses to automate their expense report creation and approval.
Hassle-free Invoicing software.
Zoho Invoice is web-based invoicing software that helps you craft beautiful invoices, automatically send payment reminders and get paid faster online. Design and send professional invoices.

Zoho Subscriptions
Smarter recurring billing and subscription management software.
Zoho Subscriptions is your definitive recurring billing and subscription management software. Effortlessly manage the entire customer life cycle, from accepting recurring payments to handling customer subscriptions.
Inventory management software for growing businesses.
Increase your sales and keep track of every unit with our powerful stock management,order fulfilment, and inventory control software.

Human Resources

Recruiting Software for Staffing Agencies and HRs
Streamline your hiring processes and acquire better talent with Zoho Recruit’s applicant tracking system and recruitment software. Source better talent, track resumes and interviews efficiently and never miss on a good hire.
Zoho People
Your complete online HR solution. We take care of all your HR activities while you take care of your employees. The perfect HR software to manage your workforce. Manage all your HR administrative actions from a central location. Search employees, set favorites, view organization trees and analyze attrition reports - all from a single dashboard.

Friday, December 1, 2017

How to properly set Subforms in Zoho Creator Part 2

To build a robust Order form in zoho creator you need to be able to automatically "fetch" the information about a product and let the system pre populate the subform with pre existing data in the Products Table.

First, you need to have a Products form with all the relevant information about the Product. Price, Description, etc.

Second, you  need to fetch the Product information based "On user input" inside the items Subform and add the below deluge scripting.

prodct  =  Products  [ID == row.Product];
row.Description = prodct.Description;
row.Price = prodct.Price;
row.Qty = 1;
if ((row.Price  !=  null)  &&  (row.Qty  !=  null))
{
    row.SubTotal = (row.Price  *  row.Qty);

Saturday, November 25, 2017

How to properly set Subforms in Zoho Creator Part 1

This is the most important step in the process of setting up your zoho creator database. A properly linked setup will enable your information to run smoothly and avoid waisting space ( MB )

First, you need to create at least 2 Forms. For example.- Orders and Items. An Order can have multiple items and 1 item can be part of many Orders. Creating a many to many relationship.

Second, you need to add the Subform Items inside the Form Orders and name it. Then you have to add a Lookup field in the Items Form and click on Existing Relations. 
Do NOT forget this part. This is the key. You must have a lookup field linking the original Form to each record on the subform you are creating. Makes Sense?

If it does not or need any help do not hesitate to contact us. We can guide you through the process to set your Subform for success.

Wednesday, October 11, 2017

Instantly Populate Sales Quotes from Zoho CRM

With a tool like Zoho CRM, you can easily manage your entire sales cycle from a single interface, leading to improved efficiencies and closing more deals.  Another way you can improve your sales process is to use WebMerge to automatically populate documents like proposals, contracts, quotes, and more.

In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically populate sales quotes from data in Zoho CRM then we’ll email the quote directly to our customer for their review.

To get started, we’re going to set up the template for our quote using a Word document.  Inside Word, we’re going to add our repeating information like our logo, contact information, and details of our company.  For the spots that we want to insert our deal/customer info, we’re going to use merge fields that look like {$FirstName}, {$Address}, {$Amount}, etc.

Here’s what our quote template looks like:
 


Once we have our template finished, we need to upload it to WebMerge.  From the Documents page in WebMerge, click the New Document button and enter a name.  On the next step, select Office Document as the document type and then pick the file from your computer.
 


After you upload your quote template, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can modify various options like the type of file that is generated and the name of the file.  For this example, we’re going to use the name of our deal in the file name and we’re going to generate a PDF.
 


Next, we’re going to set up the email delivery for our document so that the quote is automatically emailed directly to our customer.  Under the Deliver tab, we’re going to Edit the default email delivery.  For the To address, we’re going to choose the email merge field for our customer’s email address.  If you don’t have a merge field in your document, you can choose <<Other>> from the drop-down then enter something like {$Email} in the box.

Feel free to edit any of the other email settings.  Here’s what our email delivery looks like:
 


Once we have saved our email delivery, we are done with the setup process in WebMerge and we’re ready to integrate with Zoho CRM.  If you haven’t already, please make sure to install the WebMerge plugin from the Zoho Marketplace.

