Category Archives: B2B

Recently, I set an iPhone time limit on my social media use to “45 minutes”.

I figured 45 minutes would be more than enough. Almost an hour? In between working at HubSpot, catching up with friends, and attending exercise classes, I had no doubt 45 minutes would be plenty of social media consumption.

Unfortunately, I learned pretty quickly that I actually spend 45 minutes on social media before I even get to work in the morning.

I know I’m not alone. In fact, the average daily social media use of internet users worldwide amounts to 145 minutes per day.

With all that social media consumption, it makes sense that more businesses are turning to social media to market to their audiences. But marketing is just one aspect of the buyer’s journey — what about sales? Can that be done within social media platforms, as well?

It’s actually now entirely possible for businesses to sell products and services natively within social media sites.

Here, we’re going to explore that very concept — known as social commerce — and take a look at some impressive examples of social commerce, so you can consider trying it for your own company. Additionally, we’ll list some of the most popular social commerce platforms available today, so you can decide which one could give you the highest ROI.

Since many businesses are marketing on these social media sites already, it makes sense to allow users to purchase from within these platforms without leaving the site at all.

Should you leverage social commerce?

If you sell physical products online, leveraging social commerce is a great way to drive sales and revenue to your business. Users are used to the native purchasing experience at this point and prefer to be able to quickly make a purchase right on the social media app.

1. Social media checkout capabilities.

One of the best examples of social commerce is the ability to click a product and checkout right from within a social media site, like Instagram or Facebook.

For instance, Instagram has a “checkout” feature on their app, which allows you to click on a product within a post, choose a size and color, and proceed to payment within the platform.

The first time you use Instagram’s checkout feature, you simply need to enter your name, email, billing information, and shipping address. Once your order is complete, Instagram saves your information so you don’t need to enter it the next time you shop.

Additionally, you’ll receive notifications about shipping and delivery right from within Instagram, so you can also track your purchase without leaving the app.

For instance, let’s take a look at what happens when I click the “View Products” button (bottom right) on one of @NikeWomen’s Instagram posts:

Instagram immediately pulls up a page with all the details of every product included in the image.

Let’s say I’m particularly interested in the sneakers. From within Instagram, I can choose a color and size and then click the blue “Checkout on Instagram” button. If I’ve shopped on Instagram before, I don’t even need to re-enter my information. Pretty simple, right?

Plenty of other social networks have these checkout features, including Facebook, Pinterest, and Twitter.

2. Social commerce plugins and apps.

As social commerce continues to rise in popularity, we’ll continue to see more plugins and third-party apps emerge to make the process even more seamless for businesses and users alike.

For instance, one third-party app called Soldsie allows your followers to make a purchase on one of your products by simply typing “Sold” into the comments section of a post. Once they’ve commented “Sold”, the app takes care of the rest, emailing the user an invoice to complete.

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Soldsie notes — “As fans comment, your sales trend on Facebook as each photo is shared with your fan’s Facebook friends.” For instance, if my friend comments “Sold” on a Facebook post of a cute sundress, I’ll see the picture in my News Feed and might consider purchasing one for myself.

Ultimately, social commerce is a good opportunity to increase brand awareness while also increasing sales — a win, win.

3. Shoppable ads.

Shoppable ads is another example of social commerce, and is currently available on both Instagram and Snapchat.

Simply put, shoppable ads allows businesses to tag products in an Instagram or Snapchat sponsored post, ideally creating a more efficient ad-to-purchase experience. Best of all, this type of social commerce helps businesses collect valuable data on which ads convert prospects into customers immediately.

The features you’ll find on shoppable ads within both Snapchat and Instagram continue to improve — for instance, Snapchat has advanced features on their shoppable ads, including collection ads, product catalogs, advanced pixel targeting, and 30+ new Snapchat partners.

Wish, an e-commerce app, successfully uses Snapchat’s product catalog feature to create different Snap Ads and Story ads to showcase a large variety of their products, as shown below.

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Shoppable ads are undeniably profitable if done well — on Snapchat alone, FabFitFun lowered cost-per-purchase by 36%, while American Eagle increased return-on-ad-spend (ROAS) by more than 3X.

With shoppable ads, you’re able to market and sell directly to your intended audience without causing friction in a user’s social media experience. For instance, 73% of Snapchat users are between 18-24 years old. If this is your ideal demographic, why not try including your products or services directly within the ads you’re creating on Snapchat? This allows users to find products of interest to them without needing to leave the app at all.

4. Chatbot checkouts.

One final example of social commerce that’s critical to point out is chatbot checkouts — the ability for a user to find and purchase a product by chatting with a chatbot within a social platform.

For instance, consider SnapTravel’s Facebook Messenger bot, which helps people find hotel deals and book rooms right from within Messenger:

As you continue chatting with the bot, you’ll receive better, more customized deals based on your requirements. Additionally, you can click “Open Filter” to further modify your search based on your criteria, and a new screen will open up right from within Messenger:

SnapTravel offers deals only available in Messenger, incentivizing users to book with the chatbot rather than on their website.

Using a chatbot to streamline your buyer’s journey is particularly helpful for mobile users who want to find and purchase products on an app they already have on their phones — like Messenger.

1. Instagram

Between its checkout capabilities and shoppable posts tool, Instagram is undeniably one of the most popular platforms for social commerce. Many Instagram users are already using Instagram as an opportunity to discover and purchase new products — for instance, 80% of users use Instagram to decide whether to purchase a product or service, and 83% use it to discover new products. Since these users are already prepared to find and purchase new products, it’s critical that they’re given the option to buy them in-app.

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2. Pinterest

People often turn to Pinterest for fashion, home decor, or beauty inspiration, so it makes sense that Pinterest would be a viable platform for social commerce. In fact, 93% of active Pinterest users said they use Pinterest to plan for purchases, and 87% said they’ve purchased something because of Pinterest.

Pinterest’s Shop the Look Pins allows users to click on small white dots on various products within a post, and either purchase that product within the app or browse similar products. They can make purchases on both desktop and mobile.

