Major Developments Major Developments by Calendar Year

February 18, 2011

Strategies in Implementing SMS Marketing In a Business

Filed under: Business — Tags: , — Winson @ 2:14 AM

As the number of companies and businesses are entering the market to satisfy the customers the competition is increasing. One of the strategies used by the companies to sustain in this competitive market is to make use of SMS marketing. Sending messages to people via SMS messages is a great strategy because the message is delivered to the customer directly. Bulk SMS services are in great demand, due to their cost effectiveness. Bulk SMS service helps in sending a message to large number of people at one instance.

The strategies used for SMS marketing for a business are:

Mobile Coupon Marketing Campaign:
Coupons are one of the methods used by marketers to attract customers to make a purchase. An SMS coupon promotion can have several layers. The mobile number can be published in different ways, which when called by the customer, gives a brief message and then instantly a text message is received by the customer which has the coupon code or discount amount.
Customer Surveys:
Using customer polls or surveys is an effective way to gain insight into your customers’ needs and wants and also promote your products or services. Customers could be given a link to a URL where they can see options for the new spring line and be provided a discount.
Service Reminders:
The appointment attendance can be improved by communicating through SMS, which is found to strengthen communication between business and customer. SMS is a very easy and affordable method of improving the business communication with customers. Professional services can use this strategy as a reminder for services such as oil changes, pest control visits, lawn servicing calls, home repair etc. SMS communication is not only used for communication with customers, but also used in business-to-business calls related to maintenance contracts.

The reasons for using SMS marketing strategy by a business:

  • It is interactive, personalized and cost effective.
  • They can reach the customers anytime at any place.

SMS marketing is affordable for companies or businesses to promote and sell their products and services. This will also help in creating brand awareness.

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February 17, 2011

Benefits of Using Barcodes in Small Businesses

Filed under: Small Business — Tags: , — Winson @ 4:51 AM

Barcode is termed as an optical representation of data showed on certain products. It is read by specific machines called barcode readers or barcode scanners. Symbol scanners are some of the types of scanners used in market these days. Barcode technology can also be helpful for small businesses. Small and medium sized businesses include applications of barcodes in shipping, production, packaging, warehouses, and sales. Some of the benefits of barcode applications for small businesses are listed here.

Easy to Use:
Small business operations can be made easy by use of barcodes. Using efficient barcode scanners like Symbol barcode scanners is very easy and does not require any special skills. A less costly dot-matrix printers can be used by them to create simple barcode labels.

Accurate:
Many errors arise due to manual entry of data in data collections. Barcodes are accurate and avoid these errors. In order to maintain accuracy, it is necessary to maintain creation of good quality labels. It becomes easy for barcode scanners to read effective labels.

Uniform Data Collection:
Sometimes it is required for small businesses to meet some industry specific compliance standards. Specific requirements with shipments are provided for many manufacturers, industries and other organizations. Uniform data can be collected in specific industry in a fast pace by application of barcodes. This helps in improving relations with existing clients. New clients can also be attracted which helps in enhancing sales and growth of the business.

Rise of Productivity:
Manual and routine activities of a business can be automated by using barcodes. It helps in increasing the efficiency of business processes. As manual work in data collection is less, employees can perform other important tasks of businesses. It increases the overall productivity of an organization.

Timely Feedback:
Data capture can be done rapidly by application of barcodes. Hence, an efficient timely feedback of business processes can be given. Information like the number and brand of products bought by customers can be known to a businesses at the right time.

As these benefits are associated with barcode applications in various industries, small businesses prefer to implement barcode technology.

February 8, 2011

Symantec Report on Disaster Recovery Strategies by Indian SMEs

Filed under: Small Business — Tags: — Winson @ 2:32 AM

Global SMB Disaster Preparedness Survey conducted by Symantec Corp. reported about practices of disaster recovery strategies by Indian small businesses. The report also revealed the status of India’s small and medium sized businesses (SMBs) in being ready and prepared for recovery of disasters.

