Author: Franz Malten Buemann

There’s more scope for automation in your business than ever before. With automation, you can schedule emails to be sent at the perfect time, follow up with leads that have abandoned their cart, sync data between apps, and notify team members of new tasks.
However, all of these options can be overwhelming, especially if your business isn’t a huge corporation with a lot of budget and resources to throw at automation.
You might be wondering:

What types of automation will benefit my business the most?
What should I stay away from?
How can I easily implement these while keeping life simple?

Let’s explore the best types of business automation so you can start implementing a strategy in your own organization.

7 Ways to Automate Your Business
1. Email Marketing Automation
When you think of automation, email marketing automation might come to mind first. It’s not only one of the most popular types of automation, it’s one of the most accessible, too.
Types of Email Automation:

Triggering emails based on actions, such as webinar sign up confirmations or abandoned basket notifications
Email drip workflows that send content at set intervals
Delivering content or requested information after filling out a form

A/B testing content and automatically sending the best performing version of the content
Personalizing each email you send
Segmenting groups based on data and automatically sending the right email to each group

A good way to get started with email marketing automation is to have a look at the automation capabilities that your email marketing platform already has and think about how you can use them to execute your strategy.
All popular email marketing tools have built-in automation functionality. However, if you haven’t picked an emailing tool yet, make sure to pick an option with enough automation functionalities to meet the needs of your business.
2. Marketing Automation
What about the other types of marketing automation beyond email marketing? We can divide these into external automation that is customer-facing and internal automation that helps streamline the workflows inside your team.
Examples of External Marketing Automation:

Automated SMS messages
Scheduling or republishing social media messages
Unlocking new course content at set intervals after enrolling

Examples of Internal Marketing Automation:

Lead scoring and qualification
Routing qualified leads between apps, such as from your CRM to your email marketing platform
Notifying team members if a contact meets conditions or takes certain actions
Creating a strong bridge between marketing and sales
Streamlining multi-stage processes such as publishing content or setting up a new marketing campaign

3. Sales Automation
Sales automation is about managing your pipelines more effectively, reducing friction, and increasing conversion rates.
Benefits of Sales Automation

Stay on top of a busy pipeline
Better calendar management
Identify and focus on the most sales-ready leads
Collect and act on data insights
Sync the latest data across all apps
Create a strong bridge with marketing
Pass new customers to onboarding
Avoid spending time on bad-fit leads

To get started with sales automation, first look at any built-in automation functionality that your CRM offers. You can then look into adopting and integrating other apps to automate more powerful workflows.
4. Data Automation
Although automation is great for streamlining repetitive tasks and freeing up time for important work, it’s also powerful at managing data behind the scenes.
While our brains are good at looking at data insights to draw conclusions and plan actionable next steps, we’re not so good at manually managing that data. We don’t have the time, attention to detail, or accuracy to control large data sets — and we don’t need to.
With automated data management, you can leave the heavy lifting to the machines and free up time for taking action on the insights instead.
Ways to Automate Data:

Trigger/action workflows that push data between your apps

Syncing contact data two ways between apps and automatically making updates as soon as anything changes

Sending all contact data to your CRM for a centralized database
Combining data from all apps for integrated reporting on one dashboard
Automatically merging or fixing duplicate contacts in your database

To get started, first optimize the data in your individual apps. You can then use software integration tools to allow them to communicate data with each other.
5. Customer Care Automation
What about your support and customer care teams?
Ways to Automate Customer Service:

Optimize customer experience
Personalize interactions
Make sure your customer care team automatically has access to all available customer data

Automation is not about removing the human element from 1-1 interactions. In fact, it’s about making more time for these and providing a better experience for your customers.
You can automate notifications to let you know when is the right time to reach out to a customer, meaning you can spend less time working out what you should be doing every day.
You can automate customer satisfaction surveys that alert you when a customer needs quick attention to reduce the risk of churn.
You can introduce chatbots or knowledge bases with built-in AI that quickly answer simple questions, or route a customer to the best support rep for their inquiry if that doesn’t fix it.
Simply put, automation enables your customer care staff to manage a higher volume of customers more effectively, without burning out or diminishing the quality of 1-1 interactions.
6. Ecommerce Automation
It used to be that to sell products, you had to do it yourself. You had to oversee production of your inventory. You had to open up your shop in the morning, answer customers’ questions, and process their payments for your products.
But that’s all changed. As an ecommerce store owner, you don’t even need to be there. You can keep your store open 365 days a year, even while you’re sleeping or traveling.
Types of Ecommerce Automation:

Purchases via an online shopfront such as Shopify or WooCommerce
Online payments through providers such as Stripe and PayPal
Discount codes to prospects, first-time customers or engaged buyers
Abandoned cart notifications to customers
Product suggestions based on previous purchases
Inventory management
Requesting reviews post-sale

With dropshipping, you can even automate all of the fulfillment work for an order. As someone else creates the products, stores them in a warehouse, and sends them to the customer, all you have to do is create an online storefront and get eyes on it.
7. Management Automation
As with customer care automation, management automation isn’t about removing the human-to-human interactions. Instead, it can free up a manager’s time to look after their team and support their growth.
Types of Management Automation:

Team reminders to prep for meetings
Chasing overdue work
Following up on tasks after set intervals
Sharing onboarding materials with new hires
Collecting daily feedback on wins and blockers
Self-reviews and performance tracking
Reporting dashboards
Syncing data with meeting slides

For simple ways to start automating management processes, Trello, Slack, and Asana are tools you might already be using that also offer great automation functionality.
Automation is a long-term strategy: it’s not about trying to change everything at once or creating processes that are overly complex for the stage your business is at.
Take a look at where your business is now. Where are the blockers, manual tasks, and inefficiencies?
Ask yourself how can you start automating these areas to free up your focus for the areas where you have the most impact.

