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How to Avoid Customer Churn in your SMB

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Nothing in life is certain, except death and taxes…and customer churn. But, how do you know how much churn is too much churn? In the retail sector (for products without subscriptions), an average churn rate is 5-7%. It’s important to make sure that your churn number is calculated annually rather than monthly.

This is because a 5% monthly churn rate actually reflects a 46% annual return rate. Here’s the math:

(100% – 5%) 12 months = 54% churn. If you subtract that from your retention rate of 100, you get 46%. This means that just to break even by the end of the year, you’d have to acquire 47 customers to grow by one customer in a year. Clearly, this is not a sustainable business model. If you do in fact have such a high number of customers leaving your business, it’s important to re-evaluate your product or service because an increase in your retention rate of as little as 5% can impact your profitability by up to 95%.

Are retention strategies are keeping you up at night? While you may know it’s not a one-size-fit-all approach and that customers have various degrees of loyalty from the moment they first interact with your product, the bottom line is that you need to continuously inform your customers of your value. The good news is, that’s entirely within your control.

While it may, at first, seem like a daunting task to keep up with so many moving parts and a range of customers, it is possible to succeed, you just need to break down the process of retention and customer success into pieces like that of a puzzle. By combining data and tactics, you can grow client satisfaction, understand when and why churn happens, and even turn loyal customers into brand ambassadors.

  1. Define Customer Personas and Manage
    Expectations

It’s important to know who your customers are and what they expect your product to deliver. There are aspects of customer satisfaction that are outside of your control, but if you start by defining customer personas and what your product will do for each of them, you can predict their needs during the product cycle and adequately manage their expectations along the way. Combined with implementing real-time communication via social media and gaining feedback via surveys, you can also define distinct customer personas based on insights like how they connect with your product in the first place. Demographics are a common starting point, but knowing exactly how people interact with your brand can open the doors for optimized communication. For example, if your customers are more engaged on social media than with email newsletters, it makes sense to communicate with them through that medium to gain feedback.

The most common reason for customer churn is because people are unhappy and dissatisfied. Most people stray when reality doesn’t meet expectations, and in business, that means your product isn’t delivering the outcome they were promised or expected. While this may mean it’s time to check the efficacy of your product or service, it could also simply be a signal that something is being lost in communication with the customer. By outlining the product cycle and mapping the point at which customers are becoming engaged or less engaged, you will be able to adjust the messages being delivered at those points in time. This is where customer journey mapping begins.

  1. Track Behavior: Customer Journey Mapping

Tracking a customer’s behavior through website data, analytics, and in-store traffic is just the tip of the iceberg in understanding how clients interact with your brand.

analytics dashboardsource: pexels

To go even more in depth on this path of insight, use customer journey mapping, or a detailed and graphical outline of the customer’s critical touch points with your product – before, during, and after their purchase. By understanding where customers spend most time (about us, FAQs, product page, mission etc.), you can gain insight into what they need or care about. What are they saying on social media, where are they going to get help? For example, Domino’s Pizza has a real-time chat bot on Facebook Messenger that allows orders to be placed through social media, as well as a Tweet to Order function. DOM The Pizza Bot is capable of offering help as well as processing orders, so the customer can easily access the brand and make a purchase in the same way they would talk to their friends via social platforms. Being able to communicate with your customers in the way they are most comfortably and conveniently served makes it easier to stay in touch and opens the lines up to promote your brand messaging effectively.

Source: @Norwoodsocial media

Based on this outline, you will be able to more clearly identify where engagement is high versus low, and you can analyze the approach to see what is working and what needs fine-tuning. Along the product journey, you can automate email drip marketing to set up communication with your customers at defined moments. Whether you set emails to be delivered based on time or automate them based on customer behavior (i.e. after a purchase is made or when a return is processed), you can communicate directly with little effort, yet the messages will still feel personalized and be able to address customers’ needs. For example, luxury jewelry retailer Tiffany & Co. sends an email after your in-store return or purchase signed by the salesperson who helped you to thank you for your time in the store and see if there’s anything else you may need. This extra touch makes the whole shopping experience feel intimate and creates the feeling that their team members care about you personally. With these extra touches, you’re effectively ensuring customer satisfaction before issues arise. Only about 1 out of 26 customers will report an issue. The rest will likely abort your product; therefore, it’s important to stay in contact with customers so that if they do need help, it’s easy for them to receive support.

