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What Small Business Can Do In a Depressed Market

The Economy is extremely volatile at the moment and if it becomes a bear market, it can have severe consequences for a lot of small businesses. For some, it meant cutting back on expenses, downsizing, or even bankruptcy. However, during these times businesses can give real value to their customers and stand out from their competition. Your ability to adapt, shift priorities, and look for opportunities during a downturn can help you stay afloat and gain a decisive edge above the competition.

We’ll be focusing on three main areas considered to be the most vital during this phase.

Customers

Customers tend to be more price-sensitive during tough times. Buying habits change, as well as their priorities. But despite all that, you need to keep a steady flow of income for your company. Getting enough customers to keep the ball rolling should be high on the list of your priorities. There are at least 3 ways you can achieve this:

Cross-sell/up-sell
Be more competitive
Focus on Customer Service

Although it seems counterintuitive, cross-selling or up-selling when most people are trying to stay on budget actually works. In retail business, this could mean offering bundled items, a discount, or selling them in bulk. Services like salons may offer one or more complementary services at a slightly lower price than if customers were to avail of them on separate occasions. Customers will take every opportunity to get the most out of their dollar whether it’s through discounts or storing up for the rainy days.

Staying in touch with your customers is a lot easier these days because of sales and marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM). Small Business Dream helps business owners acquire new customers and maintain customer loyalty through email autoresponders, survey forms, inside sales tools for salespeople (Action List, phone script, notes, etc.), landing page templates, and sales funnel.

Cash Flow

Maintaining a positive cash flow can be tough for businesses during recessions. People tend to be more conservative with their finances, and businesses might have a hard time finding more capital to run their businesses. This often results in drastic measures like downsizing and outsourcing certain tasks, while others may try reducing their workload through automation. Check your cash flow and see if your business spending gives the best possible output.

Identify important areas in your business. If you are to strip down your business to its core, which ones would likely stay and keep you in business all throughout? Is there any task that hasn’t been automated, and is taking up too much time to accomplish? How effective is your marketing, and does it justify the cost? In many cases, business owners find themselves spending too much on things that don’t have significant impact on their bottom line. You could be hiring more people when you could have just spent a fraction of the cost using sales and marketing automation. We want our business to be as lean as possible and still be able to maximize our gains.

Reallocate your resources as needed. Technology has come a long way towards improving our efficiency from customer acquisition to maintaining good customer relationship. In fact, some businesses are already moving towards inside sales using CRM because it allows them to save up on gas, meetups, business trips, and other related expenses doing outside sales. This strategy greatly reduces business costs and helps them stay cash flow-positive when most businesses are barely making it.

Opportunities

When the economy is bad, most people turn to cash. Savvy investors and business owners use this opportunity to acquire more assets and properties as many of these will go on sale during recession. This is where businesses with enough cash stored away can benefit the most. If you are able to stay cash flow-positive, this can be your chance to grow your business significantly.

Foreclosures and auctions are pretty common during economic downturns. Take some time looking for opportunities to buy assets properties on the cheap which include real estate, office equipment, vehicles, goods, and raw materials. Some of these normally cost a fortune, but you might be able to acquire them for your business at significantly reduced prices. Market downturns allow you to grow your own business by picking up the pieces from what is left of other people’s businesses.

Final thoughts

You can succeed with any small business regardless of the present economic conditions so long as you have the mindset, skills, and the right tools to get the job done. You can always achieve more by working smarter, not harder. Use technology to speed up and automate your tasks, and be prepared to step up your business when opportunities present themselves.

Learn more on how you can successfully build your small business through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Customer Relationship Management Tools for Insurance Agents

While the insurance business is generally a traditional industry driven by referrals, more Millennials are investing their money and are demanding a technology-driven approach. As such, the insurance industry is adapting online trends like sales and marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management software (CRM) to get a leg up on their competition and to better serve their clients.

Adopting an online approach to growing your insurance business opens a world of possibilities for your company. We’ll explore some ways you can accomplish the task using Small Business Dream.