While there will always be fires to put out and short-term issues to tend to at any company, it’s essential to take a step back and focus on the bigger picture. This means looking to your business operations and creating a strategy that primes your B2B organization for success.
Entrepreneur, angel investor, and former host of the reality show, “The Profit,” Marcus Lemonis, is a seasoned pro when it comes to spotting marketing opportunities and avoiding business failure.

He also coined “the 3 P’s of success”:

Process
People
Product

According to Lemonis, the 3 P’s are fundamentals that every business needs to get right. If those fundamentals aren’t in place, success will be an uphill struggle.
Building a robust B2B operation is all about getting those three P’s in the right place.
Business Operations Definition
Business operations are everything that happens within your company to keep it running and profitable.
In most business plans, a specific section is devoted to business operations needed to make an organization function. These include:

Systems
Equipment
Staffing
Processes

While your business model is a description of what you want to achieve, business operations are the practical execution.
Even if you already have processes in place, for the best results in your B2B company you need to be intentional about your ops and create a clear strategy that’s regularly optimized.
Functions of B2B Business Operations
Although the ins-and-outs of business operations can differ substantially depending on the industry and size of a company, most of these functions remain relevant to any type of business:

Maintaining efficient internal communications and striving for alignment around goals and how to reach them
Providing senior-level managers with the information and coaching they need
Continuously auditing and optimizing business processes
Managing budget and planning processes
Monitoring third-party cooperation and software integrations

If you hire a Head of Operations, these are all focus points they will need to stay on top of and continuously improve. Otherwise, these tasks can be divided between the most relevant people on your team.
The Different Roles of B2B Business Operations
While a Head of Operations is responsible for business operations at the highest level, it’s common to appoint mid-level roles within different departments of an organization.
Sales Ops entail all the business activities and processes that help your company’s sales run efficiently and in line with your business objectives.
Marketing Ops is a role or team focused on enabling the marketing team to operate and scale efficiently with the right people, processes, and tech.
Support Ops, like the other ops roles, works behind the scenes to provide the tools, integrations, and processes that enable support teams to succeed.
Running the operations of a B2B company can be challenging, and requires the ability to analyze and evaluate processes and performance on both a macro and micro level.
To help you implement the most impactful business ops strategy for your B2B company, read on for eight pointers for success.
8 Best Practices for Successful B2B Business Operations
1. Communicate clearly — and choose the right tech.
Everything starts and ends with good internal communications. In fact, a recent study found that 89% of respondents believe effective communication is incredibly important in a business setting.
Establishing the right processes for communication is a crucial key to business success, and since team members today mostly rely on technology to communicate and collaborate, choosing the right communication tools is equally important.
2. Define team expectations and accountability.
Clear expectations for each team member, as well as clear accountability, are foundational for success. Regularly setting tasks, deadlines, and planning together is an integral part of business operations, as well as following up on and evaluating results and performance.
3. Document and automate processes.
Documenting all processes and sharing them with the organization saves a lot of time and effort. Documentation prevents the need to “reinvent the wheel” again and again and provides a common ground and point of reference that can then be further developed.
What’s even better is when your documentation and data are readily available to your team members. Integrating your different tools and syncing your contacts will make workflows run smoother and with less effort.
4. Integrate your tech stack.
An important part of business operations is maintaining a helicopter perspective on technical solutions and platforms. By choosing tools that are optimal for your needs, avoiding redundant functionalities, and integrating your different systems, you set your various departments up for success.
5. Strive for transparency.
It’s essential to have cross-functional collaboration that breaks down silos and aligns departments around common goals. Alternatively, failure to create transparency results in redundant work, misaligned priorities, and missed opportunities for collaboration, so getting this one right is worth the effort.
Some effective tactics for any B2B business include regular cross-departmental meetings and the right communication tools to facilitate collaboration.
6. Base decisions on data.
Because business operations involve various stakeholders and agendas, it’s vital to maintain an objective view of how efficient your operations are and to agree on how to define and measure success.
When creating your B2B ops strategy, take time to assess how well you are:

Running a data-driven operation with high data integrity and reliability
Basing decisions on facts and figures rather than hunches and gut feel
Creating regular reports and sharing them with all stakeholders

7. Collect feedback from teams.
An efficient feedback loop where team members can deliver their insights and comments to management is invaluable. Regular surveys and a strong team culture that invites feedback are great places to start.
Of course, only collecting the feedback is not enough; it needs to be followed up and acted on as well. How can you ensure this in your B2B ops strategy?
8. Consider hiring a Head of Operations.
Ownership of your B2B ops is crucial, and it pays to have someone accountable for maintaining the smooth running of your organization.
If you can, hire a person who owns your business ops and is responsible for continuously evaluating and optimizing the three P’s: processes, people, and product.
Agree on metrics to measure success, and follow up regularly to make sure you’re maximizing your business’s potential. You can also think about how your ops strategy trickles down to each department for the most impact and productivity.
How will you strengthen your B2B operations?
Every business is different, and you need to look at your specific company to evaluate what your needs are. But if you check all these eight boxes, you should be well on your way to a best-in-class B2B business operation.

In an ideal world, your business has immaculate customer data. You know exactly where to find the right contact email, when they became a customer, and who in your team spoke to them last. Your data is segmented, up-to-date and reliable.
But if that’s not the reality for you just yet, don’t worry… you are certainly not alone.
It’s all too easy for customer data to descend into chaos, especially when your business is using multiple apps, as most are.
However, even if your data is a mess, putting it in order is possible – and easier than you might think.
Here’s how to keep your customer data up-to-date and reliable everywhere, even when you’re using several different apps.

