Which platforms and communication tools will your competitors use to talk to clients in a couple of years’ time? It seems like there’s an ever growing number of options – from traditional mail-outs, emails, calls and the explosion of social media. So how can you use technology to make your messages cut through the noise?

Small Business Communication Tools and Trends in 2016: How to Be Heard Above the Noise

Recently, JCurve and Smart Company asked Australian small businesses how they intend to communicate with their clients over the next two years. In this article, we’ll reveal the results and take a look at the global trends affecting how small businesses communicate with their customers and empower further business growth.

Trends in Email Communication

The 2016 Smart Company SME Directions Survey found that email, a tried and true outbound marketing and communication tool, was still the preferred medium, with 86% of businesses surveyed citing this.

Email also remains the most popular communication channel globally, and experts agree it will likely continue growing in sophistication as well as popularity.

From a marketing point of view, email looks to expand as a vital part of any company’s marketing mix. More than half of the Australian businesses surveyed by Smart Company viewed email marketing as a prominent growth platform. Many also commented that they intend to use it more strategically.

This is backed up by further research. In an Email Marketing Census by Adestra and Consultancy, 74% of respondents said they expect email to have the best return on investment of all channels in five years’ time. Only 9% thought of email becoming redundant as a channel.

The growth of email is fuelled in particular by advances in technology – namely personalization, automation, the business intelligence metrics able to be gained from it and integration with systems such as CRM (Customer Relationship Management) and ERP (Enterprise Resource Planning) solutions. Here are some email-centric trends to watch over the next year and beyond:

Hyper-Personalisation of Email

It’s no longer enough to just use your client’s name in the greeting of every email.

Email communication now allows you to send personal messages to your clients based on triggers such as their recent purchases, or lack of recent purchases, and customised criteria based on their demographics, such as their business type, age and physical location.

With automation set up, it allows you to build email strategies that use deep email personalisation in terms of recipient criteria, content, delivery times, personalised marketing messages and historical analytics of recipient behaviour. Having the right communication tools to achieve this enables you to hit that sweet spot of sending the right email to the right contact, at the right time.

In the Adestra and Econsultancy survey, most respondents (76%) expect email communication to be completely personalised in the future.

The result for your customers is fewer “broadcast” emails and more relevant, targeted emails that speak to each client’s interests, habits and demographics.

Email Analytics

Email can tell you a lot about your customers – without ever having to ask them a single question. It’s a top source of data for your marketing and communication analytics, giving you valuable insights into your customers.

It can give you actionable outcomes on factors such as: which topics resonates with your clients, which headings work the best, which promotions work best for each audience segment, the downloads are more popular than others, and even the best time of day to send an email – for your particular messaging and audience.

Email Integration

Email no longer has to be used as a separate platform; it can now be integrated into business critical systems such as CRM systems and ERP solutions.

Using an ERP solution to send email campaigns from within the platform, you can draw on real-time data and information about the recipients, personalising the email with a click of a button. It also means that analytics can be collected within the same system and relate directly to the client data, all within the one system.

Even as technology adapts, and as automated systems become more sophisticated, it seems that email will remain a preferred delivery system for marketing and communications.

Face to face communication is expected to grow

Interestingly, face to face communication outweighed every high tech option, except email, in the SmartCompany survey as the preferred method of communication. At 85%, face to face was only just behind email. It’s also the number one expected growth area, as cited by 59% of businesses.

There was a large gap between the more traditional tactics and newer forms of communication, such as social media – which came in as the fourth most preferred communication method as cited by 53% of businesses surveyed.

Social Media is a Growing Trend in Client Communications

Social media has been on the rise for some time as a small business communication tool, and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down. Australian small businesses surveyed cited social media as the second most popular growth area for communication mediums to increase in use in 2016.

Businesses are starting to see the potential of social media, far beyond being just a broadcast platform. While it’s still used to further push content such as blog posts, news and product promotions, forward-thinking businesses are using social to encourage and initiate conversations with their clients and prospects, to further aid business growth.

Social media allows you to hear what people are saying about both your industry and your business. By monitoring platforms such as Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, you can listen to your target market and find out what bothers them or excites them. After all, listening is the first step in effective communication.

It also provides a platform for instant feedback from your customers – and gives them the power to initiate it. When handled well, your response to social media feedback can convert an unhappy customer into a happy customer or even a promoter. Prompt, helpful responses can go a long way to building your reputation of having excellent customer service. And other potential customers reading your responses can get a feel for that level of service they can expect, if they were to become a customer.

Two Way Conversations are Becoming the Norm

One of the biggest impacts that Millennials are having on business communications is their expectation of prompt, two way conversations. Marketing and communications is no longer seen as being a mass broadcast all the time, but can now also be viewed as a more personal dialogue. People are becoming less hesitant to respond to communications and more likely to start a dialogue with businesses directly via their staff – whether it’s the sales rep or the CEO, via one of the many channels now available to them. They’re also becoming more comfortable engaging with businesses on social media in more conversational ways, similar to how they’d engage with their friends.

Personalized email, social media, face-to-face communications and events all allow for a more human way of communicating with this empowered client base.

Video Communication can Add a More Personal Touch

Video conferencing is now a quick, cheap and accessible communication tool. Free options such as Skype, Join.me and FaceTime, along with newcomers such as HipChat, make it easy to meet with clients in dispersed geographic locations via video. It also makes it even easier to initiate video chats, with front facing cameras now on both laptops and mobile devices as a standard.

No longer seen strictly as “web conferencing”, video technologies are now used as tools for quick online meetings. Rather than picking up the phone, people can set up an online meeting, talk about it via video and actually see who they’re talking to.

Video meetings can give you a lot of advantages. They can create a more personal and human element to the communications, further encourage two way conversations, and bring all the benefits of body language and facial expressions, which make the communication experience richer and potentially more powerful.

The Rise of Mobile

Smartphone usage has changed business communication in many ways, and yet the core communication methods – email and phone – still remain solid. Smartphones have certainly sped up the pace of communication. People now expect to receive an email response within a matter of hours, and want to have the option to contact businesses quickly and directly to resolve their query.

However, the number one activity on a mobile phone is now the act of checking email.

One of the biggest impacts of mobile phone usage is the personal and portable nature of the device. When people check their mobile phone at home, they have a higher expectation that the information they receive will be personalized and relevant. They’re more likely to ignore mass emails and unsubscribe from email marketing and newsletters that aren’t useful or adding value to their busy lives.

That’s why it’s increasingly important to have email tools at your disposal which speak to the right people, at the right time, and support a highly personalized experience.

Conclusion

Technology is making it more accessible than ever to communicate with clients in increasingly personal ways. However, this also means that your clients are becoming bombarded by messages from multiple sources, including all sorts of communications from your competitors.

To stand out, be heard and to have meaningful communications with your clients, think about taking advantage of advances in technology that are available to you right now – such as automation and email personalization, making use of the data you’re getting back from your communications and segmenting communications to get your messages to the right audience, at the right time. Also look at using multiple platforms such as email, face-to-face, social media and video calling to build a well-rounded experience.

If you’d like to find out how you can leverage a cloud ERP solution with powerful inbuilt personalisation and automation functionality to build better relationships with your clients and potential clients, get in touch and start a great conversation.

And if you’re starting to think about cloud computing solutions, why not also have a read of our blog 10 Benefits of Cloud Computing for Small Business to learn what it could do for your business?