  1. ‌

    Rank Your Customers to Best Allocate Resources

Everything in business comes down to cost vs. benefit. Analyze your customers in terms of profit. Pareto’s 80/20 rule is invaluable here – 20% of customers typically generate 80% of your profit. Focus your resources on keeping these customers happiest, as they are the ones that will produce the greatest ROI and highest lifetime values.

  1. Stop Churn in Its Tracks

Regardless of the reason a customer chooses to leave, you want to be able to know before it happens so that you can stop it. By building an alert system in a given time period, say on a weekly or monthly basis, you can automatically set up notifications to inform sales and account managers to reach out to a customer based on specific changes in purchase levels and activity. For example, if you know your product typically lasts for a certain amount of time after it has been purchased, you should be able to set up outreach when it is expected to be repurchased. If a customer isn’t repurchasing when expected, you can have an email reminder sent with a subject line like “It’s Time to Reorder”. Your product’s cycle can be outlined so that when certain milestones aren’t being met, outreach becomes automatic. This tactic can also be employed during onboarding. When you acquire new customers, you want to be sure they are being serviced impeccably so that their needs are met. Creating a lasting first impression could make all the difference for retention. Therefore, recurring alerts can be created so that follow-ups with batches of new customers in any given time period, say on a weekly or monthly basis, become standard protocol.

  1. Implement Incentives & Reward Loyalty

People like earning rewards and feeling important. Developing a rewards/loyalty program is one way to keep customers hooked on coming back for more. By turning purchases into a type of “game,” where customers can level up, they’re automatically incentivized to remain loyal because of the added value of gifts and discounts they receive every time they spend. This also seamlessly translates into extra word of mouth marketing. For example, as customers earn more points and up their status, they are likely to share their experience with their circle of friends and showcase their status, especially if they get rewards for sharing too.

Additionally, people who are rewarded for their purchases become brand ambassadors organically. If you have the opportunity to provide your best spenders with some branded merchandise or additional freebies, they will gladly showcase them and continue to be your advertising agents, free of charge. Of course, this still means the customer experience needs to be of utmost importance because once they are acquired, it’s all about keeping them happy so that they don’t have any reason to shop around.

A great example of a golden (pun intended) rewards program comes from the ubiquitous coffee connoisseur, Starbucks. Seattle-based Starbucks created the Starbucks Rewards Program, with its own mobile app that tallies “stars,” or customer purchases, allowing users to pay/reload their card via the app, find store locations, and more. When you reach and sustain a certain level (or status), you receive a personalized gold card. Starbucks further utilizes the app through email marketing and creates certain promotions like Double Star Days to incentivize more foot traffic in its locations.

rewards programsource: pixabay

  1. Incentivize Your Team

Prioritizing the customer experience stems from within the heart of a business. If employees are empowered and believe in the brand, they will want to present the company’s values and mission in the best light. This, in turn, breeds optimized customer service. Furthermore, employee incentives and perhaps monetary commissions further promote better service. While you take the time to analyze customers and their experience, be sure to spend some time looking for any improvements that can be made within your organization. Start by asking employees, probably anonymously, for their honest feedback on what would make them feel happier in their work environment; that’s a zero cost and surely beneficial place to start.

Incentivize Your Teamsource: Pixabay

All Wrapped Up: What’s Next?

When it comes to customer retention, small changes can translate into big results. As you know, customer acquisition is more expensive than customer retention, so by keeping your customers happy, you will lower your costs, increase customers’ lifetime value, and grow your reach through referrals and word of mouth marketing.

The lowest hanging fruit is internal; start with your team by asking for their feedback and ideas around the creation of a loyalty program and for a list of what customers complain about most. After getting your team on the same page where everyone will prioritize customer satisfaction, you can enact some or all of these strategies and continue measure results and refine.

Moreover, what are the things that would incentivise your customers to come back. Map out special events, holidays, TV specials and anything else that would make real time marketing to them possible.

If there was one thing you could improve for your customer’s experience today, what would it be?

