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3
Aug
New Dealer Back-Office, Knowledge Base, Forums and more…
Posted in Business, Training at 11:29 pm. Comments Off We’ve improved our marketing, training and communication platforms this year to help your business grow. New Dealer Back-OfficeYour login credentials for the new dealer login are the same. If you’ve forgotten your login you can follow the “forgot password” at the login screen. Send an email to support@createabook.com if you’re still unable to login. New Knowledge Base, Forums and Support TicketsLast month we began rolling out access to our new interactive knowledge base. This platform now serves as a community forum where you can post comments and questions to existing topics, as well as create your own forum topics. This is also where you can create and track support tickets. You should have received an email invitation with a link to verify your email address and create a password. If you did not receive this email, send an email to support@createabook.com and we’ll resend it.
26
Feb
Distributor Spotlight – Feb 2012
Posted in Business, Dealer Spotlight, Training at 9:18 am. Comments Off Our Dealer Spotlight for February is shining bright on Karen and Heather, of Made 4 Me! To limit their “spotlight” to a single month is a bit of an understatement. Since their first week, the duo has been calling non-stop with great questions and ideas, and their ingenuity keeps their business growing. It’s a safe bet to assume this power pair will inspire a few new chapters in our training manual this year! How did you get involved with Create-A-Book and what you do you enjoy most? For most people, the biggest challenge is creating a plan and sticking to it, what’s your secret? Yes you did! What tips do you have on making the most of the holiday season? Starting early is SOOO important. We can’t stress that enough! The biggest mistake we see distributors make is waiting until December to send their first Holiday announcement. You can still get sales, but you’re joining the game in the 7th inning. What other types of marketing are you doing? We also believe in giving back and have donated our product to a number of charities. Not only can we feel good about helping out worthwhile causes, we can let a new segment of people know about us! Social media is very powerful, yet so underused. And the charities … what an amazing idea! What do you feel is the most important aspect of your business? I’m starting to think we should let you do a Social Media 101 conference call later this year. You’re both doing an amazing job with it! So what are your Create-A-Book goals for 2012? And finally, any advice for someone just getting starting with Create-A-Book? The only thing I’d add to that is “stick to the plan,” but that is so engrained in your DNA’s that it goes without saying! Thank you both for taking the time to share your insights and ideas. We’re grateful to have you on the team, and we can’t wait to see what you’ll come up with next. If you’d like to learn more from Karen and Heather, you can visit their website and Facebook page:
15
Feb
Distributor Spotlight – Jan 2012
Posted in Business, Dealer Spotlight, Training at 5:29 am. Comments Off In our December newsletter, we gave kudos to a team that sold 1400 orders in 2 weeks and there was an overwhelming request from dealers to learn more. So we’ve chosen the Yolanda Meador, Gladys Sanders and Nita Arrington team as our newest “Dealer of the Month” spotlight! We had a fantastic interview with Yolanda and team over the phone, but before we get to the exciting stuff, like how their promotion’s total orders have now exceeded 2,200, I want to first tell you about a situation I experienced a few days later that proves just how committed Yolanda and her team are to the advice they shared with us. A customer contacted Create-A-Book to find out how to redeem the promotional voucher she purchased during the holidays. Her computer had crashed, and she was desperately trying to find out if it was too late to receive the book in time for her for her niece’s birthday…in two days! We helped her track down which dealer was responsible, which turned out to be Yolanda. I immediately contacted Yolanda, who then immediately reached out to the customer and offered to overnight her order. Yolanda didn’t have to do this, but she describes below how she’s learned great customer service is the cornerstone to building a business with repeat customers. The customer was thrilled and we were proud to see her “walk the walk” she described just a few days earlier. So how did you get involved with Create-A-Book? Your son must have enjoyed all the personalized books Have you been working Create-A-Book since 1998 or have you taken breaks? You definitely took it to a whole new level this Christmas! For the readers out there, can you explain what you mean by 2,200 orders? That’s incredible! Who came up with the idea to run a promotion on a daily deal website? Are you creating any routines/systems to keep up with the orders? So you’re setting aside two days a week to work the business? That’s interesting, I didn’t think about customers placing orders for future deliveries. There’s a lot of debate on the long-term benefits to these daily deals, do you think you’ll repeat this promotion? Are you seeing orders where the customer spends more the coupons value on your website? It sounds like you’ve learned a lot, is it ok if we share these specific details about the promotion? What type of marketing will you do for new and repeat customers throughout the year? But back to your question, aside from the daily deal promotion we did a marketing campaign on Facebook and that worked. What I’d like to see for the future is maybe having different sales opportunities for our Facebook customers. So if you “like” us then you’ll know about the savings. We’re also looking at doing one of the big shows in town. It’s an event that yields around 20,000 women. It’s totally different for us, but we’ve always wanted to do it and now that we’ve got some momentum we’d like to grow it even more. Also, Nita is about to go through our customer database and start looking for things like birthdays so we’re able to segment our customers and know when to send reminders and coupons. That’s very smart. We’re actually planning to add a feature to the [SaviSites] websites that will let customers save profiles for their family members and friends. How are you getting the additional information from customers? For example, if they ordered a Christmas book, how are you finding out their birthdays? Are you using an email marketing service handle these newsletters? What’s the most important aspect of your business, now that you’re growing and putting systems in place? What has been your biggest challenge? Actually, you might want to call him back! We’ve many helped dealers work out logistics for large volume orders. One dealer brought us a deal with Juicy Juice and we helped produce 20,000 books, and we helped another dealer produce 100,000 books for a promotion with Huggies diapers. If nothing else, we can help you find dealers interested in making books, so call us and we’ll brainstorm with you. And finally, any advice for someone just getting starting with Create-A-Book? Congratulations once again to Yolanda Meador, Gladys Sanders and Nita Arrington for thinking outside the box on how to use current trends to promote and build your business. And thank you for taking the time to share your experiences so that others may learn from you and follow in your footsteps. Keep up the great work; and we look forward to hearing about your local big event! If you’d like to learn more from Yolanda, Nita and Gladys, you can visit their website or post a comment on their Facebook page. www.PersonalizedBooks-Gifts.com What is it about the Fall Season the fills the air with excitement? Is it the changing of the leaves, the family Holidays, or maybe the anticipation of Christmas? One thing is for sure; it’s the season when many of you will achieve your highest grossing sales for the year. To help out we’ve created a quick summary to get you through it successfully. There was an interesting question posted to the discussion board on our Facebook page that set the stage for what we hope to be an educational journey for both Create-A-Book, and you. We’re all faced with a daily challenge to do what we can within a 24 hour day. For you the challenges may be finding time to build your business while juggling a full-time job, raising a family, or both. For us, the challenge is overseeing a multitude of tasks to improve the Create-A-Book opportunity, and doing our best to prioritize them based on the outcomes they’ll bring you. And that’s just the planned ones, as you can’t predict what life will throw your way. One of our tasks is growing the Create-A-Book brand, using Social Marketing, to generate new business and to create an active online community of dealers who share ideas and work together. In January we created a 12-month blueprint, and listed the steps to make this happen. Before we could begin, we also started two more projects that will improve the profitability for our dealers, and the decision was made to postpone the social marketing. Sound like a familiar ‘postponement’ process? ![]() |