In recent years we’ve seen a growing number of real-world businesses go online. Business owners understand that online presence is becoming more important as consumers will often go online to search for reviews of local businesses.
Just by having a website set up with good content and a google places listing can help generate business for you, as users on their mobile devices can search for local businesses and locate you.
More astute business owners have email marketing set up, do SEO, and engage in social media activity to reach more customers. Often with competitive fields, it’s not enough to set and forget your online marketing.
However, I have noticed that there is a disconnect between real-world marketing and online marketing. I’ve rarely seen online stores plugging their social media account. Some businesses do display their web address over their shop window but do nothing proactive to entice store visitors to become online subscribers or followers.
For instance, it’s seldom you ever hear about small business owners gathering customers’ email addresses to add them to their list. This is done frequently by chains who have marketing departments but not be individual store owners. Many times these customers are taken for granted – when they are the most proactive and valuable user base.
Capturing user’s email addresses through incentives such as prize draws, giveaways, and discounts (on next order) can help increase subscribers to your email sequence which will ultimately help increase sales as you can follow up with these customers on a regular basis.
A great tip I learned from UbookRental a UK based iPad hire firm is to set up iPad kiosks to capture leads in a maintenance-free way. The added benefit of this is that it runs autopilot, staff doesn’t need to be reminded to ask for customer’s details – something the typical minimum wage worker does not understand the value and purpose of. The kiosk pro iPad app allows you to lock an iPad into a website such as your subscriber form page.
The app can also be integrated to Aweber and once subscribed they can go through the businesses autoresponder sequence. Receive weekly alerts, be asked to provide feedback to the business, and participate with other business activities.
I’ve seen iPad stations be used to great effect on a variety of different purposes.
- Website demonstration purposes
- Live webcast purposes
- Survey and feedback collection
- App and game demos.
Recently I’ve seen iPad stations with hand sanitizer dispensers attached to them. In light of the recent viral situation, it makes perfect sense.
Public touchscreen interfaces have the potential to harbour and spread germs so it makes sense they are adapted with hand sanitizers to make them safe.
A fixed iPad station to automate tasks is a fantastic cost-effective idea, staffing is expensive and if you can achieve your sales and marketing goals with the assistance of an iPad you can cut your costs down tremendously. iPads are cheap to buy and even cheaper to hire.