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3. Facebook

With over two billion active users, Facebook is one of the most popular social platforms in the world, making it a good place for social commerce.

If you have a Facebook Business Page, you can set up a Facebook shop to sell your products and services directly within the social platform.

Facebook notes — “While any business can have a shop, this feature best serves merchants, retail and e-commerce advertisers. We recommend it for businesses selling apparel, accessories (including bags and luggage), home furnishings, and baby or kids’ products.”

To upload your inventory to Facebook and create a shop section, you can either use a third-party ecommerce platform like BigCommerce or Shopify, or you can upload and manage your products yourself.

For further inspiration, try searching for major retailers and checking out how they’ve set up their Facebook shop. For instance, take a look at New Balance’s Facebook shop:

Facebook shop is a fantastic opportunity for your business to reach a larger audience — and, even if your customers don’t end up purchasing your products on Facebook, having these products listed on your Facebook Business Page is a good idea for making Facebook users aware of the products you sell in-store.

4. Poshmark

Poshmark is a social commerce marketplace that allows people in the U.S. to buy or sell clothing, shoes, and accessories, either new or used. Poshmark makes the experience even more social with features like “Posh Parties”, which are virtual buying and selling events that you can attend with friends.

Popular brands on Poshmark currently include Nike, Lululemon, and Chanel — to sell on Poshmark, simply download the app and follow seller instructions from there.

5. Shopee

Shopee, reportedly the largest online shopping platform in Southeast Asia and Taiwan, is a social commerce marketplace that enables users to buy and sell products ranging from home & living to mobile & gadgets.

Major brands on Shopee include Kleenex, L’Oréal, and Oreos. Selling on the app is easy enough — simply verify your phone number, ensure your products aren’t prohibited and click “Add New Product” on your Shopee page. With over 95,000 users on the app worldwide and a unique focus on the Asian market, Shopee is a good option for brands looking to expand their global presence.

Ultimately, social commerce has the ability to eliminate friction in a user’s online shopping experience, and catch users’ at moments when their excitement over your products is highest.

However, it’s critical you do market research to ensure you’re using the right social commerce platforms or apps to reach your audience in the social spaces they frequent the most.

Additionally, remember social commerce is fundamentally social in nature — if your business doesn’t also engage and communicate with its followers, then your company won’t get much out of social commerce as a long-term strategy.

Editor’s note: This post was originally published in February 2016 and has been updated for comprehensiveness.

Your business data is the lifeblood that runs through your organization. It powers automated workflows, gives customer service reps the full story every time the phone rings, and informs decision-making.

Even small businesses can benefit from the rise of big data by optimizing their organization’s data and creating processes to put it to work. According to Experian, eight in ten businesses believe data is one of their most valuable assets.

When your business data is reliable and accurate, it’s smooth sailing. But when errors, duplicates, and question marks surface… it’s not so pretty. When you can’t trust your business data, problems quickly arise and multiply in every area of your organization.

Businesses lose as much as 20% of revenue due to poor data quality, shares Kissmetrics. Back in 2013, HBR also talked about the ripple effect of unreliable data as part of “Data’s Credibility Problem”:

“When data are unreliable, managers quickly lose faith in them and fall back on their intuition to make decisions, steer their companies and implement strategy. They are, for example, much more apt to reject important, counterintuitive implications that emerge from big data analyses.”

To get the best results as a data-driven organization, here are some of the best practices to strengthen the foundations and make your business data the most reliable it can be.

9 Ways to Fix Unreliable Data and Increase Accuracy

1. Improve your data foundations.

Data debt – the cost attached to poor governance of data in a business – is a significant problem for many organizations, and 36% of businesses say data literacy is crucial to future-proof their organization, shares Experian.

Making your business data more reliable doesn’t just happen by magic: it requires strong frameworks, processes and a data-literate workplace. As early in your business journey as possible, ensure that you have:

• A strong CRM system to centralize all contact data
• Processes to organize and segment data
• Integrations between apps
• Formal data literacy programs in place to educate your team
• A clear strategy of how you will use and maintain the data you collect

Remember the old proverb: the best time to plant a tree was 20 years ago, the second-best time is now. The same goes for getting your data in order!

2. Look at where new data is coming from.

Just like reliable data, messy and unreliable data doesn’t happen accidentally. There’s always a source. To make your business data more reliable, follow the trail back to where data is coming from.

How is data being added to your CRM? Are there forms or manual imports that are causing bad data to clutter your database? Are different team members importing conflicting data in different ways to multiple apps?

3. Optimize forms and data collection channels.

Once you have identified how new data is entering your apps, take some time to optimize these data collection channels.

To collect valid and reliable data, make sure that these factors are true for every piece of data you collect:

• You actually need to collect the data
• You are collecting it in a consistent and standardized format between apps
• You have clear permission to collect it based on data protection regulations
• It will be stored and organized in the right app for the right purpose

4. Break down data silos.

A recipe for unreliable data is having data silos. A data silo is a collection of data that one department has access to but others do not.

The negative effects of data silos are bad news for performance and productivity for any organization: they include a lack of transparency, efficiency, collaboration, and trust.

To remove data silos, use a central CRM between departments, connect data between the apps in your tech stack, and focus on building a culture of collaboration between departments.

5. Segment your data.

Good business data is organized, adds value to your company, and is collected with explicit permission from users. To make your data more organized, segmentation is your friend.

Segmentation can look like labels, tags, list memberships, groups, or other properties that tell you more about each contact and divide your database into clear categories of preferences, demographics, buying history, and more.

When you integrate your data between apps using an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service), you can create syncs based on your segments and connect the right data two ways between your apps.

6. Clean up your databases.

To make your business data more reliable, clean up any messy data as soon as possible. This means fixing or removing:

• Incorrect data
• Outdated data
• Duplicate data

According to SiriusDecisions, on average it costs about $1 to prevent a duplicate, $10 to correct a duplicate, and $100 to store a duplicate if left untreated.

To help prevent duplicates and other bad data, create company-wide standards for data entry and maintenance, then sync data from the most accurate source to your other apps and create a holistic view of your database. It’s also valuable to set up and document processes to standardize and verify new data.

