Hindsight is Definitely 20/20 – Missed Bookings Report

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The missed bookings report analyzes your orders and based on your search criteria, finds customers who have missed bookings. This report is perfect for finding those customers who still need a follow up to make a sale.
Find the Missed Bookings report in the Analysis section of the Reports tab.

missed bookings1

 

Here are the essential steps for entering your report criteria:

1) Select the manufacturer(s) you are finding missed bookings for

2) Select if you are looking for orders based on order date or cancel date. Cancel date is the option most commonly used.

3) Enter the date range you are looking for missed bookings in. In the example below, we are looking for customers without orders between July 1st and September 30th.

4) Clarify if you are analyzing the period as a whole. This options allows you to specify if you’re satisfied with a customer placing an order for 1 of the 3 months (Jul, Aug & Sep). If so, set to “Yes.”
example: A customer has placed an order for Aug, will not appear in the report.

…or if you would like to see a booking for each month, set to “No”.
example: The same customer will appear in Jul & Sep.

5) This second date range is to help specify which customers you would like to consider. In the example below, the report will 1st pull up customers who have orders between January 1st and June 30th, and will only display those who have not placed an order between July 1st and September 30th. This date range selection helps focus on “active” customers, those with recent bookings and exclude customers that had purchased from the selected brand sometime in the not so recent past.

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After clicking “generate report” the results will look like the example below. Customers with missing orders are listed with their last order/cancel date and their contact info under manufacturers and date ranges.

The next step will be any combination of the following for contacting the customer:

  1. Call them.
  2. Create a note entry.
  3. Tag them for market call (if applicable).
  4. Send a personalized bulk email.

 

missed bookings3

When is the Best Time to Send an Eblast?

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Knowing when to send your bulk email is crucial for optimizing how many people see your content and increasing deliverability.

Most email marketing campaigns are sent between 8-10 AM on Tuesday, Wednesday, or Thursday. However, sending your eblast with everyone else might discourage your message being opened. Statistics are showing that there are other time windows that show better open rates (percentage of recipients that open your message).

  • Weekends see the least amount of emarketing, but these emails typically get the highest open and click through rates (click through rate is the percentage of recipients that click on the links in your message). The weekends are a good time to send out your email campaigns because you’ll have little competition for your recipient’s attention.
  • Messages sent late at night, between 8-12 pm, have a high 22.7% open rate, compared to the usual 17% when sent in the daytime. Click through rates were higher too.
  • No one time/day is perfect for everybody. Try analyzing your recipients and thinking about when they would be most likely to open emails. Send your emails at different times to compare and see what time works best for your business.

reference:
Quarterly Email Benchmark Study

http://www.iab.net/media/file/emailmarketingquarterlybenchmarkstudyq42013.pdf

 

Recall My Criteria Selections: Don’t Lose What You Were Searching For

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With “recall my criteria selections,” you can enter a search/filter on one page, leave the page, and when you come back to it, the search will still be there. “Recall my criteria selections” prevents having to re-enter your search/filter.

For example, if there’s a search for all stores in the zip code 90210 and the page is left to see the orders of one of those stores, the page can be returned to and it will still show all of the stores in 90210.

To enable/disable “recall my criteria selections,” click “customize this view,” the check-box for the feature is at the top of the window. Make sure to click “save selections” when you’re done!

recall criteria selection

Filter with Manage Column Icons (Customer Tab)

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Filter customers by icons in the manage column in the same manner you can filter by state, rating, market call label, etc. Doing so can make tasks, such as improving your customer email subscriptions, much simpler.

Click on a particular icon in the top section (the header row) of the manage column (just under the title “manage”) to filter by one of the icon statuses. Click the icon again to filter by a different status within the same category.

manage column filter

 

 

For example, if the envelope icon is clicked once, the page will reload and it will list customers with valid email addresses. When the icon is clicked again, the page will filter by customers without email addresses (a good practice to do every once in a while during downtime to update your customer profiles).

 

manage column filter example

 

Below are the different icons you can search by and what they mean:

manage column filter globe The globe icon shows if a customer address can be shown on Google Maps. Click once to see those that can be seen on a map, click again to see those that can’t (normally because their address needs to be entered in a different format).

manage column filter emailThe envelope icon shows if a customer has a valid email address in SE or not. Click once to see customers with a valid email address, twice to see those without an email address, three times to see invalid email addresses, and four times to see accounts that have emails but are missing a primary email address.

manage column filter money problemsThe dollar sign is a marker to denote a customer that has money/credit issues. Click once to see customers that have not been marked, click twice to see customers marked with having money issues.

manage column filter subscriptionThe envelope with an icon in front of it shows a customer’s email subscription status. Click once to see customers with at least one unsubscribed email.

manage column filter excl list The warning sign icon shows customers that have been excluded from a manufacturer. Click once to see customers not excluded from any manufacturer, and click again to see customers that are excluded from at least one manufacturer.

 

How Much Excel is Too Much?

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Excel has been around for sometime and has become an indispensable tool

While Excel is a great analytical tool and we encourage its use, small businesses must pay attention not just to the amount of time spent on Excel, but also to the frequency of use and what portion of that effort is redundant.

Meet with your team and determine the amount of time you spend manipulating Excel file s on a daily/weekly basis. Determine redundancy and use a simple equation to evaluate the cost to your business. e.g.; 4 hours per week @ $15/hr is just under $3,000/year. This cost does not include loss of efficiency by conducting other non-Excel related tasks.

Contact us to see if there is an existing report that is similar enough to minimize or eliminate your Excel effort , or about the possibility of creating a custom report to eliminate maintenance of an Excel file and free up time for other tasks.

