sales automation | smallbizdream blog

How Small Businesses Can Take Advantage of Boxing Day Sales

Sales and discounts are everywhere this time of the year as businesses gear up for the shopping spree. For many small businesses, this could be their chance at getting more customers, boosting sales, and reigniting old customers. Customers who missed out on Black Friday and Cyber Monday would certainly be scrambling for Boxing Day sales, so take the time prepping up for the holiday frenzy.

Gear up for the Occasion

As a small business owner, this could be your chance to reengage customers who haven’t bought from you in a long time. What better chance than to entice them back with a nice juicy Boxing Day Sale?

Try to be competitive with your pricing. Finding the sweet spot is a fine balancing act which requires some knowledge in marketing and managing your cash flow. However, since every store in the city will be dropping prices as much as 25 to 50 percent, you might want to consider a sale if nothing more than to stay competitive with your competition. Think of price cuts (also known as “loss leader”) as part of your marketing expenses.

Freeing up your store from old inventory and putting them on sale is also a good way to beat the competition. Make sure they’re still in good condition, though, to avoid hurting your reputation.

Maximize Customer Engagement: Online and Offline Sales

Small businesses don’t usually end up having “blockbuster deals” like you see in big chain stores because they can’t beat them on price so don’t even try to compete with them. Instead, the more successful small businesses have their own signature product, speciality goods, or service not found at any other place.

You might have the perfect several items sitting on your store for some time. A Boxing Day sale is the perfect time to mark them down to attract sales volume.

Having an e-commerce site or a Facebook Page for your business can also help maximize customer engagement if done correctly. Alternatively, you can set an email autoresponder to notify your customers a day ahead when they subscribe to your newsletter. Small Business Dream suite of tools can vastly improve shopping experience by engaging with customers on multiple channels such as phone, SMS, social media, email, landing page, sales funnel, and so on, whichever method they prefer.

Follow up on Your New Customers on Boxing Day

Aside from being a great way to maintain customer loyalty, one of the great things about the holiday season is the amount of information you’ll get from new customers. You’ll need a tool such as CRM to collect customer information (online or in-store visits and purchases), manage your customer database, and maintain customers’ interest through customer communication (email autoresponders and newsletters subscriptions) long after the shopping frenzy is over.

Shoppers are in the holiday spirit so they are more likely to sign up for newsletters to be notified for the latest deals to make sure they never miss out on anything. They want to know which products will be on sale and when. CRM makes this all possible for you, at little or no expense to your business.

You should also collect new customer information even before Boxing Day starts by using CRM to conduct customer surveys or newsletter subscriptions via social media. Small Business Dream puts all the information from your Survey Page or Sales Funnel straight to your customer database, segment your customers right off the bat and send them on to your email autoresponders.

You can do it the old way and let Small Business Dream take it from there. Have your in-store customers fill up a short survey or ask for their business card and quickly add them to your database using Small Business Dream’s Card Scan feature, or you can do it yourself on your spare time.

Conclusion

Take this opportunity to grow your business and get noticed this holiday season. Use technology and your creative flair to your advantage, but most importantly to bring joy and satisfaction to your valued customers. So go ahead and make this Boxing Day an unforgettable shopping experience!

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.

5 Steps to Creating Your First Landing Page

Spending a ton of money on expensive ads is pretty much a thing of the past. Nowadays, you can setup your own landing page and have as much reach or even greater. One of the quickest ways in acquiring new customers in the digital era is by having a landing page for your business.

Getting to Know Some Basics

Traditional businesses find it much easier to build an online presence, thanks to vastly improved site creation tools designed specifically for people with little or no experience working with websites. Clickfunnels and Leadpages are some examples of DIY landing page builders for beginners, but some CRMs also have this feature as one of their customer acquisition tools.

These days, you don’t have to learn HTML and CSS since most landing page builders contain visual elements aside from the usual code. However, learning some basics allows you to make fine adjustments and have greater control on your landing page’s look and feel. There are basically two stages:

Laying the basic structure and content of your landing page using HTML (hypertext markup language)
Designing and applying styles using CSS (cascading stylesheets)

Using a landing page builder, you can simply choose a template or theme to work on and give it your own personal touch (changing the background colour, image, fonts, links, etc). Small Business Dream CRM allows you to use both methods for your landing page, sales funnel, and survey form. This, combined with a database management system and autoresponder makes Small Business Dream CRM a powerful tool for both old school and tech-savvy business owners.