How to Start Using Newsletters in Your Small Business

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As a small business owner, you probably reach out to your customers via newsletters which is great but how do you know that it’s really working? Are your sales going up? Are you driving more traffic to your site? Are offering valuable content in your newsletter, and not really getting any solid feedback?

Even though many small businesses produce and distribute newsletters on a monthly or weekly basis, business owners are often unaware of the true value of this powerful marketing tool.

A properly written and well-targeted newsletter can serve a variety of purposes, ranging from maintaining and growing a customer base, building credibility for your business, as well as boosting sales. Used correctly newsletters can be  your best channel for offering new products and special promotions.

For many small business owners, selling products or services is a primary goal of an email newsletter. This is great, however to really optimise the value to your customers of your newsletter you can build on this  by also offering content as well.

By including different content this gives you a chance to show your customers that you are not just a seller, but also an expert in the field and somebody who is genuinely interested in their needs.

These can be case studies or success stories directly related to your business or industry, or news related to the products or services you offer. You could also include an interview with an industry expert or summaries of your latest new blog posts. Tips and advice related to your business and industry can also go down very well. There are lot of options, knowing which one works for you can be a challenge.

To help you choose which content is best and create a winning formula for your newsletters we have put together some helpful steps:

Step One: Set up your goals and develop a strategy

A successful newsletter requires a clear strategy to achieve your goals.. It can be hard to achieve this by  sending out the same email to all of your customers.

Before sending out your next newsletter, ask yourself: What is the goal of my newsletter? Is it to grow the number of my subscribers? Is it to drive more traffic to my website? Is it to sell more products? Or is it to promote an event?

After getting the answers, get your hands on planning that newsletter strategy.

Newsletter is used to inform, to communicate and even entertain, but most importantly – to sell. Its strategically written and then strategically distributed content is what will get you closer to your goals and boost your sales. In order to achieve both, you should keep in mind the following:

  • Make your content interesting and informative by including different types of articles in your newsletter (special offers, product and industry insights, educative articles and so on)
  • Make the content relevant for your specific goals. If your goal is to grow sales, create content then tie your product or service to it by mentioning it in the article with direct links to the items you are trying to sell)
  • Collect and analyse data on your subscribers to find out more about their interests and adjust your content according to their needs
  • Segment your subscribers by setting up different email lists for different newsletters for each of your goals

If you have multiple goals, setting up multiple email lists will enable you to send only relevant content to each list, or only content specifically aim at one goal.. For example, if one of those goals is to retain your current customers, you can set up an email list for those that have just purchased a product and tell them all about your after-sales care and warranties.

Lists helps you make the content relevant to specific customers and helps you maintain your subscribers list by providing  more pin point value.

If you think that crafting these targeted newsletters for each group of customers will take a lot of time, there is an easy solution for this. By using newsletter templates and lists offered by services like smoove, you can easily create a different newsletter for a different target group of customers to help you achieve each of your marketing goals. These templates can be saved and used again every time you want to reach your customers..

Step Two: Focus on what content to include for each goal

Now that you have formulated your strategy the next step is to decide what content you should have to implement it.

Imagine writing a letter to a friend. Would you prefer your friend to read it from the beginning to the end or for your friend to read some of it, get bored and then throw it into the trash? Certainly not the latter!

If you really care for your customers (and we all know you do!), you will want them to find your newsletters interesting and worth reading. The secret to success is in creating compelling and useful content that your customers will like and appreciate, and also content that will help you achieve your goals more quickly.

To satisfy the needs of different groups of your customers, you will need to create different types of content to keep it relevant for them.

The first thing to do is to work out what content works best to achieve your goals.

If, for example, you own a gym and one of your goals is to increase sales of the energy drinks you sell there, you can write content in your newsletter such as “What are the best things to drink after training”’ or “Tips on dieting and exercising”. Include your products in these articles and send it to your most frequent customers as it is these customers who are most likely to be interested in this.

Another example could be that you want to drive more customers to your gym on the weekdays and want to use your existing customer base to get the word out. To do this,  your newsletter content could include “Bring a friend” loyalty vouchers which are to be used during special events or classes that happen only on weekdays. You could send this newsletter out to all of your customers or maybe to the top 50 percent of customers that frequent your gym as these are most likely to be your brand ambassadors.