Why is customer data management so important?
With your customer data in disarray, you will likely come up against these frustrations:

Data silos, or pieces of information that only certain people have access to
Contradictory data in different apps (or the same app) so you can’t tell what’s accurate or reliable
Poor customer experiences as you lack the data and insights to personalize interactions

The truth is: organizing your customer data isn’t just about making life easier for you (although it does this, too).
Your customers want an integrated experience when interacting with your business, no matter who they’re speaking to or which department. 87% of customers think brands need to put more effort into providing a consistent experience.
This becomes more essential to focus on considering all of the different contact points in your organization. A customer might interact with sales, marketing, customer support, technical support, admin, and billing. And for a good customer experience, they should get speedy answers to their problems and not have to repeat their story over and over again to different people.
They want to be treated like a person instead of a message or support ticket number, and you can’t achieve this if you don’t have the data to tell you who they are and how they have interacted with your business before.
Where Customer Data Lives
In your business right now, you are probably storing customer data in several places. This might include your:

CRM
Customer support software
Customer satisfaction survey platform
Live chat
Social media inboxes

If these systems are siloed, or information sits there disconnected from your other apps and is inaccessible to other people, you risk data silos, inconsistent data, and poor customer experiences.
For the most seamless customer data management, your apps need to communicate data in two directions, in a language that each app understands.
Best Practices for Customer Data Management
1. Keep clean, accurate data in each app.
Your overall customer data is the sum of its parts, so it’s important to keep the data in each app fresh and reliable. Here’s our advice on cleaning up your customer data, including removing duplicates and outdated information.
2. Use segmentation for clear organization.
Segmenting your customer data in each app is a powerful best practice. As one key reason, it enables you to offer a fantastic customer experience that boosts satisfaction and reduces churn. And, a 10% increase in a company’s customer satisfaction score leads to a 12% increase in trust from customers.
If you know your customer belongs to segments for customers based in the U.S., and they’re subscribed to your premium plan, and are paying for your digital marketing add-on, you can use automation to send them the most personalized experiences and messaging.
You can also use segmentation in your data integration strategy, syncing the labels, tags, groups, and list memberships you have in your key apps across your stack.
3. Sync data two ways.
There are several ways you can connect your data between apps. You could use built-in native integrations offered by your software providers, or trigger-action automation such as what Zapier enables.
However, when it comes to your customer data, you’re best off with a two-way sync. This mirrors data between two apps, updating one as soon as something changes in the other.
It’s the most reliable way to make your data readily accessible to all your teams across your entire app stack.
4. Keep it simple.
As with many things in life and work, the most effective customer data management is simple. This can mean:

Standardizing data organization: For instance, having one property for ‘Industry’ rather than overlapping properties for ‘Sector,’ ‘Business type,’ and ‘Industry’.

Deciding which data to sync: Rather than syncing everything, you can sync relevant and insightful data that enriches every app, rather than adding unnecessary complexity.

Creating clear processes and documentation: For adding, editing, and viewing customer data to make life easy for you and your colleagues.

With a two-way data sync between the apps that hold your customer data, you can give your team access to up-to-date and correct customer data everywhere and provide a five-star customer experience.

Email newsletters are a powerhouse in marketing for solopreneurs and major corporations alike.
Both types of businesses have to work hard crafting and sending newsletters that work for their audience and their brand.
How do you make a newsletter you know is working? >Good writing. Good design. Good analytics.
In this post, we’ll walk you through six things you should consider to craft a newsletter that not only looks good, but persuades people to click and convert, whether that’s getting them to come to your website, donate to a cause, or purchase a product.
Six Fundamentals for Newsletters That Convert
1. Design a newsletter people want to read.
When designing a newsletter, you shouldn’t just choose the first one that looks appealing. Think about what people expect from your brand.
If you’re planning communications from a global top-tier financial brand known for its long history and industry expertise, your audience is probably not expecting edgy and bold newsletters jam-packed with GIFs and downloadables.
They might be expecting HTML emails, but more on the formal side, definitely aligned with your brand and with your logo to signify that it’s from your organization.
If you’re running a startup, your followers might be expecting something more original, innovative, and personal.
If you’re a solo freelancer, followers might be much more understanding of less formality but put higher value on authenticity.
Take Wishpond marketing platform’s newsletter gallery which showcases the wide variety of forms a newsletter can take, especially when optimizing for industry and purpose:

2. Your copy is part of your design.
Your design >also means your copy and tone – both of which should be consistent across your newsletters.
Is your copy strictly informative? Playful? Irreverent?
Picture your reader in your mind and what you want to make them feel. Use words and design to get them there.
Take a look at content pro Ann Handley’s newsletters, which are a masterful example of combining a first-person tone and feel with industry information.

Handley’s newsletter is formatted to reflect a warm, caring, fun personality that nonetheless showcases her considerable expertise.
After the newsletter itself, which is a first-person thought leadership piece, Handley uses emojis as bullet points. ‘Tools’ are useful apps from around the web for practitioners. ‘Love Letters’ are a subtle way for Handley to showcase her featured writing from around the web. And ‘Public Events’ are invitations for where she’ll be speaking.
The images add a splash of color to her email, while the powerhouse content balances them out. This is a fantastic example of design and copy working in tandem.
3. Write subject lines people want to click on.
Subject lines are the gatekeepers to your emails. The good news is that the art of a good subject line is one copywriters and marketers have examined from all angles.
There are a few things you want to think about when you’re considering subject lines:
Character Count
Character count counts! If the meat of your email subject line is cut off by browser display limits, it won’t matter how brilliant your copy is: your readers can’t see it. It’s advisable to keep your email subject lines around 30 characters.
Urgency or Value
Remember that most of your audience members are as busy (or busier) than you are, and will likely forget your email if they don’t click on it within the day they receive it.
Ask yourself, what reason have you given them to click on it the minute they see the push notification pop up on their phone, or the subject line in their inbox? An irresistible offer? A time limit? A question they want answered?
Personalization
Email subject lines that mention your recipient’s name are more likely to get clicked on. For this, you’ll need to collect data on your leads, and need their permission to do it.
4. Construct email lists that cater to audience interests.
Segmentation is key. It’s one of the simplest things you can do in your email marketing strategy that will show the most dramatic results.
It filters unnecessary emails from your audience’s inbox, boosts your open rates and your click rates, lowers your unsubscribe rates, and makes your subscribers feel more like your company is catering to them.
To optimize your recipient’s experience as well as your business’s results, here are some best practices for segmentation:
Be specific, but not too specific.
If your email group is very small when it comes to sending, it’s probably not a group you should target. Each list should be as large as possible without straying too far from the core characteristics of the group. 
Make your lists distinguishable.
No email marketing strategy is one-size-fits-all. By dividing your email database into clearly defined groups and segments, you can communicate to your different markets and audiences with tailor-fit campaigns and strategies.
Optimize your data collection.
Good data comes down to three core things: trust, accuracy, and integrity. Your team needs to ethically and reasonably collect the data you need to create effective segments while maintaining the trust of your contacts.
When a contact opts into email communication and progresses through your marketing funnel, make sure their data — including their opt-in status — is synced to the right apps.
For instance, you could sync your email marketing app and CRM after a contact is labeled ‘Customer.’
Measure your results.
Make sure you can measure the success of your newsletter campaigns. For best results, go beyond just open and click rates to understand exactly how your newsletters impact your customer acquisition.
Set up tracking to understand how many customers convert as a direct result of clicking on your newsletters, and how many customer conversions it assists indirectly.
5. Help readers find your newsletter.
Just like selling tickets is an integral part of show business, an important part of newsletters is getting people to subscribe.
Getting people to sign up for your newsletter should be a serious consideration in your strategy.
There are numerous ways to promote your newsletter. You could:

Add pop-ups on your blog and website, especially for visitors who seem particularly engaged.
Add a subscription option in your footer.
Promote your newsletter on social media: Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.
Offer a free sample of your newsletter. Look how the popular newsletter Daily Pnut offers proof of their value to potential readers by sharing their archive online:

6. Stay consistent and relevant.
However often you decide to send your newsletter — once a month, once a week, even every day — ensure your audience members can count on it.
At the same time, just because your timing is predictable, your content shouldn’t be.
Keep things fresh for your audience. The worst thing you can do is make your audience feel like your email is the same piece of tired information, hitting their inbox day after day, and clogging up their storage space. That’s an easy way to get readers to unsubscribe and lose hard-won leads.
Instead, mix up your content. Intersperse informational posts with offers and contests, make sure it’s not all text, add some gifs and photos, send out surveys, and, most importantly, ask for feedback.

Cloud-based business applications offer brilliant, flexible, and affordable solutions for small and medium-sized businesses. They have their own structure, business model, benefits, and challenges, including contact management.
We asked David Anderson, LionDesk Founder and CEO, about the impact of these platforms on the growth of SMBs and the importance of keeping different tools aligned. This is what he told us.

Q&A With David Anderson, LionDesk CEO
1. How do you think cloud-based solutions and SaaS are impacting the growth of small and medium-sized businesses?
Consumer expectations are at an all-time high. To remain competitive, businesses must evolve to deliver products and services faster, easier, and better.
SaaS technology allows businesses to keep up with demand while running their business effectively and efficiently. For example, a LionDesk user can set up their system to remind them of important tasks, automatically follow up with contacts throughout the year, and show them at-a-glance how their database is performing while only spending 15 min/day in the system. That’s the power of technology.
2. What are the biggest challenges for SMEs when it comes to contact management?
Hands down the biggest challenge is contact follow-up. We don’t have a lead generation problem, we have a lead follow-up problem.
The person who responds to the lead the fastest wins. The person who maintains a relationship with their contact through consistent communication and nurturing wins. The person who remembers small personal details about a contact wins. And, that’s exactly what a fully functional CRM system can be set up to do.
3. How can integration solutions enhance the use of LionDesk?
A core value at LionDesk is that we, “Play well with others.” By having an open system that allows users to connect their favorite business building tools, they’re able to work more efficiently and effectively.
4. Where do you think lies the importance of keeping sales and marketing tools aligned with other business applications?
The #1 benefit of having a hub like LionDesk that connects all your business tools is that it limits the number of applications you need to log into to run your business. Having the same data from your different applications aligned and shared helps your team rowing in the same direction.

Which apps are you using to power your marketing operations?
Most teams collect and use data in their CRM as well as several marketing apps, such as an email marketing tool and automation software.
These apps enable you to streamline operations, bring in more leads, and carry out effective marketing campaigns.

However, do they work together and exchange data about your marketing leads and customers, or do they operate in silos?
If you take away one thing from this post, make it this:

Your marketing apps are strong independently, but they’re most powerful together.

As a marketer, the most impactful sync to set up is betweenyour CRM and marketing apps.
This sync has the potential to enrich data in your marketing platforms, amplify possibilities for segmented and personalized communication, and boosts performance. It also sets you up foralignment with sales.
Fortunately, it’s never been easier to connect your CRM with your marketing apps using an iPaaS (Integration Platform as a Service).
This connects your organization’s business tools and lets data flow to all the right places, rather than stagnating in silos.

Read on for our rundown of how to easily get started connecting your CRM and marketing apps.
Reasons to Connect Your CRM and Marketing Apps
If you have a disconnected marketing stack and your tools don’t play nicely together, you will be able torecognize some of these common problems:

You struggle to find the most up-to-date and reliable marketing data.
Reliable marketing data doesn’t even exist.
Your data quality is affected by duplicate contacts.
Your apps have data gaps or conflicting information.
Your sales team complains about not having enough understanding of leads.
You have to repeatedly export and import CSVs to get a full picture of your customer data.

Your marketing stack will look like this, with your data sitting firmly in each app:

To fix these problems for good, your apps need to talk to one another in a two-way sync. You can map out how you want to sync information fields across apps, ensuring that each contact property is correct in every app.
This is different from most native integrations offered by your apps because it creates a two-way, highly customizable sync.
By connecting your CRM database and marketing apps, you can:

Create the most personalized email campaigns and workflows with segmentation data from your CRM.
See the latest data in every app and keep a 100% updated email list.
Avoid duplicate contacts.
Make sure subscription status is instantly reflected across all apps.
Fix and avoid data silos between teams.
Stop relying on CSVs for contact management.
Deliver marketing qualified leads in real-time to your sales team in the best app for them.

