Marketing and sales automation are the use of technology to automate marketing and selling tasks, using customer journeys and data for heightened relevance.

The most effective tools for marketing and sales automation are CRM systems like HubSpot and Keap. Here is an example of an automated marketing and sales workflow.

TRIGGER: A visitor submits a form asking to be added to your email marketing list or requesting to download an e-book about building a jewelry wardrobe.
ACTION: The visitor’s information is checked against the CRM database. If this is a contact that has been identified as a high-net-worth (HNW) prospect, the contact is delivered to a salesperson for follow-up.
ACTION: If the visitor has not been identified as a HNW prospect, the request is fulfilled and the visitor is added to an email drip campaign that delivers three introductory emails over the next two weeks.
ACTION: The visitor is added to a retargeting campaign that displays targeted ads to them across social media and news feeds.
ACTION: Following the introductory campaign, the visitor is added to a nurturing campaign that delivers relevant content and offers to them for the next four months.

TRIGGER: The visitor opens an email from the drip campaign.
ACTION: The visitor’s lead score is increased, indicating a higher level of interest.
ACTION: When a lead score reaches a pre-determined value, the lead is assigned as a task to a salesperson to follow up personally.
ACTION: The visitor is added to a sales follow-up campaign that includes a series of emails and phone calls from a sales representative. The emails include a meeting link to book a private consultation.

TRIGGER: The visitor schedules a consultation.
ACTION: The visitor’s lead score is increased, indicating a higher likelihood of conversion.

TRIGGER: The visitor places an order following the consultation.
ACTION: The visitor is added to a customer onboarding campaign that delivers helpful resources.
ACTION: An email is sent at 14 days post-purchase asking the customer if they are satisfied and requesting that they provide a testimonial.

TRIGGER: A testimonial is provided by the new client.
ACTION: The testimonial is automatically fed to both Google and Facebook, while simultaneously being queued for display on the website.

As you can see, the system handles repetitive tasks that would have otherwise been done by a human. Automation systems can track, respond to, and score volumes of individual transactions in a way that store personnel do not have time (or will not remember) to do.

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These processes consume most days. After a while, it begins to seem like the whole purpose of work is to create days with just the right balance … the right number of tasks to fit the number of hours and people available.

Which is when we begin to lose the throughline of our business.

A throughline is a concept normally applied to writing stories. The throughline is the thread that binds the story together. When you read a poorly constructed story, the first things you notice are events or details that don’t make sense, or that distract from the main point of the story. In a well-written story, each detail makes sense in the context of the whole and helps bring the story to life.

If your brand lacks a throughline, then all those processes are being done without a central theme binding them together. To the people experiencing your brand, everything will seem transactional. Pleasant? Sure. Satisfactory? Of course. But still transactional, because they will fail to be connected by a single, meaningful thread.

So how do you create a throughline for your business? It starts with your business culture.

Your business culture sets the tone for what you prioritize and how everyone in your organization communicates and behaves. What do you value, why do you value it, and how do you express those values? Most people think the story of a business starts with brand, but brands cannot be sustained without attaching them to intentional, nurtured cultures.

Your brand is where the throughline of your values turns into stories. It is how you weave the story of your values through everything every employee does.

As a brand ambassador for your business, ask yourself: “What do our culture and brand tell us about how the merchandise should be displayed? How do we answer the phone relative to our brand story? How does every surface in our store, from the floor to the ceiling, reflect our brand story? How to we treat customers according to our brand? What about our vendors and other community members? When customers listen to the way we communicate with each other, is that consistent with our brand story?”

If you’ve been focused on weaving your brand story through every social media post, blog, photograph, and web page, that’s good. But it’s not enough. Your business is literally a marketing machine, churning out messages from every surface, from the fixtures and flooring to the trays and display forms. The throughline of your brand story is conveyed in the sound bites of conversation among your employees and the clutter (or not) on the counter behind your register.

Take the collection of processes that make up each day and thoughtfully integrate them as part of your brand’s throughline. This is exactly what your customers are looking for, and the ultimate goal of marketing.

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Barely 20 years ago, marketing a small business was much easier.

Today’s small-business owner faces the same marketing complexity as any consumer-goods conglomerate, but without big corporate marketing teams and outside advertising agencies. To make the best use of limited time and staff and all the channels and media begging for attention, it’s vital to develop your marketing plan through the lens of campaign planning.

Assuming that you have analyzed your market and customer behavior, reviewed last year’s marketing performance, identified customer needs and wants, and set goals and budgets for the coming year, the next step is to do top-down marketing planning.

