With the increased usage of digital means, it is either grow or perish for businesses wanting to ease customer interactions and scale up their operations.
Podium is a customer communication and a payment platform that empowers review management, messaging, payments, and customer interactions in one place. Businesses and individuals can increase revenue and customer satisfaction by leveraging Podium for maximum value. This will walk you through the steps in leveraging Podium to make money.
Step 1: Understand What Podium Offers
To understand how to make money with Podium, one needs to understand what Podium offers. Podium is a multi-tooling software that helps businesses manage customer reviews to text messaging and payments on one single unified dashboard. Here is what Podium offers:
- Reviews Management: Supports businesses with their online review collection and management on Google and Facebook for more credibility and visibility.
- Messaging: Simplifies customer communications through text messaging for everything from inquiries and feedback to service scheduling.
- Payments: Allows businesses to receive payments directly through text messaging, offering a truly frictionless transaction experience.
- Webchat: Engages website visitors to convert leads using real-time chat.
These features in Podium help businesses build trust, enhance customer service, and iron out operational kinks-all of which lead to better revenue.
Step 2: Create Your Podium Account
To begin with, you’ll have to create an account on Podium. Here’s how:
- Follow this link to the Podium website.
- Click on the “Get Started” button, and complete the on-screen process that opens to create an account with Podium.
- You may be offered an option for a free trial; you might want to consider using that while testing this system for your needs before you pay.
Once you have created an account, take some time to familiarize yourself with the dashboard and various tools offered within the platform.
Step 3: Let Reviews Bring in Business
Online reviews are the most essential ingredient behind business success. More positive reviews increase credibility and bring more customers towards you, other than achieving top positions in search engine rankings. Here’s how you can generate money with the review feature of Podium:
- Automate Review Requests: Avail automatic review requests through Podium and send them to your customer after they have made a purchase or dealt with your service. This will increase the chances of receiving more positive reviews.
- Improve Online Reputation: More reviews mean increased online presence and can translate into more inquiries and sales. The more visible you become on platforms like Google, the more likely it is that potential customers will see your business.
- Monetize Reputation Management: As a marketing consultant, be offering services for review management to local businesses where you can use Podium to grow online reputation. Charge on a monthly basis for maintaining their reviews and responding to customer feedback.
Step 4: Messaging to Improve Customer Engagement
Closing sales and taking care of your customers require effective communication. Messaging tools offered by Podium will afford you the opportunity to manage customer interactions more effectively and drive more conversions.
Here’s how to use messaging to bring in cash:
- Close Sales Faster: The messaging capability provided by Podium lets you respond to leads via text directly to their phones, answering questions and walking them through buying decisions in real time.
- Send Promotional Offers: You can send exclusive offers, discounts, or promo campaigns to your customers through messaging. Personalized text offers are more active than conventional email marketing, which increases sales.
- Abandoned Carts: In the case of an e-commerce business, if a customer leaves the cart without checking out, you can send them a reminder or a short discount to motivate the customer to complete the purchase.
Step 5: Make it Easy to Pay
One of the biggest powers of Podium is that it can process payments via text message. This makes transactions faster and easier, reducing friction in the sales process.
Here’s how to tap into Podium’s new payment feature:
- Send Payment Requests over Text: Instead of having customers wait until later to pay your invoices via email or other traditional ways, you can send them a link to pay right in their text conversations. It might speed up the processing of payments and improve your cash position.
- Conserve convenience: The customers love convenience, and with Podium’s text-to-pay feature, you will provide an easy avenue for your clients to pay you, thereby increasing sales without the headache of dealing with delays in getting paid.
- Upsell or Cross-Sell: Immediately after sending a request for payment, follow up with upsells or cross-sells. For example, just someone paid for a service; now you are going to pitch a related product via text and help boost average revenue per transaction.
Step 6: Drive Leads with Webchat
Podium’s Webchat will let you chat with customers while they are on your website. Regarding the bottom line, it is a pretty great thing. Here’s how you drive revenue with Webchat:
- Turn Website Visitors into Customers: The ability to instantly interact with visitors on your website through Webchat gives ample opportunities for answering questions, suggesting items, and other activities which lead to making the casual visitor pay for what they need or want.
- Follow up on leads: In case they don’t convert right away, you can have them leave their contact information and thus follow up on them later. In this way, you will not miss the probable customers.
- Offer Personalized Service: An attended customer is bound to make the purchase. With Webchat, you can ensure that every response is tailored to what the particular customer needs, and thereby your chances of closing the sale increase.
Step 7: Offer Podium as a Service to Other Businesses
If you feel that you are specifically good at communication, review management, or payment management on Podium, you can very much easily offer Podium as a service to other businesses. The small and local businesses mostly don’t have the time, and sometimes the experience, to keep such tools managed themselves. You can offer this as a service to businesses around you and charge for it:
- Review Management Services: Offer review management services to local businesses looking to extend their reach with Podium.
- Messaging and Communication Consulting: Offer businesses consulting on how to implement and leverage Podium’s messaging service for customer engagement, driving more sales, and retaining more customers.
- Payment Processing Services: You help businesses onboard and use Podium’s payments feature. You can charge a percent of the transaction or a flat fee as your fee.
Step 8: Monitoring and Improvement-end
The analytics on Podium go a step further in that regard and enable you to track the effectiveness of your customer interactions, reviews, and payments. From that knowledge, adjust your processes-whether it’s response time, increasing requests for reviews, or tweaking promotional offers.
Consistently monitoring performance provides even more capacity for improvement in your quest to increase your earnings over time.
With Podium, your opportunities for making money at both an individual and business level are huge through improved customer communication, reputation, and a method of receiving payments. No matter whether you use Podium to better your business or offer services to other companies using Podium, all these steps above would help you drive maximum potential out of this platform for profit. Create your account today at Podium.com to start seeing how this powerhouse can ramp up your bottom line.
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