Many companies are finding it increasingly difficult to retain employees. Turnover has becoming a serious problem in today’s corporate environment. The employment culture is changing as more employees are demanding more and more balance between work and personal/family life; it is not uncommon to see people changing jobs every few years.

Turnover costs for many businesses are very high, resulting in a huge impact in the financial aspect of an organization.

Turnover costs include:

Recruitment costs – Job position advertising

Training costs

Increase in workloads and overtime expenses before the replacement is ready to take on the responsibility of the job position

Now because the company is short on staff, productivity is reduced resulting in an overall reduction in profits and growth.

Now I hope you get a clear idea of how serious this can be!

This is why hiring the right people initially is extremely important! It is best of the candidate shares the same vision as the company and proposes a will to follow and grow with the company.

Another way to reduce employee turnover is to make the company employee-oriented, focusing on interactions between all levels in the organization – from workers, to supervisors, managers, and directors. If one can feel part of the company as a whole, trust and loyalty can be built up between employees. Does your company’s environment openly encourage communications and feedbacks from employees?

Attractive compensation packages also help to retain the employees. The top companies that have low employee turnover have attractive compensation packages such as health and dental benefits, RRSP packages and healthy work environment. Many companies offer vacations packages, and other freebies such as free lunch, yoga courses…etc. to their employees. All these are worth considering reducing the impact on employee turnover.

Aaron Lee
http://www.articlesbase.com/management-articles/reducing-employee-turnover-rate-673801.html

Email Updates

Email Updates should play an integral part in automating your business and website as effectively as possible. Thinking of a way to get your users to leave their details may change the way you market your business online forever (and the only way you marketing online altogether). Attracting visitors to your website is great but if you want them to be a customer for life you need to be able to contact them and entice them with great offerings.

E-Shots / Newsletters

An e-shot otherwise known as a Newsletter is a great piece of marketing and ensures you remain in your customers minds at all time throughout the buying cycle, its a great tool to remind them that you’re still there offering products and services.

Newsletters are commonly sent out on a monthly basis and are used to maintain a professional online presence and gets people to expect your regular communications (which is great for brand awarness and online authority).

Many email marketing providers offer great tracking where you can view an emails open rate, click through rate and bounce rate (a bounce is when your email has not been delivered successfully).

Newsletters can be personalised and even dynamically created, for example you could segment your database list and have a section of your newsletter to change depending on who opens it, e.g. for women you may display perfume and for men display aftershave (thats just a simple example).

Broadcast Emails

Broadcast Emails allow you to send out the same email to everybody in your list quickly and very easily, furthermore you can personalise them.

You may be launching a new product, have a special offer running or you may want to share industry or company news with your subscribers.

Using Relationship Marketing and an Autoresponder to Deliver Newsletters
Its well known that you need to make several points of contact before your lead will consider converting.

Therefore you may consider using an autoresponder to deliver a series of emails to warm them up into buying from you.

Let say for example you are selling a training course in I.T. and as an incentive you are offering a free 6 week e-course in return for their contact details. After your subscribers have give you their contact details, on day one you may decide to send them a welcome message, following this after 1 week you may want to start them on the free course, then for the next 6 weeks you send them some free content every week, tutorials, top tips, etc, by this point you have built up a good relationship with your readership and you are now in a better position to convert your subscribers.

Your subscribers will be that pleased with the free e-course they have just received they will be a lot more inclined to hand over some money for the real full length course.

Whats great about an autoresponder is your emails / newsletters don’t have to go out on the first day of every month, they can go out whenever you want them to, they can go out at a set period of time after they have subscribed, meaning not everyone will be receiving the same newsletter at the same time.

What is an Autoresponder?

Allot of people think an auto responder is that email you get back when you email somebody who is on holiday “Sorry i am out of the office and i will get back to you upon my return on the 31st January” or very similar messages to this one.

This isn’t what an autoresponder is exactly. Autoresponders as previously mentioned can be an e-course or contain an attachment.

Email courses or general content delivered through an autoresponder are a great way of building and maintaining relationships.

Furthermore an even better thing about using an autoresponder is that it can automate your marketing. Using the example of the e-course, delivering a course over 6 weeks would require 6 separate pieces of content, therefore you simply create these 6 pieces of content, load them into your auto responder and pre-load the interval sends and the best of it is you only have create this content once and once only.