7. Connect your apps to integrate data.

The most effective data management strategies connect data between apps. This removes data silos, creates an integrated view of all of your data, and syncs up-to-date data to the right places as soon as anything changes.

The easiest way to achieve quality data integration is with a zero-code iPaaS solution that connects the dots between all of your key business apps, from your CRM to your email marketing system and customer support software.

8. Create accessible reporting dashboards.

Instead of hiding your data insights away on private dashboards, make them transparent to the right people in your team. For many KPIs, that means your whole team.

Organizations with the most effective and reliable data typically choose a limited number of impactful KPIs and make these very visible inside the team.

Not only does this help your team to be invested in company, team, and individual performance, but it increases the odds that errors and discrepancies in your data are picked up on. *The most reliable data has eyes on it. *

9. Schedule regular maintenance.

Maintaining data quality in your business isn’t a one-time job: it requires continual upkeep, cleanups, and optimization. If your organization has a dedicated operations manager, part of their job role can be to monitor and optimize data quality. But in any case, it’s worth making data integrity and literacy part of your company DNA – or part of every team member’s day-to-day role.

This means creating the foundations for healthy data to flow into your organization and undergo regular cleansing, alongside processes to fix problems and automate integration.

By optimizing data reliability, you can ensure your company can receive the most accurate results and insights from your database both now and further down the line as data integrity keeps gaining importance.

With automated two-way syncs between apps including your CRM and email marketing tool, you’re in the best position to manage your data holistically, perform regular health checks, and create an updated 360-degree view of your customer data.

When it comes to owning a business, time is your most valuable resource — but, time is finite, and are a lot of tasks competing for your attention. You need to make sure the right products are listed on your website, that you’re fulfilling orders and payments 24/7, and that you’re processing and dispatching packages efficiently… all while staying on top of marketing campaigns, user reviews, and customer service.

And, as you scale, your ecommerce processes get even more demanding.

So, how can you make time for the work that brings in more customers while keeping everything else on track?

With ecommerce automation.

Automation is playing a vital role in the future of tech — and it’s no surprise that we’re seeing more of it in tools designed for ecommerce businesses. As a store owner, it’s your secret to putting your time-consuming tasks on auto-pilot.

In this post, we’ll explain what ecommerce automation is, then show you what it looks like with 15 ways you can automate your online business.

What is ecommerce automation?

It means using software to turn manual tasks into automated workflows. These workflows can trigger internal or external emails, notifications, or actions in other apps — such as creating new support tickets in your help desk. To make sure everything works perfectly, you can set multiple conditions that need to be true for the workflow to run.

Although ecommerce automation saves you time, it doesn’t mean firing your employees — or yourself. Rather, it frees up your team’s time for the customer interactions, creativity, and big-picture thinking that matter most in your line of work.

To get started, here’s a list of some of the best ways to use marketing automation for ecommerce, whether you’re using Shopify, WooCommerce, or another platform.

Ecommerce Automation Software

There are several types of automation software you can use for your ecommerce business. The most popular tools are:

Shopify

One of the most popular ecommerce platforms, Shopify offers plenty of powerful productivity apps in its App Store. Many of these are designed for automation, including Arigato Automation, or “the app with a million uses,” Shop Workflow Automation, and Stock Sync.

Shopify Flow

This ecommerce automation suite is available with Shopify Pro – which certainly isn’t the cheapest (you’ll want to be making over $1 million in annual revenue to justify it). It’s workflow-based and makes it impressively simple to create automation both within Shopify and with other apps via seamless integrations. It includes automation templates that you can copy and adapt to easily get set up.

Shopify Flow automation templates are divided into buyer experience, customers, inventory and merchandising, loyalty, orders, promotions, and risk.

WooCommerce

If you’re using WooCommerce to power your store on WordPress, you also have a lot of options for automation. Most of these are powered by WooCommerce’s huge number of extensions, which enable you to power up your WooCommerce site with premium features and integrations.

Other Software to Integrate With Your Ecommerce Platform

You can also use automation software on top of your ecommerce platform. These include:

• Email marketing automation tools, like Mailchimp to trigger emails to your customers
• Automation tools like ActiveCampaign to trigger workflows for internal process and communication with customers
• CRM tools with automation features, like HubSpot
• Help desk tools with automation features, like Freshdesk and Zendesk
• Accounting and invoicing tools like Wave Accounting, Xero or Quickbooks Online

Read on for 14 of the best ways to automate your ecommerce business, including features from your ecommerce platform as well as other automation tools you can easily keep in sync.

15 Ways to Automate Ecommerce Businesses

Customer Experience & Management Automation

1. Track and reward your most engaged customers.

Do you reward your best customers? Customer retention is valuable for all businesses, including ecommerce.

Turns out you can increase your profits anywhere from 25-95% by increasing your retention rates by just 5%.

To reward customer loyalty, you could automatically add a free gift or free delivery to orders over $100. With a tool like ActiveCampaign, you can also segment customers based on lifetime spend and send them automated emails with rewards inside.

2. Sync your customers to a Mailchimp list.

All of the top ecommerce platforms — including WooCommerce and Shopify — have native integrations with Mailchimp. So, if you’re using the popular email marketing tool to send your newsletters and email marketing workflows, make sure to sync your accounts.

An integration with Mailchimp can automatically pass the email addresses of shoppers who show interest in your emails into a specified Mailchimp list, so you can keep them updated with your latest products and offers.

3. Gather feedback after a purchase.

Every ecommerce store knows how powerful reviews and honest feedback are. It can make or break your business. To encourage reviews, set up automated email workflows to send follow-up emails a certain amount of time after a purchase is made. Ask for honest feedback and share a link to where they can post their review.

4. Reach out to negative reviews.

If you receive an unfortunate 1-star review, make sure you respond to it. You can set up an automation to create a support ticket in your helpdesk software to make it easier to reach out quickly and make amends — or at least listen and understand what’s happened.

5. Tag and segment customers based on buying behavior.

Segmentation can help you understand your customers and stay on top of the different individual needs they might have. With a CRM, you can tag or segment based on demographics (e.g. gender or location), lifetime order value, milestones, number of orders, or any subscriptions or memberships, for example.

