Complementing email and social networking for small businesses

Running a small business can be tough. Reaching out to customers can be difficult as these businesses don’t have the money that multinational firms spend on advertising and marketing. Even with the advent of online marketing, small businesses are still on the disadvantage as they don’t have the resources to maximize all the information that they have and create connections with prospective customers.

Sure, you may have an email list and you may have been sending emails to prospective customers but emails don’t always convert to sales. Although some may respond to emails, some of the marketing emails may end up in the spam folders because you simply don’t have the necessary information about these people apart from their email addresses. You don’t know these peoples’ interests or their demographics, you don’t know if these people will be able to use the services or products that your business offers.

However, with the rising popularity of social networking sites like Facebook and Twitter, email marketing can now be complemented by making connections through these social networks. More and more businesses now employ social marketing campaign.

But how can you successfully connect with customers everywhere in the web if you only have their email addresses? This is the problem and it seems that Flowtown now has the answer. Flowtown is a platform designed to help businesses connect with customers in the social web. Using only an email address, they can now get information like the name, age, gender, occupation, location and the social networking sites where the person is hanging out on the web. Businesses are also given tools to interact with these customers.

So if you’re a small business owner making funny T-shirts and going through your email lists you discovered that you have more customers who are using Twitter compared to Facebook, then you will know where to exert more efforts in your social networking campaigns.

Change is constant. Just like anything in this world, the way we are doing business is constantly changing. The ability to adapt to these changes can spell the difference in the success or failure of any business endeavors.