With effective syncs in place, your marketing stack will look more like this:

Much better, right?
Tips for Syncing Data Between CRM and Marketing Apps
With integration tools like a two-way sync, you don’t need any special tech skills to start connecting data in your CRM and marketing apps.
To get the best results, here are a few of our tips:

Createa two-way sync when you want to keep the same data in both apps and update any changes in real-time.
Sync tags, labels, and list memberships between your apps to allow for the bestsegmentation and personalization in either app.
Clean up your data between connecting your apps and follow our pre-sync guidelines.

The amount of data in the world is growing exponentially. By the time you finish reading this page, 90 million texts will be sent and received. 350,000 Instagram posts will be uploaded. 1.2 million Skype calls will be made. 21 million GB of traffic will be received on the internet.
Big data is everywhere, from the Netflix shows we watch to the social media we browse. But did you know that big data can also benefit your small business?
61% percent of companies say that big data drives revenue because it delivers deep insights into customer behavior. With this valuable intelligence, you can delve deeper into the collective psyche of your customers — and find out what consumers really think.
Imagine you could guess what customers purchase — and when and how. Big data isn’t a crystal ball, but it can certainly help you make smarter, faster decisions about the future of your business.

What is big data?
In the simplest of terms, big data is “big” amounts of data. It can be structured, unstructured, or semi-structured. It can be collected and shared and analyzed.
Big data is all of the information that we create. Emails. Texts. Tweets. TikToks. It’s data that passes from digital devices to routers to servers to clouds and back again.
To quote the famous computer programmer, Daniel Keys Moran:

“You can have data without information, but you cannot have information without data.”

Here’s a helpful definition of big data from Investopedia:
“Big data refers to the large, diverse sets of information that grow at ever-increasing rates. It encompasses the volume of information, the velocity or speed at which it is created and collected, and the variety or scope of the data points being covered. Big data often comes from multiple sources and arrives in multiple formats.”
Big data isn’t perfect, but it’s one of the most powerful weapons in any marketer’s arsenal. Leverage big data in your small business, and you can move more customers through your sales and marketing funnels. It’s as simple as that.
Here are some eye-watering facts about big data:

Big data could add more than 4.4 million jobs to the American economy over the next two years.
Humans generate 2.5 quintillion data bytes every 24 hours.
Google processes more than 40,000 search queries every single second –that’s 3.5 billion searches a day, or 1.2 trillion a year.

The Benefits of Big Data For Small Businesses
It’s important to note that big data on its own won’t do much for your organization. However, the right technology systematically extracts large data sets from various sources so you can find patterns, trends, and correlations in this data.
The best analytics tools provide you with deeper insights into your business operations and replace many of the manual methods associated with data analysis.
Read on for some of the main benefits of using big data in your small business.
1. Cuts Costs
Big data can have a significant impact on cost-cutting in your organization by identifying expensive processes and redundant workflows. With the latest data, you can find areas of your business to scale up or down. This can have long-term financial benefits.
2. Improve Customer Service
Big data drives better customer service. With real-time insights into your customer base, you can discover how consumers think and behave – and make changes to your business as a result.
Personalized customer service derived from big data analytics will help you engage with customers on a deeper level and provide customized service that drives sales.
“Big data is poised to help marketers reach and engage customers and prospects in ways that businesses are only now starting to understand,” says business journalist Allen Bernard, writing for CIO.com. “Enterprises that don’t embrace analytics may soon see embattled customers voting with their wallets.”
Customer service is more important than ever, and more small businesses are using big data to retain consumers. Why? Just a 5% increase in customer retention generates more than 25% of profit increases.
3. Identify (and Solve) Problems
With big data, you can finally answer all those nagging questions: why do customers abandon their carts? When are customers likely to make a purchase?
Data analytics tools can give valuable insights into customer behavior as they move through your funnels.
Although data analysis isn’t an exact science, it provides you with the tools you need to solve a wide range of complex problems in your small business. As well as tracking customers, you can solve issues associated with suppliers, investors, and other clients. With real-time reports, you get a 360-degree overview of your business, and you can make smarter decisions going forward.
4. Increase Revenue
Big data increases revenue in various ways. Analytics provide you with in-depth intelligence into the customer lifecycle, and you can identify new ways to encourage sales.
Good data might give you the confidence you need to launch a new product or diversify your business, and this could prove lucrative.
On average, companies that incorporate big data into their business generate a profit increase of 8%. Do the same, and it could be the best investment you make in your small business this year.
“Most people used to think that big data was only for big business. But, as time goes on, it is clear that this technology is for everyone,” says Entrepreneur.
5. Team Management
Big data also makes it easier to manage the team in your small business. You can identify employees that provide you with the most value, for example, or employees who require additional resources or training. This is because analytics systems generate insights that help you increase productivity and keep employees happy.
“The value that big data brings to managing employees is in identifying and analyzing the relationship between engagement and retention,” says employee engagement website Hppy. “How and why people are engaging with what they do, how does that translate into the business metrics, and what you can improve to retain them.”
Combined with a great team culture that inspires engagement, the tech stack you use can make all the difference when it comes to managing your team. With an Integration Platform as a Service (iPaaS), you can connect your cloud-based apps for enriched data and the broadest range of insights.
How Small Businesses can Leverage Big Data
Remember: big data is only one slice of the pie. It’s the processes and solutions that collect, store, and analyze all your data and you should act on these that best serve your business.
So, how can your small business leverage big data for the best results?
Use your CRM intelligently.
You probably already use a CRM to manage your customer information, but you’re not necessarily getting the best results from the data inside it.
Before diving into other analytics tools, fully explore the data you already have in your CRM. Here are some valuable questions to ask as you do so:

What do we know about the people we serve?
How can we leverage this data to deliver the most value?
How can we use this data to provide a more personalized experience?
What automation and new processes can we power with this data?