Natural disasters, malicious employee behavior, virus attacks, and changes in IT infrastructure were found to be main concerns for adoption of disaster recovery in India. The report revealed that data protection and recovery was taken care by IT departments in 42 percent of SMBs. Awareness on requirement and importance of disaster planning was increasing among other employees and also among small businesses. Owners and senior executives of about 39% of small businesses were involved in management and execution of disaster planning. In spite of the awareness of disaster recovery, some SMBs were not prepared for planning and execution.

The report revealed that 73 percent of respondents were satisfied with their disaster plans. Around 34 percent felt that they were protected in case of occurrence of a disaster. Most common outages were virus or hacker attacks, natural disasters, and power outages. These were prevalent among SMBs in India in 2009. However, many companies had no plan to deal with such situations. Due to lack of being prepared for disasters, SMBs had to spend a lot of amount and also lost the business.

According to the report, 18 percent of SMBs back up data on daily basis. However, only 50 percent of the company and customer data was backed up on a daily basis by some SMBs. About 59% of the customers complained loss of important data. As a result, materials and presentations were referred by SMBs for preparing a recovery plan. The report found that about 91% of the SMBs had no formal disaster preparedness plan.

January 27, 2011

Barcode Time and Attendance Systems Provide many Benefits

Filed under: Business — Tags: — Winson @ 5:26 AM

Barcodes include linear bars and spaces containing information of a particular product. Barcode readers are the devices that scan or read data from barcodes. Barcodes today are used for many applications. Manual systems usage involve labor and errors taking lot of time. Hence barcode systems can be used in place of manual systems in businesses. Barcode time and attendance systems include tracking of attendance of employees and also track the time of hours worked. Payroll accuracy and efficiency can be improved by barcode time and attendance systems. Some of the advantages of these systems are listed here.

  • Quick payroll preparation time
  • Reduction of key entry and mathematical errors
  • Reduction of time required for payroll audit tasks
  • Elimination of time required for compliance reporting
  • Elimination of loss from fraud and non-conformances with company policy

Data from barcode identification cards of employees is read by barcode scanners such as Symbol scanners, HP Laser scanners and so on. This helps in allowing employees in making quick and accurate time transactions. The data collected has to be stored in a database and proper management of the data is necessary. The scanner is fixed to an individual PC that stores the data. Then the data is used by the barcode time and attendance software for payroll generation and detailed reports. Special barcode time and attendance software is available and used by many organizations.

Many businesses implement the barcode time and management system. They use specific barcode readers like Symbol scanners to read the data properly. The barcode time and attendance systems help in improving overall efficiency and performance of an organization. The system also ensures government, customer and contract compliance.

January 11, 2011

Know About Laser Barcode Scanners

Filed under: Business — Tags: , , — Winson @ 2:39 AM

Because of rapid development in science and technology, every industry now needs advanced gadgets in order to perform their functions. Barcode industry too has come up with new innovations in designing barcode scanners which give quick, effective results. Due to these advanced features, effectiveness and productivity of various businesses in industrial sectors are increased.

Barcode products especially barcode scanners effectively reduce the time and gives results with less effort in completing the required work in the process of billing in the commercial transactions.

Today, many popular barcode manufacturers use laser barcode scanning technology. Because a laser barcode scanner is 50 times faster and 10,000 times more accurate when compared to manual data entry. Each laser barcode scanner consists of a laser beam, substitute of a light source for catching information in the barcode scanner. So, these type barcode scanners have gained more popularity compared to other barcode scanners. Today, many barcode manufacturing companies like symbol barcode scanner identify these points and are releasing laser barcode scanners with best-in-class features, which can perform under every work conditions,which are highly durable and have reasonable prices.

A laser barcode scanner can complete up to 500 scans per second. Laser scanners are more flexible to use as they come in both handheld and fixed mount configurations. Also, laser barcode scanners are classified based on their distance of reading from barcode label. They are standard barcode scanners, long-range barcode scanners and also little modified, extra long-range barcode scanners.

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