If you want to promote a new instructor, or new group classes, then you can create a list of people who fit that demographic the best. If you don’t know this then start with attendees of similar classes. Then send them content containing customer reviews or interviews with people from the industry about the class that is being taught. Ask the personal trainer holding the classes to write content  talking about the benefits of group training. Link the articles with a special offer for you may have and you will be another step ahead in getting the most from your newsletter.

By following this method you can add greater value to your services and make new connections with possible business partners (such as industry experts) which can help you grow your business and provide your customers with greater value and appreciation for what you offer.

If you always get the same questions from your customers  such as ‘when should I replace my road bike tires?’ or ‘how do I secure my bike from theft?’, you can turn the usual Q&A section into an article such as ‘The things you should know when buying a new bicycle’ with links to your best selling tires, bike locks and other related items. Experienced marketers use this little trick to save valuable time spent on answering the same questions all over again, but also to promote their products and services.

With this in mind, here are some examples of other content you could include in your newsletter to help achieve your goals:

  • New products and services
  • Special offers such as discounts, contests and loyalty vouchers
  • Product news and industry insights
  • Interesting and educative content (‘How to’ or ‘Did you know’ articles, tips and advices)
  • Events and Projects you participate in
  • Interviews with people from industry and satisfied customer reviews

Don’t forget to pay close attention to the structure of your newsletter by making sure it follows the same format each week. This way customers will find your newsletter easy to read and quickly find what they want.

Put the most attractive offer or most interesting article at the top of your newsletter and make sure your headlines are short, catchy and engaging.

Your Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons such as ‘Get you offer’ or ‘Find out more’ also need to be clearly visible so users can easily spot and click on them. If your newsletter has CTAs try to make one of them to stand out and put in at the top of your newsletter.

Step Three: Track and improve the user’s experience

Now that you have created your goals and strategy, and chosen the type of content you need to achieve this, your next step is to track  your newsletters impact and performance. As a backbone of every content marketing campaign, metrics help you increase your chances of success by helping you focus your efforts on what works best.

Online marketing platforms such as smoove provide a number of email tracking tools which can help you to easily track the numbers of newsletters that were sent, opened and even which articles were clicked on most (what marketers call CTR or click through rate). You can even get separate lists of people for each of these metrics. CTR is the percentage of email recipients who clicked on one or more links in your newsletter, and gives you a direct insight into the number of subscribers engaging with your content. If you know what people are clicking on, you can improve your newsletter for the next time you send it, by writing more about what your customers click on (desire). You can also remove content people don’t click on (not desire). This keeps the newsletter as valuable as possible.

Fundamentally you need tracking to make sure the content you are creating in your newsletter is helping you reach your goals and helps achieve your strategy. If it doesn’t then simply choose another type of content or change your customer list.

Tools like smoove can also provide you with many of your tracking needs such as the email open rate,, and click through rate, so you can make all the changes you need to keep  your newsletter strategy on track and achieve your goals fast..

Wrap-up

“While email marketing has an unfortunate reputation for being a cheap marketing channel, lots of brands have wisely decided that they want to maximize their returns from this high-ROI channel by investing heavily in their teams and tools.” – Chad White, author of Email Marketing Rules and Research Director at Litmus

A well-written and targeted newsletter is one of the best marketing tools for any small businesses. Along with staying in touch with your subscribers on a regular basis, newsletters can help you to boost your sales and build credibility for your business.

To start your using your newsletters for your business, first create the strategy, then choose and create the right content to achieve that strategy. Segmenting your subscribers into lists can help your content be more relevant, and allow you to be more specific in your goals so you can create lots of different newsletters to achieve many different goals. Finally you can then track the success and optimise your content accordingly.

With its easy-to-use system, smoove enables you to do all of this to help you make all of your newsletters a great success.

Start your newsletter today by thinking about what strategy you want for your business.
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The Elements of A Winning Small Business Newsletter

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The first newsletter was sent in 1978 to approximately 400 clients generating $13m in sales and despite many changes in its format over the years, they remain one of the most effective marketing tools for promoting your small business.

