As a small business owner, you’ve probably already heard about the wonders of marketing software tools designed to help you grow your business and boost your sales.

Merging  email marketing, marketing automation and landing page building into one software platform helps small businesses to develop a successful strategy to reach more customers and to sell more!

As one of the most tested marketing technologies in the last few years, email marketing and marketing automation have revolutionized the way businesses do marketing. Studies have revealed that automated emails have had a 152% higher click rate and a 77% higher open rate than other emails sent.

According to another research, 4 out of 5 marketing automation users experienced an increase in leads, and almost as many (77%) saw an increase in conversions. An interesting fact is that recently published stats showed that 67% of marketing leaders are currently using marketing automation platforms in their businesses.

As the fastest way to grow your business, marketing automation, email marketing and landing pages allow you to provide more relevant and personalized content, so you can reach, convert and keep more customers than ever before.

With automation tools such as smoove you can do all of this to take your business to the next level. Users love it for its simple, intuitive, effortless and easy-to-use features that transform the way they interact with their customers.

smoove is a marketing automation platform which allows you to build personalized email templates, set behavior-based triggers for when the emails are sent, and attract new visitors through smart landing pages and personalized forms. It’s a platform specially designed for small business owners who need a simple and all-in-one sales-boosting tool. We call it “smart marketing”.

How does Smoove work?

To  see what smoove can do for you and your business, here are some of its core features:

1. Email marketing

Email marketing is one of the most effective channels for marketing your business. Automatic email campaigns are triggered by a user’s actions and are sent out personalized and timely, with content relevant to the email recipient.

By setting this up in your business these automated emails are opened and clicked more frequently and drive more visits and revenue.

With smoove you can create your own template or choose from many email templates and then personalise them with custom fields. This feature also enables you to include URL’s and ZIP files in your email.

With smoove’s email builder you can easily choose to send an email to an individual customer or a list of segmented customers, and you can also exclude any segments you don’t want to target. This enables you to build a strong relationship with your customers, simply and easily.

a. List management

smoove enables you to create and manage an unlimited number of mailing lists. By segmenting your customers into different target audience groups based on variety of parameters (such as fields of interest, purchased products, responses to your previous emails and more), you can adjust the content of your offers according to these parameters. This way, you can make sure every recipient gets only the most relevant content for his or hers interests and needs.

For example, if you own a hair salon and want to attract more new customers, you can make a list of your first time subscribers and then send them an email with a 20% off coupon to use on their first haircut. This is how list management can help you to target a specific group of customers and bring more people to your store.

b. Adding personalized fields

Adding personalized fields to your emails is great feature from smoove that helps you maximize conversion and strengthen relationships with your customers.

This way you can collect lots of different information about your clients such as their phone number, their interests, past purchases and even ask them if they have any special requests when it comes to the content of your offers. You can then use that information for all your emails, choosing between different formats and types of personalized fields such as yes/no fields, drop down lists, free text and more.

For example, if you own a bicycle store and have some data on your customers interests such as mountain biking, you can use that information in future to send out a personalized email with offers that include bicycles and accessories specially designed for mountain biking.

c. AB testing

A/B testing is a smoove tool that can instantly improve your email performance and drive more engagement from your customers. It allows you to make smart decisions by choosing between two options for the one that works best.

The best strategy is to change just one element (such as subject line, CTA button, coloring and so on).

You can then, for example, send half or a proportion of your customers version A, and the rest of your customers version B to see which works best.

With this very simple and useful tool, you can choose between the one that was opened the most and the one that was clicked on the most.

For example, if you run a bike store and have two offers that save the customer the same amount of money, such as free shipping or a 15% off coupon for purchase of a new helmet, A/B testing lets you know what offer is the most appealing.

2. Marketing Automation

Marketing automation software is a technology which is solely designed for the purpose of automating many time-consuming marketing actions and tasks. With smoove’s marketing automation, you have access to many powerful features like multi-step campaigns and easy to build landing pages and web forms. It helps you to integrate your campaigns with social media such as Facebook.