Develop a Theme

Start by defining a theme for each year. This can be based on something tangible, like a new store opening or major new product or brand releases, or it may be more conceptual. During the pandemic, businesses made good use of themes, embracing messaging about diversity and inclusion, tradition, or environmental sustainability.

Coming out of the pandemic, we see other themes emerging around being more social, having fun, and gathering for experiences. An overarching theme helps focus attention and energy and gives you the opportunity to create trust and brand recognition through repetition and familiarity. Even promotions that do not refer directly to the theme should echo the theme in some way. A good theme is like a mini-brand within your brand; it will have its own messaging, graphics, and a color palette.

Populate the Calendar

With your theme established, the next step is to create a broad calendar of promotions. I like using an annual calendar layout so I can see all 12 upcoming months in one view.

Start by penciling in all the usual promotions: holidays, events, seasonal experiences, and promotions that your customers have come to expect and support.

Next, look for the empty swaths on the calendar. How can you fill in the blanks with something interesting to promote each month? Your theme functions as a guide, helping you come up with ideas for promotions that are consistent with each other and that will help you achieve your marketing goals.

Turn it Into Campaigns

Once you have a promotional focus for each month, it’s time to turn the events on your calendar into campaigns. It might look something like this:

Theme for the Year: Celebrating Women

• January: New Year, New You
• February: Be Your Own Valentine
• March: International Women’s Day
• April: Make Your Own Luck
• May: The Nurturing Month
• June: New Fashion Brand Launch
• July: Bite-Sized Summer Adventures
• August: Rest & Rejuvenate
• September: Never too old for back-to-school shopping!
• October: Women’s Health Awareness
• November: The Gratitude Month
• December: Making Memories

In this example, calendar events like holidays are wrapped up in the monthly themes, ideally in unique and interesting ways. I once had a client say to me, “But we’re just making stuff up here!” Well … yeah. And he who makes the best, most interesting, most consistent stuff up in retail wins.

Apply Goal Metrics to Campaigns

Apply performance metrics to each campaign, making sure the sum of your campaign goals adds up to your strategic sales growth ROI goals for the year. Now you know what each campaign must produce to be successful.

Break Campaigns Down to Tactics

Next, brainstorm the types and quantities of promotions you need. For example:

• What are your instore and online traffic conversion rates, and how many ads, social posts, organic search results and radio spots do you need to drive sufficient traffic to your website and store to achieve your sales goals?
• Which types of promotion lead to higher quality customers and higher margin sales sufficient to achieve your margin goals?

Your monthly themes will help you frame the tactics, and your annual theme will continuously tie them all together.

You still have nine months left in this year to get your marketing plan on point. Get out there and make some stuff up. Your marketing results and budget will thank you.

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AI writing is not new. During the past three years, dozens of affordable AI-writing software programs have hit the market, and the internet has been filling up with AI-generated content ever since. So if the software is readily available and small-business owners need help generating content, is AI the solution?

The answer is … sort of. AI writers may be beneficial to you if you know what they are suitable for … and what they are not.

Let’s answer the big question first: No, the output from AI writing tools should not be used for your blog or newsletter. Google is already crawling online content with tools that can identify AI-generated text, and we expect that Google will soon be devaluing content that is not disclosed as AI-written. No sense producing more writing just to damage your SERP (search engine results page) results.

Besides, AI may spell correctly and use good grammar (mostly), but it cannot infuse writing with an authentic voice that sounds like your brand.

So if it is inadvisable to use the outputs of AI for your marketing, how can it be helpful?

A well-managed blog strategy involves planning content that suits your brand and promotes your products and services while increasing your SEO performance. The most challenging aspect of blogging is not the writing: It’s figuring out how to write endlessly on a limited set of topics. With software like ContextMinds and Frase, you enter a topic description and the program spits out lists of related topics, questions and answers it found online for each topic and can even create outlines for articles. These programs also display the value of search terms related to the topics and make it easy to pin or save reference articles.

In less time than most marketing writers take to produce one article, an AI software program can help you plan many weeks of writing, with confidence that the content you are planning will contain information that is popular or that is underrepresented. It’s simple to use the outlines you’ve created and the research sources you’ve pinned to write an article for each topic. In addition to saving time, every article will be in your brand voice and will improve your SEO ranking.

AI tools can significantly speed up the brainstorming, planning, research, and outlining tasks required in marketing writing. Use them for this purpose, and you will reduce the time involved in producing content while increasing overall quality. Still hate writing? No problem. Hire a writer to do the writing for you, with full confidence that when they ask the dreaded question, “So what do you want me to write?” you can hand them your AI-assisted planning output to direct them.

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He treated the word exercise with disdain. But I’ve always thought of exercise as a way to improve strength, hone skills, and achieve results.

