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Miscellaneous

Top Three Ways To Perfect An Eco-Friendly Digital Nomad Lifestyle

Helen Keller once said, “life is either a great adventure or  nothing.” The truth is that life, as fleeting as it may seem, can feel as though it lasts forever when doing something you love. Although it can often be difficult to grab onto the adventure in your own life at times, this desire to do more and be more will forever call to you—the only question is whether or not you will answer. For some, the idea of answering alone can be terrifying but, for others, it can be the best decision they ever make—and for these select few, the idea of a fully nomadic lifestyle calls them forward on journeys they will surely never forget.

However, a life of adventure is far from the only reason why these individuals choose lives on the road rather than stationary lives in the city. In fact, with a massive transition toward a greener tomorrow from our younger generations, it only makes sense that these nomads also choose this lifestyle as a way to reduce their carbon footprint one day at a time.

With this in mind, if green adventure is the kind of life you hope to one day lead, it is highly important that you consider what type of nomadism you hope to achieve, whether or not the RV lifestyle is right for you, and how you hope to create an eco-friendly nomadic alternative to everyday stationary life in order to not only begin this new chapter of your life but ensure that you journey is headed in the right direction, from the first day to the last.

RV, Travel Trailer, or Van: Choose Your Form of Nomadism

The first step to any eco-friendly adventure is to choose your new home. There are many nomadic options out there but one of the most common and enticing comes in the form of the traditional Class A, B, or C motorhomes. However, there are many other things to consider besides the actual home itself, especially if a greener alternative is your goal. For instance, some RVs have solar power, which can be far more cost effective and green than generator-reliant counterparts.

Furthermore, many RVs are complete and total gas guzzlers meaning that your fuel economy will be far less efficient and each day you will be producing copious amounts of carbon emissions. In fact, the average Class C RV emits thousands of pounds of carbon each and every year. On top of all of this, RVs are also known for succumbing to some of the most common transmission problems you should never ignore, such as leaking fluids and slipping gears, which could very quickly turn your fun adventure into a nightmare for both your bank account as well as your health (carbon monoxide poisoning and dangerous leaking fluids are also quite common).

With these cons in mind, you may want to turn toward a van, as it is certainly smaller and more efficient overall. However, this gives you far less space and also means that if you break down, you more than likely will not have a backup mode of transportation on board. Furthermore, most vans do not provide green energy alternatives and still require a large amount of gas.

Therefore, for many fully nomadic individuals, neither of these options are ideal, leaving the travel trailer and truck combo far ahead of the other two regarding both fuel economy and environmental friendliness. The main reason for this is due to the fact that there are many eco-friendly truck brands out there which, when combined with a solar-powered travel trailer, provide the user with fuel economy, and extra space, and green energy alternatives and a setup that allows you to hook up to RV spots and still be able to visit the nearby cities and places using the unattached truck as a mode of transportation. However, once you choose which option is right for you, the next step is to actually create your “green machine” and make it feel like less of a trailer and more of home in the process.

Transform Your New Home Into a “Green Machine”

There are many easy tips to make a stationary home more sustainable out there, but mobile homes are all too often lost in the mix due to the misconception that you cannot create a sustainable home that travels. However, although gardens and compost bins may be impossible in the long run, there are plenty of other ways to make your travel trailer or recreational vehicle less of a mode of transportation and more of a comfortable home that focuses heavily on green alternatives.

For instance, even if your trailer or RV does not have solar power when purchased, it is not all that difficult to install solar panels after the fact. This can not only reduce the amount of hookups needed on the road, which will inevitably save you money, but also reduce the carbon emissions your vehicle produces as well. Furthermore, by reducing the amount of frozen items you have on board, you can also reduce your refrigerant usage likewise. In 2008, every household in America released over 1,500 pounds of carbon dioxide from their refrigerators and freezers alone, making the reduction of these emissions highly important for our environment as a whole.

Furthermore, although you might not be able to have an entire garden, you can still grow herbs and bulbs which will make your life far simpler, help ensure the air in your new home is naturally filtered, and also lower the cost of weekly groceries as well. However, although all of these green alternatives are useful, there is still one that could quite literally reduce your carbon emissions by hundreds of pounds each and every year on the road which is surprisingly simple to achieve.

Choose Your Eco-Friendly Secondary Mode of Transportation

The most crucial way to reduce your carbon emissions is by reducing the amount of travel you do outside of getting from point A to point B. For instance, by choosing secondary modes of transportation, such as electric mountain bikes or scooters, you can significantly reduce your carbon emissions when traveling to nearby cities fro myour hookup locations as you can leave behind your gas-powered vehicle and also get in some outdoor exercise in the process.

However, a lot of young individuals think that there are no cheap and quality electric mountain bike alternatives, but this is far from the truth. In fact, there are many cheap electric bike brands, including a few that are even located online such as the E-Zip 2008 Trailz bike and the Mongoose 26” Electric bike.