By automating marketing tasks and processes via smoove, you can collect different kinds of data based on how your leads engage with your campaigns and content.

Marketing automation benefits are multiple. For example, you can create different campaigns ahead of time, and schedule them for a time and date in the future. This way you can send a “Welcome” email to your new subscribers today, and your first “Did you check our offer” newsletter 5 days later to keep your company front of mind with every customers and start the relationship building with them. Along with being a huge time saver, automation gives your business an instant credibility.

Also, marketing automation makes it possible for any business to build a consistent brand presence on multiple channels such as email, SMS, Facebook, Twitter, Instagram and more. This helps customers to recognize your brand easily and to connect to you via their preferred channel.

smoove saves the time you would usually spend on these repetitive tasks and makes them much easier and more efficient.

smoove’s automation allows you to create automated emails that are sent when triggered by a subscriber’s activity, or a certain date like a birthday. Its automation builder has a broad range of triggers such as Facebook registrations, reminders & occasions, landing page registrations, purchases, abandoned cart and more. You can also start from scratch with your automation and create your own triggers, actions and conditions.

By automatically sending emails with the help of triggers you can provide your customers with content that matters to them in a specific moment in time. This saves you valuable time and makes sure everyone is nurtured correctly, and helps you segment your customers in order to create other personalized campaigns.

For example, you can send a different “Thank you” email for each type of product range instantly the moment they purchase from your store.

You can also send an automated welcome email to your first time subscribers, offer a free trial or product sample to those who’ve been your users for a while, or remind those who purchased your product that you have more of that good stuff for them.

This is how you convert your subscribers into customers in a timely manner as not all of them are ready to purchase from the very moment they subscribe to your email.

The amazing thing about smoove’s automation is as soon as you set it up, smoove will give you live data for each part of the process, so you can see live feedback on its performance.

3. Landing page building

A landing page is a web page with the sole purpose to converting your visitors to customers by offering them something of value. This may be a product sample, free ebook, discount, consult, trial or any product or service you’re selling.

It invites visitors through calls-to-action to provide data in exchange for interesting and useful content and other offers you may have. By using a form you can collect customer data such as their name, address or email address and the great thing is it requires no extra work on your part. This means you can use your landing page to convert leads into customers while you’re on vacation or busy doing other important tasks.

With smoove’s landing page builder you can support your marketing campaigns and generate leads easier than ever. Its drag-and-drop interface and pre-designed templates saves you time and money that you would usually spend on hiring designers, and its simple web forms capture customer information easily.

Its smart functionality takes conversions to another level. smoove is full of smart hacks such as smart buttons, smart blocks, the ability to connect several different landing pages, and create an easily customisable “Thank you” page to send your visitors in the right direction once they have completed your landing page form.

smoove enables you to simply design by using its modular template system, add a registration form so you can define which list of the subscribers it will be directed to. For example, if you run an organic food store, you can offer a free online consultation from a nutritionist to every new subscribers, or provide the first 100 of subscribed people with a free sample of your popular product.

smoove’s landing page wizard offers you a number of templates suitable for different kinds of small businesses and enables you to upload your logo with a background image or video you may want to go with.

By attracting customers with smart landing pages, personalized forms and collecting all the data you need, you will be growing your business the smoove way!

Wrap-Up

smoove is a smart marketing automation platform designed for small business owners who need an all-in-one easy to use system to improve their marketing efforts. Its core features – email automation, marketing automation and a smart landing page builder helps you personalize your marketing campaigns, maximize the conversion and establish a strong relationship with your customers.

With smoove you can start creating your campaigns today with no risk using smoove’s free sign up. It’s also full of other interesting content and tutorials to help you on your way. Get started today and grow your business with smoove!