Inventory Automation

6. Automate inventory management for low-stock items.

Running out of a product can mean missed income and frustrated customers. To avoid this, automate your inventory management so you know when a product is low in stock.

With Woocommerce, you can trigger low stock notifications (based on thresholds you set) and out-of-stock notifications. This way you can instantly know when a product needs reordering from your supplies.

Order Management Automation

7. Send abandoned cart emails.

75% of ecommerce shopping carts get abandoned. Abandoned cart reminders help you bring customers back to your site — and with automation, you don’t have to do a thing.

Integrating your ecommerce software with a mailing provider is an easy way to send abandoned cart emails. You can also look at other native integrations between your ecommerce platform and transactional email providers.

8. Try dropshipping for passive income.

Did you know some ecommerce businesses automate order fulfillment and delivery? It’s possible with dropshipping — a way to find products, add them to your online store, and ship them directly to your customers without holding any inventory or risk yourself.

Oberlo, acquired by Shopify in 2017, is one of the most popular dropshipping tools. As expected, it integrates neatly with Shopify and you can add dropshipped products to your existing Shopify store, or create a new one for your dropshipped products.

The main challenge with dropshipping is finding the products that match your store’s branding and quality standards.

9. Print shipping labels and send out tracking numbers with one click.

By integrating WooCommerce with ShipStation, a single click can complete several time-consuming tasks:

• Sync your orders with ShipStation.
• Create and print shipping labels for your WooCommerce orders.
• Mark all orders as complete.
• Generate and send tracking numbers.

10. Send reminders to re-order consumables.

Do you sell food, health, or beauty products? Your customers might be interested in repurchasing consumables once they run out.

To let them know, set up automated workflows to send reminder emails for these products a certain time after purchase.

Marketing Automation

11. Nurture leads into customers with email marketing.

People don’t always become customers right away. Your company will have its typical customer journey, with people spending time in research and consideration phases before deciding to hand you any money.

However, if someone has given you their email address and permission to contact them, you can nurture this process along with marketing content. Just make sure that anything you send them is top-quality and valuable, perhaps with discount codes or free gift offers.

12. Schedule social media posts automatically.

If social media takes up too much of your time, there are lots of tools out there to streamline processes.

Use the Shopify app, Post Studio ‑ Auto Posting, to automatically post products to your Facebook and Twitter pages every day.

Buffer is another app that lets you easily schedule messages ahead of time. It’s simple to reschedule content that’s performed well, too.

Business Management Automation

13. Add tasks to Trello, Asana, or Slack.

If you’ve used automation to find out when a product is low in stock or when a customer left a frustrated review, you will also want to notify your team so they can do something about it. Another perk of using automation is that you can notify your team on the internal platforms that you use most — like Trello, Asana or Slack.

If you’re a Shopify user, Arigato Automation offers 100+ pre-built automation features including pushing data to Google Sheets, Slack messages, Trello cards, and more.

14. Choose a powerful help desk software.

As you scale your ecommerce business, it’s important to make sure your customer service is covered. Implementing help desk software is one of the best ways to do this.

With a help desk platform, you’re in the best position to centralize your customer support in one place and get a clear view of tickets from all channels. These tools also give you many options for improving your customer experience with automation, such as with bots and satisfaction surveys.

Working from home can sound like a dream for many people. You get to enjoy more time in your house, you cut out the commute, and you get to see much more of your family.

But the flip side has some not-so-dreamy realities, especially for parents having to balance work and childcare: a difficulty to focus; having to juggle work with looking after children and, in some cases, homeschooling them; blurry lines between work time and personal time, and kids lobbying for your undivided attention when you need to GSD.

A customer walks up to your store. What’s the first thing you do?

Ask them what they need? Show them a few choices that are trending? Let them check the store out before reaching out to them?

The question is: why?

Why do you need to make contact with your customers and understand their needs?

Showing interest in your customer’s needs makes them feel valued and important. And that’s what every customer wants to feel when they walk into a store. It’s this feeling of attachment to a brand that makes customers come back and buy something again.

But how will you go about the situation if you’re starting an ecommerce business? How do you build relationships with your customers online?

It may seem like a difficult question, but it isn’t. There are so many ways you can build relationships with your customers online.

Here are a few tips that will help you build and maintain a relationship with online customers.

How Ecommerce Companies Build Relationships With Customers

1. Direct Engagement on Social Media

Every business needs to be on social media platforms like Facebook, Twitter, and Linkedin. They are some of the most significant online marketing tools that businesses can use to publicize product offerings, advertise the company, share news about the industry, and connect with customers.

On social media, you can create a page and fill it with content about your product. Potential customers will drop their comments, and you can reply and start conversations with them. When you get along with them they will be convinced to trust you. The trust you build with them will lead them to purchase your goods or services.

Apart from building trust, communicating with customers makes them feel confident and important. By talking to customers, you will provide them with your business contact and assurance of quality service. Other prospects can also go through your social media conversations and decide to support you.

When you have direct conversations with your customers you’ll build personal connections and also make them see how responsive you can be to their questions and feedback.

2. Follow-Up

When a customer has made a purchase, following up is important. Calling or sending personalized emails may be ideal but you may not have enough time. You can use automatic messaging and emailing strategies to customize your messages and make them more personalized.

For a seamless process, create a base template and after each purchase, personalize it and reach out to the customer to make sure they got their product in good condition and if they are pleased with the experience.

This way, you will gather valuable customer feedback that will help improve the experience of future customers. You can even use automation to include the customer’s name and other relevant information in the email.

3. Email Communication

You must build an email list if you intend to keep in touch with customers. And, make sure that the emails you’re sending out are not sales-y. Every email sent to a customer should contain relevant content that can help them solve a problem. That way, you will create a connection with your customer and improve your online relationship.

Other than this, you need to have an email strategy: When do you plan to send out emails to your customers? What will you wish to achieve through emails? What USPs will you promote via emails?

