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Smart Pickle exists to simplify your marketing. We help you spend less time worrying about how to tailor content to customers and more time investing in your business. In this article, we’ll give you a crash course on how to allocate your time to use Smart Pickle across our three primary channels–email, social media, and text (SMS).
Good business comes down to finding out what works and doing it over and over again–or, using “best practices.” “Best practices” refers to “commercial or professional procedures that are accepted or prescribed as being correct or most effective.”
Whether you are just starting your small business marketing, or are mastering methods for multiple locations, each of Smart Pickle's three communication channels has its own set of best practices. Spending a few moments familiarizing with how to best use each channel will put you ahead of the game as you get started with our tool.
Email is one of the most powerful ways to get in front of your customers. Over 70% of consumers list email as their preferred form of communication with businesses. Email is direct, personal, and allows you to be completely in control of content.
It’s important, however, to avoid bombarding customers. According to Entrepreneur.com, 69% of users unsubscribe due to “too many emails.” We recommend that you try to reach your customers by email 2x weekly to keep your audience engaged without filling up their inbox.
When communicating by email, it’s equally important to keep content relevant. While nearly 70% of users unsubscribe due to overwhelm, 32% unsubscribe because they find emails “irrelevant or useless.” Regardless of the channel you use, keep content relevant. A great way to do this is to make sure every email includes an incentive. Smart Pickle makes this simple and easy to do by helping you create a variety of promotions using our visually compelling templates.
Another way to keep customers engaged is to ask customers for feedback. Ask subscribers what foods they would like you to feature, what events they would be interested in attending, and what else you can do to deliver the best user experience possible.
Smart Pickle exists to simplify your marketing.
Today’s businesses rely on social media to connect with customers, increase visibility, and give their brand a compelling voice. Smart Pickle helps you leverage the power of social media by allowing you to send promotions via Facebook and Twitter.
Facebook. When it comes to posting on Facebook, balance is key. According to the marketing analytics platform Socialbakers, businesses that post only once per week risk losing their connection with followers, while “posting more than twice per day was crossing the line into annoying.”1 To strike the proper balance, we recommend posting to Facebook at least 1x per day about your business and 3x per week using Smart Pickle (i.e., about current or upcoming offers).
Twitter. Unlike Facebook, when it comes to Twitter, more is more. In fact, research shows that businesses need to post as least 3x per day to keep followers engaged. Some businesses see success with using Twitter up to 30x per day. BufferApp, for example, keeps a detailed schedule for Twitter activity which involves tweeting “14 times per day, from midnight to 10:00 p.m. Central Time, never more than once per hour; seven times per day on weekends, from 3:00 a.m. to 9:00 p.m., roughly every three hours.”2
While this hyper focused schedule works for some, most businesses see success by staying within Twitter users’ home feed of 3-5x per day. Roughly half of those posts should involve Smart Pickle promotions.
SMS is an increasingly effective marketing medium. Research shows that SMS produces engagement rates that are 6-8x higher than email and that SMS marketing coupons are 10x more likely to be redeemed and shared than mail or newspaper coupons. It’s not surprising that 70% people in the US would like to receive offers on their mobile phones.
Using Smart Pickle, you can maximize on this–sending up-to-date information on your current offers right to customer’s mobile devices. To maximize communication, we advice you to contact customers XXXXXX per week.
Regardless of the channel, Smart Pickle works with you to fine tune the timing and frequency of your offers. Every time you send a promotion using Smart Pickle, we gather information to help you determine what’s working and what’s isn’t. As time goes on, we’ll help you use that information to automate offers–meaning that we’ll need less and less of your time moving forward. Using these best practices, you can use Smart Pickle to reach customers starting today.
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