The majority of businesses advertise online nowadays, which means the battle for attention for the average internet user is raging more than ever before. For businesses, this means that getting noticed in a sea of other businesses doing the same things, is becoming increasingly difficult.

However, marketing online has grown to much, much more than just buying advertising space. People are now doing a myriad of things to advertise their business online and get noticed, like setting up a strong social media presence, using email as a marketing platform, building high-converting landing pages and using forums to engage in a direct, one-on-one conversation with their customers.

Here is what you can do to stand out from the crowd and get noticed by the people you care about most – your customers.

Set up a Facebook page and start creating Facebook live videos

Facebook still reigns as the undisputed champion of the internet, amassing more than two billion active monthly users, and almost 1.5 billion active daily users. For that reason, your first step towards marketing excellence is to create a Facebook page as a place where your customers can come, talk to you, share their experiences, ideas and demands. It is also a place you will use to help solve your customers’ problems and dilemmas, strengthening the bond between the two of you in the process. You will use it to raise brand awareness, to show your customers your business’ personal side, and share the content they would find useful.

You can find a step-by-step tutorial on how to create the page here.

That being said, it is important to know what kind of content you should consider for your Facebook page. We highly recommend focusing on video content. Why? It’s very, very, *very* (we can’t stress this enough) efficient. Recent stats have shown that more than half a billion people watch videos on Facebook every day. And if that wasn’t enough, 80 percent of all consumer internet traffic in 2021 will be video traffic.

If the type of your business allows it, create Facebook live videos. All you need for those is a smartphone and the Facebook app, and you’re good to go. You can find a step-by-step guide on how to go live on Facebook via mobile on this link.

For example, if you own a hairdresser salon, or a tattoo parlor, you might bring up a livestream session when you start cutting or tattooing. You’d be amazed at how many people actually enjoy watching these sessions. For inspiration check out these 9 Facebook live for business examples. Live video streaming can be used to present a new product or offer, to host live tutorials, to do a live Q&A, or simply to chat with your customers.

Utilize landing pages to engage with your customers and grow your business

One of the purposes of landing pages is to help you with lead generation [Image Credit: Pinterest]

Landing pages work on a simple give-and-get principle – they offer a visitor something valuable, and ask for an email address in return. That email address is crucial, as it allows the business to open a direct and (virtually) free channel of communication with a cherry-picked group of consumers. Businesses can set up landing pages themselves, they don’t need to hire expensive design experts or buy software that’s gonna burn a hole in their wallets. A simple landing page builder, like this one, together with a few minutes of their time, will suffice. Moreover, collecting email addresses is only the first step – landing pages can be a tremendous customer retention tool. Businesses can use landing pages to offer things like:

• Discounts and sales
• Special events (for example, a dentist can offer a free dental check-up),
• Joining mailing lists to get newsletters filled with useful and interesting information,
• One-on-one appointments.

Send out newsletters

When it comes to advertising your small business online, don’t forget newsletters. Newsletters are a great way for small businesses to engage with their current customers and retain them. With that in mind, you should keep the types of sales and content of these emails in your mind, at all times.

You can use newsletters to notify your customers of new arrivals, or if their favorite items are back in stock. You can use it to notify them if the store will be closed on a specific day, or for a specific reason. But not all of the content in a newsletter must be promotional, you can also use it to tighten up the bond you have with your customers by providing valuable, cool information. You can write a few tips or tricks about your business, or something you’ve learned in your practice. So if you’re running that bike store, you can write about that cool new method of replacing the chain you learned yesterday, or share some arcane knowledge on how to clean your bike after a downhill, without looking like you fell down the mountain in the process. You can send out newsletters directly from your inbox or by using simple tools that offer hundreds of ready to use templates. The bottom line is that you can have your newsletter up and running in virtually no time.