Building Your First Landing Page with Small Business Dream CRM

Landing pages are some of the client acquisition tools you can use along with Small Business Dream’s survey forms, sales funnel, and card scan function. You may start with a simple landing page as your opt-in page and slowly build your email marketing strategy with Small Business Dream’s mailing list, email series, and autoresponder.

Step 1:

Sign up for a CRM Account. Small Business Dream has plenty of options for business owners, sales and marketing teams looking to gain a firsthand experience using the CRM. Upon subscription, you’ll be receiving updates which will guide you through the whole process and introduce you to the CRM’s main features and different functionalities including page and sales funnel creation.

Step 2:

Pick a landing page template. Small Business Dream has plenty of templates to choose from including restaurant, hair salon, facial care, auto repair – pretty much any kind of business. If you can’t find a match, you may choose any template and customize it by yourself (DIY), or you can avail of Small Business Dream’s Done for You (DFY) packages and have it set up for you (just provide your landing page’s ‘look and feel’ to facilitate the process).

Step 3:

Apply customization and styling effects. Start by putting your logo, images, and texts to your template. You can use your own images or get them free from Pexels or Pixabay. Match the aspect ratio of the target image to the page. Editing texts is pretty much like using a word processor on the page editor. You can then edit the links in your CTAs (call to action) by double clicking on the CTA button and inserting the URL or permalink to your sales funnel, survey, opt-in confirmation, or any other page you’ve made on the CRM. You can also change the background image for templates that utilize scrolling parallax effect (faux 3D) using the CSS editor; insert a video, modify background colour, or implement dynamic styling effects during mouse hover, etc.

Step 4:

Test your landing page. Small Business Dream’s templates are responsive both on PC and mobile. Modifying the templates on the surface level won’t have any effect on those. However, if you choose to move things around with the CSS editor, (float, aside, etc.) it’s good practice to check on the PC and mobile browsers if they’re positioned correctly. Also, test the CTA buttons if they lead to your assigned page URL.

Step 5:

Promote your landing page. You can start acquiring new leads with your landing page and watch your Action List fill with new contacts from time to time. Create more traffic to your landing page by using social media and encourage your friends and followers to share it with others (shorten your landing page’s URL using Small Business Dream’s Shorten URL feature to make it easier to remember). You may also try promoting your landing page through Facebook Ads for a limited time or have two versions (split tests) running at the same time – the possibilities are endless.

Final Thoughts

Spending some time working on your landing page pays dividends for your small business and really allow you to target niche markets. You only have around 8 seconds to make a good impression so you need to have good graphics and good copy on your landing page to make each second count. Make some improvements from time to time. See what works and update your knowledge on how to better use landing pages or have Small Business Dream assist you in reaching your goals.

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.

Customer Relationship Management Strategies for Financial Planners

Creating wealth and being financially secure later in life should be on top of everyone’s priority. However, most people know very little about the ins and outs of financial planning and probably need professional advice to help them with their short-term and long-term goals.

Financial planners are the go-to persons for people hoping to maintain the kind of lifestyle they want beyond their productive years. In the busy age of social media, technology, and shrinking attention spans financial planner need a way to educate and communicate with current and potential clients about the necessity of financial planning in these uncertain times. The best way to stay in touch is to automate using Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

Why Financial Planners Need CRM

Financial planners usually start small, often with very few results during the first few months. You’ll have to gain traction and build your name over time.

People who want to learn more about financial planning will come to you for answers. Most of the time, they can be dealt with in one or two articles (if you have your own blog or website), on your FAQ, landing page, or having an automated email response for each set of questions and related topics.

Autoresponders works perfectly in these situations, allowing you to stay in touch with your current and potential clients with less work. CRMs makes it easier to create your own pages, set up an email series or sales funnel, and have the system do the rest of the job screening out and acquiring new clients for you.