All your website visitors have to do is opt in to your free course or website updates by leaving their name (preferably their first name) and email address. You can then deliver the course to them and even choose to make personal contact a few weeks down the line.

Autoresponder Software

You can read about this in more detail here but the market leading autoresponder software is called AWeber. This is a great piece of autoresponder software which is widely used and has many satisfied customers, this is the perfect tool for automating your marketing and build long term relationships and at such a low cost its a must have tool to generate leads and build relationships.

A small note ‘Email Deliverability’

A big thing to consider here is email deliverability. AWeber has a 99% deliverability rate, this is an outstanding rate and you will not be able to ascertain this kind of deliverability using your own server and you may be at risk of getting a bad reputation as a spammer if you were to do so, so a word of warning there.

Protecting your online presence is extremely important and if you do not do this it could effect your search engine rankings, therefore you need to ensure your emails are coming from a trusted third party.

How Does AWeber Work?

There is nobody who can explain this better than AWeber themselves. AWeber offer a whole host of excellent Video Tutorials. Starting from scratch where you can learn everything for a quick and easy setup for your first email marketing campaign, includig how to set up your list, add messages and publish a sign up form to your website, its so easy and AWeber make it even easier.

Other tutorials include using free templates for email newsletter and how to build an effective follow up again (this is great!).

Ok so where do i start?

The thing i find with email marketing is to get started ASAP. Say you receive X number of visitors per day on your website, why arent you collecting their contact details?. Your potentially chucking away your chance of making a sale.

The most important thing to do is get started as soon as possible, offer some great content, special offers or an e-course and start collecting details now.

Simply sign up to AWeber for a free test drive, get the code on your website (its very easy – its a simple copy and paste job – all of the code is provided for you) and start collecting names and email addresses.

Once you have registered with AWeber (its completely free) they will give you a little bit of code for your form in which your subscriber will enter their details, if you dont feel comfortable with this feel free to drop me an email and i can help you out.

To try this piece of sofware out for free by clicking on my author bio link and take a free test drive now.

Jonathan Aston
http://www.articlesbase.com/marketing-articles/relationship-marketing-745028.html

For over 30 years, Scuola Leonardo da Vinci has been one of the best Italian language schools in Italy thanks to its experience and its wish to constantly innovate. To teach and learn in a better way is Scuola Leonardo da Vinci’s aim. We have always taken care of our students, and their relationships in and outside the classroom.

After the great success of the Italian language lessons on ‘Second Life’, we decided to explore the web 2.0 and the online communities world to make the relationship with our students and between them stronger.

In our schools there are students who come from 50 different countries spread all over the world and sometimes it’s difficult to keep in touch with everyone. Thanks to innovative platforms such as Facebook, YouTube, Flickr and LinkedIN, we want to liaise with our students and maintain the relationship established during their time in one of our schools (Florence, Milan, Rome, and Siena).

We would like to invite you to become our fans on Facebook and join former students groups or to sign up to the groups on LinkedIN, watch our videos on YouTube or have a look at our pictures on Flickr. These spaces will become places where you can keep in touch with your school friends, meet your teachers again, find pictures and videos directly from the school and much else besides…

In addition, the school has just created a new account on Flickr, an original website where you can find a lot of interesting and lovely pictures uploaded by the School Leonardo da Vinci about the schools in Florence, Milan, Rome and Siena, the classrooms, students, teachers, the free time moments and many more. So, if you are curious to see and discover the places you will visit, the classroom where you will attend your Italian lessons, and also to seek out the really relaxed and friendly atmosphere that surrounds the Leonardo da Vinci school, than take a look at Flickr on our account!

Finally, we couldn’t forget about the famous Youtube, the platform where we uploaded our schools’ videos. Search the two Leonardo da Vinci’s videos, an alternative and quick presentation to make you see with your eyes the cities where our schools are located, the streets, the squares and monuments of Florence, Milan, Rome and Siena. Moreover, you will have the opportunity to see what happens during the Italian language lessons and during the special and traditional courses, such as the Professional Italian Cooking Course or the Painting Course, and also some students flats, and some charming and unique Italian landscapes.

Our School makes use of Web technology and web design that aim to enhance creativity, communications, secure information sharing, collaboration and functionality of the web.

