Getting Started with Business Accelerator
Business Accelerator is a group of products that provides online monitoring and marketing tools to build your online presence by targeting, monitoring, and staying in touch with your current and potential customers.
Whether you're growing your blog readership or going international with your online retail business, the products included in Business Accelerator let you easily stay in touch (even through social media like Facebook®), monitor to see what works, gather feedback to guide decisions about your site's future, and keep your customer information (order history, campaign contacts, phone calls, reminders) all in one place.
Because Business Accelerator is made up of separate products, each product can be implemented as you're ready to work with it. The instructions below guide you through the setup of each product according to your needs.
Let's Get Started!
Express Email Marketing: Collect and Notify Subscribers
As we indicated, these products can be implemented in any order. But to get the quickest start, we suggest that you begin with Express Email Marketing®. It's your key to immediate results. Complete these three steps and you're on your way to collecting interested subscribers. How will you know they're interested? We'll ask them for you! See What are Express Email Marketing email notices? for more information.
Here's the step-by-step to get the ball rolling:
- Set up your Express Email Marketing account. See Setting Up Your Express Email Marketing Account for instructions on the process.
- Set up an email opt-in form to collect subscribers. Building a Sign-Up Form in Express Email Marketing provides information on this step.
- Add the opt-in form to your website. See Adding Express Email Marketing Subscription Links to Your Website for instructions on generating and placing code on your website to create a link to your new opt-in form.
If you already have contacts you want to use, you can import existing customers to your Express Email Marketing account, but remember: Express Email Marketing has a strict opt-in policy. See What is a confirmed opt-in policy? to understand the policy, and then use the information in Importing Existing Customer Lists in Express Email Marketing to import the list.
Once you're ready, you can begin notifying your contacts about your products, services or blog. See Creating Email Campaigns for information on creating your first campaign.
Social Visibility: Expand Your Online Profile through Social Media
Social Visibility lets you to interact with all of your social media accounts with one login. It simplifies the process of getting company information out to all of your social media sites.
See Connecting Express Email Marketing to Your Social Media Profiles to get your Social Visibility account ready to use. Then see Posting Social Media Status Updates from Express Email Marketing for information on broadcasting your updates to all of your social media at one time via Social Visibility.
Site Analytics: See What's Working on Your Site and What's Not
Site Analytics is a comprehensive reporting tool that analyzes traffic coming to and moving through your site. With the knowledge of exactly how visitors find your site and their behavior once they get there, it's easy to target your audience and ensure their experiences are positive.
See the Getting Started Guide for Your Site Analytics Account for instructions on setting up and using Site Analytics. It also provides great information about using the product's array of reporting capabilities.
Site Surveys: Get Customer Feedback and Plan for the Future
See Getting Started with Site Surveys to get your new account set up and learn the basics of setting up surveys and using reports. It links you to articles on setting up your first survey, the types of questions you can ask, how to distribute the survey (even on Facebook!), and the various reporting options.
Contact Manager: Organize Your Contacts, Order History, and Account Notes
At some point, stickies and spreadsheets can't handle all the information you'd like to keep about your customers. The Contact Manager can organize all of this and more.
See Setting Up Your Contact Manager for information on setting up your new account. Then see Adding a Contact to Your Contact Manager to begin setting up your contacts. If you have existing contacts and information, see Importing Contact Records Into Contact Manager From a File for instructions on uploading them to your account.