Inside Zoho, we’re going to go to the WebMerge Mappings module and we’re going to create a New Mapping.  After you give the mapping a name, we’re going to choose the Module we want to use (Potentials), then we’re going to choose the WebMerge Document we want to merge.
 


Next, we’re going to match up the merge fields in our document with the fields from our CRM.  This tells Zoho how to send the data over to WebMerge so that it’s populated in the correct spot on your template.
 


Once you have matched up all of your merge fields, go ahead and save your mapping.  We’re ready for a test!  Open up one of your Potentials and then click the WebMerge button (it might be under the “…” drop-down).  This will generate the quote and email it out!

Here’s what our quote looked like ready for the customer:
 


Congrats, you’re all finished!  You can now instantly generate all kinds of documents from your Zoho CRM data.  Can you think of any other ways you can use WebMerge to simplify your paperwork process?

Thursday, September 14, 2017

What makes Zoho Mail so great to disrupt a 22 million user market?

Zoho Mail is a familiar hosting emails interface for businesses. Over time it has gain traction according to google trends based on the searches people around the world do.
While India is an obvious country to show up on the Interest by region it has grown more rapidly in other countries such as Colombia in Latinamerica and is quickly growing the share of use.
At this point, i was intrigued and had to dig deeper to find out how Zoho mail was doing vs the market dominant email hosting for businesses provider Microsoft outlook. Outlook trend does not look good at all in Colombia for Mr softy and Zoho Mail is gaining traction traction traction. So the obvious question now is What makes Zoho Mail so great to disrupt a 22 million user market like Colombia?

What makes Zoho Mail so great?

Ad-Free, Clean, Fast Interface.

There are no ads displayed in Zoho Mail's webmail interface, ever. Not even in our free plans. This means total respect for user privacy as your messages are not scanned for keywords to feed you ads. However, freedom from annoying ads is not the stand out feature in Zoho Mail. It's the wide range of options to organize and categorize your messages. This includes familiar items like folders and labels, flags, automatic filters, as well as one-of-a-kind capabilities, like the thread nesting style conversation view.

Feature Packed for Business & Professional Use

Zoho Mail's webmail interface has been designed to break the notion that only desktop email clients can provide the power features favored by business users. Your users will find the familiar functionality of desktop email blended perfectly with the convenience and flexibility of browser-based access. This means you get the best of both worlds.

Go Beyond Email. Take Your Office Online

Gone are the days of software installations and upgrades. Take your office to the cloud. Zoho Mail comes bundled with Zoho Docs, a comprehensive online office and document management suite that runs from within a web browser. Your users can create, edit and collaborate on word documents, spreadsheets and presentations; online. Along with integrated calendar, tasks, notes and contacts modules, Zoho Mail provides the best tools to improve productivity and efficiency.

Anywhere, Anytime Access

The biggest advantage of email hosted on the cloud is that you get to access your messages on the move. Be it through your mobile, laptop or desktop, as long as there is an internet connection - present almost anywhere, anytime these days - keep your email exchanges and communications flowing.

Extensive Control Panel

Your IT administrators will find it a breeze to set up and manage emailing for your business with the extensive control panel interface. Representing the entire back end of your email hosting account, administrators can easily control individual user mailbox quota and privileges, email policies, group email accounts and other such aspects from within this centralized control center.

Free, Expert Aided Migration Options 

The task of migrating from your existing email solution is simple without laborious setup, loss of time, or loss of productivity. A self-service migration module is a few clicks away in the control panel. Lightweight software tools are available for Exchange server and Outlook PST migrations. Our support experts will coordinate with you throughout the process to ensure your switch is smooth. And to top it all up, we do not charge extra for migration assistance.

Email & CRM Integration 

Businesses of all sizes are doing the smart thing of setting up a CRM application for their sales and marketing teams, enabling them to work more efficiently. At the same time, habits die hard and people still rely on good old email for communicating with clients, prospects, and customers. What do you do? If you made the wise decision of choosing Zoho CRM for your business, you'll be amazed by the contextual gadgets feature in Zoho Mail. It's like having CRM inside your email.
There is no magic to such traction. Explosive growth is an art with very specific steps to follow. If you are interested in learning more about explosive growth? Check out Traction: How Any Startup Can Achieve Explosive Customer Growth If you are a Zoho Mail user? We would love to hear your feedback and help you with any Zoho questions you may have.