Newsletters allow you to engage with customers and provide your customers product offers, and also valuable and useful information your customers may be interested in. For example, if you’re running a local restaurant, you can provide subscribers with your weekly specials, plus a recipe for a more simplified version of the dish they can make themselves at home.

In the past newsletters were sent just to remind customers that you and your business is ‘alive and well’, however in 2018 you need to offer something new and compelling. The content of a newsletter should be crafted both in consideration of your brand and your customer’s needs.

To create the best newsletter ever, always keep in mind the basics;

Keep you subject line short but relevant

Make sure the subject line of your newsletter is interesting and catchy but also closely related to its content, so that users won’t be disappointed or surprised once they click on it. First impressions coming from the subject line and are very important to keep the user’s attention and establish a strong connection with them so they want to read more beyond it.

When building your subject line, avoid writing down the obvious, such as ‘a weekly newsletter’ or ‘your daily newsletter’ or create a jaw dropping subject that your content is unable to live up to, making it a disappointment when the customer reads on.

Keep it frequent and regular

Newsletters are usually sent weekly, unless your business requires it to be more frequent by having daily offers. Depending on your business and products or service you’re selling, try to decide which day of the week is the best to send out your newsletter. Many experienced email marketers are sending their newsletters on Tuesday, Wednesday or Thursday. Busy Mondays or ‘waiting for the week to end’ Fridays may not be the right time to send your offer.

Keep it personal

Segmenting your customers and creating a specific newsletter with specific content relevant to a specific group of users is always a good idea. Some of your subscribers may only be interested in a particular product line, and the others may be newcomers, so make sure you have a different offer for these different types of subscribers. You can also further personalise it by using the customer’s name. Tools such as smoove offer both of these features.

Knowing your customers and acting accordingly to their needs will help you to establish stronger relationships with them, and also increase your sales.

Make sure your customers can opt out easily

Email Opt outImage Credit: Pixabay

While you may not want to lose any of your valuable subscribers, making it hard for them to unsubscribe could easily send all your newsletters to spam for all of your subscribers. Also, there is a small psychology trick behind this; once your subscribers see they can opt out easily, they may not do it at all, and you (and your business) will not look desperate to keep them or sell them your product at any cost.

Make your email address visible and always respond to questions or comments you receive from your subscribers. This can earn their trust and allow you to receive valuable feedback concerning your business and the newsletter itself.

Consistency is everything (for your business)

People prefer to interact with businesses they can easily recognize, so in order to make your newsletter consistent with your business, always use the design and colors that matches your business.

Your logo is your signature and it should always be placed in the header of a newsletter. Most common practice is to place it centrally or in the top left corner as that is the first place where ‘left-to right’ readers will look at after opening an email.

Include links to your social accounts

By including links to your social accounts, you’re adding value to your newsletter by offering additional content or alternative ways to get your content. Some subscribers may prefer to use social media to look for your new offers.

Make sure it’s mobile responsive

People today read their emails while they’re on the move. Make sure your newsletter is responsive by displaying content properly across these different devices such as tablets and mobile phones.

How to create great newsletter content

“I see 2018 as the year where email marketers start really focusing on meaningful personalisation. Specifically, making sure that emails are relevant and received at the right time within the customer’s lifecycle.” – Jacques Corby-Tuech, Email Marketing Manager at Paymentsense.

Luckily crafting a winning newsletter for your small business is much easier now than it ever used to be. Using services such as smoove which offers easy to use custom-made newsletter templates it can save you both money and time. They also offer you the ability to create several templates to send to different target markets and different groups of customers. This allows you to focus on the content. Here are some top tips:

  1. Provide value to your content

People will only read your newsletters if there is something interesting and of value to them. So make it a NEWSletter and be sure that you’re offering something new in each one you send. Keep your customers informed and up to date with new deals, events and contests you may have. Bear in mind that the average time a person spends to read the newsletter is less than a minute so keep it short and interesting.

Pay special attention to the promotional content of your newsletter. People very often sign up for a newsletter in order to get insider coupons and promotions. Along with putting these special offers at the top of your newsletter, adjust the rest of your content to it as well. For example, if you own a barber shop, and your ‘How to’ section contains an article such as ‘How to take care of your hair during winter’, match it to a product you’re trying to sell or a service you offer.

