Limitless possibilities: what can you do with a Custom Counter?
April 14, 2022
The Custom Counter is the communication and motivation tool you didn’t know you needed. Don’t let the humble exterior fool you though. Handled right, these little boxes can create wonder for your customers or align your team around powerful KPIs.
Let’s take a look at what’s possible.
Perhaps you saw our Instagram and Facebook Counters and thought aloud, ‘They are great, but can I get a Counter that tracks my marketing metrics?’ Or the company’s sales figures? Or its positive environmental impact?
Well, dear friends — you can.
Say hello to the Smiirl Custom Counter!
The use cases are infinite, the possibilities endless, the numbers…well, ultimately limited by the size of box you buy. But still, they are big too. Counters come in 5-digit or 7-digit configurations.
With a Custom Counter you can display your company’s success in a living metric, front and center at the office. Or you could keep the team vision ever-present with this numeric talisman, highlighting every step taken on the path towards a massive goal. Counters come emblazoned with the high-definition image of your choice, so people know who you are and what you’re counting.
The limitless use cases for Counters could bewilder some among you. That’s why we decided to give you a few real-world examples to stir your imagination.
Keep it simple: Count app downloads
Bring the team around a cardinal KPI, in a fun, clear way that’s always visible. Markus and his colleagues at Friendspire have their Custom Counter in the middle of the memorabilia wall where everyone can see it. The Counter tracks the company’s most important metric: downloads of the Friendspire App.
It can actually no longer show the full number because downloads have shot well past 100,000.
As it has done for many other companies, Friendspire’s Custom Counter shows the size of the user community and how quickly it is growing. In doing so, it supercharges the team’s efforts with motivation and validation every time things are working well.
Counting trees
In a similar way, Leon and his colleagues at ReviewForest enhance the visibility of their service to their clients by taking the figures and bringing them to life.
When what you deliver is about emotion and engagement, it’s essential that users of the service can see and report the numbers. ReviewForest plants trees each time someone reviews a company subscribed to its service, and this can be expressed via a Custom Counter.
This idea can easily be taken into the office as well. If a company decides to add a positive impact initiative to the business, a charity, or a climate project – this can be clearly displayed, lifting spirits and raising awareness.
Use as a force multiplier for your service to clients
Believe it or not, Custom Counters are also a fantastic way to show your clients how much you care, while enhancing the service you offer.
Colin and the Duet Digital team offer Counters as gifts. Appreciative clients then have the perfect tool for tracking the success (via Google metrics) of the website created for them by Duet!
This unique gift provides clients with tangible evidence of the value of the service as well as the care and consideration of their service provider.
Energy efficiency
For the climate-conscious business, Custom Counters can also be set up to chart your do-gooding for the environment. For instance, you could track how much energy the team has saved by switching to a particular service or using solar panels.
In fact, Nicolas and Joanne from Enerfox use Custom Counters as white-label products for displaying the energy efficiency their solution creates for their clients.
The company uses rebranded Custom Counters as visualization tools. It turns out that when a Counter has been installed, customers actually do more to optimize their energy consumption!
Track business progress with a fleet of Custom Counters
When used right, combinations of Custom Counters can be used to paint a truly compelling picture. Shura and the team at Wehkamp use different setups for Counters all over the place.
The company uses Custom Counters to track the real-time performance of its e-commerce business and to show the customer demand in euros for the whole business (indexing this against last year's numbers). And they even show the individual figures for their biggest product categories. This wide-shot approach builds more awareness of business performance throughout the whole company. It's a very natural way of making people conscious of how they're all doing collectively.
Now, some practical advice:
How do you connect your Custom Counter? Here, you have three options:
Feeling technical? Then build your own integration.
The Counter can display any data parsed into a JSON webpage by calling a specific URL (PULL) or it can wait for external calls from your server (PUSH) to update its numbers. Visit our official GitHub repository for more technical details on how to do this. If that was technical mumbo jumbo to you, fear not — we have two other methods.
Data not accessible online? No problem — update your Counter manually.
Connect to MY.SMIIRL from a smartphone, a computer, or a tablet to display the number of your choice with just one click.
And now, for the very first time, you can connect your Custom Counter code-free to thousands of services using Zapier!
Short on time or programming skills? Use Zapier to connect your favorite apps to your Custom Counter. Our Zapier integration allows you to update, reset, increment, add or subtract any number. Get early access to our private BETA on Zapier today!
That just about wraps things up. Now you know what can be done, get in touch and we can discuss building a Custom Counter for the numbers that matter to you!