Buy ads

Obviously, buying ads is still indispensable and you would do good not to turn a blind eye on it. Besides still being highly relevant and efficient, another thing that’s good about buying ads online is that it is much easier to set up than it sounds (it makes sense – people will make it easy for you to give them money, right?). You don’t need expensive visual designers, copywriters, digital marketing experts or dark arts practitioners to get your ad campaign up and running. All you need to do is pick a platform and go through its step-by-step guide, and you will have set up a campaign in no time.

For platforms, we suggest either Google or Facebook as those two are the largest and have solid customer support. To learn how to set up your Google advertising campaign follow this tutorial, and for Facebook – this tutorial.

Start talking

Another cool way to advertise your business and get noticed among the crowd of your choosing is to find where they hang out online and get into the conversation. Forums, social media sites and topics, such as Facebook groups or Twitter hashtags, are teeming with questions for which you, and your business, are most likely the answer. By successfully finding those sites, and within them, the right threads/questions, you can join the conversation, add value to it by providing great answers, and promote your business in the process. Start by googling questions your customers usually ask you in store, see what comes up. You can type in the same questions directly on Facebook / Twitter, as well. After that, try expanding the search by using synonyms, as well as shorter or longer questions. Just don’t forget not to come off as too salesy when responding to questions. People won’t mind you throwing in a few nice words about your business, as long as you are able to properly answer their questions and help them with whatever problems they are facing.

Let’s say that you own a store selling healthy food. By searching for pages related to healthy food on Facebook, you can find groups with hundreds of thousands of people discussing different foods and recipes, sharing experiences and new ideas. A perfect place to get noticed.

Facebook is a great place to start a conversation about your business [Image Credit: Screenshot]

Closing comments

Advertising online and being noticed in an internet brimming with businesses and people with ever shortening attention spans is becoming an increasingly difficult task. But it can be made simpler by staying up to date on the current trends, knowing where people go when they’re online, and what they look for, once they’re there. With that in mind, you’ll do good to start using Facebook live video tools, landing pages, newsletters and forums to advertise your business. Without a doubt, it will get you noticed among your current and future customers.

Small businesses are always on the lookout for clever ways to keep their existing customers, and win over new ones. Business marketing always ends up being an essential part of that endeavor, but not everyone has the time or the resources to hire expensive marketing professionals, or go back to school to learn about marketing. If you are one of those people, check the marketing hacks in this post and use them to make your customers love doing business with you.

Email marketing

Email is a great tool for a simple reason – it opens a direct avenue of communication with your customers. If you have their email, you can reach out to them directly, which is something of a holy grail for every marketer. You can use it to send newsletters, advertise new offers, loyalty programs or special discounts. The use of email for marketing purposes is limited only by your imagination.

But people are also very sensitive when it comes to their emails because emails have become a personal, intimate thing. So first thing you want to do is make sure you get their permission to send them emails.

If your small business is a store, you can kickstart this process by asking your regular customers to give you their email addresses in order to receive your weekly/monthly offer with discounts. You can also use your landing page for the same purpose. Depending on the type of business you’re in, you can offer a discount or a free trial of a service, in exchange for your customers’ email address.

The second step is to create a welcome email. Here are few things you should focus on when writing your email:

• Use conversational and relaxed tone, as if you are talking to a friend of yours, informing them about the great local store they should visit.
• Do not forget to include basic information about your business, with references to the social media you are active on.
• Offer them a reward, in form of, say, a 10 percent discount on their next purchase.

Preparing and sending great newsletters can be an essential component of your marketing plan. Their content and proper sending timing will be the key consideration on your checklist here, which is why you can use these tips to better plan for this approach:

• Do not underestimate the effect of creative email subject lines. You want to grab your customer’s attention from the start.
• Focus on promotional newsletters. Offer discounts, loyalty rewards, etc. Use this channel to promote company announcements, benefits, coupons. Think of the same type of content you’d put on a Facebook page, but with the difference of using the newsletter to generate foot traffic to your store.
• Finally, do not forget to make it easy for your customers to unsubscribe. You may not want to see it happen but once it is decided make sure you part your ways with a subscriber on good terms.