In business, the word for exercise is process, and like exercise, we use processes for stability, longevity, and muscle-building. The problem with most marketing planning in the small business sector is that it isn’t done as a process, so its output isn’t predictable.

The Process

Step 1: Assemble the following data for a comprehensive understanding of your facts:

• Market data. Review industry performance overall and by category. See how your business compares.
  Competitive analysis. How many employees do they have? What are their operating hours? What brands do they carry? What price points do they advertise?How do these details compare to previous years?
• Behavioral data. How did your customers respond to your marketing and sales efforts, including email and social media engagement, website visits, store visits, purchases, purchase sizes, margins, repeat orders, returns and referrals?

Step 2: Analyze. Rate the tactics you used in the prior year relative to results. Note which of your story elements are factual and which are assumptions. It is acceptable to use assumptions, but you must highlight them so you can monitor any decisions based on assumptions.

Step 3: Review and (if necessary) update your target customer (also known as Ideal Customer Profile, or ICP). Reviewing your ICP focuses you on weighing each marketing idea against your ICP’s interests and needs.

Step 4: Commit to a budget and set goals. Set spending, sales, revenue and margin goals. This will help to ensure each plan is weighed against its ability to deliver the desired results.

Step 5: Develop marketing strategies. These include messaging, campaigns, media … all the combined tools you can use to achieve your marketing objectives. Steps 1 through 4 will provide insight into which strategies you should pursue.

Step 6: Establish metrics. These metrics should align with achieving your goals and staying on budget. Comparing plans to actuals will help you know if you are staying on track from day one.

Step 7: Make a plan and a schedule. Q1 schedules should be highly detailed; actual results and market conditions will lead to modifications and new opportunities throughout the year.

In that old company, I did implement marketing plans (and all the other exercises). The company grew profitably and significantly. You can fill a library with books about all the different ways to market, but if you overlay this outline of process, you will get it right more often than not.

The post Follow These Steps to Streamline Your Marketing and Achieve Higher Sales appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

Every luxury business needs its whales. I’m not being disrespectful! A whale is any customer with the potential to bring in extraordinary sales revenue. Like whales, these clients are large (in the pocketbook), elusive, and uncommon.

Clienteling is the traditional method of luxury sales whale hunting. Network extensively, build a book of contacts, nurture relationships, and become their go-to. Those are all still important practices, but they have become more challenging.

At one time, local networking was the bedrock of retail relationship-building, but today’s whales are harder to find and meet. The social fabric built around service clubs (Rotary, Lions, Kiwanis), social and country clubs, chambers of commerce, and church memberships is fraying as such memberships have dramatically declined. In days gone by, networking was the top of the sales funnel for whale leads, the middle of the sales funnel for nurturing those leads, and the relationship grease that continued those relationships over time.

Today, if you tell a new salesperson to “get out there and network!”, you’ll just get a blank stare.

So, what’s a whale-hunter to do? Get skilled in Account Based Marketing (ABM). ABM has been around since 2003 and is a highly successful B2B marketing and sales strategy. But with a tiny bit of adaptation, it also works extraordinarily well for cultivating high-end luxury retail clients.

Let’s start with a caveat. ABM is not the right marketing approach for marketing to the occasional $2,000 client. Your regular inbound marketing and advertising strategies are the best way to drive a steady stream of foot traffic. But for finding the regular $25K, $50K and higher clients, ABM is a method that pays.

ABM starts with defining your Ideal Client Profile. When we’re implementing in a B2B environment, we call this the ICP, but for luxury retail, we call it the WCP (that’s right … Whale Client Profile). Because this client is different from the rest. You may have hundreds of regular clients, but only a dozen WCPs. The way to create this profile is to do some research and look closely at the whales you have. What are their demographics? What are their interests? What are they involved in? How did they find you (or you them)? How often do they buy from you and for what reasons?

Once we have a solid WCP, we create a Customer Journey map, which documents what is happening at each point in the sales journey from Awareness & Discovery, to Intent, to making a Purchase Decision and beyond to Loyalty and Referrals. The customer journey process evaluates what is happening in each stage: the activities the WCP is engaged in, the touchpoints for each activity, the problems the WCP is trying to solve or the challenges they face, and importantly, what we might be able to do to solve the pain points and meet the needs in each stage in order to move the WCP on to the next stage.

The work of ABM is to take that WCP and customer journey map and create highly personalized campaigns to engage each lead based on their specific needs and using the right marketing messages and channels for them. It is an incredibly personal form of marketing that, when it’s done right, builds trust and relationships.

