Most small businesses are missing out on opportunities to increase customer response rates because they are not tracking results and are failing to incorporate multi-channel communications, according to the newly released Pitney Bowes Small Business Marketing Survey.
Most small businesses fail to measure the success of their marketing campaigns, according to the survey, which revealed that 73 percent of respondents didn’t measure e-mail marketing metrics and 80 percent didn’t measure direct mail or traditional mail responses.
While one low-cost channel, e-mail, is used by 46 percent of respondents, most of the 750 companies surveyed had yet to embrace social media or QR codes, according to Pitney Bowes. Only 17 percent of those surveyed said they were using social media. None of the largest businesses (51 to 100 employees) listed social media as their primary channel. These businesses also used transactional mail as their main communication channel more than their counterparts. Pitney Bowes theorized the reason could be that the larger firms’ larger client bases provided more opportunities.
Businesses more than 10 years old didn’t use social media as their primary channel either, though firms less than a year old were very comfortable with the social media channel.
Sixty percent of respondents said they stay with e-mail due to its low cost, 59 percent (multiple answers were allowed) said they stayed with e-mail due to cost effectiveness, while 40 percent cited familiarity. Yet most firms had e-mail lists of less than 100 customers and were ignoring many of the opportunities to leverage the communications, according to Pitney Bowes. “For small businesses that aren’t yet ready for a full-scale e-mail marketing program, you still have the opportunity to give your transactional e-mails a marketing touch. For example, in your next set of e-mails, try including links to your Web site for offers and discounts or to your social media channels on Facebook and Twitter.”
But even those firms that were using e-mail and social media were largely ignoring a multi-channel strategy, according to Pitney Bowes.
One of the biggest opportunities that most small businesses are missing is the adoption of QR codes, according to Pitney Bowes. Since most small businesses don’t use them today, those that do have the opportunity to differentiate themselves from competitors by offering customers the codes for “deals” offering immediate benefits.
According to Pitney Bowes: “If you are not using QR codes yet, the main opportunity for your small business is using them to create powerful links between your traditional and digital marketing efforts. When integrated marketing is done right, it is greater than the sum of the parts, with each element lifting the other through reinforcement or cross-linking. Instead of asking every customer where they heard about your promotion, you can log into your QR code software to see exactly how many responded to your offer.”
Pitney Bowes also stressed the importance of measuring the results of marketing campaigns in order to know the ones that are underperforming and should be cut and the ones that are delivering maximum return on investment.
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