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| Hosted Apps Also Drive Marketing |
April 24, 2006 |
By Paul Lima
Joel Litwin, president of Concord, Ont.-based Access 8, imports and distributes network cabling and accessories such as switches, routers and wireless products.
Incorporated in 1985, Access 8 has a product list that exceeds 1,500 items. Until recently, Litwin found it difficult to keep his customers updated on his growing and changing inventory. He also found recruiting new employees for the 10-person firm to be a costly and time-consuming endeavor.
Last summer, after spending several months searching for an online marketing tool, Litwin settled on Eliteweb, an online marketing and human resources management ASP based in Toronto.
Before finding Eliteweb, it could take Litwin two or three days to put together product flyers and e-mail them in batches of 100 to his customers.
Because marketing was a “slow and tedious process,” Litwin only sent out electronic flyers every few months and he sent the same information to all his customers.
Now he uses templates on Eliteweb to create customized flyers and sends the appropriate ones to the each customer—all on a permission basis—when he has new products to announce or has products on sale. “It all boils down to time and cost and benefit,” he said. “For relatively low cost we freed up time and were able to do more—reach more customers more frequently.”
In the past, Litton could only use sales figures to gauge the success of his sporadic marketing campaigns. Now he can see how many customers open his e-mail flyers and which links they click on. This information helps him adjust his marketing efforts to better cater to customers.
Litwin also uses Eliteweb to facilitate recruitment. When running recruitmentads, the company receives 400 or 500 resumes—a lot of paper to shuffle through.
“Hiring is not a favourite part of anyone’s job,” he said. Now prospective employees apply online and Litwin filters applications based on keywords and other criteria of his choice. The filtering system ranks applications and he selects those to interview from the top 20 or so candidates. “It cost a few dollars, but the cost is so small compared to the amount of time it is freeing up, and we hire sooner rather than later,” he said.
“We had been running our business the old way, doing the same thing religiously for 12 years...and now we wonder how we ran our business all those years,” he said.
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