Explore other analytics solutions.
A CRM can only tell you so much about your prospects and customers. With big data analytics solutions, however, you can analyze all the data inside your CRM (and other programs in your tech stack) and find patterns in all this data.
G2 Crowd shortlists some of the best big data solutions on the market, including Azure Databricks and Splunk.
However, if you want a more accessible data strategy, start with the apps you already have and look into a platform such as Clearbit to help fill the gaps in your data and enrich what you know about your contacts.
Big data software needs to be user-friendly and flexible enough for everyone on your team who manages data. It also needs to be tailored to your budget and requirements. As a small business, you likely won’t benefit from a data program designed for the world’s biggest multinationals.
Integrate your data.
Any data solution is only as good as the data it uses, and out-of-date and inconsistent information won’t provide you with any useful insights. You need to make sure your data is synced and integrated.
By deploying an integration solution, you can keep your contact database consistent and up-to-date between apps in order to ensure your customer data is well-integrated across your app stack. You can sync contacts in real-time and streamline contact management.
Create insightful reporting.
Once you have interesting data at your fingertips, you need a way to visualize it. With clear reporting, you can easily make deductions and share your insights with other team members and stakeholders.
Act on your data.
Once you have useful data in your business, what can you do with it? The short answer: automation, personalization, and customization.
Here are some of the most impactful ways to take advantage of big data as a small business:

Personalize your emails
Segment your email lists
Use SEO research to influence your content strategy
Use dynamic or smart content on your website based on device, geography, lead status, or other properties to customize content
Send the most relevant content to a prospect based on their preferences
Trigger internal workflows based on customer actions to provide the best service
Create A/B tests for emails and automatically send the best content
Pivot your company or team strategies to match what’s performing best
Deliver the most relevant advertising and channel your spend to top-performing channels and campaigns
Automatically organize contacts into the most relevant groups and lists in your CRM

Big data can benefit your business in various ways, from increased sales to better team management.
However, you need to leverage all this data properly to optimize your workflows and grow your small business to its full potential.
Regardless of the big data processes and tools you choose, it’s important to keep your contact database up to date. Otherwise, you’ll be limited in the results you can get from your customer data.

Proper contact management is essential to keep your business productive and organized. But while technology offers countless solutions to effectively manage contacts at scale, without good processes your contacts can get messy very quickly.
Without proper planning, centralized administration, and automated syncing, contacts end up being spread across multiple email accounts and other databases. When your contact management processes break down, some team members may be tempted to go back to paper or DIY solutions, noting down contacts on sticky notes where they inevitably end up getting lost or mislaid.
With the extra work required to find the right data and tidy things up, it’s not a recipe for productivity for anyone.
Fortunately, with the optimal blend of process and technology, you can improve access to this mission-critical information across the board.
Here are five tips to improve your organization’s contact management systems for the smoothest operations, productivity, and reliability.

Contact Management Best Practices
1. Clean your data.
The digital universe is huge and continues to double in size every two years. A lot of this data, however, is of no use to anyone.
With so-called big data, the biggest challenge lies in determining which data is valuable and which isn’t. When it comes to managing your contacts, bad data includes that which doesn’t help you deliver the right message through the right channels.
Examples included duplicate, outdated or incorrect contact information, as well as contact details you’re not supposed to retain due to privacy legislation like GDPR. That’s why you need to make sure your contact data is properly cleaned and organized before making any major changes to your contact management processes.
For organizations that have thousands of contacts, it’s practically impossible to clean contact data manually. Instead, you need a smart system for unifying multiple data sources and getting rid of any duplicate, incorrect, or outdated information.
Merging contacts without losing critical data is especially important, which you can achieve by smartly syncing different databases while enriching contact records, instead of keeping information from just one source.
2. Use a centralized database.
Contact data plays a vital role in every department of every business. The challenge here lies in the fact that different departments collect contact details in different ways.
Sales teams typically organize their data in a CRM, while marketers collect data like email addresses via lead gen apps and email marketing platforms. Other departments, like HR and support, have their own systems for managing contacts as well.
Contact management becomes exponentially more complicated in larger businesses where different branches adopt different tools and platforms which don’t always work well together.
To alleviate these problems, you’ll need a centralized database that all the right people have access to.
For very small businesses, a digital address book like Google Contacts or Microsoft Outlook might be just fine, but that’s not going to work for larger companies.
When you have dozens or even hundreds of employees, it’s easy to end up having your contacts spread across multiple apps, hence the need for a cloud-based CRM such as HubSpot, Pipedrive, or Salesforce as the central source of truth in your tech stack.
But a CRM itself doesn’t necessarily solve the problem — you’ll need to keep all your data synced by establishing the necessary app integrations between your CRM and the rest of your business tools.
3. Segment your contacts.
Unless your organization has a very niche audience, there’s no point in sending out the same message to everyone on your mailing list. Even if your business does cater to a broadly similar demographic, you may still need to group contacts into existing customers, leads, internal contacts, suppliers, partners, etc.
Audience segmentation is one of the most powerful tactics for email marketing. Segmenting your mailing lists and using personalization increases open rates, click-throughs, and conversions, simply because the email will be more relevant to your audience.
The optimal way to segment your mailing list depends entirely on your business and the sort of people it caters to. For example, you can send tailored newsletters to your audience with blog posts that will be more relevant to them based on their interests or previous interactions with you.
Some businesses segment their lists based on demographic attributes. Others group their audiences based on when, where, and how they signed up. Others target people who have already purchased a specific product or added one to their wishlist. You can also use a combination of these tactics depending on what works best for you.
4. Prioritize security.
Protecting your contact data and enabling your customers to trust you is one of the most important aspects of contact management.
Even if data such as names and email addresses aren’t always considered sensitive information, they are absolutely subject to data protection and privacy laws such as GDPR or CCPA.
This means that you need to take every necessary step to prevent your mailing lists from being exposed to spammers and cybercriminals — and only using the data you have in ways that your customers have explicitly agreed to.
You’ll also need to implement an opt-in that lets subscribers give their explicit permission for you to send different kinds of emails, including marketing communications. All of the major email marketing platforms — such as Mailchimp or SendGrid — offer full compliance with data protection regulations.
Not only will this help ensure that you stay on the right side of the law, but it will also help you build a high-quality mailing list with contacts who actually want to hear from you. Trust, security, and privacy should be integral to your contact management strategy from the outset.
5. Sync your data.
Maintaining customer data across a variety of cloud-based apps and services can be a daunting task. But a centralized and synchronized database solves that.
While it’s always a good idea to limit the number of apps you use in your business to just the necessary tools to get the job done, you’ll still likely end up with dozens of tools.
For example, you might be using Mailchimp to conduct your email marketing campaigns, HubSpot for your CRM, Zendesk for customer care, and ClickSend for SMS marketing. All these apps collect contact data in different ways, so you end up with lots of different databases that take a lot of time to manage separately.
Automated contact syncing keeps everything in check between your business apps and devices. It does this by keeping the right data in sync between all of your business tools.
This also helps you maintain a central database where all your contacts are readily available to everyone who needs them. By syncing your apps, you empower every team in your business with easy access to critical data. That way, employees will be better positioned to focus on strategic tasks and stay productive rather than spending their time on tedious and repetitive manual processes.