Also, emailing frequency for your customers should not be something to be taken lightly if you are after optimal marketing results. Do not overmail them, as being persistent with your email marketing does not mean sending mails on daily basis. Actually, one of the key reasons people unsubscribe has to do with them being emailed too often.

You can start with the following recommended emailing frequency, while being ready to experiment with it on your own: Day 1: First follow up (+2 days), Day 3: Follow up (+4), Day 7: Follow up (+7), Day 14: Follow up (+14), Day 28: Follow up (+30), Day 58, followed by monthly emails (+30 days).

Overmailing can be just as bad as undermailing your customers.
Image Credit: Technology Advice

If all of this feels as too much work, don’t worry – you don’t have to hire extra staff. A lot of this can be automated through email automation tools. Automation tools can be used to send newsletters in blast to your entire email list, which will prove extremely valuable when promoting new or special offers. These tools also use triggers, so you can send automated emails on different occasions, such as when users subscribe to your newsletter, purchase something from you or click on your ad. In addition to setting these events, you can prepare this email’s content in advance as well as schedule regular intervals at which they will be sent, taking into account the above recommendations regarding overmailing/undermailing. What’s also a nifty little advantage is the fact that you can personalize these emails to a serious degree. For example, if you know your customers’ birthdays, you can set up an automated email to be sent on their birthday, with a little congratulations message, paired with a special birthday offer.

Finding your way around social media

“Whether you are a small business or a big corporation, there is a space for you on social media. It’s understandable as a new entrepreneur to be hesitant to implement a social media marketing strategy, particularly if you have a small team or a limited budget.” – Kurt Lohmann, Digital Marketing Consultant and Founder at Engaged Digital

Also, there’s the vast world of social media that absolutely must be utilized to win you more customers. But there are so many of them, and they’re all unique and different in their own way, so which ones do you choose? Choosing the right social media sites for your business probably requires a blog post of its own, but there is one network you can’t go wrong with, and that’s definitely Facebook. Here are a few reasons why:

• It’s the biggest network out there with more than two billion active users
• It has an awesome tool for business pages that allow you to communicate with your customers, but also to track all kinds of useful statistics about them

Using Facebook to attract new customers starts by building a Facebook page. It is all very simple, here is a short guide to get you started. Once you set it up, you’ll need to make sure your customers hear about it and join your community. You can do that by setting up a paid ad to promote your new page as well as to use your newsletter to do it (pro tip: include links to your social media accounts in your email signature, with a call to your customers to join you there). You can also use offline methods, like printing invites to whatever physical materials you use for the promotion of your business, such as receipts, bags, business cards etc.

OK, you got yourself a page and a bunch of people on it, but what do you actually do with it?

• Your new or most active followers/customers can be rewarded with special promotional/discount offers or “thank you” videos which can be uploaded to your page.
• Showing the customer-focused side of your business is bound to get you new clients. Upload a behind-the-scenes video/images of how your business functions on daily basis, and focus on this content being authentic instead of technically perfect.
• Do not overspread you resources – focus on the social media that your customers have the strongest presence on.

Paid advertising

We’ve left paid advertising for last. By buying advertising space on sites where your customers hang out, you are basically guaranteed that they will see your message. The next important thing is to make sure that message is compelling and interesting enough for them to either visit your website or your store and make a purchase.

Before we go down to the nitty gritty of actually building an ad and creating an ad campaign on the internet, here are a few thoughts to consider:

• Focus on your customer and the problems for which you can offer solutions. Put yourself in your customer’s shoes: If you own a hardware store in your area, think of what your customers would want from you and which keywords they may use in trying to find a solution on Google, such as “What are the best tools for the distribution box repair” or “Best hardware store in [my XY area]?”
• Use power words that are more likely to make your customers click on your ads.
• Focus your ads on an area your business operates in and add localized contact information.