Strategies You can Implement Using Small Business Dream CRM

Let’s take a look at how CRM can be used to grow and succeed in this particular business.

Share your Expertise on Financial Literacy.

Most people shy away from financial literacy because it seems too complicated. You should start with an email series based on which plans your prospects would be interested in, say an email series about 401k’s, mutual funds, annuities, etc. Or you can have them sorted out based on a particular age bracket, net worth, long term/short term plans, and special cases such as illnesses and disabilities, and so on.

With Small Business Dream, you only have to do them every once in a while and have the system do the rest like switching from one email series to the next based on user response, or how often they’ll receive updates on their newsletter subscription.

Use Networking to Build Reputation and Trust.

Financial planners should work on building trust and establishing good reputation in the community. People want someone they can count on with their life’s savings, esp. one who is qualified to manage people’s funds. They want to know you really care about them and that you’re not just doing it for personal gain.

Networking events are a perfect opportunity to tell others how they can benefit from you. Whenever possible, make some preparations ahead of time building your own landing page and sales funnel, so you can present your business at a moment’s notice. Small Business Dream incorporates these features in the CRM and made it easier for the averager use to make one.

Follow up on your clients about their plans and recent changes in the market.

Inflation, market fluctuations, tax laws, etc. canimpact on your client’s portfolio. You need to be able to notify all of your clients as quickly as possible.

This can be done using Small Business Dream’s email blast feature, targeting specific segments in your email list that belong to a particular category of clients. This feature not only simplifies tasks for you, but it also helps build trust and confidence with your clients.

Conclusion

These are just but a few examples of how Small Business Dream can help financial planners succeed using CRM as their marketing and follow up tool to achieve phenomenal growth in the financial planning industry.

5 Ways CRM Can Help Your Auto Body Repair Shop

Standing out in a competitive world of auto repair industry is becoming more challenging. Shops are pretty much the same with their services offered, and they all share a common problem with regards to cycle times, turnarounds, and customer satisfaction. But there is a way to beat the competition and fix these problems using the right tools.

Growing Your Customer Base

Customer acquisition can take some time unless you actively market your business. Traditional means of getting exposure through ads and promos are still being used in the digital age, although they’re not always as affordable and effective as having your customers spread the word about your auto body repair business, i.e. through customer referrals or word of mouth. CRMs enable business owners to grow their customer base by reaching out to their target market more efficiently. Consider the following examples for auto body repair shops:

Acquiring information of potential customers on-site. Shop owners can collect customer details such as contact information from walk-in prospects and customers asking for quotes on their repair service and follow up on them based on their preferred method. Shop owners can also leverage by offering a referral program and give points redeemable for discounts, free items, and services to existing customers who can bring along new customers on-site. Small Business Dream’s Card Scan function takes a step further by having a data entry service to do all the typing work for them.
Acquiring information of potential customers online. Tech-savvy shop owners can acquire customer information through their websites, blogs, Twitter account or Facebook page and import them to the CRMs’ contact list. One advantage of having an online presence is it allows shop owners to collect customer data basically on autopilot. Small Business Dream can be used alongside existing auto body repair website, blog, Twitter, or Facebook Page, or it can create one for them as a micro-site or as part of a sales funnel. This automated feature not only increases your chances of acquiring new customers, but also saves your business time and money.

Managing Your Customer Data

Customer information has a lot of potential for growing your income. Unfortunately, many shop owners don’t have a system of collecting and storing them, or they have no idea what to do with the information they have. As a result, they miss a lot of opportunities for making conversions and repeat customers. CRM keeps all the customers’ data in one spot and shop owners can easily organize them however they want. This allows them to do the following:

Segmenting contact list. Business owners should be able to categorize and manage their contacts if they are to stay relevant and top of mind with them. Majority of email marketing campaigns fail because they are too generic or end up in the recipients’ spam folders. Small Business Dream CRM enables auto body repair shops to hone in to a specific type of audience based on category, whether they are new clients, regular customers, or you can categorize them based on their cars’ make, model, mileage, ownership status, and so on. With Small Business Dream you can also send automated or semi-automated emails to let customers know what stage their car process is at. For example, an email can go out that you’ve got a quote for the work from insurance. The next email can be you’ve started work and so on. This is an easy way to keep your customers engaged and will ensure a higher level of customer service which will in turn get more referrals and more sales.