Over 59% of marketers say email is their biggest source of ROI. Email marketing is one of the most powerful ways to engage your contacts and nurture them to becoming long-term customers, one email at a time.
But how can you get the best results from email marketing?
Some of the best practices for effective email marketing include:

Personalization and segmentation for the most tailored messages
High-quality content that delivers value with every email
A/B testing emails, especially workflows, to refine your messages
Not sending emails too often, nor forget to send them for so long that your contacts forget who you are

But to be in the best position to increase your email marketing conversions and get the highest ROI, there are many valuable tools worth adding to your marketing stack. We’ve compiled 10 of the best to get started with.
10 Tools to Get Better Results From Email Marketing
1. Email Marketing Service
Getting more email conversions starts with an email marketing tool you love using. This could be part of your CRM or a standalone tool, but it needs to be a tool that you can get the most out of.
Some of the best email marketing tools to compare when you’re starting out are Mailerlite, Sendinblue, and Mailchimp.
When you’re choosing the best email marketing tool for your business, start with free trials and compare your shortlist of services on:

User Experience – Do you like using the app and find it intuitive?

Functionality – Does it include well-designed drag and drop templates if you need these? What about easy-to-use automation and A/B testing tools?

Price – Does it fit your budget?

Integrations – Does it sync with your other favorite apps?

2. Data Enhancer Tool
With personalization comes conversions. To craft the most personalized emails and get high engagement rates from your messages, use a data enhancer tool that increases your scope for personalization.
Clearbit allows you to enter an email address or corporate domain and receive useful data from over 250 sources on 85 unique data fields, including company sector, job title, and more.
3. Marketing Automation
Are you using marketing automation yet? This enables you to automatically send the right emails to the right people at the right time, which is one of the best ways to increase conversions from email.
Some of the best marketing automation tools for small businesses are:

ActiveCampaign – its goal is to provide “true marketing automation”

HubSpot – CRM with automation for internal workflows and external communication

SendinBlue – a powerful email provider with built-in email automation features

Mailchimp – the most popular email marketing service is now all-in-one marketing software

4. Inbox Tool
With your current tools, can you check if a particular contact has opened your email? What about scheduling messages to send at a specific time? With tools like Boomerang for Gmail, you can easily see if your emails have been opened.
Many CRMs also have inbox sync — including Copper, which is built for G Suite and works inside your inbox.

5. Landing Page Optimization
To increase your email marketing conversions, think about the pages where you want your contacts to convert. Are they fully optimized? Take time to check if every page you link in your emails is high-quality, user-friendly, and has a clear CTA that’s a logical next step from the email content.
To maximize the conversions you get, use a landing page tool like Unbounce to build the most user-friendly page with an effective CTA.
6. Email and Conversion Analytics
How much data do you have on the emails you send? By collecting data throughout the funnel, you’re in the best position to identify and fix any leaks that are losing you conversions.
For email marketing that converts, some valuable data to inform your strategy is:

Email sends, opens, bounces, clicks
Conversion rate on landing pages
Revenue, time to close, and ROI from email marketing contacts and customers

7. Email Verification and List Cleaner Service
Reviewing your performance data after sending a campaign is all well and good, but what if you could check key information before sending to increase results?
With a tool like DataValidation, you can quickly see the percentage of deliverable and undeliverable email addresses on your list prior to sending. This is a great way to eliminate bounces, improve email marketing conversions and boost ROI.
You can also sync DataValidation two-ways with the rest of your tech stack to remove undeliverable emails from all tools.
8. Calendar Scheduling App
What does conversion look like to your business? If it’s booking a time in your team’s calendar, such as for a demo call, maximize the number of meetings set with a calendar scheduling app.
With a tool like Calendly, you can include links in your emails that enable qualified leads to quickly book a meeting at a time that suits both of you.

9. CRM System
The businesses with the best operations tend to have a CRM that their team likes using and can rely on. Your CRM increases email marketing conversions by helping you send the right content to the right groups of people, maximizing the chance that they’ll respond to the CTA and convert.
To get the best results from your CRM, make sure that all of your contacts from all apps are synced to it as well as your mailing list. Make sure the right segmentation and data are synced too, like original source, business information, and up-to-date contact details.
10. Two-Way Data Syncing
To get better results from email marketing, look at who you’re sending to. Are all contacts who have opted in across all apps in your mailing list? You might be missing email addresses from your webinar tools, personal inbox, or other lead gen tools.
To make sure that every single contact is synced to the right place, use a two-way data sync to connect your data between apps and have every piece of data exactly where you need it.

