Small businesses face a competitive and challenging business landscape. They enjoy working with their local customers and work tirelessly to establish their niche within the communities they serve. On the other hand, they strive to reach new clientele continuously to add to their coffers—without decreasing the customer experience of their loyal existing base of customers.
This balancing act becomes exhausting quicker than these small businesses had ever imagined and leads to frustration. Many business owners eventually give up altogether on reaching out and growing their customer base out of sheer frustration.
Add to that, small businesses feel the constant pressure of competing with their enormous name-brand competitors who spend millions of dollars on advertising. While a marketing budget might be in the marketing plan, the little guy (or gal) certainly cannot pay even a fraction of those big-brand budgets.
So, what can a small business owner do to improve year after year in such a treacherous environment?
Ease some of the pressure by harnessing the power of EmailMeForm. Automate some of your processes by adding these essential tools to your kit.
1 - Capture leads…even without a website
Some entrepreneurs hang up a shingle, create social media accounts, and open up for business. This is true, particularly for brick and mortar start-up businesses.
Okay, so the business launch is not quite that easy.
The point is, you might not see building a website as your primary concern. For service businesses, this is quite often the case—an effective Facebook page allows you to capture those local customers that you need.
EmailMeForm allows you to integrate with Facebook and Twitter, enabling you to add a lead capture form without having a website. If you eventually do create a website, you can just as easily house that same form on your site with no extra work.
Of course, if you already have a website, you can embed your form in that site in just a few easy clicks.
2 - Send Newsletters
Whether you have a website or not, it is imperative that you remain relevant to your customers via a newsletter. Email marketing is a keenly effective strategy that allows you to compete with those big budget competitors by sending these out on a predictable schedule.
This process is one that you can streamline using EmailMeForm. As you begin collecting leads, the data is stored securely by us. Before you send out a newsletter, connect your account with us to your email provider. This integration automates your newsletter process and saves you time that you cannot afford to waste.
The importance of newsletters exists whether you’re an online business or a work from home business—your customers love hearing from you!
3 - Collect Employment Applications
Many brick and mortar locations often experience constant interruptions due to walk-in job applicants.
This represents a particular challenge to start-up businesses who might not even require employees (yet!) and must focus on overseeing every task throughout the day.
For those small businesses who have an established presence, they might need employees but not want those prospective employees trudging in all day long asking for a job application.
Either way, skip the paper job applications and request that applicants
complete an employment application online instead.
Even without a website, you can direct each applicant to the URL of the online job application you created with EmailMeForm—although it will be helpful to have a small box of business cards printed with that URL and application instructions to eliminate wasted time explaining this!
4 - Improve Cash Flow
What do online forms have to do with cash flow? Unless you’re a cash-up-front-only business—everything!
Regardless of being a brick and mortar or an online business, you won’t make money if you can’t send invoices and collect payments! Without a positive cash flow, your business clearly will not survive for very long.
EmailMeForm enables you to create customized invoicing and payment forms that help you reach your business goals.
Customizing the invoice is essential to help you improve accuracy in your record-keeping and can become a tax-time savior. Here, you can notate customer information, exactly what work/service/good you provided, and, of course, bill the customer.
You can allow the customer to pay the invoice by credit card upon receipt. Making it simple for the customer to pay you right away improves your receivables process, improving your cash flow and margins.
EmailMeForms integrates with many payment providers, including PayPal.
5 - Mitigate the Risk of Storing Data
If a data breach happens on your watch, guess what happens. You are liable for the damages.
With the ill intentions of phishermen, hackers, and other nefarious online criminals that exist in the world today, customer data must be a priority.
EmailMeForm helps you mitigate that risk.
We hold PCI-certification, and we’re proud of this fact.
That certificate means that we place a serious emphasis on storing data. So, when we collect form data for you, it is secure.
Take that employment application example, for instance. It contains sensitive and personal data that can be used for fraudulent purposes—full name, address, and a phone number. Those who perpetrate fraud need little more than that to score big.
Why keep paper lying around your brick and mortar store? All it takes is one dishonest person capturing an image with their cell phone to compromise the data.
Or, for work from home businesses why house spreadsheets containing sensitive data on your computer? Even savvy online entrepreneurs are not immune to hackers.
Housing private data in-house places your company at risk—for most small businesses, data breaches are disastrous.
Final Thoughts
These are only five ways that EmailMeForm can help small businesses make money. We offer you the ability to harness the power of our robust online forms. In doing so, you streamline your processes, remain connected to customers, and protect customer data. All of those are steps every entrepreneur must take to achieve long-term growth and success.
EmailMeForm lets you create secure online forms and surveys to collect information, process online payments, and automate your everyday tasks. Create a form for free today.
Deborah Tayloe
Deborah is a blogger and freelancer who often writes for EmailMeForm. When she’s not blogging, you’ll probably find Deborah working on DIY projects around her home in North Carolina.
