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The business world is constantly changing, with trends and tactics shifting constantly. So it’s essential for small businesses to prepare for the unexpected, even if it sounds impossible. You don’t want your business to fail, and it all depends on how you plan for sudden market changes.
With more than 32 million small businesses operating in the US, no one will look out for your business but you. Fortunately, there are helpful guides like this to keep you on the right track and steer you in the direction you should be going.
We’ve gathered the best ways you can prepare for market changes so that the next time it happens — and it will happen — you won’t have to panic or fear the downfall of your business.
Have you ever experienced this case?
As an experienced fashion email marketer, you know how it feels to enter a market with new opportunities: constantly trying new tactics while deciding what’s working for your business. After two months of constantly implementing your email campaigns, you notice a difference in consumers' buying patterns and decide to look deeper into them.
However, when you start segregating your audience, you notice no clarity on when changes are final. Furthermore, some campaigns could be skipped over and not updated by mistake, which may pose a critical threat to your email marketing campaign.
Therefore, you need firm strategies to mitigate the potential risks for your email marketing campaigns.
How can email marketing risk assessment impact your strategy?
In the world of fraud detection, the more data you have about your users, the better. This is why you need to focus on every possible data point you can gather to make informed management decisions.
Getting more information can help your business:
- Reduce chargebacks: you can block fraudsters before they purchase goods and services on your website with stolen credit card details.
- Protect your users: is someone changing their email address in your system? It could be a fraudster trying to perform an ATO attack or account takeover. You can flag them if the email address appears suspicious.
- Curb bonus abuse: too many wrong users abusing your promotional codes and referral programs for new signups? It’s time to stop them at the registration stage.
- Block fake users: harmful agents who want to join your site with fake IDs and synthetic IDs (a mix of fake and accurate user data) won’t be able to register.
The critical point is that the earlier you block fraudsters, the less damage they can cause to your business.
Practical approaches you can leverage to avoid critical scenarios
1. Invest in predictable lead generation
All businesses need to sell their products or services to generate revenue to grow and invest in the future. But to sell effectively and hit quota each month, sales organizations need a pipeline of leads.
To that end, marketing teams run programs that create a consistent pipeline of high-volume, quality leads. But what’s the most effective way to generate leads and customers?
For one, investing in creating content such as ebooks, webinars, whitepapers, blog posts, and more will help your business attract qualified traffic to your website. This is because content has a compounding impact that increases in value over time, whereas many traditional tactics quickly lose steam.
Some organizations adopt a blended approach where they use inbound marketing for most of their lead-generation activity and occasionally top up their marketing funnel with PPC advertising.
How you approach the unique demands of your organization will determine it. However, the important thing is that there are numbers to prove that the inbound methodology works. Just check out this HubSpot ROI Report.
In short, the businesses best placed to ride out any uncertainty have a consistently topped-up pipeline of quality leads and a marketing team that knows the right levers to pull to increase lead flow. Investing in predictable lead generation is what leads to predictable sales and revenue growth.
2. Explore new and emerging markets
If a market becomes less attractive to do business in, you should look at alternatives.
Entering new markets doesn’t necessarily mean building a brick-and-mortar store or opening a shiny new office. You can take the first steps by creating a local market website and launching marketing activity targeting that market. This handy and “digital first” approach will enable you to test your hypothesis on whether or not a new market is right for your business at that time.
Tools like Google's Global Market Finder can show you online search volume as a proxy for potential customer demand for products and services. That, coupled with the location data of your customers, and leads, will help you make more informed decisions about customer demand and where to plan future investments.
Organizations that understand high-potential markets can more easily move to overcome changes in the business environment, such as currency fluctuations or economic uncertainty. Strategic marketing leaders know not only where today's customers are but, more importantly, where the customers of tomorrow will be.
3. Prepare for immediate messaging
Imagine something happens independently of your email efforts that require communication with your customers ASAP. A product recall or negative news coverage that demands quick clarification.
It's tough to plan for that specific incident. But you can have an appropriate email template ready for immediate use.
Most existing email templates are built for promotional messaging or multiple contents. They are only sometimes suited to simple, non-promotional messages or short-form information. It may make sense to prepare one that:
- Carries light branding, so it's easily recognized in preview panes and with a glance, but it doesn't distract from the message's text.
- Is the light on any images that distracts attention from the message.
- Contains a single, open template position into which you can simply slot the required text.
4. Prepare for quick-hit or responsive messaging
A related issue is when an event opens a short window of opportunity for an appropriate email campaign.
Examples might be a notable celebrity appearing on TV wearing a certain kind of shoe or a new handbag, or headphones that you also happen to stock. Or a new seasonal collection of new clothes leading to sudden interest.
One approach is to have at least one pre-approved basic email template that only needs a brief copy of the text, an image, and a linked CTA before sending.
Another is to develop alternative emails in advance when you know a future event only has a limited number of possible outcomes. Then send the right email as soon as that outcome becomes known. So that the number of changes you want to apply in these email sequences can be minimized.
In a more negative scenario, a marketer may add too many changes or unnecessary email edits so that he may accidentally impact negatively email subscribers. Resulting in a loss of customer trust and loyalty.
5. Focus on the value in your value proposition
In uncertain times, many organizations look to curb spending on nonessential items. This makes communicating the value your product creates to prospects and clients more critical than ever.
Developing your product’s value proposition is both parts of art and science. You must craft compelling copy and test different versions to see which works best. While it can be tempting to focus on product features, always bring it back to the job to be done and what the end-user values most, such as helping them do something faster or better or enabling the user to make more money.
Amazon is well known for making developers draft a product's hypothetical press release, and FAQ announcement before even a line of code is written. This helps the company to fully define the product’s value proposition and how it will be pitched to customers. Otherwise, your customers won’t understand what exactly you want them to do or it may have a negative impression on them, which may result in revenue loss.
Here are two examples of very different businesses that effectively communicate their value proposition to give you a better sense of how to approach this:
Stripe
Stripe spells out its product exactly, its target audience, and the value it generates. Ecommerce and online payments are notoriously complex industries with high barriers to entry. Still, Stripe shows how developers can quickly and easily get businesses set up to send and receive money online.
Stripe spells out its product exactly, its target audience, and the value it generates. Ecommerce and online payments are notoriously complex industries with high barriers to entry. Still, Stripe shows how developers can quickly and easily get businesses set up to send and receive money online.
Tortuga Backpacks
The value proposition communicated by Tortuga Backpacks is that its backpacks make traveling easier. This is important to its target persona -- urban travelers who value convenience and want to avoid checking their luggage -- which adds cost and an unwanted visit to the luggage carousel.
The value proposition communicated by Tortuga Backpacks is that its backpacks make traveling easier. This is important to its target persona -- urban travelers who value convenience and want to avoid checking their luggage -- which adds cost and an unwanted visit to the luggage carousel.
Conclusion
Unexpected market changes can be stressful for small business owners, but now that you know how to prepare for them, you can keep calm and rest assured your business will survive. Remember: always plan ahead, never stop innovating, and look for business opportunities
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