Here’s Where Its Features Went

If you’ve used Microsoft Publisher for flyers, newsletters, business cards or that one perfect letterhead template, we’ve got a bit of news for you: Microsoft is officially retiring Publisher on 13 October 2026.

After that date it’ll be pulled from Microsoft 365 subscriptions entirely, and while older standalone versions might keep limping along, they won’t get security updates or support.

We know a few of our students and clients still reach for Publisher out of habit, so we wanted to put together a quick “bye bye Publisher, hello again Word and PowerPoint” guide, because the good news is Microsoft has been quietly building most of Publisher’s best bits into the apps you’re probably already using every day.

Why Is Publisher Being Retired?

Microsoft’s own explanation is pretty simple: rather than keep maintaining a 35-year-old, desktop-only, non-collaborative app, they’d rather put that energy into Word, PowerPoint and newer tools like Designer, apps that already work in the cloud, on mobile, and with real-time collaboration built in. Publisher was never really built for any of that.

Publisher Features That Are Already in Microsoft Word

A lot of what people used Publisher for, layout-heavy documents with text, images and structure, has quietly had a home in Word for years. If you’ve done our Office Support & Administration training, some of this will already look familiar:

• Letterhead and template creation – Word’s template tools let you build and save a professional letterhead once and reuse it forever, exactly the kind of task Publisher was popular for
• Text boxes and WordArt – for getting text exactly where you want it, with fill effects, colour gradients and shaping options
• Drawing tools and shapes – lines, arrows, callouts, banners and connectors, useful for flyers, instructions or simple diagrams
• Images and graphics formatting – cropping, watermarks, transparency, borders, shadows and text wrapping around images
• Tables for structured layouts – handy for price lists, schedules or anything that needs to line up neatly
• Envelopes and labels – built directly into Word’s Mailings tab, no separate app required
• Mail merge – for personalised newsletters or bulk print jobs, another classic Publisher-style task Word already handles

Publisher Features That Are Already in Microsoft PowerPoint

It surprises a lot of people, but PowerPoint is genuinely a strong option for the single-page, design-led documents Publisher was often used for, business cards, posters, social tiles, and one-page flyers:

• Templates and themes – a big library of pre-built designs you can adapt in minutes
• Free-form layout – unlike Word, PowerPoint’s slide canvas lets you drag, layer and position text and images anywhere, which is exactly how Publisher worked
• Design templates and formatting options – for building something that looks genuinely professional without starting from a blank page
• Chart and graphic tools – for adding data or visuals into a flyer, poster or one-pager

What Should You Do Before October 2026?

• If you’ve got existing .pub files, convert the important ones to PDF or Word format now, while Publisher can still open them
• Get familiar with Word and PowerPoint’s layout and design tools before you actually need them for something urgent
• If your business relies on regular flyers, brochures or newsletters, it’s worth building your go-to templates in Word or PowerPoint now, rather than scrambling in September 2026

Get Confident Across the Whole Microsoft Office Suite

Publisher retiring is honestly a good excuse to make sure your whole team is genuinely confident across Word, Excel, PowerPoint and Outlook, not just the basics, but the layout, design and template tools that make everyday tasks faster.

Our Ultimate Advanced Certificate in Office Administration Certificate Training Course Package takes you from beginner right through to advanced across the full Microsoft Office suite, including the exact Word layout tools, PowerPoint design skills and Excel spreadsheet skills that pick up right where Publisher leaves off.

The post Microsoft Publisher Is Being Retired in October 2026 appeared first on The Sales Training Academy.

If you’ve ever added a pop-up form to your website promising a discount code or a free guide in exchange for someone’s email address, you’ve probably run into the same problem we did: the enquiry lands in your inbox, gets buried under fifty other emails, and by the time you get around to replying, the prospect has forgotten they even signed up.

Or worse — your confirmation email never reaches them at all, because it’s sitting in their spam folder.

We see this a lot with students who are setting up their first pop-up or landing page as part of their Digital Marketing Training.

A basic contact form plugin might look like it’s doing the job, but it’s really just moving the same manual, disorganised process from your shopfront to your website.

If you want your pop-up form to actually grow your business, it needs to talk to a proper CRM or email marketing system — not just your inbox.

