However in many industries, that is not the case. Financial Services and insurance companies have many rules that dictate which collateral can be shipped to people, based on the State that they live in.

Many of our service provider clients have received business from companies in those vertical markets. One way that our software supports them is via our State Restrictions feature.

In the Inventory Management section of our software, users have the ability to create and define details of the products that they are responsible for. This might include reorder points, descriptions, print instructions, and order approval rules. Users can also define if a product (or kit) is restricted to specific States.

If a product is restricted to specific States, our Order Placement/Shopping Cart pages will honor those rules.  Users will only be able to view and order products that are available to the applicable State. This helps to ensure that any laws surrounding distribution of that sensitive literature are honored.

Another example of how this feature may be used is if a person orders a kit. Let’s say someone orders the “Welcome to ACME Insurance” kit. This kit might include a generic Welcome letter, a What’s New document, and perhaps a description of the various insurance options that are offered. But if the person lives in the State of Massachusetts, the system could automatically inform the warehouse that they must include a supplement that provides state-specific guidelines when they ship the order.

interlinkONE certainly has modules that customers can use to offer those types of services. In some cases, service providers use our solution to offer online portals where sales and marketing representatives can log-on and order printed materials. This may include postcards, brochures, or business cards. In many cases, the user placing the order can also customize the item that they are ordering and view an instant proof of their personalized materials.

We are also seeing that many of our customers are also looking to offer “public storefronts”. In these cases, people will head to a website to order merchandise. It could be anything — clothing, equipment, or perhaps promotional & specialty items.

To help support our clients in endeavor for public storefronts, our software includes a “Product Bunches” feature.

This allows customers to easily add products that contain many variations. The most popular example of this may be when it comes to clothing. Below is a screen-shot of how the Product Bunches feature can be utilized in an online storefront:

As you can see in the screen-shot above, a product bunch may be used to show different sizes, colors, and even prices.

It is really easy to set up a product bunch in our system. Below is a screen-shot of one of the Administration pages. If you have any questions about using this feature, please feel free to contact our sales team.

Here are some of photo’s that John took of the advertisements.

Customers often use the “Part Number Usage” report to analyze what they have on the shelf, how much they’ve used, and what they may need for the future. Our new enhancement provides customers with a quick way to record notes for each product, directly from the report.

Simply click on the “notes” icon, and you will able to enter a new note for that item. You will also be able to review previous notes.

This enhancement will allow customers to truly utilize the usage data that our system calculates. The notes data is often used in determining the next steps for re-printing or re-stocking an inventory item. Having immediate access to that data should help all personnel involved.

Here is a screen shot of the updated report:

Click the Notes Icon on the Part Number Usage Report

Here is a shot of the “Add/View Notes” window:

Review and Add Notes for your Inventory Items

In collaboration with The Ace Group and interlinkONE, Canvas Magazine introduces the most recent and innovative marketing technology.  Learn not only what QR codes entail, but also what they can do for the industry and enhance your marketing campaign.

Please join us as we walk through items such as:
 - What are QR Codes?
 - How can your business use them.
 - and more…

There is no charge to attend this webinar.  — simply click here to register.

Interested in creating and tracking the success of QR Codes for your own efforts? Feel free to check out http://QReateAndTrack.com

I’ve worked here for almost 11 years now — thus, there are quite a number of features in the software that I’ve become very familiar with. I’ve also taken some of the granted. However, training new customers about these features certainly helps to re-kindle my excitement about the tools we’ve built over the years.

Here’s one of them:

We encourage all of customers to develop multi-channel marketing campaigns. For example, it certainly takes more than one direct mail piece to promote (and fill up the seats) a seminar.  With our solution, we encourage clients to consider using a combination of direct mail, email, social media, banner ads, print advertisements, and other channels to promote their efforts.

If you do set up a multi-channel campaign in our system, you will have multiple legs in our Campaign Management view. You do have the ability to enter unique questions and answers for each leg — for example, you could ask people that visited your landing page via social media sites different questions than what you ask people that responded via the direct mail postcard.

However, if your multiple legs will have a number of questions in common, we have a shortcut.

• Via Campaign Management, click to edit the actual Campaign.
• Click the “Add New Questions” button
• Enter the common questions and answers that will be used in your multiple channels/legs.
• Then, as you build out the Response mechanisms for each channel, you’ll be able to click one button to bring the Campaign-level questions into each channel’s form.

This feature will absolutely save your crucial minutes as you develop your multi-channel campaigns. Rather than spending your time doing repetitive data-entry, you’ll be able to start planning your next campaign

             In a world of change you must have a willingness to make change. According to Harold Wilson, former Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, “He who rejects change is the architect of decay. The only human institution which rejects progress is the cemetery.” People fear and reject change because they fear the unknown and being vulnerable. Take, for example, the internet. When the internet initially went mainstream it was rejected as a fad. We all know how that played out. Like the internet, social media is not going anywhere. It will persist and eventually be outplayed by a new form of communication. The world of communication will continue to change and we will have to adapt in order to keep our businesses viable. Will you keep up? Your business depends upon it!

It’s very simple. No matter what type of marketing you use, old fashioned or social, you must have personality. What is going to make you stand out from the competition? How are you going to catch the attention of today’s busy and expert consumer? Consumers now have easy access to a countless supply of products and services available to meet their needs. Just promoting the benefits of your products and services is not enough anymore. Your personality is necessary to shine through the media saturation. If you want to grab the consumer’s attention you have to be engaging, authentic, and credible. So show your personality and say what you think! Be entertaining and provide people with something that they can talk about.

Why?

So in two days I have heard the word “cool” more than a few times…  And the words did not come out of the mouths of 60’s and 70’s babes, if you know what I mean.   And the times I did hear the word, it stuck.

The word “Cool” — Urban Dictionary says “never goes out of style”  - http://ilnk.me/1f52

Wednesday, during the @interlinkONE webinar on CRM/Sales module of the ilinkONEV8 app on demand, @JasonPinto said “maybe cool is not the right word but it applies here”.  He goes on and says “using this feature is pretty ‘cool’ “.  I laughed  and thought to myself, yeah that feature of the application and its use is pretty  “cool”.  This morning I read an email about how the @interlinkONE techies added flyaway drop downs and other “cool” things to the start page of our application. The writer of the email said: “We can’t ignore this – this stuff is cool”.  I thought to myself, yes, the stuff is cool and most importantly it helps our users!

And then it hit me – that’s it!  The word of the week is “cool”. I must blog about it.

So in closing…

- My job is “cool”.

- I get to work with really “cool” people.

- I hope you have a “cool” day.

-john

@johnfoleyjr

During this webinar, interlinkONE will demonstrate some of the latest enhancements to its ilinkONE Version 8 Marketing Software. Specially, we will walk through our CRM/Sales functionality.

Please join us as we walk through items such as:
- New features for adding and editing Contacts
-Options for the List Management tool
-Using User-Defined Contact Fields
-and more…

There is no charge to attend the webinar. interlinkONE customers — simply click here to register.