Friday, August 25, 2017

Automatically Populate PDF and Word Documents from Zoho Forms



Using online forms on your website can be a great way to collect information form new leads and customers.  With a tool like Zoho Forms you can easily build mobile-friendly forms that can be embedded directly in your website.

Add WebMerge to the mix and you can automatically take the information being collected through Zoho Forms and populate templates that you have setup in WebMerge.  You can easily generate PDF & Word documents like invoices, proposals, contracts, letters, and more.

In this example, we’re going to show you how to automatically generate a sales proposal with data collected through the Zoho Form on our website.

To get started, we’re going to setup the template for our proposal using a Word document.  In our Word document, we’re going to add our repeated information like our logo, address, and company details.  For the spots that we want to insert our lead’s details, we’re going to use merge fields that look like {$FirstName}, {$LastName}, {$Address}, etc.

Here’s what our proposal template looks like:
 

Once we have our template finished, we need to upload it to WebMerge.  From the Documents page in WebMerge, click the New Document button and enter a name.  On the next step, pick Office Document as the document type then pick the file from your computer.
 

After you’ve uploaded your template to WebMerge, you’ll be taken to the Settings tab where you can modify various options like the type of file that is generated and the name of the file.  For this example, we’re going to generate a PDF and include the name of our lead in the file name.
 

Next, we’re going to setup the delivery of our document so that the proposal is automatically emailed to our lead.  From the Deliver tab, click the Edit button under the default email delivery.  For the To address, we’re going to choose the merge field we have in our document for the lead’s email address.

If you don’t have a merge field for the email address, choose <<Other>> from the dropdown, then enter something like {$Email} in the box.

Feel free to modify any of the other email settings.  You can add merge fields there too.
 

Once you have your email delivery setup and saved, you’re done with the setup process in WebMerge and we’re ready to hook up the document with our Zoho Form. 

Inside Zoho Forms, we’re going to add the WebMerge integration to our form.  Under the Settings page for your form, click on the Document Merge tab, then choose WebMerge.  After you enter your API Key, Zoho will have you pick the document you want to merge
 

Once you pick the document that you want to merge, Zoho will load a list of the merge fields in your template.

For each merge field, you need to pick the corresponding fields from your Zoho Form.  This tells Zoho how to send your data over to WebMerge so that it is populated in the correct spot on your template.
 

Once you have matched up all of your merge fields, you’re done with your integration and you need to Save.  We’re ready for a test!  Go submit a new entry on your form and Zoho will take that information, send it over to WebMerge, and your proposal will be generated.

Here’s what our proposal looked like ready for the lead:
 

Congrats, you’re all finished!  You can now automatically populate all kinds of documents with data from your Zoho Forms entries.  Can you think of any other ways that you can use WebMerge to simplify your paperwork process?

Thursday, July 13, 2017

Iron-clad Zoho Creator Dashboards

In today's data-driven world it has never been easier to collect, to aggregate and to present terabytes of information in a well-structured chart or table. However, it's not the amount of data you can process what will drive your business forward, but all the actionable steps that can be drawn from the dashboard metrics.

We spent some time on the www looking for the best dashboards out there and we found a plethora of graphics and software applications eager to feed your aggregated data cravings, but few stand out and are worth considering. 

For example.-  How to build your dashboard metrics by Ash Maurya. You can check his Youtube video below or buy his Running Lean: Iterate from Plan A to a Plan That Works (Lean (O'Reilly)) book.
You should also consider reading the post What makes a good lead generation dashboard?by Jonathan Taylor and 6 Golden Rules to Successful Dashboard Design by Nick Smith, these are golden gems worth your time. Once you inform yourself with the endless suggestions google has to offer. You will probably come to the conclusion that less is more and a simple yet useful dashboard is always the way forward.

Zoho Creator allows you to be creative and code your own dashboard metrics or if you prefer you can also embed some of the automatically created dashboards Zoho Reports has to offer. Below you can review a few options you can implement in your Zoho Creator application.

Simple Header


Simple header with room for up to 6 metrics to track. The source code for this particular dashboard is available in our Zoho Library

Chart Type


More robust dashboard with room for several layers of charts or tables stacks one below the other. The source code to implement this dashboard is also available in our Zoho Library

Note: If you purchase access to our Deluge Script Library we will assist you with the script setup in your application. Send us an email with subject line: less=more