First, here’s why you should consider using Small Business Dream as your companion in the insurance business.

Ease of use. Small Business Dream focuses on crucial areas in business such as customer acquisition, customer communication, customer feedback, and customer education. It offers a simple, user-friendly interface and avoids unnecessary clutter.
Small Business Dream enables you to devise your own strategies with as many combinations and customizations as your creativity would allow. It offers a wide selection of themes, landing page templates and email autoresponders which can be customized to fit any kind of business.
Cost-effectiveness. Small Business Dream increases your profit margins by minimizing the overhead cost of acquiring new clients with cutting-edge technology in sales and marketing automation.

Online Customer Acquisition

Our long-held notion of a typical old-fashioned insurance agent is quickly being replaced by tech-savvy mobile users capable of reaching hundreds of potential clients from any place around the world with a mobile app like CRM. It’s not surprising why so many traditional insurance companies are also scrambling to learn CRM just to keep up with the competition.

With Small Business Dream’s Sales Funnel Setup, you can easily set up your first landing page about your insurance company for just an hour or two, or customize our generic sales funnel pages with your chosen theme and start creating traffic through social media, customer referrals, or sales funnel card. The system works whether you have a company owned website or want to have a micro-site right off the bat.

Opt-in Survey Form

Segmenting your leads and contacts from the outset can save you a lot of time sifting out your ideal prospects. Typically, insurance agents will have to qualify their leads based on the following information:

Personal information (name, sex, date of birth, email address)
Health information (height, weight, lifestyle habits, pre-existing condition)
Employment status (type of work, employer, length of service)
Financial information (income, net worth)

However, for our CRM, you might have to skip some of those during the initial opt-in survey and get to them later on after showing more interest. Instead, we’ll be focusing only on the basic information such as name, email address, sex, age, and the type of insurance they’re interested in. This might slightly be different from one type of insurance to another.

If your insurance company offers life insurance, your opt-in survey form may ask for additional information about the specific type of life insurance they’re interested in (term, universal, or whole life), and have them subscribed to a specific email series based on which option they’ve checked off. This method can be used in other types of insurances as well.

The idea is to have your prospects spend as little time as possible on your opt-in survey form and get just the right amount of information for your email autoresponder to work with. Eventually, you’ll be able to get to them via phone, sms, or email after showing up on your Action List. You’ll have a much better experience qualifying your leads using this method than having it done manually by yourself.

Upselling to Your Existing Clients

Insurance upgrades can help increase your income by as much as 30% or higher depending on the number of clients who opted for a policy upgrade. You need a follow-up tool like a CRM to update their knowledge about additional coverage offered by the insurance company through policy upgrades.

Again, Small Business Dream’s survey builder will come in handy. Depending on user response, you can switch them over to an email series about the advantages of increasing their coverage and specific situations where they are considered vital, as is usually the case with health insurance and long-term disability.

You can also upsell to your qualified prospects prior to the sale by showing some of the benefits of whole life over term insurance, or you may follow up on them from time to time for policy upgrades after showing some interest on it.

Offer Solutions through Customer Education

You can help your future clients save money on their monthly premiums by sharing some useful information such as avoiding risky behavior or by maintaining a good level of fitness prior to the insurance exam. You can also educate your prospects and existing clients about the pros and cons of choosing one type of insurance over the other and why people need to have coverage. One way of doing it is through your email autoresponder or through your company website or blog.

Conclusion

There are plenty of ways CRM can increase your productivity as an insurance agent. You’ll be able to come with more creative ways and develop new techniques as you gain more experience in the insurance business and with Small Business Dream CRM, or you can reach them on how you can use the system for your industry better.

Learn more on how you can successfully build your business through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.

Protecting Your Customer’s Data – How CRM Provides Security for Your Small Business

Governments around the world are tightening the laws on data protection and breach notification, affecting millions of businesses across the globe. Europe has already tightened their data privacy laws with the General Data Protection Regulation giving the individual more rights and protections. Now it’s Canada’s turn to beef up its data privacy laws.

