Small business owners think they understand their customers. But they clearly don’t, judging by the Small Business Now Report -- a two-part study released Thursday by Constant
Contact.
Take their media preferences. Small businesses say they are using:
- Social media — 63%
- Websites — 55%
- Email — 52%
But consumers say are most likely to purchases via:
- Email —
34%
- Text messages — 30%
- Social media — 20%
They also
differ on the kinds of emails that are most likely to drive a purchase. Small businesses list these:
- Check-ins with customers (i.e., “We haven’t heard from you in
awhile”) — 30%
- Business updates (“Come discover our new flavors!”) — 26%
- Coupons or discounts — 22%
Consumers see things differently. They are most likely to be driven by:
- Coupons or discounts — 67%
- Check-ins — 33%
- Business updates — 26%
Yet 84% of small businesses are “very or
extremely” confident they know what consumers want.
On another front, here is where small businesses stand on adopting new technologies: 35% are using
automation, 34% are using AI, 29% use machine learning and 21% use none of the above.
But they see the benefits of such tools:
- Improving
customer communications — 34%
- Building a strong relationship with customers — 32%
- Saving time on their email campaigns — 30%
(That last item is no small thing: 72% say it takes them from one to four hours to create an email campaign).
In general, 53% don’t see the business
benefit of modern marketing technologies, and 22% believe they are too expensive.
Still, ecommerce is growing: 58% of small business started selling online for the first time after
COVID-19 hit, and 48% are now generating most of their revenue from ecommerce.
But the survey shows that 60% of shopping is done in stores, and 40% is conducted online.
Of the
consumers polled, 86% have bought something online in the past month, and 35% say they will buy elsewhere if there is no online store for what they want.
Constant Contact surveyed 1,000
small business owners and 1,000 consumers form June 23 to July 2 of this year.