Why a Plain Pop-Up Form Isn’t Enough

Most website pop-up plugins do one of two things: they email you the details, or they store them in a spreadsheet you have to remember to check. Neither option:

• Confirms to the subscriber that it worked
• Delivers a promo code or resource automatically
• Tells you whether that person actually opened the email
• Groups similar leads together so you can follow up the right way

That’s the gap a CRM or email marketing platform closes.

Benefit 1: It Keeps You (and Your Emails) Out of Spam

When a pop-up form emails a plain “thank you” message from your website’s server, it often hasn’t been authenticated properly, and mail providers like Gmail and Outlook are quick to flag it as spam or bulk mail.

It also means every subscriber gets exactly the same message, whether they were interested in your Xero course or your MYOB course.

A dedicated email marketing platform like Aweber, MailChimp or similar is built specifically to be trusted by inboxes.

It handles authentication properly, manages unsubscribes for you (which keeps your sender reputation clean), and lets you set up an automated confirmation sequence that actually lands where it’s supposed to — with the current promo code attached.

Benefit 2: It Categorises Your Prospects Automatically

This is where a CRM or email system really earns its keep. Instead of one big pile of names, you can tag each subscriber based on which pop-up they signed up through, which page they were on, or which promo code they used. That means when someone joins your list from a page about Xero courses, they’re automatically grouped differently to someone who came in through a page about MYOB or Microsoft Office training.

From there you can send relevant follow-up content instead of one generic newsletter to everyone — which is a big part of what we cover in our Email Marketing Communications Training Course (912), where we go through audiences, campaigns and reporting using MailChimp (with a look at alternatives like Aweber too).

Not Every Subscriber Is Your Ideal Client

Here’s something we talked about in a previous post: not all customers are ideal customers. The same is true of pop-up form subscribers. A CRM lets you see, at a glance, who’s genuinely likely to become a good client and who’s just curious.

Before you even build the pop-up, it’s worth being clear on what your ideal client actually looks like — their budget, the kind of course or service they need, and how ready they are to buy. Our Sales & Marketing Success Strategy course walks through exactly this: defining your ideal client and packaging your offer so the right people put their hand up, rather than trying to be everything to everyone.

What Should Actually Be On the Pop-Up?

We covered the essentials of a high-converting landing page in a previous post about what your landing page should contain, and a lot of the same principles apply to a pop-up:

• A clear, specific offer (a promo code beats a vague “join our newsletter”)
• One field if you can manage it — just an email address, or email plus first name
• A strong, single call-to-action button
• A confirmation message straight after signing up, so people know it worked

Bringing It All Together

If you’re using WordPress (which most of our students are), your pop-up plugin should feed straight into your CRM or email marketing platform — not sit there as an island collecting names nobody follows up on. Once that connection is in place, you can automatically deliver your promo code, tag the subscriber by interest, and start a follow-up sequence that speaks to what they actually signed up for.

If you want to see how all the pieces — website tools, customer relationship management and digital marketing — fit together for a small business, our Online Tools & Digital Business Course is a good place to start, and it pairs well with the email marketing and ideal-client courses linked above.

Want help setting up your pop-up form, CRM tagging and automated email sequence? Get in touch with our team or browse our full range of courses at marketingacademy.com.au.

The post Stop Losing Leads & Wasting Sales: You need a Pop-Up Form + a CRM appeared first on The Sales Training Academy.

It’s Because of the FAQ’s about our MYOB and Xero courses

We’ve been rolling out AI-assisted customer service across a few of our own websites lately, and it’s given us a pretty clear, real-world lesson: the AI isn’t the hard part. The knowledge behind it is.

Take two of our own sites as an example. On computertrainingonline.com.au, our AI chat agent handles pre-sales questions about our Xero, MYOB, QuickBooks and Microsoft Office courses with genuine confidence, it gives specific, accurate answers about course access, certificates, payment plans, support channels, and more. Over on natbooks.com.au, our National Bookkeeping site, the same kind of AI-assisted chat doesn’t have nearly as much to work with, and it shows.

Same underlying AI technology. Very different quality of answer. Here’s why.

It All Comes Down to Our FAQ Page

The reason our computertrainingonline.com.au chat agent performs so well is our FAQ’s page, and we don’t say that lightly. It’s not a token “top 5 questions” page. It’s a genuinely thorough, 30-question resource covering everything from course duration and certificates, to payment plans, refund policy, support channels, CPD points, and even how insurers and rehab consultants can enrol clients.