In ABM, you monitor your WCP leads’ behaviors as they interact with you on your social channels, visit your website, open and click on email communications, and communicate via email, text and phone with you or your staff. An ABM play requires using a system that can centralize all these communications, and involves creating a separate set of carefully curated marketing materials that help you support the sales effort at each stage.

Some folks are saying that clienteling is dead. It is most definitely not dead. But the way to do it has changed. If you’re worried that your current whales are aging out and struggling to new ones to take their place, consider giving ABM a try. Today’s digitally savvy whales are incredibly receptive to being cultivated, but your old black book technique is no longer capable of engaging them.

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CRM has come a long way since being that part of your POS that records customer contact information, birthdays and anniversaries and allows you to print postcards. CRM in 2023 is about creating connected customer experiences.

CRM eliminates all the post-it notes, individual note pads, static POS customer notes that nobody remembers to look at and private email and text communications that you can’t see (but you worry about). With CRM, you replace all those individual, disconnected methods with the ability to track every customer interaction from outbound calls to inbound, every email communication, social media clicks, shares and comments, clienteling outreach and staff reminders, repair communications, custom orders, and yes, even those all-important birthday and anniversary communications.

Businesses that adopt CRM easily outpace the average growth rate of their competitors. There are many CRM systems to choose from, and the best of them consistently deliver these seven benefits:

1. Better customer service. Centralized, accessible customer information helps everyone who touches the customer understand them better and meet their needs.

2. Increased sales. CRM helps you prospect for more qualified customers, nurture prospects and turn them into customers. How? By streamlining your prospecting and sales processes, providing meaningful sales data, and supporting your sales team with reminders, clienteling workflows and productivity tools.

3. Increased customer lifetime value. Companies that use CRM are better at encouraging repeat business, and their team members are far less likely to drop the ball or represent the company in a way that doesn’t suit your brand.

4. Automated sales reports. A CRM connected to your POS and website collects and organizes data about your customers on dashboards tailored to each employee. Performance evaluation, tracking quotas and goals, and checking progress become part of everyone’s work without requiring a full-time reporting person to produce the information.

5. Higher productivity and efficiency. Modern CRM software uses marketing automation technology, which handles most of the menial sales and marketing tasks and frees you and your staff to do the value-add work that only well-trained humans can do.

6. Better insights. CRM systems provide detailed analytics to contextualize your customer data, develop the right products and promotions, monitor important metrics and motivate your teams.

7. More strategic focus. Most business owners feel like sheepdogs, chasing all the wandering elements of their business and trying to keep everything in alignment. A CRM dramatically simplifies that work, giving you time to do the work that only you can do.

While you’re busily occupied producing those holiday sales, just tuck these ideas and benefits in the back of your mind. I have a feeling that by the first week in January, you’ll be ready to consider CRM as the most important thing you can do for your business in 2023.

The post This Is Why a CRM System Should Be Your Top Priority in 2023 appeared first on INSTOREMAG.COM.

So what do you need to do to launch SMS marketing in time for the holidays? It’s surprisingly simple.

To begin, you need a platform. If you have a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system like Hubspot or Keap, you already have a platform for SMS. If you use an email marketing system like Mailchimp or Constant Contact, many of them have partnerships with SMS platforms so you can do text marketing right from your email marketing system. A third option is to use a standalone SMS platform like SMS Bump, Postscript or Podium.

The most effective SMS campaigns are drip campaigns, so called because the messages are set on a timer to drip drip drip out to the customer, each pre-written message launching a set number of days after the previous message. For example, when a prospect completes your subscription form, they instantly receive a text thanking them for their interest, perhaps including a special “welcome” offer. The next day, they may receive a second message sharing a fun detail about your store. A week later, they may receive a text asking if they have activated their special offer yet. Ten days after that, they may receive another communication. This type of marketing is powerful because it is triggered by specific interest on the prospect’s part.

You can also send text broadcasts to all or part of your list to promote new products, invite people to events or announce specials. Data shows that 95 percent of SMS recipients read and act upon the messages they receive within three minutes. For this reason, making a digital offer or geo-fencing your broadcasts only to people within a geographical area closest to your store are the best ways to capitalize on the immediacy associated with SMS campaigns.

Finally, SMS is an excellent way to follow up on abandoned carts, solicit feedback on recent orders or ask for reviews.

If you don’t feel prepared to start SMS marketing this season, at the very least consider incorporating the ability to communicate via SMS with your customers. And by this I don’t mean individual salespeople texting from their personal mobile devices! It is important for your store communication to be visible and accessible to you, and you need an SMS system in place to do that.