Another reason to send out emails to your customers is to capture their feedback. Whether a customer avails your service or purchases a product through your website, it is essential to send out surveys and get an insight into their overall purchasing experience. This way, you know whether you need to improve upon your customer journey and what stops you from providing a delightful customer experience.

4. Creating/Hosting Events

When you invite your customers to a promotional event or a product launch, it allows you to socialize and improve your relationships. The invitees will know more about your brand from the event while it gives you the chance to meet with your customers personally, create a strong impression, and foster trust.

Let’s say you run an online clothing and accessories brand. You can invite your online customers to attend a fashion show, for example, so you will have an idea about the audience you’re targeting and they will have a close look at your products.

5. Excellent Customer Support

Your customer service should be top-notch, since there are only a few moments of two-way communication between your business and customers in the ecommerce world. Therefore, those few times should count.

You have a lot of options to choose from because online customer support has been improving steadily in the past few years. You can use FAQs, customer forums, searchable knowledge bases, and many other methods to provide information. Some businesses use self-service support, but if you are determined to maintain long-term online relationships, live chat and phone support are your two best bets.

This is because these support channels provide a direct line of communication between your business team and customers. If your support team communicates directly with customers, they’ll be able to understand the customer’s needs perfectly and improve their experience. These are some ways you can provide the best support experience for your customers:

• Let support be your competitive advantage: Your customer base will increase if you’re able to provide excellent support. You can use that as an advantage against competitors offering the same service and products.
• Let customers have personal attention: When you provide live chat for your customers, support reps can attend to the problems of several customers at once.
• Listen: Because of how many customer complaints they respond to, support teams may just pour out the first solution they think of. However, for customers to have a better experience, reps must break a little and listen so they can offer the best solution.
• Equip support agents: Your customers will have a bad experience if you keep pushing them from one team of agents to another. Equip your support team with the mastery needed to solve real customer problems quickly and easily.

6. Customer Loyalty Programs

Another strategy to improve customer relationships and increase revenue is creating a loyalty program to benefit both old and present customers. They can be enticed with discounts or coupons so they can sign up for the program. You can also give extra benefits to those who buy repeatedly.

Also, show gratitude by celebrating with your customers on birthdays, holidays, and anniversaries with personalized messages.

Ecommerce businesses can also improve customer relationships by using applications to make things easy for them. However, no matter the method adopted, every online business should aim to build strong customer relationships.

Right from creating insightful surveys to providing 24/7 customer support, these tips will help you build a long-lasting relationship with your customer base.

There’s more scope for automation in your business than ever before. With automation, you can schedule emails to be sent at the perfect time, follow up with leads that have abandoned their cart, sync data between apps, and notify team members of new tasks.

However, all of these options can be overwhelming, especially if your business isn’t a huge corporation with a lot of budget and resources to throw at automation.

You might be wondering:

• What types of automation will benefit my business the most?
• What should I stay away from?
• How can I easily implement these while keeping life simple?

Let’s explore the best types of business automation so you can start implementing a strategy in your own organization.

7 Ways to Automate Your Business

1. Email Marketing Automation

When you think of automation, email marketing automation might come to mind first. It’s not only one of the most popular types of automation, it’s one of the most accessible, too.

Types of Email Automation:

• Triggering emails based on actions, such as webinar sign up confirmations or abandoned basket notifications
• Email drip workflows that send content at set intervals
• Delivering content or requested information after filling out a form
• A/B testing content and automatically sending the best performing version of the content
• Personalizing each email you send
• Segmenting groups based on data and automatically sending the right email to each group

A good way to get started with email marketing automation is to have a look at the automation capabilities that your email marketing platform already has and think about how you can use them to execute your strategy.

All popular email marketing tools have built-in automation functionality. However, if you haven’t picked an emailing tool yet, make sure to pick an option with enough automation functionalities to meet the needs of your business.

2. Marketing Automation

What about the other types of marketing automation beyond email marketing? We can divide these into external automation that is customer-facing and internal automation that helps streamline the workflows inside your team.

Examples of External Marketing Automation:

• Automated SMS messages
• Scheduling or republishing social media messages
• Unlocking new course content at set intervals after enrolling

Examples of Internal Marketing Automation:

• Lead scoring and qualification
• Routing qualified leads between apps, such as from your CRM to your email marketing platform
• Notifying team members if a contact meets conditions or takes certain actions
• Creating a strong bridge between marketing and sales
• Streamlining multi-stage processes such as publishing content or setting up a new marketing campaign

3. Sales Automation

Sales automation is about managing your pipelines more effectively, reducing friction, and increasing conversion rates.

Benefits of Sales Automation

• Stay on top of a busy pipeline
• Better calendar management
• Identify and focus on the most sales-ready leads
• Collect and act on data insights
• Sync the latest data across all apps
• Create a strong bridge with marketing
• Pass new customers to onboarding
• Avoid spending time on bad-fit leads

To get started with sales automation, first look at any built-in automation functionality that your CRM offers. You can then look into adopting and integrating other apps to automate more powerful workflows.

4. Data Automation

Although automation is great for streamlining repetitive tasks and freeing up time for important work, it’s also powerful at managing data behind the scenes.

While our brains are good at looking at data insights to draw conclusions and plan actionable next steps, we’re not so good at manually managing that data. We don’t have the time, attention to detail, or accuracy to control large data sets — and we don’t need to.

With automated data management, you can leave the heavy lifting to the machines and free up time for taking action on the insights instead.

Ways to Automate Data:

• Trigger/action workflows that push data between your apps
• Syncing contact data two ways between apps and automatically making updates as soon as anything changes
• Sending all contact data to your CRM for a centralized database
• Combining data from all apps for integrated reporting on one dashboard
• Automatically merging or fixing duplicate contacts in your database

To get started, first optimize the data in your individual apps. You can then use software integration tools to allow them to communicate data with each other.

5. Customer Care Automation

What about your support and customer care teams?

Ways to Automate Customer Service:

• Optimize customer experience
• Personalize interactions
• Make sure your customer care team automatically has access to all available customer data

Automation is not about removing the human element from 1-1 interactions. In fact, it’s about making more time for these and providing a better experience for your customers.

