One of the principles of a small town business is to be personal. Sometimes, automation can help you to be personal.
Here’s what I mean.
A friend was taking registrations for an event. If you’ve ever dealt with event registrations, you know it generates a lot of emails. One of the options in his marketing software was to send an email to anyone who started to register for the event, but stopped for some reason and still hadn’t registered within an hour. He chose to send a simple email along the lines of, “If you have any questions or are having trouble registering, just reply and I’ll help you out.” He actually wasn’t sure he should, afraid it would be “too pushy.” But there was no way for him to watch every single person attempt to register and send an email if they needed help without automation.
The first email he got back was a potential attendee worried the event would sell out before he could get the approvals he needed to make the purchase. So my friend held a ticket for him.
So automation can help you be more personal, but only if you are smart and selective about the automation you set up.
Take a look at your own marketing processes. Where can you set up some simple automation that will help you to be personal in ways you otherwise couldn’t be?
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Becky started Small Biz Survival in 2006 to share rural business and community building stories and ideas with other small town business people. She and her husband have a small cattle ranch and are lifelong entrepreneurs. Becky is an international speaker on small business and rural topics.
This is such a good point and something I try to stress to my clients who resist technologies like MailChimp. I spent a lot of my days going “I swear you can use technology and stil come off as personal and nice. I swear!” Great case study that I’ll have to share!