How DailyStory can help your small business

The bar for running a successful small business has never been higher. Customers expect seamless digital experiences, personalized communication, and fast follow-up. They research online before they buy, compare competitors easily, and have little patience for generic outreach.

At the same time, most small business owners are stretched thin. Marketing often falls to one person, or to the owner themselves, alongside everything else the business demands. The result is a gap between what customers expect and what most small businesses can consistently deliver on their own.

This is exactly where marketing automation changes the equation. Businesses with automated marketing workflows convert 53% more leads than those without, and automated email flows account for just 2% of total email volume but drive 37% of all email-generated revenue. The businesses seeing those results are not necessarily bigger or better resourced. They are simply more systematic about how they reach and follow up with customers.

DailyStory is a marketing automation platform built to help small and mid-sized businesses do exactly that: expand their reach, automate their follow-up, capture more leads, and measure what is working, without needing a large marketing team to make it happen. Here is how.

Automate and nurture your customers

DailyStory lets you organize all your marketing activity into easy-to-manage campaigns that coordinate every customer touchpoint across email, SMS, push notifications, and more.

Beyond the channel, personalization is built into every message. You can use contact information to make each message feel uniquely relevant, from first-name personalization in a subject line to dynamic content blocks that change based on a contact's segment or behavior. Personalization and segmentation work together to increase the success of any campaign. Nurtured leads produce 20% more sales opportunities and companies that excel at lead nurturing generate 50% more sales-ready leads at 33% lower cost.

For teams who want control without complexity, DailyStory's drag-and-drop email designer makes it easy to build on-brand emails quickly. For those who want more control, the HTML and CSS of each email can be fully edited. The automation designer uses the same drag-and-drop approach to build multi-step workflows of any complexity, from a simple two-email welcome series to a full multi-channel nurture sequence spanning weeks. For more on what is possible, see our guides on 17 types of automated emails you can start using today and how to build a welcome email series that engages new leads.

Power of automation

The real leverage in marketing automation is making your efforts repeatable, consistent, and measurable. A great campaign run manually once is good. The same campaign running automatically for every new lead, every time, without any additional effort, is transformative.

Here are a few examples of what DailyStory automation looks like in practice:

• A lead capture popup on your website captures a visitor's email address. An automation immediately sends a welcome email with your offer, then follows up three days later if the email was not opened, this time with a new subject line and a text message as a second touchpoint.
• A contact downloads a guide from your website. An automation enrolls them in a five-email drip sequence over two weeks, each email offering progressively deeper value, ending with an invitation to book a call or demo.
• A customer makes a purchase. An automation sends an order confirmation, then a week later sends a follow-up asking for a review, and three weeks later sends a cross-sell recommendation based on what they bought.
• A lead has not engaged with any email in 90 days. An automation sends a re-engagement sequence, and if there is still no response, suppresses them from future sends to protect your sender reputation.

Each of these runs automatically, for every contact who meets the trigger conditions, without manual effort from your team. You can also score contacts based on their activities and actions, including pages viewed, emails opened, and links clicked, to identify your highest-intent leads and prioritize follow-up accordingly. For more on best practices, see our guides on mastering the art of drip emails and 14 best practices for email drip campaigns.

Capture and convert new customers

Driving traffic to your website is only half the job. Converting that traffic into leads you can follow up with is where most businesses leave money on the table. Around 96% of website visitors are not ready to buy on their first visit, but that does not mean they will never buy. It means they need to be captured and nurtured.

DailyStory makes it easy to capture visitor information in multiple ways:

• Welcome mat and exit-intent popups: Promote a newsletter signup, a discount offer, a free resource, or any other incentive to capture a visitor's contact information before they leave.
• Lead capture forms: Embed forms on pre-built landing pages, custom landing pages, squeeze pages, or anywhere on your website. Form submissions automatically create contacts in DailyStory and can trigger an automation immediately.
• Contact imports: If you already have a list of contacts from another system, you can import them easily into DailyStory for better management and to enroll them in nurture sequences.
• Lead visit alerts: DailyStory can automatically notify team members when a known contact visits specific pages on your website, giving your team a warm signal to follow up personally at exactly the right moment.

For more on building a lead capture system that works, see our guides on getting more leads with lead capture popups, landing page benefits for your small business, and 12 strategies to capture more email leads.

Track and measure visitor experiences

Effective marketing requires knowing what is working and what is not. DailyStory gives you a full picture of your website visitors and your marketing performance through a suite of tracking and reporting tools.

• Visitor tracking: Understand what your website visitors are doing, where they came from, and how often they have returned. See the full customer journey from first visit to conversion.
• Lead Periscope: DailyStory's anonymous visitor identification feature lets you identify website visitors by business and organization, even before they fill out a form, giving your sales team valuable intelligence about who is researching you.
• Remarketing audiences: Tag website visitors for remarketing through your third-party ad networks. DailyStory can help you target potential customers across other platforms, reaching people who have shown interest but not yet converted.
• Reporting dashboards: DailyStory's reporting dashboards cover all the metrics that matter: email opens, click rates, text message replies, landing page conversions, automation performance, and more. Heat maps and additional insights are also available to inform your strategy.

Understanding your data is the foundation of continuous improvement. For guidance on measuring your overall digital marketing performance, see our guides on how to measure the success of your email marketing campaign, what UTM codes are and why you should use them, and how to check your Google search rank for free.

Connect with your existing tools

DailyStory is designed to work alongside your existing systems, not replace them. Native integrations with WordPress, Salesforce, Slack, Mindbody, and more allow for seamless data sync across the tools your business already relies on.

Beyond native integrations, DailyStory connects to thousands of additional applications through Zapier, letting you automate workflows between DailyStory and virtually any other platform in your tech stack. For developers and teams with custom systems, DailyStory also offers a full REST API and Webhooks for building custom integrations.

The goal is straightforward: DailyStory should amplify what your existing systems are already doing, giving your marketing more reach, more consistency, and more measurability than those systems provide on their own. To learn more about what DailyStory integrates with, visit dailystory.com/integrations.

Ready to level up your digital marketing?

Streamlining your marketing resources and engaging more consistently with your customers is no longer a nice-to-have. It is a baseline expectation in today's customer-first digital marketplace.

DailyStory brings together the tools you need, automation, email, SMS, lead capture, visitor tracking, and analytics, in one platform designed to help you grow without requiring a large team to operate it.

For more on building your digital marketing foundation, see our guides on Digital Marketing 101, the digital marketing to-do checklist, 7 benefits of using a sales funnel, and 9 reasons why email automation matters to your marketing.

Schedule your free DailyStory demo today and see how much more your marketing can do.