Prioritizing qualified leads and customers. Shop owners pay careful attention to cycle times and turnaround times in order to stay on schedule. Small Business Dream CRM allows them to prioritize who comes up first on their Action List and when they wish to have them back on that section. This feature will come in handy when you want to give your customers a heads up in case you experience some delays with your auto parts supplier, auto insurance company, or if you want to update them about the status of the repair. You can also set the date when you want to follow up on them based on your turnaround date so you can quickly notify them of a successful repair, and a thank you note for choosing your shop.

Maintaining Customer Relationship

Brand loyalty can be a game changer in the auto body repair industry; you need a tool to keep your business top-of-mind to your customers and be able to do them with minimal effort. CRM helps maintain customers’ interest by automating certain tasks for you. Touch base with your customers if they need a tune-up. Offer tire changing services for the winter and summer season. Small Business Dream lets you accomplish all these tasks with just a few clicks after searching for a specific category of clients and potential customers on the Email Group section you wish to communicate with.

Creating an Email or Content Marketing Strategy

As a shop owner, you can share your expertise and experiences gained in the auto repair industry to educate your prospects and customers about proper care and maintenance. Small Business Dream’s autoresponders, enables you to build an email series for your subscribers about the importance of rotating their tires once every 5000 miles to evenly distribute wear and maintain traction, or preserving their cars’ lustre and shine by using automotive cleaners instead of liquid soaps and detergents. This CRM feature can also lead to a sale or a new customer when used with the sales funnel and following up on them through the Action List.

Listening to Customer Feedback

Business owners learn a lot by listening to their customers and can make you stand out in an industry that isn’t known for its customer service. Small Business Dream’s Survey Funnel allows shop owners to find gaps in their services and act accordingly. By automatically sending out a survey to all its customers it allows you to receive valuable feedback. How many of your customers prefer shorter turnaround times and those who prefer to have a thorough check-up, damage assessment and repair? Survey forms can be fine-tuned at any point in time to stay relevant and collect more information from your customers as needed.

The Small Business Dream Survey Funnel is extremely easy to use and doesn’t require any special web skills. All you need to do is write the questions you want your customer to answer and then create an answer field. You can use multiple choice or a checklist – whatever fits your needs.

Whatever your customer service needs, Small Business Dream is an amazing tool to collect, contact, and manage all your customers and leads.

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.

Simple Ways to Integrate Permission Marketing Into Marketing Automation

Marketing automation is at the core of almost every online business today, and should also be a key strategy in more traditional businesses as well.

As a cost-effective way to reach out potential customers, this strategy has proved time and again that anyone – with sufficient knowledge, tools, and skill sets – can have a fair chance to compete with other businesses worldwide.

However, even the most innovative online strategy has a downside. For years, marketing automation has become the subject of misuse among online marketers who pitched automation as a way of turning businesses into online ‘cash machines’ without ever spending time and effort with potential customers. It made marketing automation synonymous to spamming.

Faced with more stringent rules regarding customer engagement and increased customer awareness, online marketers are back to the drawing board on how they could use automation to deliver the same results back in its heyday, or even better.

Why a Change of Strategy is Necessary

When marketing automation was at its peak, many believed that as long as you were able to make tons of content and send a relentless barrage of emails to practically any person on earth that has an email address, sooner or later people would respond to your call and generate income for your business.

The idea comes from the analogy of shooting as many arrows as you can, hoping that one or two will eventually land on their target out of mere chance (known as the ‘spray and pray’ method). Although some businesses use this method effectively, it usually comes at a price.

For one thing, marketers who rely heavily on conventional marketing automation are putting their businesses at risk by sending unsolicited emails to people whose contact information were sourced from a third-party data supplier.

This method obviously won’t work, since most emails have already built defenses against spamming. CAN-SPAM Act will also make these marketers think twice about ever using this method again.

Aside from bordering unlawful marketing practices, it tends to yield diminishing returns over time as contacts starts falling off and fewer people become available to them. It usually guarantees a one-time success with little or no regard for ongoing customer relationship and repeat purchases.