If you are having trouble deciding what content to include in your newsletter here are some examples:

  • Exclusive offers and promotions such as coupons for free samples or discounts, contests and events
  • Updates about your business or new product offers, awards or projects you are participating in
  • Educational content with ‘How to’ and ‘Did you know’ articles (depending on your business those can be recipes, DIY tips for home improvement, tutorials and such)
  • New blog posts and satisfied customers reviews

  1. Visual presentation

Visual presentationImage Credit: Pixabay

Your newsletter should be easy to read, with lots of attractive headings and short paragraphs with an option to ‘read more’.

Don’t waste valuable space in your newsletter by putting lots of images in it. One photo per newsletter is desirable in order to ‘break up’ the text, but you should be more focused on the content.

  1. Pay attention to your CTA’s

If you want to lead people back to your website and bring them into your store, make sure that your Call-To-Action (CTA) buttons are clearly visible and compelling to click on.  Great examples of CTA buttons such as ‘Take up an offer’ and ‘Read more’ have both aim to sell and to take the subscribers back to your website.

Make one of your CTA buttons stand out more than others by making it a featured CTA, depending on what you want your customers to focus on in a specific newsletter. Be sure to place the featured CTA at the top of your newsletter.

  1. Don’t forget the structure

Always keep the sections of your newsletter in the same order. For example, in every newsletter start with a weekly offer, followed by ‘Did you know’ or ‘How to’ and end it with other news related to your business or industry.

It’s ok to move things around a little to perfect the format and engagement, but try not to change it too much and aim to keep it as consistent as possible.

  1. Test it for yourself

Before sending out your newsletter to the customers, make sure that everything works properly. Test it by sending it to yourself and clicking on all the text links, CTA links, and particularly links on images. Read the content thoroughly to check for possible mistakes or spelling errors, including the subject line and address. Lastly, don’t forget to check if the newsletter displays correctly across different devices such as tablets and mobile phones.

  1. Track it

Track the activities of your subscribers to help you learn more about their habits and behaviors. This can be used when crafting your next newsletter or another marketing campaign for your business. For example, if your deal of the day is the most clicked on part of your newsletter, make sure it is moved to the top so that people see it first. Services like smoove have some great analytics tools for all your newsletter tracking.

Wrap up

Newsletters are a powerful and cheap marketing tool for every small business, but only if it is done correctly. To create a winning formula for your business newsletter, you should first get the basics right and then pay a special attention to its content and structure. This way your will engage customers and also increase your sales and drive more traffic to your website. To be as effective as possible, remember to track your newsletter subscribers via tools such as those offered by smoove.
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The Difference Between Landing Pages and Websites

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In 2018 everyone and their dog knows that businesses need to be online if they want even the slightest chance of success. What some small businesses sometimes fret about, though, is – what form should this online presence take? It’s a solid question, because being online in 2018 isn’t as simple as it used to be, say ten years ago. There are many forms to choose from, and today we’re comparing two of them: websites and landing pages.

Below, we will discuss the purpose of each asset, how they’re created, how they’re typically used and how traffic is generated towards one, or the other. Read on below to find out which type you need and which would work best for you.

The purpose of each asset

The best way to describe your website is to look at it as your virtual business card. It is your online presentation that people can find by either searching for you on search engines, or typing in your address directly. It is filled with various information about your business such as your address, contact information, or working hours. It details the team (if you have it), the product or service you offer, and offers links to your blog, social media channels, testimonials, media mentions, those kinds of things. Also, a website can help a visitor get a general feeling about your business and it can help generate customer growth.

A landing page, on the other hand, has a different and very precisely targeted purpose – to gather contact information (usually, an email address), from people who visit it. The visiting part is also different – people can’t just stumble upon the landing page as they might with your website. You need to send them to the landing page, either by paid efforts (advertising) or by directly inviting your current contact database (your social media following, your newsletter subscribers, or your text message subscribers, for example). It also looks differently – it is devoid of all the information a website has, like contact information, the “about us” section, or blog.