You can automate notifications to let you know when is the right time to reach out to a customer, meaning you can spend less time working out what you should be doing every day.

You can automate customer satisfaction surveys that alert you when a customer needs quick attention to reduce the risk of churn.

You can introduce chatbots or knowledge bases with built-in AI that quickly answer simple questions, or route a customer to the best support rep for their inquiry if that doesn’t fix it.

Simply put, automation enables your customer care staff to manage a higher volume of customers more effectively, without burning out or diminishing the quality of 1-1 interactions.

6. Ecommerce Automation

It used to be that to sell products, you had to do it yourself. You had to oversee production of your inventory. You had to open up your shop in the morning, answer customers’ questions, and process their payments for your products.

But that’s all changed. As an ecommerce store owner, you don’t even need to be there. You can keep your store open 365 days a year, even while you’re sleeping or traveling.

Types of Ecommerce Automation:

• Purchases via an online shopfront such as Shopify or WooCommerce
• Online payments through providers such as Stripe and PayPal
• Discount codes to prospects, first-time customers or engaged buyers
• Abandoned cart notifications to customers
• Product suggestions based on previous purchases
• Inventory management
• Requesting reviews post-sale

With dropshipping, you can even automate all of the fulfillment work for an order. As someone else creates the products, stores them in a warehouse, and sends them to the customer, all you have to do is create an online storefront and get eyes on it.

7. Management Automation

As with customer care automation, management automation isn’t about removing the human-to-human interactions. Instead, it can free up a manager’s time to look after their team and support their growth.

Types of Management Automation:

• Team reminders to prep for meetings
• Chasing overdue work
• Following up on tasks after set intervals
• Sharing onboarding materials with new hires
• Collecting daily feedback on wins and blockers
• Self-reviews and performance tracking
• Reporting dashboards
• Syncing data with meeting slides

For simple ways to start automating management processes, Trello, Slack, and Asana are tools you might already be using that also offer great automation functionality.

Automation is a long-term strategy: it’s not about trying to change everything at once or creating processes that are overly complex for the stage your business is at.

Take a look at where your business is now. Where are the blockers, manual tasks, and inefficiencies?

Ask yourself how can you start automating these areas to free up your focus for the areas where you have the most impact.

While there will always be fires to put out and short-term issues to tend to at any company, it’s essential to take a step back and focus on the bigger picture. This means looking to your business operations and creating a strategy that primes your B2B organization for success.

Entrepreneur, angel investor, and former host of the reality show, “The Profit,” Marcus Lemonis, is a seasoned pro when it comes to spotting marketing opportunities and avoiding business failure.

He also coined “the 3 P’s of success”:

• Process
• People
• Product

According to Lemonis, the 3 P’s are fundamentals that every business needs to get right. If those fundamentals aren’t in place, success will be an uphill struggle.

Building a robust B2B operation is all about getting those three P’s in the right place.

Business Operations Definition

Business operations are everything that happens within your company to keep it running and profitable.

In most business plans, a specific section is devoted to business operations needed to make an organization function. These include:

• Systems
• Equipment
• Staffing
• Processes

While your business model is a description of what you want to achieve, business operations are the practical execution.

Even if you already have processes in place, for the best results in your B2B company you need to be intentional about your ops and create a clear strategy that’s regularly optimized.

Functions of B2B Business Operations

Although the ins-and-outs of business operations can differ substantially depending on the industry and size of a company, most of these functions remain relevant to any type of business:

• Maintaining efficient internal communications and striving for alignment around goals and how to reach them
• Providing senior-level managers with the information and coaching they need
• Continuously auditing and optimizing business processes
• Managing budget and planning processes
• Monitoring third-party cooperation and software integrations

If you hire a Head of Operations, these are all focus points they will need to stay on top of and continuously improve. Otherwise, these tasks can be divided between the most relevant people on your team.

The Different Roles of B2B Business Operations

While a Head of Operations is responsible for business operations at the highest level, it’s common to appoint mid-level roles within different departments of an organization.

Sales Ops entail all the business activities and processes that help your company’s sales run efficiently and in line with your business objectives.

Marketing Ops is a role or team focused on enabling the marketing team to operate and scale efficiently with the right people, processes, and tech.

Support Ops, like the other ops roles, works behind the scenes to provide the tools, integrations, and processes that enable support teams to succeed.

Running the operations of a B2B company can be challenging, and requires the ability to analyze and evaluate processes and performance on both a macro and micro level.

To help you implement the most impactful business ops strategy for your B2B company, read on for eight pointers for success.

8 Best Practices for Successful B2B Business Operations

1. Communicate clearly — and choose the right tech.

Everything starts and ends with good internal communications. In fact, a recent study found that 89% of respondents believe effective communication is incredibly important in a business setting.

Establishing the right processes for communication is a crucial key to business success, and since team members today mostly rely on technology to communicate and collaborate, choosing the right communication tools is equally important.

2. Define team expectations and accountability.

Clear expectations for each team member, as well as clear accountability, are foundational for success. Regularly setting tasks, deadlines, and planning together is an integral part of business operations, as well as following up on and evaluating results and performance.

3. Document and automate processes.

Documenting all processes and sharing them with the organization saves a lot of time and effort. Documentation prevents the need to “reinvent the wheel” again and again and provides a common ground and point of reference that can then be further developed.

What’s even better is when your documentation and data are readily available to your team members. Integrating your different tools and syncing your contacts will make workflows run smoother and with less effort.

4. Integrate your tech stack.

An important part of business operations is maintaining a helicopter perspective on technical solutions and platforms. By choosing tools that are optimal for your needs, avoiding redundant functionalities, and integrating your different systems, you set your various departments up for success.

5. Strive for transparency.

It’s essential to have cross-functional collaboration that breaks down silos and aligns departments around common goals. Alternatively, failure to create transparency results in redundant work, misaligned priorities, and missed opportunities for collaboration, so getting this one right is worth the effort.

Some effective tactics for any B2B business include regular cross-departmental meetings and the right communication tools to facilitate collaboration.

