How To Be Extra Resourceful as a Small Enterprise Proprietor

Owning a small business is a major challenge. Without the help of a large corporation—and the many resources that come with it—you’re left navigating the ups and downs of the business world on your own. Any advantage over the competition sets your business apart. Don’t worry if you’re unsure what your resources are just yet. We know you’ll be up to the challenge!

ActiveCampaign can help. Let’s walk through some ways to be more resourceful as a small business owner. With these tricks, you can get ahead of the competition, and your business can grow even faster.

Tip #1: Connect with your customers

There is a human element to every purchase, one that often goes unnoticed and underappreciated. Especially as a small business, customers are looking to you for a sense of comfort. They want to hear from you! Keeping up with your customers on a regular cadence will keep you top-of-mind with your customers and create rapport. Sending regular updates and making customers feel like part of the family will go a long way towards them wanting to come back and purchase.

But trying to keep up with every customer is simply impossible. Even if you were the famous Taiwanese man with 64 phones — though he used them to play Pokémon Go — you can’t email or send an SMS to every customer yourself, though you can send SMS to specific groups at specific times.

Still, there are plenty of tools that can help you as a small business stay ahead of the game: ActiveCampaign, Calendly, Docusign, QuickBooks, and more. In fact, you’d be surprised at how many of these are not only affordable but also highly valuable in helping you manage your processes. These tools can help you do just about anything: automating processes, scheduling meetings, managing your accounting, and more.

Tip #2: Use the tools at your disposal

Think about how much time you could save if your emails were being automatically sent out. Or if you didn’t have to manually schedule (and re-schedule) meetings every time you have an interested client. Automating your processes not only ups your effectiveness, but also your efficiency. This is where you can really set yourself apart from the competition.

Using a powerful platform like ActiveCampaign can help you save tons of time on your marketing campaigns. Take in client information and save time on manually organizing information into spreadsheets. Automatically sending welcome emails nurture your customers into feeling like they are a part of your business’s family. Sending abandoned cart emails create sales when customers are on the fence about any given items. You can even see how well your homepage is performing with its current copy to maximize the success of bringing your customers into your business’s pipelines. Or even use ActiveCampaign’s Free plug and play webinar templates to learn how to better present your information to clients and win them over.

If you want to schedule meetings with prospective clients, there’s Calendar. Have your customers pick times to meet with you where you’ve marked down that you’re already available. No longer will you have to go through the mundane and time-consuming process of picking times out with clients. Instead, you can spend that extra time working on your business.

Consider other tools for different purposes as well. There’s everything from DocuSign for signing documents, to QuickBooks for accounting, and more. The more you take advantage of the various tools at your disposal, the less manual work you’ll have to do on processes. The less work you do on processes, the more time you can spend working on what you’re best at: your business.

Tip #3: Embrace the “small” in small business

There’s a major human element to salesas we learned at the 2022 Martech Conference:

“Humans are your audience, not MQLs, SQLs, or leads! People are, well, people! And people want to be treated as such. If you look at your customers as numbers, you’re going to sell to them like they’re numbers.

If you sell to people like they’re numbers, they’ll feel like you’re not being genuine with them and won’t want to work with you. Keeping the human in the sales process is essential.”

When looking to improve, it’s easy to overcorrect. Don’t lose sight of what makes you special. In the end, your customers chose to support you. Return the favor and keep their loyalty by providing a unique customer experience they couldn’t hope to get from a large corporation.

It’s key to never lose your grasp on this. Embrace what makes you unique, what you do to make your customers feel special, and the personal touches you’re able to provide as a small business. Remember, you’re a human too! As much as your transactions are small business to customer, they’re also human to human. Embrace the human element on both sides of your transactions. Consider signing off on your emails with your name, or checking in on those you’ve sold to personally (especially those that have purchased from you multiple times).

Overall, there are a variety of ways to succeed as a small business owner. These are just a few key ones that will help you grow your small business. Moving forward, make sure to follow these tips. If you need additional guidance, check out how to make yours Email as a small market businessand always remember that human touch along the way.