So you’ve decided to grow your business. You might already be thinking about best practices to avoid common pitfalls when scaling. But this doesn’t mean that your business will be immune to challenges.
The best strategy for growing businesses is to be aware of common problems so you can prevent them or fix them fast.
Here are seven of the most common growth problems faced by small businesses and the best ways to prevent and solve them.
7 Challenges for Growing Businesses
1. Your earliest employees are unhappy.
The Problem: While working for a growing business sounds good in theory, some of your earliest employees might start to show signs they’re unhappy. Why do things have to change? Why can’t we all sit around the same meeting table anymore? Why can’t I chat with the CEO whenever I need to?
How to Avoid It: If your longest-standing employees are unhappy, your team culture has likely changed and they would like things to remain the same. This is hard to avoid completely, but there are some things you should keep in mind.
Pinpoint what is important to your team culture — although this will change with time, there will be some aspects you want to protect as you grow. Also, make efforts to keep the same levels of transparency and communication you’ve always had.
How to Fix It: Increase your business’s transparency and communication with employees as you grow. But also realize that not every employee is right for every stage of your business’s journey. Some people prefer small startup teams, others prefer corporate and enterprise environments. Do what you can, but understand if it’s time for some early employees to move on.
2. You’ve outgrown your tools.
The Problem: The tools you chose when your business was just starting out don’t cut it anymore. You’re running into problems with your apps, maxing out plan limits, and you know you need to make some changes.
How to Avoid It: Take a good look at your tech stack before intentionally scaling up your business. Will your most important tools (including your CRM, email marketing provider, and accounting software) offer what you need as you grow? Will you be able to upgrade your plan, or is the only option switching to another provider? Save time and money in the long run by making these decisions early on.
How to Fix It: Take time to look at your tools and audit what needs to go, change, or be added. We’ve compiled our recommendations of the best SaaS tools to get you started.
3. You’ve hired too fast.
The Problem: With budget in the bank, you’ve done what many growing businesses do: increase your team size. But a few months down the line, you might be thinking you’ve hired too fast. Your cash flow might be in trouble, productivity might be dwindling while new employees are trained up, or your team culture might be suffering.
How to Avoid It: Hiring too fast is one of the biggest business expansion problems — and it’s one you really want to avoid instead of fixing. Don’t grow your team more than is truly necessary and validate every addition to the team.
Remember to learn from other startups’ mistakes and avoid over-aggressive growth choices and risk appetites. You can also follow our guide to scaling your small business successfully.
How to Fix It: If you’ve hired too fast and you need to make some tough decisions, don’t delay making them but do it with heart and empathy. Be transparent about what went wrong.
Buffer opened up about the most difficult decision for its business so far: making 10 layoffs and saying goodbye to 11% of the team after it started to burn cash instead of being cash flow positive.
Buffer attributed this mistake to over-aggressive growth choices and moving into a house it couldn’t afford, said CEO, Joel Gascoigne:

“We thought we were being mindful about balancing the pace of our hiring with our revenue growth. We weren’t. One of our advisors gave us an apt metaphor for what happened: We moved into a house that we couldn’t afford with our monthly paycheck.”

As well as making 10 difficult layoffs, Buffer got its cash flow back in the green by cutting founder salaries by 40%, discontinuing two employee perks, cutting sponsorship budget, and canceling a team retreat. It ripped the band-aid off quickly and are very conscious of avoiding similar mistakes.
4. Budget has doubled but not your results.
The Problem: We’ve doubled the team, why haven’t we doubled the results? We’ve multiplied our spending, why don’t we have more customers? Whether it’s you or your investors asking these questions, it can be difficult to find answers.
How to Avoid It: Scale slowly. Make gradual improvements and investments and keep your finger on the pulse of your business’s core financial metrics.
Following a slower growth philosophy and maintaining nimble teams can keep your business more productive than making large hiring rounds that disrupt your team’s flow and require time-consuming onboarding.
How to Fix It: Slow down and look at what’s gone wrong. Has productivity gone down? Are you burning way too much cash? Have you hired the wrong people? Or were you just too optimistic?
Get clear on what the real issue is and decide how best to pivot your growth strategy.
5. You’re spending too much time on coordination instead of actual work.
The Problem: Hiring people should free up your time, right? Eventually, yes… but usually not at first. Onboarding new employees is one of the most time-consuming tasks for any business.
How to Avoid It: This is another business growth problem that’s best avoided by growing cautiously. By hiring more gradually, you and your team will have more time and energy for onboarding new team members.
How to Fix It: If you or your business’s management team are spending every minute managing people instead of focusing on your “real work,” look at your processes.
Identify where the inefficiencies are and understand what needs to change in your strategy, leadership team, and business tools. What are you wasting time on?
In an interview with First Round Review, Bob Sutton, organizational behavior expert at Stanford’s School of Engineering, shares that scaling is often about less, not more:

“Scaling is actually a problem of less… There are lots of things that used to work that don’t work anymore, so you have to get rid of them. There are probably a bunch of things you’ve always done that slowed you down without you realizing it.”

6. Departments are becoming less aligned.
The Problem: You once sat together around a table, but now your team has multiplied. Your sales team has their own meetings while marketers talk amongst themselves. And, data silos have started to set in.
How to Avoid It: Scaling a business successfully requires excellent communication and collaboration. Keep your departments working closely together, maintain individual accountability for overall business goals rather than just departmental numbers, and make sure you synchronize your tools transparently.
How to Fix It: No surprises here; you solve unaligned teams by increasing alignment. This means more face-to-face time, collaborative tech tools, and cross-departmental projects. Also, make sure your data is in sync to fix silos.
7. Contact management is getting messy.
The Problem: As your business is using more apps than before, the number of contacts in your database is multiplying fast. And, they’re not even close to being organized.
How to Avoid It: The most effective way to prevent and fix messy contact management is with a two-way data syncing tool. By setting it up, you can quickly align contacts across all of the right apps, with exactly the right data and segmentation synced between tools.
How to Fix It: It’s never too late to introduce two-way syncing and restore order to contact management. You can also use this as an opportunity to do a contact clean-up and get a clearer picture of your leads and customers.