Staying relevant with the customers is almost impossible to attain with conventional marketing automation. Usually, what happens is that companies will send every content that they have on a particular niche to people in their massive list of contacts, hoping to strike a chord with just one or two articles sent to them in rapid succession. It’s essentially a ‘hit-or-miss’ strategy.

As customer engagement comes close to non-existent, they would eventually lose their ship, and no amount of automation can save it from sinking to the bottom.

The question now is whether marketing automation can still be a viable option to speed up the process and boost sales despite its shortcomings in customer engagement.

A Step towards Permission Marketing

Permission marketing was coined by marketing expert Seth Godin to denote marketing strategies that rely on customer feedback, i.e., permission, to initiate ongoing customer relationship and interaction which allows them to receive updates and follow-ups on demand.

Unlike traditional outbound marketing, which he appropriately calls ‘interruption marketing’, permission marketing spares people the trouble of going through the ordeal of being constantly bombarded with marketing pitches. It gives them more freedom and control over the situation and encourages them to either share more about their interests and other key information about themselves, or turn into buying customers.

Others tend to view permission marketing as the antithesis of marketing automation because it’s more involved and requires frequent human interaction. The fact is, permission marketing needs a starting point, and that involves automation.

Sign-up forms via landing pages, which may also include opt-in to newsletters or social media posts, are just a few classic examples on how to initiate permission marketing.

Still others believe that permission marketing is a little too slow compared to marketing automation aside from the fact that it gives too much freedom to potential customers to take action whenever they want to. They aim for quick, albeit short-lived gains, instead of nurturing previous and current customers for long-term, sustainable income.

In the final analysis, those who relied on one-time customer engagements end up losing more money looking for new prospects while those who took their time watering and growing their customer base could increase revenue exponentially through updates, follow-ups, customer referrals, crossing-selling, up-selling, and repeat purchases.

The Smart Way to Automate

Marketing automation platforms can only do so well when it comes to tasks which could be reasonably accomplished through automation. Some aspects of marketing are best performed through human interaction which cannot be copied or supplanted by automated means.

Read: Digital and Physical Customer Engagement, and Why You Need Both

Keep these in mind when using marketing automation to attract and maintain customers for your business:

Open up multiple channels to collect customer information.

Inbound marketing has proven its effectiveness over outbound marketing by emphasizing customer awareness.

Opening up multiple channels of customer engagement maximizes your chances of getting in touch with them. This includes setting up a blog, website, landing page, and social media account, to name a few.

Your marketing automation platform can be seamlessly integrated to all these channels to collect, store, and analyze customer information for you after signing up to your mailing list or subscribe for a free newsletter. Marketing automation shines best at this stage of customer engagement.

Dissect your sales pipeline to see which approach works best in every stage. In case you haven’t noticed this part has been alluded to in the previous item.

The first stage, which involves data collection and storage, is best accomplished with marketing automation.

Following up, which is the next stage, involves a combination of both permission marketing and marketing automation.

When trying to learn more about your leads, you can revert back to automation to, once again, collect relevant information about them and analyze whether or not they could be qualified as potential customers. The marketing team would then assign the lead scores, start with the sales process, and close the deal.

Use email segmentation and the buyer persona to guide your marketing effort. These marketing strategies allow you to narrow down your target audience and zero them in with pinpoint accuracy. It takes time and effort creating relevant content based on different segments and customer behavior.

The easiest way to fail in any kind of marketing strategy is to use the same cut-and-dried content across all contacts and send them out at a robotic pace, one email after another.

You need to customize your content according to the different segments in your email list and provide an option for a follow-up or additional information about the topic.

When deciding for the most appropriate product or service for a certain group of customers, you can refer to your buyer persona as your guide.

Choose a marketing automation platform that works for you. A good marketing automation platform often comes at a price.

However, most companies offer different versions of their product ranging from the most basic ones at no cost, to premium offerings with a complete suite of tools at about a hundred to two hundred dollars per month.

Marketing automation can still be as powerful as any marketing strategy if you can put other elements into the mix such as permission marketing to interact with your potential customers and collect your data about your target market.