How to sell more online with GoogleBase and Pearl
Posted on January 9th, 2010 by Chris Tanner

Here’s how to set up your Pearl ecommerce webshop to maximise the FREE Googlebase product search, and track your results all the way back to your accounting.

How does it work?

Google can be set up to collect a product feed from your website automatically. Sign up at http://www.google.com/base/

Set up a Lead Source in Pearl

Visit Contacts : Marketing : Lead sources and create a new one for your Googlebase feed. This allows you to track incoming leads and clicks from other websites. Pearl will insert a Lead source ID into the Googlebase data, so you don’t need to set up a lead source domain. You can see from this screen shot how the sales and new leads (customers) are being tracked.

Set up a Googlebase lead source

Set up a Googlebase lead source

Configure your web settings

Pearl will produce a file for Google to collect. We’ll insert the lead source tracking ID into the product landing URL so that each customer and purchase is tagged with the “Googlebase” lead source. Visit Website: Setup and open the Googlebase tab.

Set up your Googlebase URL

Set up your Googlebase URL

Next, go back to your Google Merchant Center account and insert the feed URL.

Use the filename “gbase.txt”

Google Merchant Center

Google Merchant Center

Either upload the file manually, or create a schedule for Google to collect automatically:

Googlebase schedule

Googlebase schedule

Enter the URL from your Website:Setup page, it will be like http://www.mydomain.com/index.php?p=gbase

That’s it! Google will soon be listing your items in search results. See the two listings here for one of our clients, “Eco kitchens”:

Googlebase search results

Googlebase search results

Users are taken directly to the product landing page. A cookie is placed on the user’s computer, and if they go on to buy online then the contact and sale are both tied to the “googlebase” lead source you created.

Googlebase landing page

Googlebase landing page

Bingo! More sales and an easy way to get your items listed online. If you want to preview or edit a spreadsheet with all your products for manual upload to Googlebase, then you can find it in the Products area:

Googlebase export products to Excel

Googlebase export products to Excel

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Posted in E-commerce, General posts, Products | 1 Comment »

Wordpress CRM / Contact form plugin
Posted on January 5th, 2010 by Chris Tanner

If you run a Wordpress blog or website, then you’ve probably got a “contact us” page to capture new leads. Excellent, that’s a great start. But what happens to those leads that come in from your site? You probably get an email sent to you, which you filter, respond to and then wait for a reply. You’re probably pretty busy, so if they don’t get back to you, then it’s unlikely that it’s going to turn into a deal.

How handy would it be if all your website contact form submissions appeared magically in a contact management system, with all the relevant information already filled out for you? Even better, let’s send the visitor a welcome email, perhaps even instructions for the next step that they should take. When you have time,  you visit your system, pick up the leads, and immediately you have all the information you need in front of you. If they’ve contacted you or bought from you before, then it’s easy to see what’s going on, who’s spoken to them and what their relationship is with your company.

It’s really easy to keep your new lead stack under control.

Just install the Pearl plugin for Wordpress, and your contacts will be captured directly into the CRM software. The plugin is a really simple, yet uber-powerful tool, available from Wordpress here. It inserts a Pearl Smartform into your blog or website, which you control from within your Pearl account.

Some of the awesome features are:

  • Tag incoming contacts
  • Assign contacts to staff members
  • Send an automated email reply
  • Send an SMS to yourself or a team of staff members
  • Trigger emails to yourself or your team
  • Add as many fields as you need, including custom fields
  • Set “required” options
  • Add as many different forms as you need to your site

Want more information? Visit our Wordpress plugin page now.

Smartform on your Wordpress site

Smartform on your Wordpress site

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Posted in Customers, General posts, New features, System & service news | No Comments »

Smartforms – saving you time and effort
Posted on December 9th, 2009 by Chris Tanner

Here’s a tip for those of you that capture leads from a website and then need to do something with those leads. Of course if you are running your website on Pearl then you get a load of other benefits too.

Smartforms are used to inject contact information directly into your CRM system from any website. Just configure your form in Pearl, insert a small bit of code into your website, and all contact requests will not only send you (or your team) an email/SMS, but will also store all the contact details in your CRM ready to follow up later.

Smartforms can also be used to trigger an automatic reply, tag incoming contacts, and give them a lead source. Watch the video below to get an overview, then read the documentation to set up your own!

If you’re running Wordpress, then hang on a couple of weeks more and we’ll have our Wordpress plugin ready for you.

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Posted in Customers, General posts | 1 Comment »