Furthermore, Walmart also has many electric bike conversion kits, which can transform any mountain bike into an electric marvel, in little to no time at all. The best part about them, however, is that the average mileage of these electric bikes is anywhere between 20 to 60 miles, which means that even some of the farthest locations from a hookup site can easily be reached without wasting any gas or money in the process. Furthermore, with the incorporation of eco-friendly gear such as the Tree Hugger gear supply, you can also explore campgrounds and nature trails without being forced to return to your RV every few hours likewise.

In the end, there are countless ways to grab life by the horns and hold on, but travel is one of the few that actually pays off in full over time. Furthermore, choosing to lead a greener life can also lead to a happier you and a better future for the next generation as well. With this said, it’s no surprise why hundreds of young individuals are choosing a nomadic life over the traditional lifestyles their parents led before them. After all, life is short — so why not live it while you can?

Categories
ecommerce Software and Apps

3 Beginner Tools to Understand Customer Data

It’s hard to believe that in 2017, there are industries in which customer data isn’t valued at its true worth. The good news is things are changing. According to Forbes, 60% of business owners believe in the revenue power of data within their companies. And 83% feel that data increases profitability among existing products or services. Even so, some industries out there still lack severely in the customer service sector. Government offices, Healthcare, Airlines, Retail, to name a few. The full list and percentages are available in this infographic by Statista.

Customer support Customer data is crucial to your sales and marketing strategy if you want to:

  1. Understand what your customers need before you upgrade your products and services;
  2. Develop loyalty programs for your buyers;
  3. Apply design thinking principles (innovation) in your line of work;
  4. Attract a new audience and diversify your clientele;
  5. Be one step ahead of your competitors. And more…

Working with customer data isn’t easy especially if you are a beginner in the field of analytics. Or a content marketer with little knowledge in working with stats. But with these 3 beginner tools, no customer data will be left behind.

SEO Tools for Excel

Let’s start with the basics. Before you consider customer data and the sales process, you need to understand what is happening with your website behind the scenes. How people find your website. Who mentioned your website/product/service. Links. And ranking performance. I’m sorry to remind you again, but search engine still matters, and I don’t know of a business who isn’t peeking at competition every now and then.

If you want to discover the current Google cache for a web page, that’s easily manageable by typing “cache:www.websitename.com” into your web browser. But for multiple pages or the entire website, this is time-consuming. Imagine if each product has a dedicated page, and you have about 1,000 products displayed. Not cool, right?

That’s why the Excel SEO tool is useful because it allows users to simply apply a formula to return the data (in this case, the formula is =GoogleCacheData(“URL_TO_CHECK”). There is a basic option (ad supported, free, but with reduced functionality) and a pro version (where you can connect your other accounts, such as Moz, Ahrefs, GA, SEMRush, Majestic), which pulls data directly into Excel, without having to manually transfer it. This guide explains all about the uses of Excel in SEO and marketing, so you might want to check that out. Meanwhile, I have requested permission from AcuityTraining to use some of their screenshots to showcase the tool’s functionality.

Installation Tips and Examples How to Use the Tool

Installation is simple: Go to the SEO Tools for Excel website, and simply download it. This only works for Windows users, and you will need to check compatibility of Office version with Windows version (32 versus 64 bit).

Excel SEO

Here are a few formulas you can use to speed up your analysis. There is a series of string tools that help with text variables (in case you didn’t know, more advanced tools as SPSS, for e.g., do not run an analysis on a string variable, so you must compute the variable from a string into numeric. Which takes up time and energy). But SEO tools in Excel is friendlier with beginners.

To remove spaces from the text, use the “=Normalize()” function. To remove blank spaces in a string variable, use “=StripWhitespace()”.

SEO Excel tool

You can also use the tool for spidering and pull current data for multiple pages. The Spider icon in the upper left will generate a dialogue box that needs to be filled in every section. Add a report name of your choice. Specify the website to crawl, and level of crawling required. Specify data required per page. Highlight the options (you can choose up to 51) in the left-side column. Click Add. Data will be generated in the right-side column.

SEO Excel tool

Clicking Generate will display a table with multiple columns, such as URL, GoogleCacheData, and LinkCount. Or any other metrics of your choice (based on your previous selection from the left column options).

SEO Excel tool

Web stats are a great way to understand what is happening behind the scenes on your page/website. If you have this figure out, it’s time to proceed to the next level: customer specs.

Website Call Conversion Tool

Conversion testing is nothing new. Almost anyone is familiar with A/B testing of channels, for e.g., to see which one drives more traffic, leads, sales. This Hubspot article shows how inbound marketing and sales combine one another.

Recently, more attention has been paid to custom web data reports that showcase what the customer journey is, and how their interaction with your service or product impacts the decision-making process. Call conversion is linked to both customer journey and conversion testing. If you think this isn’t an important subject, think again, as Google Analytics has been allowing phone call tracking since 2016, with phone calls being a marketing channel. Users can simply add the GA code to their websites, and either setup Events and Goals (free option) or opt for an integration software (paid) to track phone calls.

Using Nextiva Analytics: Short Guide

Nextiva is a call conversion software (premium), which offers around 225 report combinations to analyze real-time data and historical data using graphs and tables. Below, you can see an example of Summary for Calls (Total Count, Count by Day, Hourly Average).