That page didn’t happen by accident. It’s been built up and refined since 2011 by actually paying attention to the questions our students and prospective students ask, then writing clear, specific, honest answers to them.

When you feed an AI system that kind of detailed, well-organised, first-hand knowledge, it has something real to work with. It’s not guessing or generalising, it’s answering the way one of our own team would, because it’s essentially drawing on the same accumulated knowledge our support team has built over more than a decade.

Why This Matters for Any Business Thinking About AI Customer Service

This is a pattern we expect to see everywhere as more businesses experiment with AI chat agents: the AI is only ever as good as what you give it to work with.

A generic AI chatbot with no grounding in your actual business will happily make things up, or fall back on vague, unhelpful answers. But an AI system trained on a genuinely detailed FAQ, your policies, your course structures, your actual support history, starts to sound like it actually knows your business. Because, in a very real sense, it does.

This is exactly the kind of thing we’re exploring further on our AI in Marketing, Sales and Customer Service page, where we go into more detail on how tools like Claude can be set up with custom knowledge, instructions and integrations so they genuinely reflect how a business works, rather than giving generic, one-size-fits-all answers.

The Takeaway

If you’re a business owner thinking about adding AI to your customer service, sales or marketing, don’t start with the AI. Start with your knowledge base.

Sit down and write out, honestly and specifically, the questions your customers actually ask you, the ones your team answers over and over on email, phone and website chat, and answer them properly. That FAQ page, or knowledge base, or set of support documents, is what turns a generic AI chatbot into something that actually sounds like your business.

We did it the slow way over more than a decade on computertrainingonline.com.au, and it’s paying off now in a way we didn’t originally plan for.

Want to know more about how AI can be trained to work the way your business works? Read our AI in Marketing, Sales and Customer Service page, or get in touch, we’re happy to talk through what we’ve learned.

The post Why Our AI Customer Service Agent Actually Works appeared first on The Sales Training Academy.

If you’ve ever typed out almost the same reply to a customer for the third time in one morning, you already know the problem we’re solving today. It’s one of the most common questions we get asked by our office admin and customer service students: “How do I stop rewriting the same email over and over?”

The answer is Outlook email templates, and once you’ve set one up, you’ll wonder how you survived without it.

Why This Matters More Than You Think

We talk to a lot of small business owners and office admin staff, and email templates come up constantly, usually right after someone has spent their lunch break rewriting a refund policy explanation for the fifth time that week.

Templates aren’t just a time-saver, though that’s reason enough. They also help you:

• Keep your tone and branding consistent, no matter who on the team is answering
• Cut down on typos and missed details when you’re replying quickly
• Respond faster, which customers genuinely notice and appreciate
• Onboard new admin and customer service staff faster, because the “how do I word this” guesswork is already done
• Create a teaching framework to train AI in online customer service

We covered a lot of this same ground, from setting expectations with customers to speeding up your response process, in our Online Customer Service Training Course article. Templates are really the practical, day-to-day version of that bigger customer service strategy.

How to Create an Email Template in Outlook (Classic Desktop Version)

1. Open Outlook and click New Email
2. Type up the message exactly as you’d want it to appear, generic customer name, generic details, and all
3. Go to File > Save As
4. In the “Save as type” dropdown, choose Outlook Template (*.oft)
5. Give it a clear, searchable name (we like something like “Refund Policy Reply” or “Late Payment Follow-Up”) and click Save

To use it later: go to New Items > More Items > Choose Form, set the “Look In” dropdown to User Templates in File System, select your template, tweak the details for that customer, and send.

How to Do It in New Outlook or Outlook on the Web

The newer versions of Outlook (and Outlook.com) use a slightly different system called My Templates:

1. Compose a new email as normal
2. Go to Insert > Apps (or “Enhance Outlook with apps”) and search for My Templates
3. Pin it to your ribbon so it’s there next time
4. Click + Template, write your subject and body, and click Save
5. Next time you need it, open a new email, click My Templates, select your saved reply, personalise it, and send

Simple as that. No add-ons, no extra software, no line item that blows out your monthly budget.

A Few Templates Every Customer Service Inbox Should Have

If you’re not sure where to start, these are the ones we see used the most:

• A welcome / thank you for your enquiry reply
• A “here’s what happens next” order or booking confirmation
• A refund or returns policy explanation
• A late payment or overdue invoice follow-up
• An out-of-office or “we’ve received your message” acknowledgement

Keep each one written in plain English, keep the tone friendly rather than corporate, and always leave a gap where you can personalise the customer’s name and specific situation. Nobody likes a reply that clearly wasn’t written for them.

Want to Get Properly Confident with Outlook, Word, Excel and PowerPoint?

Email templates are just one small (very useful) corner of what Microsoft Outlook can do for office admin and customer service tasks, calendar management, contact and CRM tracking, and task lists are all in there too, and most people are only using a fraction of it.

If you want your whole team working faster and more consistently across the entire Microsoft Office suite, our Office Support & Administration using Microsoft Office course covers Outlook email and meeting management, contacts and CRM, and tasks, alongside practical Word and Excel skills your admin and customer service staff will use every single day.

Got a Microsoft Office, MYOB, Xero or QuickBooks question you’d like us to cover in a future post? Get in touch, we’re always keen to write about what our students actually want to know.

The post How Do You Create an Email Template in Outlook? appeared first on The Sales Training Academy.

Here’s a breakdown of what to include:

1. Compelling Headline

• Example: “Master MYOB & Xero Bookkeeping — Get Certified and Boost Your Career or Business!”

• It should instantly communicate the value of the course and who it’s for.

2. Subheadline with Outcome-Focused Benefit

• Example: “Learn practical bookkeeping skills using Australia’s most popular accounting tools — even if you’re starting from scratch.”

3. Strong Call-to-Action (CTA) Above the Fold

• Use buttons like:

  • “Get Instant Access”

  • “Start Free Trial”

  • “Download Free Course Preview”

• CTA should be repeated throughout the page.

4. Short, Engaging Explainer Video or Demo

• Brief video (1–2 minutes) introducing the course, showing platform walk-throughs or testimonials.

5. Benefits-Focused Copy

• Break down what students will learn and how it helps them (e.g. start a freelance business, get hired, manage small biz finances).

• Use bullet points or icons to make it scannable:

  • MYOB & Xero practical training

  • Real-world bookkeeping scenarios

  • Certificate of completion

  • Lifetime access & updates

6. Social Proof

• Include:

  • Student testimonials (video or text)

  • Logos of companies that hired graduates or where instructors worked

  • Star ratings from course platforms

  • Number of students enrolled (if impressive)

7. Lead Magnet (Freebie)

Offer a free resource to collect emails:

• “Download our FREE MYOB vs Xero Comparison Guide”

• “Try the first module for free”

• “Free bookkeeping checklist for beginners”

8. Clear Course Features

• List what’s included:

  • Modules

  • Quizzes & exercises

  • Templates

  • Support (e.g. Q&A, email help)

  • Certification details

9. Instructor Bio and Credibility

• Share the instructor’s experience, certifications, and real-world bookkeeping background.

• Build trust by showing why you’re qualified to teach.

10. Pricing Options

• Use clear, simple pricing.

• Highlight:

  • Payment plans

  • Discounts (limited-time offers)

  • Money-back guarantee

11. FAQ Section

• Address common objections like:

  • “Do I need accounting experience?”

  • “Is this accredited?”

  • “How long will it take?”

12. Trust Elements

• Show:

  • SSL secure checkout

  • Satisfaction guarantees

  • Accreditation or industry partnerships (if applicable)

13. Mobile-Optimized Design

Ensure the landing page looks great and is easy to navigate on mobile—many users will come from social media or email.

14. Exit-Intent Popups or Slide-Ins

• Offer a last-chance discount or lead magnet before they leave the page.

Is starting an online course and training business something you would consider?

See how we help people start their own online course business.

The post What your landing page should contain if you want to sell online bookkeeping courses appeared first on The Sales Training Academy.

Training courses are designed for people who want to be taken on a learning journey that gives them practical skills to help them remember what they learn.

The olden days

Before the Internet, a training course usually involved

1. finding a good training centre within 20kms
2. reviewing their course schedule for course duration and session times
3. enrolling before all available seats were taken
4. going to a physical training centre,
5. being shown how to perform a task, and then
6. having a go yourself.

If you got stuck you’d put your hand up and the trainer would come over, see what you’ve been doing and then correct you and explain what you did wrong.

Then you’d all have a tea break with coffee and Tim Tams and chat for 30 minutes (but it should have been a 15 minute break). Does that sound familiar?

Videos, Workbooks, Support

Now it’s the same but different.

1. you can enrol and start whenever you have time,
2. the training instruction is delivered via video (and replayed as often as needed).
3. you don’t need to travel and can learn from home
4. you can use website chat, email, sms and phone if you get stuck
5. have a coffee and whatever you want to eat from your fridge or pantry

Videos are easy

The biggest change we’ve noticed is how easy it is for anyone to create a training video. Some of these videos are of people speaking (talking head videos) and others are screen recordings using the software.

There are thousands of great bookkeepers and accountants and they can all create videos to explain how to use the software – and you can watch most of them for free online and particularly at Youtube.

The hardest part of creating a course is to design the learning journey that starts with basic skills and then gets gradually more complex, building on the basic skills you’ve just learnt.

With bookkeeping this normally means doing the full cycle of

1. quoting,
2. invoicing,
3. accounts receivable and
4. receiving payment.

But none of this normally goes to plan. If you’re a course designer you will know about some of the tricky things that can happen and build them into the learning journey. That’s what we’ve done with our courses.

Videos are cheap

If you can’t afford a premium short course which also includes:

1. training workbooks,
2. practical tasks,
3. support when you need it and
4. a certificate to demonstrate you’re competent,

then access to a video library is one of the cheapest ways you can learn. When you choose our training libraries you can have the confidence that the videos flow from one logical step to the next.

Click the Learn Express logo below to see the training video library options.

If you find you need support AND the training manual you can explore one of the tutoring packages.

Tutoring for one on one attention

Tutoring in how to use Xero and MYOB has always been popular for students who need the complete attention of a trainer. They’ve become more popular in the last few years because companies like Airtasker entice contractors onto their platform and then promote them – but have you ever used Airtasker?

We’ve heard from people who’ve used Airtasker for delivering things or other handy man tasks that haven’t gone that well. Many people have had a great experience but the problem with the Airtasker platform is that you never get any of the persons contact details until you choose one person and pay your money.

Even then, some Airtaskers will communicate with you solely through the Airtasker platform rather than give you their email address and mobile number.

With our tutors you know who you’re getting and they know their stuff.

Click on Trevor Turners ad below to see our tutors and tutoring packages.

The post How cheap to go for your MYOB and Xero Bookkeeping Course appeared first on The Sales Training Academy.

Is Google Harassing You To Increase Your Advertising Spend?

Google now achieves billions of searches every single day, making it without doubt, the world’s leading search engine.

So, with the search market effectively cornered, and most of the planet seemingly online at any given time, businesses are only too aware that featuring in Google searches can be central to getting their brand in front of their target audience.

The real problem though, is that with high competition, many operators know just how difficult it can be to rank organically (that is for FREE). In many cases they also feel ill-equipped, under-skilled or lacking in know-how to effectively manage online marketing in-house.

Not surprisingly, this situation has not escaped the attention of the people at Google! And as many Google Account owners may have noticed recently, Google would really like you to know that they have a solution to your online visibility needs: Google Ads.

Would you like to learn how to write a compelling ad for your business and stay away from costly outsourcing? There’s some free training here.

What is Google Ads and do I want it?

Google Ads is Google’s well-known and widely used online marketing tool. It is a paid service which can guarantee businesses a place at the top of online search results. While a paid search listing will be flagged as an ad, in all other respects it looks much the same as the organic search results that appear beneath it.

Although marketers tend to agree that a paid advertisement is likely not as valuable or effective as a high-ranking organic search result, knowing that their brand will be seen above others is still a desirable outcome for many businesses, and Google understands this.

Whether or not you opt to invest any of your marketing budget into Google Ads will obviously come down to your own particular cost benefit analysis. To do this, you will need to identify and document exactly where your leads come from so that you have the best possible understanding of where to focus your attention for a successful marketing campaign.

If a Google Ads campaign is done well, by someone skilled with a strong understanding of your business, it can ultimately increase leads, conversions and sales, and be worth the outlay for some businesses. However, as with any marketing strategy, coming out on top depends on many factors.

Want to learn how to track your sales pipelines and optimise leads? Check out our free training here.

Google account strategists

As a business owner, you may have noticed an increase in phone calls or emails from agents representing Google Ads. Known as Google account strategists, these people work for companies that are third party contractors to Google, and they are there to entice you to buy into a Google Ads campaign, managed by them.

A quick Google search reveals that in many cases, these contractors can be very persistent. Coupled with the obvious fact that these agents are not direct employees of Google, business operators of all kinds are beginning to get curious.

So, what is going on? Why does Google outsource this task?

In fact, there are several reasons why Google might choose to engage contractors over appointing additional employees to carry out this particular work.

Keeping costs down and maximising business flexibility

A distinguishing feature of any field that is tech or internet related, is that it is in a perpetual state of innovation and transformation as it continues to expand into new areas of our lives. So, for a multinational tech company like Google, its operations, focus and goals will necessarily be dynamic, transforming rapidly over time.

For this reason, while companies such as Google will always require a comprehensive, highly skilled staff to achieve core strategies and business goals, and maintain growth and direction, it makes financial sense to utilise independent contractors to deliver certain projects along the way.

Using Online Sales Contractors in certain circumstances enables the company to expand and contract as necessary over time, far more easily than would be the case if it relied on in-house employees for every task. This service is also available to small businesses by utilising an experienced Virtual Assistant.

Using contractors for these types of projects, the company can maintain flexibility to respond to changing circumstances, both internal and external, while at the same time keeping staff costs down. Rather than receiving a wage or an hourly rate from Google, the contractor earns through creating a job for themselves, while Google wins through increased advertising revenue.

Appearance of independent endorsement

Another incidental positive of using contractors to perform this task is that there is potential for some businesses to perceive it as a sort of independent validation of the product. That is, Google doesn’t need to push it for themselves, because other companies whose sole focus is to increase your sales, are seemingly clambering to do it for them.

Should you pick up the phone?

Ultimately, whether or not you choose to engage a Google Ads strategist is up to you, but always do your homework before making a decision.

First, you need to make sure that it is in fact a legitimate Google representative. To ensure they are legitimate, ask them to send you an email from their google.com email address, and to include your customer ID.

After this, you should think about whether or not you actually need this kind of help. Understanding where your leads come from, identifying the richest sources, tracking sales pipelines, knowing the tools you need, and writing effective copy can seem daunting, but in many cases you can learn these skills yourself.

You may not consider yourself an expert in anaylitics, however, you know your business better than anyone, and there are plenty of free resources available to help you excel. So, take the time to inform yourself first.

Risks to consider

If you feel that you are in a financial position to run a Google Ads campaign, always remember that an Ads professional who understands your needs and the nature of your business is best placed to make effective campaign decisions that will deliver relevant and valuable results.

While an anonymous strategist that has cold-called you may have some helpful suggestions, and will likely be an expert in the Google Ads platform, there is always the possibility that they will not have similar expertise with your particular business. Remember that a deep knowledge of your business is key to marketing success.

Strategists are also randomly assigned, so while you may have excellent experiences with a representative one quarter, it may be quite the opposite in the following quarter if a new representative is assigned.

Remember also, that in many cases the driving motivation for these strategists is to obtain as many accounts as possible, rather than to truly understand your business and create campaigns that deliver meaningful results to you. In this case campaign data analysis of campaigns may not be prioritised, and you can’t be sure that the campaigns you’re paying for are value for money.

If it doesn’t work out for you, and your representative does not achieve promised or adequate results, it can also be quite difficult to navigate any consequent dispute or to recoup money you have invested.

So, the best way to manage your marketing campaigns is to become an expert yourself, so that you know you are in the best possible position to make effective decisions.

The post Is Google Harassing You To Increase Your Advertising Spend? appeared first on The Sales Training Academy.

Online Customer Service Training – All You Need To Know

The Online Customer Service Training Course is a training package filled with easy to understand information, real life case studies, and practical tasks designed to get you up to speed on all aspects of online customer service.Once you finish this course, you will have all you need to get your business up and running, including a hands-on understanding of marketing and income boosting strategies.

One of the best parts is that you will have mentor support for a full six months. You can also work at your own pace, and save the training materials to refer back to whenever you need to.

What You Will Learn

The course is divided into 12 distinct sections that cover the what, why, when and how of every aspect of your online customer service tool kit, from knowing your products or services, to boosting engagement, and the marketing pipeline.