Starting November 1^st, organizations across Canada will be subject to the Personal Information Protection and Electronic Documents Act (PIPEDA) which will require companies to provide consumers and individuals notice of privacy breaches. Companies and organizations may also be liable and could face fines from $100,000 to $500,000 if they are found negligent.

Businesses must ensure customer information is in safe hands, and should come up with a system of reporting data breach to privacy agencies and all persons involved as quickly as possible.

Complying with Data Protection Laws

CRMs generally conform to data protection laws by helping customers make informed decisions along the ‘buyer’s journey’. With the new law coming into force, businesses that use them are much better off compared to those who don’t. This is due to the fact that CRMs have certain features and functionalities which covers both business owners and customers from improper use of customer data.

Consider some of the GDPR-compliant features and functionalities of Small Business Dream CRM:

“Double opt-in” email confirmation – your email subscribers will not be entered into your mailing list until confirmation by email, explicitly stating his or her interest to receive more information from you. This step is extremely crucial because it can be used as proof that they’ve agreed to your terms.

“Opting out” from your mailing list – subscribers can unsubscribe at any point in time by clicking “Unsubscribe to this email” at the end of every mail. This goes perfectly with data protection laws allowing users to opt out of your mailing list fairly easily. Sending marketing emails to your subscribers without an “unsubscribe” link puts a lot of risk to your business for non-compliance of the GDPR.

Deleting contacts – this option will come in handy if you have prospects and customers who want information about them completely wiped out from your system – again, in compliance to data protection laws about your customer’s right to be “forgotten.” However, it is good practice to keep a CSV file of all your customer’s data offline as in the case of a data breach where you might have to take drastic measures to prevent further attacks.

Business owners who use CRM will have better chances of being on the right side of the law than if they were to do things haphazardly on their own. Note: this is not legal or financial advice and is written only for educational purposes. Whenever possible, seek competent legal advice about data protection or have Small Business Dream help you with it.

Collecting and Storing Customer Information

As much as possible, you should avoid storing sensitive information which may cause potential harm to the customer, esp. matters about one’s financial status or health condition except in business like real estate, medical services, or financial planning where they are considered essential. In this case, we need to secure information about our customers by all means.

At the very least, we only want the bare minimum such as names and contact information from the get-go. But as we get to know our potential clients and customer, we can collect more information about them through surveys, e.g., specific interests, hobbies, preferences, and other such details which doesn’t reveal sensitive information. Ultimately, we want to make sure our CRM is impervious to cyber attacks and allows us to quickly respond to data breach with relative ease.

Keeping Your Data Safe

Before signing up for any CRM service, you should ask your account representative where they store their data. You should avoid companies that have data centres in countries that don’t have a good record of privacy or security. Small Business Dream uses servers in Australia, Japan and the United States – three countries that take privacy and security very seriously.

Most CRMs have SSL certificates to prevent unauthorized access to your customer database. Small Business Dream CRM uses secure connection for accessing the CRM accounts. It also makes it possible to remotely access the CRM in case of theft or loss, providing users some window to pre-empt a data breach, and quickly notify customers about it. In any case, don’t hesitate to let Small Business Dream help you out by availing one of our mentoring and customization packages designed to provide you with the best and most secure user experience.

In closing, CRM can be of great help for business owners to be a step ahead, not only in the competitive world of business, but in keeping it within safe bounds of data protection laws. Compliance is no longer just an option – having a CRM for your business is more of a necessity, if not the only logical choice.

Creating an Email Strategy for Your Small Business

We’re all familiar with email marketing. It’s how we get our coupons, discounts, and newsletters from businesses all over the internet. Many of these emails are considered spam. So how do small companies without a big marketing budget do email marketing correctly to engage their audience and drive more people to their websites or into their stores?

We’ll answer the question with a proven strategy using sales and marketing automation. Here’s why you should consider creating an email strategy for your small business:

Half of the world’s population are email users. Estimates show around 3.8 billion email users by the end of 2018. Gmail users alone account for 1 billion email accounts, 75% of whom access them through their mobile devices. In fact, every mobile user has at least one email account for signing up on Google Play or accessing their social media account through Facebook Mobile or Twitter. One in two of your potential clients and customers are email users (give or take, depending on where you live), and by being able to connect with them, you could potentially increase your income by as much as 50%.