6. Base decisions on data.

Because business operations involve various stakeholders and agendas, it’s vital to maintain an objective view of how efficient your operations are and to agree on how to define and measure success.

When creating your B2B ops strategy, take time to assess how well you are:

• Running a data-driven operation with high data integrity and reliability
• Basing decisions on facts and figures rather than hunches and gut feel
• Creating regular reports and sharing them with all stakeholders

7. Collect feedback from teams.

An efficient feedback loop where team members can deliver their insights and comments to management is invaluable. Regular surveys and a strong team culture that invites feedback are great places to start.

Of course, only collecting the feedback is not enough; it needs to be followed up and acted on as well. How can you ensure this in your B2B ops strategy?

8. Consider hiring a Head of Operations.

Ownership of your B2B ops is crucial, and it pays to have someone accountable for maintaining the smooth running of your organization.

If you can, hire a person who owns your business ops and is responsible for continuously evaluating and optimizing the three P’s: processes, people, and product.

Agree on metrics to measure success, and follow up regularly to make sure you’re maximizing your business’s potential. You can also think about how your ops strategy trickles down to each department for the most impact and productivity.

How will you strengthen your B2B operations?

Every business is different, and you need to look at your specific company to evaluate what your needs are. But if you check all these eight boxes, you should be well on your way to a best-in-class B2B business operation.

In an ideal world, your business has immaculate customer data. You know exactly where to find the right contact email, when they became a customer, and who in your team spoke to them last. Your data is segmented, up-to-date and reliable.

But if that’s not the reality for you just yet, don’t worry… you are certainly not alone.

It’s all too easy for customer data to descend into chaos, especially when your business is using multiple apps, as most are.

However, even if your data is a mess, putting it in order is possible – and easier than you might think.

Here’s how to keep your customer data up-to-date and reliable everywhere, even when you’re using several different apps.

Why is customer data management so important?

With your customer data in disarray, you will likely come up against these frustrations:

• Data silos, or pieces of information that only certain people have access to
• Contradictory data in different apps (or the same app) so you can’t tell what’s accurate or reliable
• Poor customer experiences as you lack the data and insights to personalize interactions

The truth is: organizing your customer data isn’t just about making life easier for you (although it does this, too).

Your customers want an integrated experience when interacting with your business, no matter who they’re speaking to or which department. 87% of customers think brands need to put more effort into providing a consistent experience.

This becomes more essential to focus on considering all of the different contact points in your organization. A customer might interact with sales, marketing, customer support, technical support, admin, and billing. And for a good customer experience, they should get speedy answers to their problems and not have to repeat their story over and over again to different people.

They want to be treated like a person instead of a message or support ticket number, and you can’t achieve this if you don’t have the data to tell you who they are and how they have interacted with your business before.

Where Customer Data Lives

In your business right now, you are probably storing customer data in several places. This might include your:

• CRM
• Customer support software
• Customer satisfaction survey platform
• Live chat
• Social media inboxes

If these systems are siloed, or information sits there disconnected from your other apps and is inaccessible to other people, you risk data silos, inconsistent data, and poor customer experiences.

For the most seamless customer data management, your apps need to communicate data in two directions, in a language that each app understands.

Best Practices for Customer Data Management

1. Keep clean, accurate data in each app.

Your overall customer data is the sum of its parts, so it’s important to keep the data in each app fresh and reliable. Here’s our advice on cleaning up your customer data, including removing duplicates and outdated information.

2. Use segmentation for clear organization.

Segmenting your customer data in each app is a powerful best practice. As one key reason, it enables you to offer a fantastic customer experience that boosts satisfaction and reduces churn. And, a 10% increase in a company’s customer satisfaction score leads to a 12% increase in trust from customers.

If you know your customer belongs to segments for customers based in the U.S., and they’re subscribed to your premium plan, and are paying for your digital marketing add-on, you can use automation to send them the most personalized experiences and messaging.

You can also use segmentation in your data integration strategy, syncing the labels, tags, groups, and list memberships you have in your key apps across your stack.

3. Sync data two ways.

There are several ways you can connect your data between apps. You could use built-in native integrations offered by your software providers, or trigger-action automation such as what Zapier enables.

However, when it comes to your customer data, you’re best off with a two-way sync. This mirrors data between two apps, updating one as soon as something changes in the other.

It’s the most reliable way to make your data readily accessible to all your teams across your entire app stack.

4. Keep it simple.

As with many things in life and work, the most effective customer data management is simple. This can mean:

• Standardizing data organization: For instance, having one property for ‘Industry’ rather than overlapping properties for ‘Sector,’ ‘Business type,’ and ‘Industry’.
• Deciding which data to sync: Rather than syncing everything, you can sync relevant and insightful data that enriches every app, rather than adding unnecessary complexity.
• Creating clear processes and documentation: For adding, editing, and viewing customer data to make life easy for you and your colleagues.

With a two-way data sync between the apps that hold your customer data, you can give your team access to up-to-date and correct customer data everywhere and provide a five-star customer experience.

Email newsletters are a powerhouse in marketing for solopreneurs and major corporations alike.

Both types of businesses have to work hard crafting and sending newsletters that work for their audience and their brand.

How do you make a newsletter you know is working? >Good writing. Good design. Good analytics.

In this post, we’ll walk you through six things you should consider to craft a newsletter that not only looks good, but persuades people to click and convert, whether that’s getting them to come to your website, donate to a cause, or purchase a product.

Six Fundamentals for Newsletters That Convert

1. Design a newsletter people want to read.

When designing a newsletter, you shouldn’t just choose the first one that looks appealing. Think about what people expect from your brand.

If you’re planning communications from a global top-tier financial brand known for its long history and industry expertise, your audience is probably not expecting edgy and bold newsletters jam-packed with GIFs and downloadables.

They might be expecting HTML emails, but more on the formal side, definitely aligned with your brand and with your logo to signify that it’s from your organization.

If you’re running a startup, your followers might be expecting something more original, innovative, and personal.

If you’re a solo freelancer, followers might be much more understanding of less formality but put higher value on authenticity.