Does all this mean you should stop sending email entirely? Not at all. Some messages are better suited for email and some customers will always prefer email to texting. As you learn more about your customers and their preferences, you’ll be able to adjust until you achieve a proper balance between the two.

The goal is to provide communication options that are most convenient for your customers, and the data has spoken: By and large, consumers prefer SMS to email, as long as the offers are interesting and relevant and don’t arrive too often.

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1. Double down on brand messaging. It’s time to reinforce those three questions you’re supposed to answer with everything you do: Who are we? What do we do that makes us different? Why do we matter? Consumers will price-compare, but they find it difficult to abandon brands they trust.

2. Express your values. Talk about and demonstrate your brand values inside the store and out, and your core customers will stick with you through everything.

3. Reward existing customers. Skittish businesses are competing on price. Instead, protect your best customers by giving them extra attention and rewards. Sending a handwritten “just glad you’re our customer” note with a $10 Starbucks card can get you as much in loyalty and word-of-mouth as a $500 boosted ad on Facebook.

4. Get creative with product selection. Offer options for all kinds of budgets. If you haven’t offered a bridge or silver line in the past, now is a good time. A well-planned merchandising strategy can take much of the sting out of price increases.

5. Promote products with the best margins. Yes, inflation means prices are increasing, but those increases don’t occur evenly across all products and categories. You can always find promotional opportunities if you’re looking for them.

6. Scrutinize your ad spend. Competition for ad words and phrases that are important to you may have softened, outdoor advertising companies are struggling to get renewals, and depending on your market, this may be a good time to negotiate for better radio or cable TV buys. At the same time, do a deep dive on your current ad spend and cut out anything that is underperforming. Now is a good time to invest in customer appreciation, word-of-mouth, and any excuse to host an event or throw a party.

7. Use more marketing automation. A properly implemented marketing automation system will crank out welcome emails, nurture prospects, follow up with customers, send birthday and anniversary greetings, manage your text promotions and a whole lot more, for anywhere from $150-$800/month, and these systems don’t call in sick or take vacations.

8. Raise your prices (and don’t apologize). If you need to raise prices, just do it. Don’t make an announcement or excuses. If a customer happens to notice and brings it up, be transparent. “Yes, our suppliers have increased our prices and we’ve passed along some of that increase.” Inflation affects everyone, and most people understand. Just avoid doing across-the-board price increases. Be strategic and raise prices only where you need to.

It’s a good time to get creative with your marketing. Remember that fortune favors the bold, and being bold is not only more fun than hunkering down, it has an infectious energy that attracts more customers.

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The easiest way to understand why this matters is to consider your bridal trend savvy relative to a typical bride’s customer journey.

The beginning of any customer journey is the awareness phase. Social media (primarily Instagram and TikTok), organic search, wedding sites like The Knot or Wedding Wire, or any one of a plethora of wedding bloggers all cater to the awareness phase of nascent brides. You want to get on a bride’s radar at this point before the engagement ring is purchased. What content are you putting on your website or sharing on social media to grab the attention of a future bride? If you’re not following current wedding trends, you won’t have the language or graphics to signal that your business is relevant. For example, if you’re following bridal news, you are aware lavish earrings have taken center stage in 2022 bridal wear. Show a Harper’s Bazaar-worthy Instagram carousel of wedding day earrings and set yourself apart.

The next phase of the bridal customer journey is evaluation. Brides do an intense amount of research. During the evaluation phase, you probably won’t even know you’re on a bride’s radar, so you have to depend on your website and social media to do the work for you. Think about every question you’ve ever been asked by a prospective client who was trying to decide between your business and a competitor and find interesting ways to put those answers on your website. You also need a web page of reviews specifically from bridal customers, explainer pages that talk about how your custom design works, and guides to help brides and grooms plan everything from engagement rings to wedding bands to wedding party gifts.

If you’ve done a good job to this point, the next stage of the bridal journey is intent, which is the moment when that bride is likely to walk through your door. Make it easy for her to plan by putting an online booking link on your website and all your social media channels.

Most retail jewelers really shine in the next phase of the bridal journey, which is the in-store experience. Being up to date on current bridal trends and fashions will make it easier for you to relate to her bridal journey and even offer ideas or share fun stories that are relevant, interesting and timely. This is the relationship building that ultimately leads to the final phase of the journey, which is retention. Not only do you want your bride to turn into a lifelong customer, you also want her to tell all her friends about her experience.

If it’s been a while since you paid attention to wedding trends, put it back on your radar. Make bridal trends a topic of future sales meetings. Keep a few bridal magazines on subscription. Because when your next new bride-to-be walks through your door with her wedding binder, you need to be ready to engage in her favorite topic and become a fellow traveler on her bridal journey.

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