Stay on top of user engagement. Besides email, the internet has plenty of other platforms for connecting with other people around the world. But despite the popularity of social media, email still ranks as the best and the most preferred method of communication, particularly on anything business-related. One of the key advantages of having an email list is that, unlike Facebook or Twitter, you have more control over how your message is delivered to your target audience. You could spend hours creating great content for them, but it could quickly vanish from Facebook newsfeed or buried underneath by dozens of other posts within minutes.

Automate routine tasks more easily. Small business owners don’t have much time on their hands responding to every email. Fact is, they don’t have to. Some of the best sales and marketing automation have mailing lists, email templates, and auto-responders taking care of most of the work so they can focus more on things that matter. It might take some work initially getting more acquainted with the ins and outs and creating an email strategy. As you gain more experience, you’ll be spending less time with it, and begin to reap the benefits of using this sales and marketing feature for your small business.

Steps in Building your Email List Using Sales and Marketing Automation

Step 1:

Choose a sales and marketing automtion software with an auto-responder feature. If you’re just starting out with email marketing, you don’t need an expensive CRM like Salesforce, Hupspot, or NetSuite. There are plenty of options for business owners from email subscription service and lead-generation software. Small Business Dream offers service packages for small businesses who want to accelerate growth using this feature. Just remember to stay within the bounds on the proper use of this tool.

Step 2:

Set up an opt-in page or survey form. You can start with a very simple and straightforward landing page or survey form and add your bells and whistles as you get better. Small Business Dream can help you set up your first landing page and survey form. Share the link through your Facebook Page, WordPress, or your company website. Or you can have it the old way and add the contact yourself (be sure to get their email addresses). Another method is to put QR codes in conspicuous places to get your walk-in prospects and customers to your landing page or online survey. Offer freebies or discounts for taking the time.

Step 3:

Wait for confirmation from your subscribers. Double opt-ins is the preferred method of choice for email subscriptions because it accomplishes two things at once. First, it filters out low-quality leads, and second, it helps verify real users. This might seem tedious compared to single opt-ins, but you’ll have better chances of making more conversions over the long haul for getting high-quality leads. It consists of a few lines asking your recipients to confirm they’ve opted in to your mailing list by clicking a link, etc., hence a “double” opt-in.

Step 4:

Segment your prospects and customers. You may start with just a few categories at first. Later, you can add more details to your customer data to make it more granular. Small Business Dream allows you to segment your prospects and customers from your initial survey. For instance, you can include a list of brands, companies, or products on the survey form and Small Business Dream will categorize each contact based on which box your visitors have checked. The same applies for setting priority to every customer. You can update their category by giving out surveys periodically in order to stay relevant to them.

Step 5:

Create a simple email follow-up series. Take some time reading through the templates to see how each customer engagement progress seamlessly to the next, and so on. It usually takes some practice and experimenting to make sure it won’t sound robotic. As much as possible, we want to avoid the impression that they’re dealing with a robot secretary instead of a real person, by a adding a human touch to every conversation.

Conclusion

Having a mailing list for your small business is more of a necessity these days, now that our target audience is moving towards mobile. Take some time learning the ropes and start making your own email strategy.

5 Reasons Why You Should Learn CRM Now

Running a successful business takes more than just hard work. A lot of times, it’s more about being smart, critical thinking, and minimizing work through sales and marketing automation and Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Many small businesses are still missing out on this remarkable tool which would have saved them time and money, reduced stress, and helped grow their business like never before. However, it’s never too late learning about CRMs. We have a system that can help small business owners and salespersons become a CRM virtuoso with practice and a little bit of creativity.

Here are five reasons why you should learn CRM now.

Use Time More Productively

You’ve probably heard about the 80/20 rule with regard to time management and productivity. Put simply, 80 percent of outputs comes from 20 percent of our tasks, while the other 20 percent comes from 80 percent of tasks.