Landing pages vs. websites – how each is created

The process of creating one or the other is also different. Building a solid website is quite the endeavor, both time-wise and money-wise. You’ll need to buy a domain name (that’s your site’s address, like www.mysmallbusiness.com), and a hosting (that’s the disc space on some server somewhere, where your website will be set up for the world to see), and depending on how good you want this to be, the price will vary.

Then, you’ll need a developer to actually build the website, organize the links between different pages, make sure everything works and that it’s in line with the rules of the internet (stuff like SEO optimization, mobile-friendliness, user experience, not to bore you too much with the tech stuff).

You’ll need a designer to make sure everything’s nice and tidy, easy on the eye and pretty enough to keep the level of interest high.

Creating a landing page is a much simpler endeavor, if nothing than for the fact that it doesn’t have all the sub-pages of a website like “about us” or “our services”. It doesn’t need a domain, because its goal isn’t do be found that way. Yet, if you do have your own domain, you can connect your landing page to it. For the same reason, it doesn’t have to be SEO optimized. All of these lead to the fact that you don’t need a developer, hosting or domain, or a designer to create a great landing page.

You can build one yourself using one of many great WYSIWYG tools (What You See Is What You Get) out there. By using templates and pre-defined design ideas that these tools are teeming with, you can get a landing page up and running in no time.

Typical uses of landing pages for small businesses

Earlier in the article we shortly touched on the question of the typical use of landing pages for small business, saying that its goal is to gather visitor information. With that in mind, landing pages can serve either a very short-term purpose, or one which is more of a long-term thing.

Here are a few examples of how a short-term landing page is utilized to gather user information:

–     Customer discounts and benefits (Visitors leave their email address in order to receive a one-time, limited discount offer, or similar benefit)

Pagetuners
Credit: Pagetuners.com

–     Special event sign-up (Visitors leave their email address to be notified of a special, one-time event either online or in their vicinity)

A landing page with a long-term purpose could be something along these lines:

–     Scheduling an appointment (Visitors leave their email address in order to schedule an appointment with the business owner. Offers like this one can remain active indefinitely)

Landing pages
Credit: GoDaddy.com

Woodcock
Image Credit: Rogan Chahine

–     Newsletter sign-up (Visitors sign up for your business’ newsletter in order to receive the latest news and updates in their inbox. Also available indefinitely)

How traffic is typically generated to landing pages vs websites

As you see, landing pages are quite different from regular websites, with different purposes, use cases and ways of creation. The way these two elements generate traffic also differs, greatly. Websites, on one hand, generate traffic through SEO, or Search Engine Optimization. In a nutshell, it’s a process that makes sure search engines can read the website correctly, so that when people search for things online, the engine knows when’s the best time to present it as a result. It’s a long-term effort and a long-term investment that takes at least half a year to show results, and usually more. Also, SEO is not something you do once – it’s an ongoing practice.

Landing pages don’t work that way. They want specific people in specific moments. That’s why landing pages generate traffic through paid advertising and business communication. Businesses will share the link to the landing page in their newsletter, through social media, SMS, virtually any type of communication.

Summary

Even though both are great and have their place under the digital sun, websites and landing pages are vastly different universes. Unlike websites, landing pages have one purpose. They are also much simpler to set up and drive traffic differently. Landing pages are a great way to engage with your customers and grow your business.

How to Generate an Online Conversation About your Small Business

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Whether we like it or not, a large chunk of communication happens online. People turn to the internet to talk about all sorts of things, from if the Earth is flat or not, to whether your business is worth anything or not.

Yes, if you are running a business, there is a good chance someone out there is talking about it, so it is quite the risk not to be a part of that conversation. In case nobody is talking about you, then it is up to you to make them start, by generating online conversations about your small business.

Generating and engaging in discussion about your small business online has many benefits, but we will mention just two of the biggest ones:

  1. It will allow you to tweak your customers’ (both current and future) perception of you and your business (to your liking, hopefully)
  2. It will help you draw in new customers

But finding where people talk about you, or where you should initiate such discussions, is not as easy as it sounds. Where do you start?

Google it

Yes, the first thing we advise you to do is to google the terms that are directly linked to either you (your name) or your business (its name, its core service or features, things like that). Google your main competitors in the same way, as well, and don’t forget to add a little geography into the mix, too.

