FreshLime corrals data from a wide swath of sources into one simple platform. It brings the power of big budget data analytics to local small business so they can engage customers automatically.
A FreshLime Overview
Small Business Trends spoke with Jay Bean, the CEO of FreshLime. He told us about what they do and why small business needs to pay attention.
Helping Meet Small Business Needs
He started by talking about the small business data needs FreshLime addresses.
“Consumers are in charge today,” he said. “The use the messaging platforms they want. The interact with businesses the way they want. It can be a hard transition for an SMB.”
Small businesses can be overwhelmed with all of this information. That’s where this customer data platform comes in. The platform was built with local businesses in mind.
“We collect all of their data together,” Bean says. “FreshLime bring it all together to build a single customer profile.”
Analyzing Information
He supplies an example:
“Think about a plumber that’s been in business for five years. He may have done 20,000 jobs. He can’t personally interact with all of those customers.”
FreshLime takes all that information and analyzes it. The platform uses important benchmarks like average purchase, last purchase, lifetime value and others. The idea is to send tailored automated messages out based on these groupings. To find new customers and keep old ones.
Segmenting
“By segmenting like this we have smaller buckets and can send the right type of message to the right customer.”
It’s the small business version of a big business strategy. Think Amazon. They know who you are and what you buy and send you messages tailored to your purchases and demographics. FreshLime does the same for small local businesses.
Using Playbooks
At the core is what Bean calls playbooks. This is how the platform categorizes customers. These are based on engagements, demographics and purchases. Some of these include single purchase customers, others that repeat occasionally and those that are the most loyal repeat clients.
People get categorized into different playbooks so small businesses can act accordingly. For example, one might be a “win back” type campaign. Another might be geared toward getting them to increase their purchases as a repeat customer.
“We assign these playbooks to people based on who they are and their past behavior,” Bean says. “We don’t know very much about people who haven’t converted.”
Categorizing Customers
Past purchases aren’t the only way FreshLime categorizes customers.
Bean supplies another example.
“One of our customers is a garage in Detroit,” he says. “They might have someone who comes in a brand-new Corvette and another in a 1985 Honda Accord with 212,000 miles. The Honda needs a high mileage oil change versus the Corvette that needs a synthetic oil.”
The messages sent here take other factors like that into account. As another big advantage, FreshLime allows you to send out messages over different channels like Facebook and Twitter. Email and text messages are other options.
He stresses that FreshLime isn’t traditional marketing. It focuses on data driven customer retention.
Offering an AI Solution
“We call the playbooks the AI in the middle.”
Best of all, these automated messages get sent out around the clock. That means a small business owner is working on retaining customers 24/7.
Another aspect makes this platform special. FreshLime not only gathers transactional data for companies. It also gathers industry trends that get overlaid for a complete picture.
The result is a network effect for an affordable price catering to small business.
FreshLime targets SMB’s using software like QuickBooks but without the tools to do any analytics. Other target markets include small businesses using software as a big part of their business.
“Either way these aren’t big businesses with big marketing teams,” he says.
FreshLime interacts with your customer wherever they happen to be. In other words, if they find your company on Facebook the template message gets sent there. The same holds true with Google or your website and other places.
Finally, Bean sums everything up.
“FreshLime was designed to help with that other side of marketing. Not necessarily finding the lead, but what to do to maximize transactions over and over again,” he says.
Image: Freshlime