No one knows the small business struggle quite like those who are living and breathing it every day. In honor of Small Business Week, we wanted to share more stories from the companies featured in our What’s in Store newsletter. We figured some of the biggest learnings come from real-life examples. From landing page success to fun with A/B testing, here’s what they had to say:
Landing page love
We caught up with Kristen Lambert of Third Piece, a one-stop shop for warm, chunky, handmade knits. To boost digital engagement, Kristen uses MailChimp’s landing pages feature. She set up 2 different types of landing pages: one designed to grow her subscriber list, and the other to recommend her top-selling items.
“The functionality to set up landing pages was extremely user-friendly,” she says. “It was something I had delegated to our marketing manager to explore, and she has great success in increasing our engagement, generating new leads, and increasing traffic to our business.”
Feature combos
April May spoke to us about the backstory behind her stationery and gift line, Smudge Ink. When customers leave items behind in their carts, she uses MailChimp’s product recommendations feature to bring them back. Smudge Ink sends those suggestions as part of their abandoned cart strategy.
“We use product recommendations the most in our abandoned cart emails,” April says. “Not only can it automatically fill in what’s abandoned in their cart, but then below we can have recommendations of other similar things that they might want to add to their cart when they go back and hopefully buy that thing they forgot.”
Save time with automations
Lekker Home founder Natalie van Dijk explained that time management is always a crucial part of their modern furniture line’s success. Enter email automations, which can be left running in the background.
“As a small team, automations make it easy to engage with our customers consistently no matter what the business throws our way on any given day,” she says. “We know those emails are going to be sent without a hitch. Our time is precious and automations help us re-market.”
Advertising made easy
Sure, Harvard’s long-standing tradition of educational excellence dates back to pre-social media days, but the Ivy League institution’s current students love Instagram and Facebook. In our 100th issue, we sat down with Christi Lee, marketing manager for The Harvard Shop. Christi explained why using Instagram ads through MailChimp were a game changer for them.
“MailChimp ads have increased our market reach by the thousands,” she says. “The features that allow us to narrow down our audience and target certain people are really helpful in making our ad campaigns as effective and efficient as possible. We look at the target audience and the impact that all of those ads are having, whether it’s clicks on the ads and getting them to our website or it’s actually translating into revenue, both are really effective for growing our brand as a whole.”
Experiment often
Lovepop co-founder Wombi Rose said it best: “It’s not always obvious when something’s going to work in an email. So knowing that you have a statistically robust way to test it is really valuable.”
We spoke to the team behind the 3D-greeting card company about how A/B testing gives them the analytics to their messaging more clear.
Wombi’s co-founder John Wise says, “By being able to test side-by-side over a long period of time, we can better understand our customers and better present them the materials they want.”