News Release – June 23, 2020
Saskatchewan companies join forces to provide Local Business Online Toolkits to small and medium businesses to navigate the province’s reopening.
Directwest and Vendasta are proudly partnering to offer digital toolkits on free trial to small and medium sized businesses affected by the pandemic. The tools provide local companies with critical products to get online, transact with customers, provide business updates, and more.
“Directwest and Vendasta, two Saskatchewan-based companies, have a long history of working together to help local businesses thrive along with growing the economy of our province. It just made sense for both organizations to work together to support the local business community during this time with something that will have a big impact for many,” said Keith Jeannot, President and CEO of Directwest Corporation.
“Many small businesses that are not online and e-commerce-enabled are being disproportionately affected by the pandemic. The situation is dire for these small businesses,” said Vendasta CEO, Brendan King. “By partnering with Directwest, taking advantage of their strong business relationships across our province, we can get local businesses online very quickly and help them survive and thrive at a challenging time.”
The Local Business Online Toolkit is designed to provide the critical tools a business needs to connect with customers digitally, such as e-commerce websites and communication solutions. The tools include:
– An easy-to-design, no code e-commerce website.
– A reputation management solution for monitoring, responding to, and requesting online reviews.
– A digital listings solutions to keep business hours, contact information, and available services up to date and in-sync on Google, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter.
– A social media solution to help keep customers updated across all popular social and search networks.
– Email marketing tools for sending effective, automated email campaigns to customers.
– Automated, easy-to-understand analytics and insight reports emailed weekly.
All tools in the Local Business Online Toolkit are available using a single sign-on account for each business. The Toolkit is a ‘self-serve’, do-it-yourself (DIY) suite available through Directwest and powered by Vendasta’s technology.
The digital toolkits are available on free trial until Dec. 31, 2020, helping businesses continue their work through Saskatchewan’s phased reopening and the uncertain months ahead, including the holiday shopping season. In 2021, businesses will have the opportunity to move into a paid service for a similar or more robust product or cancel their toolkit at no risk to them.
Businesses interested in acquiring their digital toolkit on free trial can do so by contacting Directwest.
About Directwest
Directwest, a wholly-owned subsidiary of SaskTel, has been connecting buyers and sellers across Saskatchewan for over 100 years. Offering a suite of digital marketing services from website design to digital advertising management, Directwest continues to launch innovative and customer driven products and services while delivering strong, measurable return on investment for their customers. Directwest is home to the largest inventory of digital billboards province-wide and is also the exclusive provider of Mysask411 with local information available in print, web, and mobile app. Directwest’s head office is in Regina, Saskatchewan and also has an office in Saskatoon.
About Vendasta
Vendasta provides an end-to-end commerce platform to 28,000+ customers who sell digital products and services to more than 3.8 million small and medium businesses (SMBs) worldwide. These customers include marketing agencies, independent software vendors (ISVs), and media companies. The Vendasta Platform allows these groups to easily adopt new solutions from a marketplace of SaaS technologies that they can sell under their own brand to SMB customers. The platform provides AI-driven marketing automation, sales tools, and an integrated CRM to facilitate go-to-market. It also includes task, orders, and billing management systems to help scale through robotic process automation. SMBs are provided one login for all solutions purchased under a Vendasta customer’s brand. They enjoy one integrated dashboard with prescription, context, and tracking to understand how they are doing and how they can improve performance. Vendasta has a growing team of more than 400 people based in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan, Canada, and has been named one of Canada and North America’s fastest growing companies for five years in a row.
For more information, please contact:
SaskTel Corporation
Greg Jacobs
External Communications Manager
Phone: 306-777-3433
Mobile: 306-570-5816
Email: greg.jacobs@sasktel.com
Vendasta
Dani Mario
Director of Corporate Marketing & Communications
Phone: 1-306-955-5512 ext. 289
Mobile: 1-306-371-4999
Email: dmario@vendasta.com
