Marketing Commentary from interlinkONE
Marketing. Web-to-Print. Warehouse Management.
Using social media to get to know your customers and prospects
Posted by 
on Thursday, December 9, 2010 
at 4:21 PM 
in Social Media is everywhere these days. Sure, you might rely on it for personal use, or maybe your company uses it to promote their products and services.
Another way that social media can be helpful is in regards to getting to know your customers and prospects on a personal level. For example, before you go to call someone (perhaps someone on your prospect list), wouldn’t it helpful to know what has been on their mind recently? Social media can help you to easily access that information. Perhaps they’ve recently tweeted about their family, favorite sports team, or a project that they’ve been working on. If you draw on that information, you may experience greater success in building a relationship with them.
Yes, merging social media with customer relationship management (CRM) is important.
One of the features in our ilinkONE Version 8 software lets you do just that. It lets you see your contacts most recent tweet, directly from their contact record in our software. All you need to do is enter their Twitter username on their record.
Here are couple of screenshots of those features:
Top 5 Most Recent Tweets show up.
Tags Customizing Your Online Ordering Portal
One of my favorite features in the ilinkONE Version 8 software is how users can easily customize the look and feel of their online ordering portal. Primarily, users have quite a bit of flexibility on how they present their “Item Search” page to users.
When people visit a site to place an order, they certainly may know which product they’d like to order. But oftentimes, people simply like to browse. Thus, they may utilize the Product Group and Product Type categories.
In the ilinkONE Version 8 software, users have the option to present the Groups and Types via thumbnails. Thumbnails for each group or type can be displayed directly on the Search page. Users also have options as to how big the thumbnails may be (by default, the thumbnails are 100 x 100 pixels and the large option is 250 x 250 pixels). If you only have a few items, then you certainly may take a look at using the large thumbnail option.
But no matter what you choose, you certainly will want to ensure that the sizes of your thumbnails are consistent.
If you’d like to do this in your own instance of our software, it’s real easy. The main two things you need to do are:
- Modify your Client Rules to display thumbnails for Product Groups and Types (other options include text links and dropdowns)
- Create your thumbnails, and then upload them via the Database Admin pages for Groups and Types
I hope that you find this feature helpful!
Below is the screenshot of one way that thumbnails could spice up the front page of your online ordering portal:
