Working in an industry that is high-priced, traditional and highly competitive can be stressful. Take that stress and develop a digital platform to scale it up and you’ve added a whole new layer of challenges. That is what James Soh from Renopedia did when he created his company to disrupt the Singapore interior design and renovation business.

To find out more, we spoke to James to better understand what he and his team uses to build a business that is generating over 1000 high quality leads for the interior designers in Singapore.

We hear from Ryan Choy, Co-founder & CEO, Faire Leather Co about the tech tools that make his work easier

Currently, Renopedia is one of the fastest-growing online renovation media company in Singapore. From large interior design firms to small companies, he helps build their digital marketing presence in this traditional industry.

Homeowners visit the website for home renovation inspiration, sourcing for interior designers or renovation materials, as well as those who just love looking at home decorations.

Zapier helps integrate our tools (Paid and Free)

Zapier is a software that allows end users to integrate the web applications they use and automate workflows. It connects to more than 4,000 apps. These apps includes Gmail, google sheet, email software, third party landing pages, WordPress password and more.

The most common usage for Zapier in our company is having an automated system for our leads. As Renopedia have more than 1000 leads per month, we need to extract the leads data eg. Name, email address and contact number to a google sheet and to our email software and to our SMS software and to our WhatsApp software. And these actions are done via one software, Zapier, rather than manually.

Other usage also including the following:

  • When we post a video content via Facebook, it will appear on YouTube and our website.
  • Ability to set conditions for automation eg. Date, words
  • Ability to set delays for automation sg. Number of days, hours, mins, weeks, months
  • Think Zapier as a duct-tape or a connector. It allows the flow of 1 task from 1 app to another. It saves time, hassles and money for any companies going digital.

Canva for basic design (Paid and Free)

Canva is a free graphic design platform that allows you to edit photos without extensive photo editing knowledge or experience. One of the most dependable tools in our company.

Imagine designing any of this in less than an hour and without prior designing experience

  • Brochures
  • Facebook posts
  • Resumes
  • Pitch Deck
  • PowerPoint
  • E-magazine

Canva is a software that every company should use to improve their work flow. One of the functions I love most is the PowerPoint slides. I struggle with PowerPoint presentations every now and then, be it to create a training slide for staff or to create a PowerPoint presentation for events.

Using Canva to create PowerPoint slides at least cut down the amount of time spent to 700% due to the numerous templates and the easy to edit functions. And most importantly, it’s aesthetically pleasing.

Handle all email marketing with ActiveCampaign (Paid)

ActiveCampaign gives you the email marketing, marketing automation, and CRM tools you need to create incredible customer experiences.

Every company should have an email automation system, be it to follow up with existing clients or sending promotional or on-boarding emails to new clients.

My favourite is ActiveCampaign, because of its user-friendly platform to help automate emails on a regular basis and these emails look personalised.

Clickfunnels for lead generation (Paid)

Clickfunnels is a software that was created to help businesses facilitate highly effective sales funnels able to generate leads and make sales in a simple and hassle-free way. Generally speaking, it exactly does what it says on the tin – builds sales funnels and landing pages.

In the past, it was believed that every company should have a website. To create a website, you have to engage a developer to help you create a website. Easily, a website costs between $2k to $10k to produce due to the cost of hiring a developer.

What’s worse, if you need to recreate certain pages or to revamp a website, the additional cost kicks in. Anybody with digital marketing knowledge these days will know that having a landing page is more important than having a website.

In short, anybody with Clickfunnels subscription can create a website easily, and it does not limit you to one only.

WATI (Paid)

WATI Automation allows the WhatsApp business bot (WhatsApp Business Chatbot) to automate responses to customers’ inquiries under certain conditions. A WhatsApp bot for business helps you to quickly respond to a user’s query without the need of a human agent.

Every month, we have 1000+ leads from homeowners looking for interior design firms on Renopedia. In the past, we used to call every single lead to ensure that the lead is genuine. This process takes up a few hours every single working day.

We had tried to use SMS automation or email automation to connect with the leads, however, the response rate was not high. After using WATI Automation, it actually cut down our communication time by more than 50% and improved our response time to every single lead to less than a second. Best still, homeowners are very responsive via Whatsapp.