A simple smile and a friendly greeting can make customers feel much more loyal towards small independent companies, according to new Kingston University research...The study, which examined the retail behaviour of 2,006 consumers and the business practices of 1,216 decision makers in small and medium size enterprises (SMEs), reveals that a smile and a friendly hello is the most common reason (59 per cent) why consumers feel loyal towards independent retailers. However, only just over half (54 per cent) of respondents stated their small business employed this practice. Three in five consumers are also willing to pay more for a product from a small independent shop rather than deal with a large corporate retailer...More than a third of loyal consumers said they kept coming back because of excellent customer service and one in five said they valued businesses remembering their usual order.

Ashok Ramachandran's insight:
Small businesses can benefit from the personal touch.

LazPaint is an open source and free to download raster image editor aimed at users who are looking for an application that is more easily accessible than GIMP. While GIMP offers a broad range of powerful features that mean many see it as a genuine open source competitor to Photoshop, that power comes with a steep learning curve that is often a barrier to use for less experienced users.
This means that there is a market for less powerful, but more user friendly image editors.
LazPaint presents its users with a pretty clear and easily understood user interface...For image editor newbies who aren't looking for an overly powerful package or to enhance their photos, I believe that it is worth taking a look at.

Ashok Ramachandran's insight:
As described above, if you want a free open source image editor with features comparable to Adobe Photoshop, go for GIMP. However, if you want a more user friendly image editor, then you can check out LazPaint.

We all know it's a good idea to have personal savings, but have you considered how much your business needs in cash reserves, and how you should go about meeting this goal?

 

In a business’s daily operations, unexpected expenses and opportunities arise that require a quick response. And if you don’t have enough tangible funding on hand to meet these costs, your operations could come to a halt because you can’t afford to fix an emergency mishap, or you may lose out on an additional source of capital because you don’t have enough to travel to meet a new investor.

 

As a business owner, you should always have a contingency fund. It’s hard to speculate what could happen in the future, but it’s best to have money on hand for when the impossible happens...You should try to save 5-10 percent of what these issues would cost and set it aside as an emergency contingency in addition to your regular cash reserve.

Ashok Ramachandran's insight:
It is not enough that your business is profitable. It is important to create a cash flow projection and manage it carefully. Keeping an emergency fund helps minimize risks.

In recent months, her marketing attention increasingly has turned to mobile to engage social media-savvy customers who are ready to spread the word. Her Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pinterest, Tumblr and Snapette (a local fashion shopping app) accounts are updated frequently with new products and promotions.

Next on her to-do list is developing a website optimized for phones, though she's also wondering whether it might be worth getting someone to build an expensive app for the store. "We need to start looking more closely at what devices people are coming from," she says.

Poitevent's quest reflects the curiosity and changing priorities of many small-business owners as mobile marketing tools broaden their potential message channels to reach nearby customers -- and open their shops to the scrutiny of nitpicking critics.

Mobile search capabilities and shopping options quickly have advanced to the point at which customers can be located -- and served targeted ads -- not only based on their demographic data but by their ZIP codes, street addresses, even the roads they're currently driving on.

Ashok Ramachandran's insight:
Mobile marketing is best suited for small businesses to deliver the message to a more focused audience in the nearby vicinity of your shop.

Recent studies show that companies with a fully utilized CRM system can increase sales by 29%. But, any system is only as valuable as the information that goes into it. How do you get everyone in the company to use it and provide real time data?

- Make it simple: Any CRM system only needs: Prospect information, when and what was talked about last, follow up date/reminder and action, who it is assigned to, and what is the dollar value of the opportunity.

- Make sure it integrates with other company systems: Is it complementary to what is already being used? Can data be easily imported and exported from the CRM?

- Train them over and over again: Make it easy to use so they can get their jobs done. Show them how to use it from their smart phones or tablets.

- If the activity isn’t in the CRM system, it never happened: Every company needs to treat their CRM as the only repository for history. No one gets credit for anything if it is not written about here.

- Reports: Make sure you can get real time reports from the data.

Ashok Ramachandran's insight:
Check out free open source CRM systems featured on this site for your small business.