To find out more or to speak to a course adviser, click here.

Product or service knowledge

Be an expert! The importance of being completely across not only your products or services, but also their unique benefits, and how and where they feature on your website can’t be underestimated.

As well as this, a deep knowledge of your target market is crucial, so that you can define and communicate your products or services effectively, and with precision.

Bundles and packages

In this section you will learn all about bundles and packages, and who in your target audience to discus them with. Is there a particular segment of your market that would benefit from a bundle of particular services or products?

Find out who this might be, learn what packages to combine, and how to target your offering to the customers most likely to add it to their shopping cart.

As an Online Customer Service agent your role is to ask the right questions to identify the ideal client and then make a recommendation based on their goals.

Special offers and promotions

Offers and promotions are commonly used tools in small business.

While they can be extremely effective, in many cases they fail to achieve their purpose. This is often because business owners haven’t taken the time to identify and understand their own goals, which is crucial to developing the right offers and promotions.

In this part of the course, you will learn about the full range of potential offers and promotions. After defining exactly what it is you want to achieve, (whether that is to spotlight a new product, increase customer spending overall, or bulk up your email list), you will be able to choose the promotions that best fit your goals, and implement them successfully.

This also helps you create better Google Ads and marketing campaigns.

Lead generation

Collecting your customer’s details is one of the most important steps in the sales and marketing funnel.

In this part of the course, you will learn how the lead generation system works, along with all the ways in which you can optimise your website to capture visitor information, from your contact page, to the full range of enquiry forms.

These forms, including lead generation forms, inline lead forms, and qualifying leads, can be used strategically on your website so that you not only obtain important prospect information, but you can also develop an understanding of the most effective pages on your website.

One of the main reasons that a list of prospects is important is that only about 3% of the people who enquire are ready to buy right then and there. If the person has never heard of you before you’ll need to build your brand and profile by making regular contact and following up with them.

Speaking with customers

Learn how to prepare for engaging with customers, and how to speak with them by developing a strong understanding of what they are after.

This can be achieved to a certain degree with lead generation forms and other means. However, as you establish yourself and perfect your sales skills, you will also learn that much of the time you will often be fielding similar questions from your prospects.

This Online Customer Service course will give you the skills you need to establish trust so that your client feels comfortable to share their information, and also to accept advice. It will also show you how to be proactive, taking control of the interaction, and leading the conversation with a clear idea of what you want to obtain from the prospect (but also based on their needs).

In the process of dealing with customers, you will also be able to identify the most commonly asked questions, and then to develop an FAQ page for your website, (which is also a handy technique for increasing website engagement).

These are the most common questions asked about online MYOB & Xero Training Courses.

Maximise website engagement

Engagement is the moment that a person at your website becomes a real person and not just an anonymous visitor – so it is VERY important.

There are many ways in which you can increase engagement on your website by potential customers. In this segment of the course you will discover methods for boosting engagement while on phone and website chats with prospects.

You will also learn how to communicate direction clearly and concisely so that they understand exactly how to navigate where they need to go.

The sales and marketing pipeline

In this part of the course you will learn the process for converting leads into paying customers. Your goal is to “qualify” as many prospects as possible, right from the point of initial interest.

Integral to managing this process successfully is obtaining permission to send your prospects information. You will learn how to get prospects to “opt in” to an email list, and you will be given all the tools, as well as an understanding of all the key platforms to facilitate this process.

You will also learn different techniques for encouraging prospects to opt in, including targeted rewards.

Marketing

Marketing covers a lot of ground from pricing and creating product ranges, to consistent messaging and communication aimed at converting prospects into paying customers, right through to managing post-sale issues.

In this part of the course you will learn what sort of messages you need to send to prospects and customers, and how to send them in order to inform them of key information, encourage them buy, and to build ongoing trust.

Selling strategies

Learn the “science of selling” without relying on outdated and off-putting “hard sell” techniques. In this part of the course we will help you to really understand your prospects, and in turn how to link them with the product or service that they are most likely to want.

You will also develop an idea of who your ideal customers are, how to locate and target those customers, how to identify and communicate the key benefits of your product or service to them, and the sales process as a whole, including the all-important art of closing sales.

To enrol or to speak with someone about how this course can benefit you, click here.

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