In short, you need to look for a local audience, make sure you communicate a clear solution to their problems, and make sure you use power words while you do it.

It is best to set up these campaigns on two networks – Google and Facebook. They are the largest networks in the world with millions of daily active users. They are also very transparent in their practices and offer great customer support services, which is definitely something to value. The main difference between the two is that Facebook ads show only on Facebook, while Google ads show on Google, but also on a huge network of other sites that sign up for the Google AdWords service.

The great thing about these two networks is that their ad setup process is very simple. You can set up a Google campaign in nine steps (find them here), and a Facebook campaign in three (here’s a guide).

So how do you create an ad?

For an ad, you’ll need a short but powerful message, like “Buy a new hammer with a 50% discount, and a call to action (CTA), like “buy now” or “visit here”. You will also need strong visuals – humans are visual creatures and a good image will do you a lot of good. You can use free archives like Pixabay, which offers more than 1,300,000 high quality photos, illustrations, and vector graphics, all free for commercial use and without the need for attribution. Tools like Canva are great for those looking to create fast graphics for their ads. The best part is that Canva is also free to use.

If you are wondering which ad format to choose, given that there are so many different shapes and sizes, we would recommend going for 336×280 large rectangle, the 300×250 medium rectangle, the 728×90 leaderboard, the 300×600 half page, and on mobile the 320×100 large mobile banner.

These are also the sizes that Google recommends and claims they are most effective.

Landing pages

Even the best advertising campaigns can be inefficient for a simple reason – they are not leading anywhere specific. This is best described with an example. Let’s say you were browsing around for a shoe store and you run into an ad with a really cool pair of sneakers with a clear message – Buy now, 30% off. Obviously, you click the ad, only to be taken to the shoe store’s home page.  So you end up with a huge question mark above your head, saying “Where are my sneakers?”

The moral of this short story is that ad campaigns are only part of the job – you need to take your clicking visitors somewhere, and that somewhere is the landing page.

Designing your landing page does not require advanced web design skills (as this video shows) and it rather relies on your eye for detail and intuitive knowledge of your customer. Here are some steps you can follow when creating your own landing page:

• Your offer has to be presented in clear terms and with the focus on the value offered to the customer.
• The description has to be accompanied by concise and easily visible headline
• Keep the sign-up, registration, or purchase form short and clear of clutter and visual distractions
• State clearly what you want your customers to provide (email address, telephone number etc.)
• Humans are visual creatures – balance the text with a visually attractive yet informing input
• Make your page shareable on social networks

Despite the universality of these tips, you can always adjust your approach on the fly by experimenting with whatever option you want to try. Just bear in mind that they need to be ultimately tailored to your customers’ needs as their satisfaction is the money-churning engine your business runs on.

The actual act of designing a landing page isn’t that complicated, either. There are some amazing landing page builders out there, like this one, from Smoove.

It is also important to notice that people browse the web on different devices, with different screen sizes. A landing page designed for a wide-screen desktop computer most likely won’t look the same on a 4-inch iPhone. But being able to consume the contents of a landing page with ease on every platform is paramount for every user’s experience, so keep that in mind.

That doesn’t mean you have to build a new landing page for each device. All you need to do is make sure the landing page is “responsive” – or capable of responding to the viewer’s device and rearrange itself accordingly. That way, you can offer a stellar user experience regardless of the device.

Good landing page builders, like the ones mentioned above, incorporate such features. With Smoove, you can actually create unique mobile landing pages, as well.

Wrap-up

Running a small business means being ready to adapt to ever-changing circumstances on its path to marketing excellence and financially secure future. Thankfully, there are a number of tips by which small businesses can improve stuffing their pockets and enjoy a smoother ride in terms of marketing outcomes. These revolve around using email, social media, websites and landing pages as pieces of a puzzle whose successful completion will bring guaranteed financial rewards.