Take Wishpond marketing platform’s newsletter gallery which showcases the wide variety of forms a newsletter can take, especially when optimizing for industry and purpose:

2. Your copy is part of your design.

Your design >also means your copy and tone – both of which should be consistent across your newsletters.

Is your copy strictly informative? Playful? Irreverent?

Picture your reader in your mind and what you want to make them feel. Use words and design to get them there.

Take a look at content pro Ann Handley’s newsletters, which are a masterful example of combining a first-person tone and feel with industry information.

Handley’s newsletter is formatted to reflect a warm, caring, fun personality that nonetheless showcases her considerable expertise.

After the newsletter itself, which is a first-person thought leadership piece, Handley uses emojis as bullet points. ‘Tools’ are useful apps from around the web for practitioners. ‘Love Letters’ are a subtle way for Handley to showcase her featured writing from around the web. And ‘Public Events’ are invitations for where she’ll be speaking.

The images add a splash of color to her email, while the powerhouse content balances them out. This is a fantastic example of design and copy working in tandem.

3. Write subject lines people want to click on.

Subject lines are the gatekeepers to your emails. The good news is that the art of a good subject line is one copywriters and marketers have examined from all angles.

There are a few things you want to think about when you’re considering subject lines:

Character Count

Character count counts! If the meat of your email subject line is cut off by browser display limits, it won’t matter how brilliant your copy is: your readers can’t see it. It’s advisable to keep your email subject lines around 30 characters.

Urgency or Value

Remember that most of your audience members are as busy (or busier) than you are, and will likely forget your email if they don’t click on it within the day they receive it.

Ask yourself, what reason have you given them to click on it the minute they see the push notification pop up on their phone, or the subject line in their inbox? An irresistible offer? A time limit? A question they want answered?

Personalization

Email subject lines that mention your recipient’s name are more likely to get clicked on. For this, you’ll need to collect data on your leads, and need their permission to do it.

4. Construct email lists that cater to audience interests.

Segmentation is key. It’s one of the simplest things you can do in your email marketing strategy that will show the most dramatic results.

It filters unnecessary emails from your audience’s inbox, boosts your open rates and your click rates, lowers your unsubscribe rates, and makes your subscribers feel more like your company is catering to them.

To optimize your recipient’s experience as well as your business’s results, here are some best practices for segmentation:

Be specific, but not too specific.

If your email group is very small when it comes to sending, it’s probably not a group you should target. Each list should be as large as possible without straying too far from the core characteristics of the group. 

Make your lists distinguishable.

No email marketing strategy is one-size-fits-all. By dividing your email database into clearly defined groups and segments, you can communicate to your different markets and audiences with tailor-fit campaigns and strategies.

Optimize your data collection.

Good data comes down to three core things: trust, accuracy, and integrity. Your team needs to ethically and reasonably collect the data you need to create effective segments while maintaining the trust of your contacts.

When a contact opts into email communication and progresses through your marketing funnel, make sure their data — including their opt-in status — is synced to the right apps.

For instance, you could sync your email marketing app and CRM after a contact is labeled ‘Customer.’

Measure your results.

Make sure you can measure the success of your newsletter campaigns. For best results, go beyond just open and click rates to understand exactly how your newsletters impact your customer acquisition.

Set up tracking to understand how many customers convert as a direct result of clicking on your newsletters, and how many customer conversions it assists indirectly.

5. Help readers find your newsletter.

Just like selling tickets is an integral part of show business, an important part of newsletters is getting people to subscribe.

Getting people to sign up for your newsletter should be a serious consideration in your strategy.

There are numerous ways to promote your newsletter. You could:

• Add pop-ups on your blog and website, especially for visitors who seem particularly engaged.
• Add a subscription option in your footer.
• Promote your newsletter on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
• Offer a free sample of your newsletter. Look how the popular newsletter Daily Pnut offers proof of their value to potential readers by sharing their archive online:

6. Stay consistent and relevant.

However often you decide to send your newsletter — once a month, once a week, even every day — ensure your audience members can count on it.

At the same time, just because your timing is predictable, your content shouldn’t be.

Keep things fresh for your audience. The worst thing you can do is make your audience feel like your email is the same piece of tired information, hitting their inbox day after day, and clogging up their storage space. That’s an easy way to get readers to unsubscribe and lose hard-won leads.

Instead, mix up your content. Intersperse informational posts with offers and contests, make sure it’s not all text, add some gifs and photos, send out surveys, and, most importantly, ask for feedback.

Cloud-based business applications offer brilliant, flexible, and affordable solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. They have their own structure, business model, benefits, and challenges, including contact management.

We asked David Anderson, LionDesk Founder and CEO, about the impact of these platforms on the growth of SMBs and the importance of keeping different tools aligned. This is what he told us.

Q&A With David Anderson, LionDesk CEO

1. How do you think cloud-based solutions and SaaS are impacting the growth of small and medium-sized businesses?

Consumer expectations are at an all-time high. To remain competitive, businesses must evolve to deliver products and services faster, easier, and better.

SaaS technology allows businesses to keep up with demand while running their business effectively and efficiently. For example, a LionDesk user can set up their system to remind them of important tasks, automatically follow up with contacts throughout the year, and show them at-a-glance how their database is performing while only spending 15 min/day in the system. That’s the power of technology.

2. What are the biggest challenges for SMEs when it comes to contact management?

Hands down the biggest challenge is contact follow-up. We don’t have a lead generation problem, we have a lead follow-up problem.

The person who responds to the lead the fastest wins. The person who maintains a relationship with their contact through consistent communication and nurturing wins. The person who remembers small personal details about a contact wins. And, that’s exactly what a fully functional CRM system can be set up to do.

3. How can integration solutions enhance the use of LionDesk?

A core value at LionDesk is that we, “Play well with others.” By having an open system that allows users to connect their favorite business building tools, they’re able to work more efficiently and effectively.

4. Where do you think lies the importance of keeping sales and marketing tools aligned with other business applications?

The #1 benefit of having a hub like LionDesk that connects all your business tools is that it limits the number of applications you need to log into to run your business. Having the same data from your different applications aligned and shared helps your team rowing in the same direction.