After you've completed your initial setup, you may want to start adding new prospects and existing customers to the Vendasta platform. Once added, you can engage them with Snapshot Reports and email campaigns. Follow this checklist to get started!
Getting Started Checklist
- Create accounts
- Add users to accounts
- Learn to leverage account lists
- Create and customize Snapshot Reports
- Leverage email campaigns
Create accounts
Individual accounts
You can add new prospects or customers individually for which you know the business details through one of the following methods:
- Go to Partner Center > Accounts > Manage Accounts > Create account
- Search for the business you want to add (the business must have a Google Business Profile and can't be a service area business to be found through this method)
- Select the business you want to add
- Select up to three competitors you want to make note of
- Click Continue.
- Ensure the information pulled from the Google Business Profile is accurate
- Update Administration information
- Assign a salesperson
- Add tags
- Add customer identifiers (if you use them for internal purposes)
- Click Create account
If you are adding a business that can't be found in search, you can manually enter their information:
- Go to Partner Center > Accounts > Manage Accounts > Create account
- Click Skip to account creation
- Add in all of the mandatory fields and any optional information you have on the business
- Update Administration information
- Click Create account
You can discover new prospects based on geography and vertical by using the Find accounts workflow:
- Go to Partner Center > Accounts > Manage Accounts > Find accounts
- Do a search based on a keyword related to the business vertical and add geographic information (eg. restaurants in Boston's Leather District)
- Select any of the search results you want to add by clicking the checkbox
- Click Continue
- Review and then click Create accounts
These new accounts will be added to the platform and will create a List for you.
Bulk account import
If you have a spreadsheet of accounts that you want to add in bulk to the platform, you can import them via a CSV file. Go to Partner Center > Accounts > Manage Accounts > Click ⋮ in the top right corner > Import Accounts (CSV Upload) to get started. The video below walks through the process of setting up your CSV file and completing the upload. You can also follow the steps in-depth here. A simplified CSV template to help you get started is attached at the bottom of this article, and you can learn more about the CSV setup here.
Add users to accounts
Like account creation, you can add users individually, or in bulk. There are a few ways to add a user to an account after an account has been created. One of the most common is as follows:
- Go to Partner Center > Accounts > Manage Accounts > Click the Account to which you want to add a user
- Scroll down to Users and click Add Users
- Click the checkbox for an existing user then click Add user
OR - Click Create user if the user does not exist
- Fill in the user details
- Click Create user
For more information on adding users to the platform, go here.
As shown in the Bulk Account Import video above, you can add users in your CSV upload. This is the easiest way to ensure that you have the users added to your accounts when adding them in bulk, but you can add users into the platform through a bulk import; go here for more info.
Learn to leverage account lists
Lists are a way to group accounts. Once you have accounts added to a list, you can perform actions on them all at once. Creating accounts using a bulk account import or using the find accounts workflows noted above will automatically create lists for the accounts that you have created.
The video below will walk through how to set up a new list of accounts that are already in the platform and provide an overview of list actions that you can take. Our Lists Overview provides you with more in-depth resources if you wish to learn more about lists.
Create and customize Snapshot Reports
There are multiple ways to create Snapshot Reports. They can be created in Partner Center > Accounts > Manage Accounts or in Sales & Success Center > Accounts by clicking on the Create Snapshot Report "document" icon in-line with the account. Learn about all the methods of creating a Snapshot Report here.
Customizing the Snapshot Report can only be done by accessing the report in Sales & Success Center and clicking the Snapshot Report "document" icon again after it has been created. Here are some of the actions you can take to customize an individual Snapshot Report:
- Change the order of the sections of the report
- Hide sections of the report
- Hide blocks inside each section
- Add SEO keywords
- Add competitor data (based on a competitor URL or another Snapshot Report you have run)
- Change the language and videos in the Report
Leverage email campaigns
Create an email campaign
You can easily add recommended email campaigns or create brand-new ones from scratch to send out to your prospects and customers. These drip email campaigns can create Snapshot Reports, can include custom emails, and can have delays between events to allow you to customize the timeframe that they will be received.
You can leverage Vendasta's Email Builder to create your emails. To read step-by-step instructions on configuring an email campaign, adding recommended campaigns, and publishing your email campaigns, see this article.
Send an email campaign
Once your email campaigns are ready to go, there are a few ways that you can send them. You can send them to individual accounts or multiple accounts in Partner Center; your salespeople can send them through Sales & Success Center; you can even add them into automations!
There are several methods to send your campaigns to individual accounts or to many at once. To learn more about the different methods, see this article.