Small business owners often put too much time and energy on things which can easily be done through automation like customer acquisition, and maintaining customer loyalty. Time lost is money lost, so we want to focus more on strategy and developing skill sets such as dealing with prospects and customers – also known as ‘soft skills’ – and be able to automate most of our routine tasks.

Small Business Dream CRM works on the same principle by allowing the system to do most of the heavy lifting so that by the time it gets to you, all it takes is a simple follow-up call, email, or SMS. In other words, we’re working smarter, not harder. Additionally, Small Business Dream keeps your customers in the loop through automated email follow-up series, newsletters, and surveys.

Use Technology to Outpace the Competition

Technology has levelled the playing field for many of our small businesses. We’ve seen this many times with brick and mortar stores, local shops and restaurants growing massively through the internet and social media. It’s incredibly hard to compete with stores like Walmart, Amazon, McDonalds and General Electric, however when it comes to reaching your target audience, no matter if you’re big or small, we all have the same access.

Today, it only takes a simple tool like sales and marketing automation to do certain tasks which would otherwise be more involved and time-consuming. Small Business Dream CRM combines marketing automation with a simple, user-friendly interface to help business owners build their own templates, landing pages, sales funnel, and survey forms, and be able to promote their business on multiple channels, either directly from a sales funnel card (QR code or link to site) or through referral links, social media posts, updates, and invites – the possibilities are endless.

Create a Good Impression about Your Business

Customers will have an opinion about your business during the crucial 8 seconds on your website or landing page. They’d either stay on page to learn more about your business, or look somewhere else. Most of the hard work when trying to get more customers comes from designing landing pages which are both appealing and engaging.

CRMs make it surprisingly easy for businesses to create user experience with potential clients and customers. Small Business Dream integrates a lot of its site-building capabilities on the Sales Funnel Setup enabling business to create stunning websites, sales funnels, and landing pages. With practice you’ll be able to create professional-looking web pages to impress your target audience, but more importantly, convert more prospects into qualified leads and buying customers.

Save Money on Your Marketing Expenses

Automation took over a lot of our tasks such as sending emails, replying to certain requests, promotion, lead acquisition, and so on. It enables small businesses to cut back on marketing expenses while still gaining a competitive edge over the competition whether it’s real estate, insurance, event planners, restaurants, salons, dental practice – pretty much any kind of business.

Nowadays, you don’t have to hire additional personnel to do multiple tasks. You can build on your marketing strategy from time to time, spending just an hour or two on Small Business Dream. Customize your email autoresponder, tweak some settings, and perfect your Sales Funnel after doing all your tasks in the Action List.

Spend as much time as your schedule would allow. For those who need more time typing in customer information, Small Business Dream has a Card Scan function to take care of your data entry tasks, and done-for-you (DFY) website setup packages for busy business owners.

Have Full Control On How You Want to Interact with Customers.

Marketing automation works best with different approaches to customer acquisition such as permission marketing, personalized messages, and human interaction. We want to use both full-automation and semi-automation when dealing with potential clients and customers. Buying lists from data suppliers won’t cut it, and you could end up paying fines on the wrong use of marketing automation like sending unsolicited emails (CAN-SPAM Act of 2003).

Small Business Dream CRM gives business owners total control by combining different approaches on how they wish to interact with their leads and buying customers. Need more clients to fill up your Action List? Set up a Sales Funnel or landing page and have your visitors and walk-in customers optin to your email lists, Facebook, or Twitter follow up series. Use templates to quickly send personalized, semi-automated messages on the fly, or make the call as soon as they show up on your Call List.

Conclusion

Your ability to use CRM will make a big difference in getting more customers and increasing sales. With all the challenges faced by many small businesses and with competition on every turn, this could mean the difference between rapid growth and going out of business. You, too, can experience the power of CRM if you only take the time to put these words into action.

Take your business to the next level through sales and marketing automation. Visit SmallBizDream.com and start using our suite of tools to increase your sales and profitability like never before.