So, for example, if your name is Macy Gray and you have a bicycle store in Wisconsin, you’d google things like “bike stores in Wisconsin”, “Macy Gray”, “buy a bicycle in Wisconsin”.

Among the results, focus on sites that allow discussions, so pay attention to sites like Reddit and Quora. Look for sites that specialize in bicycles, see if they have a forum, a blog with comments enabled, or if they have pages on social media sites like Facebook or Twitter. And finally, go directly to these social media sites and look for relevant discussions there.

Facebook has a search engine which allows you to filter results and focus only on the discussions. So, if you search for “bike stores in Wisconsin”, and click the “Posts” filter, you will be presented only with other people’s public posts about bike stores in Wisconsin.

Twitter, on the other hand, has made things even simpler. It revolves around hashtags to help people find topics easier. When on Twitter, bring up the search engine and start digging: #bikestores #bestbikes #Wisconsinbikes, until you find where you want to be.

Facebook
You can search for much more than just people on Facebook (Image Credit: Screenshot)

Talking to people

Once you identified all the sites, forums and social media pages / groups where people discuss things like your small business, yourself, your competition and the industry you’re in, it’s time to start talking.

Make sure you contribute properly. If people are looking for a solution to a specific problem, and your business seems to be the answer, make sure to help them in a way that doesn’t come off as salesy or too promotional. Give something of value to the community. If you have a blog post that discusses that particular problem, don’t hesitate to share the link. Engaging in such a discussion could look something like this:

“Hey, Amanda, that is a really good question! I’ve been running a bike store for years now, and I’ve had dozens of customers come in asking the same question. The answer isn’t that simple to give, so I’ll try my best. I’ve also written a blog post where I go into more detail about it, so make sure to check it out on this link!”

This is just one of the many examples of how you can generate an online conversation about your small business.

But there will also be negative situations when people, unsatisfied with your business or service, will go online to complain and warn other people about you. The most important thing here is not to panic, and not to rush into answering. Arguing with a disgruntled customer will only deepen the gap between you and them, and that’s not where you want to be. Instead, you can use this moment to turn this complaint into an opportunity.

Domino’s Pizza did just that, quickly transforming from one of the world’s most infamous pizza places, to one of the world’s biggest chain restaurants. Back in the day, people criticized its pizza as being tasteless and loveless. After realizing what kind of discussions are being led online, it first changed its recipe, and then put the customer at the very center of its communications strategy. It used social media to encourage them to try new recipes and leave comments. It even created a microsite dedicated to nothing but these comments.

By using social media to discuss improving, it managed to get to the hearts and souls of its customers, quickly turning from infamous to most loved.

Opening up your own channels

These days Facebook registers 2.07 billion active users per month and 1,37 billion active users on a daily basis, making it an unavoidable platform for every business. You would do good to create a business page on the network and start talking to your customers.

You can find a step-by-step tutorial on how to create the page here. Creating a business page on Facebook means that you now have a space of your own to share your content, as well as other content you think would be valuable for your customers.

Once built, that space needs to be filled with customers, otherwise you will have no one to talk to. Now you need to do a little promoting. You can do that in person, when customers enter your store. You can add a short “Join us on Facebook” call to action on your printed receipts or coupons. You can add a link to your page in your email signature. And finally, you can add a little paid advertising to the mix.

What’s also cool about Facebook is that it allows tabs, similar to what you have on your internet browser. These tabs can be filled with different kinds of information, so for example you could use one of the tabs to add your landing page to it. Marketing automation tools such as smoove allow you to build these tabs with ease.

Conclusion

On the internet, people talk about all sorts of things, and the business you are in is most likely included. Being a part of that discussion is crucial to the success of your small business, especially if there are a few disgruntled customers out there. In order to generate online conversations about your small business, you need to find where the people interested in it reside and identify the most important sites, forums and social media pages. You need to create your own channels where customers interested in you can come and join the talk, and lastly (but definitely no less important), you need to make sure that you engage in these discussions meaningfully, adding value to your customers. It will create new and tighten old bonds with them, helping you grow your business as a consequence.