Nextiva key features

Besides summary reports and other technical features, call group reports are also available. This how a call group report looks like with graphs (right) showcasing call channels, and scatter-plots (left), displaying count by day.

Nextiva call group

For e.g., if you want to analyze the target group “company employees” with a final objective of understanding the business needs, you can create a custom report and dashboard. An example of the custom dashboard is listed below. This type of report allows you to compare users, sales numbers, call duration, and clusters (i.e. Summer sale promotion team; Sales team; Mike’s calls, Support team).

Nextiva custom dashboard

Operating with agile decision-making processes, the wallboard feature enables transparency and displays critical information. Here’s how a critical process map looks like, detailing all types of calls, duration, and number for each section. I.e. 4,608 dials under Unique calls, 726minutes for International Talks etc.

Nextiva wallboards

The tool itself is easy to handle, and user-friendly. They have a resource center on their YouTube channel, with video guides for Beginners, worth checking out.

Pivot Tables: Sales, Buyer Behavior, and More

For a tool that has been around since before Moses ( the first version of Excel for the Macintosh was launched in September 1985, and first Microsoft version 2.05, in November 1987), you would expect everyone to be an expert at it. For the ‘80s version, probably everybody is. Microsoft developed their Office suite to address its other market segment: businesses. If you’re just starting with customer data, Excel is an excellent tool for beginners.

The simplest, yet useful and powerful feature is Excel pivot tables, which are used to summarize, analyze, explore and present the data through graphs and charts. You can find out how your services and products are performing in an industry, region, segment, by simply grouping the data into designated columns for each variable (i.e. variable “Services”, “Industry”, “Purchases”) and performing the analysis.

Types of Action in Pivot Tables

  1. Summarize your data by finding the average (mean) value of a specific metric/variable. e. Purchases are done per region, per industry, for each product.
  2. Organize the columns of a table. Structure them based on metric/variable/action performed by the customer.
  3. List unique values. You can work here with “outliers” (min and max values, which are outside the mean; call them “particular cases”. For e.g., a customer purchasing your Christmas products in Summer/Fall is natural. But a customer purchasing Christmas gifts in April is peculiar.)
  4. Create dynamic pivot charts and reports that show custom forms and subtotal values. Instead of having a report/graph generated for each segment, you can combine segments, and check for a particular result or for general outcomes.
  5. Filter, sort, and structure your data without formulas or macros. You probably don’t know this, but the main disadvantage of formulas is that you need to carefully follow each function and element/item of the formula. Otherwise, the formula will either not work at all generating error reports, or work in a way, but generate a fake report and false findings. These numbers will affect business decisions. And this isn’t something anyone wants.
  6. Link data sources that are outside Excel and generate pivot reports for this type of data. Think of data such as Google Analytics, tracking stats in email campaigns, surveys, social media data that can be linked to, analyzed, and reported.
  7. Transposition of data from rows to columns and vice versa.

Data sources you can use for a Pivot analysis include GA, Bing, Yandex, surveys, email campaign tracker data, SQL data (website data), external or in-house social media analytics tools, APIs, Internet marketing tools (Moz, Majestic, SEMRush etc).

Example: Customer Devices Pivot Analysis

Let’s say you are interested in finding out if your website should have a mobile-ready version, or it’s enough to have a mobile-responsive theme. You can extract the data from the past year (53 weeks) or from the last 6 months (26 weeks). For this example, I will work with data from the past year, that showcases traffic metrics which came from “All Users” compared to “Mobile Users”.

The steps are: Import Data from GA >> Organize Data in Columns and Rows >> Run Pivot Tables >> Generate Pivot Chart.

SERPiflied pivot table

Based on the results in the pivot table, I see that a third of my customers use a mobile device. I can expect the number to grow in the following year, although I would need to run a predictive analysis to confirm my statement.

However, this pivot chart result is enough, at this point, to convince me to invest is a mobile version of the website, so that my customers can enjoy a fully mobile experience.

More information about pivot tables and user experience is available here.

Takeaways

Remember: customer data is crucial to your sales and marketing strategy. Before understanding your customers’ needs, you need to understand what is happening with the main sales channels. In this case, your web properties and how they rank in the SERPs. For that purpose, the SEO tool for Excel will generate enough valid reports to help you plan your marketing strategy better.

Then, the customer journey and the customer experience are two defining factors in achieving success with your online business. Almost all major e-commerce websites offer call or chat support. Call support helps with conversions. Nextiva has a series of YouTube videos for beginners, explaining how to use the tool and how to get the best out of your reports.

Ultimately, Pivot tables will reveal in a simple, fast, accurate way if it’s worth investing in a mobile-only version for your website. And not only that. Go beyond my example and discover the relationship between sales, purchases, revenue, and trends.

Grab the business insights you need. Data can be turned into calls to action and used for competitive advantages, long-term goals, predictions of future user behavior, success rate analysis, and KPI restructuration. And revisit these examples any time you need.