(213) 438-0600 ext. 502
help@readytoview.com

 

Report Scheduling Reincarnated

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This is a major improvement of our Report Scheduling tool.

What makes this special is the ability to use “relative dates” (aka. Multiple Periods), e.g.; Schedule a report “ONCE” to run (indefinitely) at the 1st of every month for the period of the preceding month.

Showroom Owners & Managers:
Relieve your reps & assistants from the task of generating reports for you on regular intervals. Showroom Exchange can do this for you.
You can now schedule automated reports within Showroom Exchange. Configure the settings once and have your reports emailed to you daily, weekly or monthly. The reports will be emailed to the address saved in your settings page. They will include a PDF and CSV/Excel link.

 

To schedule a report, enter report criteria/filters, then at the bottom of the report, click the “schedule this report” button.
Note: to use relative dates, date criteria entries are not considered for scheduled reports.

 

 

schedule report1

 

 

 

In the following pop-up, enter the title of the report (subject line of your email), then select the interval (frequency) of how often/how many times you want to receive the report.

schedule report

 

Daily, Weekly, and Monthly reports become more detailed as you can choose to make them examine a static period or multiple periods (relative dates).

Selecting a static period means that the reports will examine the same date range (either order date or cancel date) every time a report is run. This is not the preferred date-criteria selection as the same period will be considered for the report over and over again. e.g.; a report scheduled to analyze Jan 2014 generated in Feb 2014 or anytime in the future, will always consider Jan 2014 as the date filter.

With Multiple Periods, every time the report is generated, it will examine a different date range based on the interval and period you select. For example, if you schedule a recurring Daily report for 9 am, with multiple periods, looking at the “Previous period”, you will receive reports that analyze the previous day. i.e.; you arrive at your desk to find yesterday’s activity in your Inbox.

There are more examples below for Daily, Weekly, and Monthly scheduled reports.

The report below is configured to run on Mondays and Fridays of every other week, analyzing sales with cancel dates in the following week. It will run ten times before stopping.

schedule report4

 

 

The example report below will run every day @ 11:59 PM forever, analyzing sales ordered on that day.

schedule report6

 

 

In the example below, the report will be generated on the first of every third month until 12/31/15 and will analyze sales with cancel dates in the previous month.

schedule report7

 

 

On the report page, click “maintain schedule reports” to delete or edit existing scheduled reports.

schedule report5

Seasons & Projections

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We offer Seasons & Projections as optional features of Showroom Exchange.

With seasons, you can mark orders by season and season year. This allows you to track, search, and filter orders/customer order history by season.

Below are screenshots of adding an order, the orders tab, and the customer tab with seasons.

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seasons

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You may also automate the assignment of Seasons during order entry by defining rule-sets per mfr. e.g.; Assign any order entered for MfrX between 1/1/ANY_Year and 3/30/ANY_YEAR to Fall.

seasons5

 

The seasons feature also allows you to further analyze your data with two additional reports:
1) Forecasting Analysis by Season and
2) Season Comparison.

seasons4

 

Forecasting Analysis by Season

The seasons feature lets you make projections of your sales based on seasons. You can assign projected dollar values to customers as well as mfr’s (see below).

assign projection2 assign projection

 

 

 

You can then use the “Forecasting Analysis by Season” report to summarize your projections as well as compare them to your actual sales once orders have been entered (see below).

assign projection1

 

assign projection3

 

Season Comparison

In the Season Comparison Report, you can compare bookings by season and year, much like mfr yearly comparison and cust yearly comparison. Below, a sample report result:

seasons3

 

If you’re interested in activating the Seasons and Projections add-on to your showroom’s account, send us an email to help@readytoview.com and check out our pricing page for details:
https://www.showroomexchange.com/pricing.aspx

Housekeeping: Avoid Data Redundancy, e.g.; Market Codes & Year

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It’s redundant to save categories with the year value as it is already provided during entry (see picture below). For example, some showrooms will save a market with the year, such as “Coterie Feb 2013” and “Coterie Feb 2014.” It’s best to have just one “Coterie Feb.”

Categories that often get years added to them are Markets, Seasons, and sometimes Territories. While everyone uses Showroom Exchange differently, we recommend that nothing created under “Setup Categories” should have a year next to it.

Including the year in a category can have undesired effect other SE features (i.e. reporting). For example, say you want to use the Customer Comparison report to compare your customers between this year’s and last year’s market. If you have one saved as “Coterie Feb 2013” and the other saved as “Coterie Feb 2014,” analyzing the report will be more challenging.

If you have any questions or concerns about this, let us know at help@readytoview.com or call us at 213 438 0600 ext. 502.

category years redundancy

PBE Eblast Analytics

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Who is Opening Your Email Blasts?

See who is or isn’t receiving your Eblasts, opening your messages, or clicking on the links inside.

Click to learn more…

 

Keep an Eye on Your Unsubscribers & Re-Engage Them

After you send a bulk email, see who unsubscribes and possibly reengage with them.

Click to learn more…

Keep an Eye on Your Unsubscribers & Re-engage Them

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From the PBE (“Personalized Bulk Email”) Sent Items page, you can manage the email recipients that have unsubscribed.

After clicking on PBE sent items under the customer tab (shown below), click on the envelope icon (below the ‘to’ column) by any message to view the addresses it was sent to.

A subscription icon will appear next to each email address. Just like on the customer tab, clicking on the icon will show their subscription status as well as an email template you can send asking the receiver to resubscribe.
IT IS BEST to do this while you’re on a call with the respective recipient, otherwise this may be considered further spamming. The same approach should be considered daily when engaging your customers (from the customer tab).

Note: Any email addresses with an unsubscribed icon does not necessarily mean that they unsubscribed from the same e-blast.