So…What are you waiting for? Hurry up and become a member of our community! You will find again the friends and colleagues who attended a course at Scuola Leonardo da Vinci. Become our fan on Facebook, sign up to the groups on LinkedIN, search and watch our videos on Youtube, and see the wonderful photos on Flickr!

Scuola Leonardo da Vinci
http://www.articlesbase.com/languages-articles/join-leonardo-da-vinci-school-foreign-students-communities-672276.html

Taiwan GPS Receiver Market

In Taiwan, GPS suppliers besides taking over most international companies’ orders, also successfully develop GPS watches for hiking, golfing and cycling.  GPS receiver navigation devices have developed rapidly in recent years and are now much more than talking maps. Auto electronics, consumer electronics, home appliances, information and communications technology (ICT), and telecoms companies have worked together to give them a much more diverse range of functions including use in those of MP3 players, digital photo albums, movie players, and real-time road-condition receivers. They now provide information on navigation, recreation, and entertainment, all in a single unit.

Taiwan’s GPS industry started to take off in 2007. After MiTAC bought Navman, they’ve become the second biggest GPS company in Europe. Also, their sales of 800 million of PND has made them become the third largest GPS supplier in the world. At the same time, TomTom and Garmin have expended their ordering to Taiwan OEM’s from components to fabrication products. The global leader in satellite navigation, Garmin Ltd. and its subsidiaries have designed, manufactured, marketed and sold navigation, communication and information devices and applications since 1989 – most of which are enabled byGPS technology. One of their principal subsidiaries is located in Taiwan. Including Japanese and European orders, Taiwan’s GPS sales were around NT$171 billion. The total growth rate was 70%, which makes its growth very noticeable compared to the 2007 ICT industry growth rate of 4.6%, or 730 billion dollars.

Even though this year, European and U.S. consumer electronic product sales are still being effected by the current economy situation, IEK is still very pretty positive about the GPS market in Taiwan. The Taiwan GPS industry market will grow strongly once the market moves from Europe and the, U.S. to the newly developed countries.

GPS for Hiking

What’s a suitable GPS for cycling? Color mapping, long life battery or replaceable batteries, topo, street/road, & bike trail mapping, text-to-speech (gives me the street name), prefer selectable car vs bicycle mode, a way to pick future routes, possibly software that would use steet & topo to avoid large hilly areas on long distance biking, large SD card, fairly waterproof, screen can be seen in sunlight. One of the Taiwan GPS receiver suppliers announced their product as an all-in-one GPS receiver.

Dedicated massive-correlator signal parameter search engine within the baseband enables rapid search of all the available satellites and acquisition of very weak signal. An advanced track engine allows weak signal tracking and positioning in harsh environments such as urban canyons and under deep foliage.

With very fast signal acquisition speed, it has very low average power consumption for locate on demand type of applications.

GPS for Golfing

Golf GPS systems are rapidly evolving from only player enhancement to complete course management systems. The primary goal of a golf GPS system is to provide players with distances to all kind of features on the course and especially to the green they are playing. Some courses are better fit to use the capabilities of GPS than others. In order to obtain a satisfactory accuracy the GPS receiver must have a non-obstructed view of the sky. This makes that courses with lots of trees are less suitable for golf GPS.

Golf GPS system should contain the following:

• Provides you with GPS distances from “any” location on the hole to the 200, 150, 100 yard / meter markers, to the front, centre, and back of the Green.
• Record the GPS distance, club used and landing position for every stroke you make.
• Stroke length Statistics: tells you the average and longest distance you hit each club in your bag. You know exactly how far you drive the ball.
• Club Selector! Suggest which club to use for your next stroke based on the historical stroke data already stored from previous scorecards!

Taiwan GPS suppliers, Mobile Action Technology Inc and Polar have released their new GSP products for sport.

GPS for Cycling

Whether you are a road biker or a mountain biker, there’s a GPS that will work well for you, and it can mount right on your handlebars. All of them have high-sensitivity chipsets for superior satellite reception in urban canyons and under canopy. While they are excellent cyclometers, they aren’t all that great as navigation devices. If you are primarily wanting to track your performance though, Taiwan suppliers who make sporting GPS receivers would be your excellent choice. They are suitable for whoever wants data acquisition and a dashboard lap timer.

To get a complete report on Taiwan GPS, please go to http://gps-receiver.ready-online.com/index.html

Rita Su
http://www.articlesbase.com/automotive-articles/excellent-gps-receiver-in-taiwan-701755.html