When you are running your own online business, you need to be a master of many trades. But if marketing is not one of them, don’t worry. Meet Lumiary, the company that says it will pull in all of your marketing stats and analytics, and save you a lot of time overall.
Lumiary
Launched within the last few months, the company offers three simple plans between $10 and $50 a month depending upon the volume of orders your online business generates and the level of service required. There is also a free trial.
Lumiary lets you create an account, fill in the necessary details about your online business, including information on your website, online store and social media channels. Then sit back and let Lumiary start collecting data. You’ll see the information collecting on your Lumiary dashboard giving you a much more complete picture of your business as a whole.
In an interview with Small Business Trends, Charles Valentine, co-founder of Lumiary explains:
“As more and more people were getting online with their store, the next thing they needed to work really easily, which was too technical and too complicated, was online marketing. The life cycle we found is that people start their store, they get a lot of local PR, they’re on social media, they get a pretty good following. But they kind of get to a plateau, and they don’t know how to keep growing. Online marketing is very complicated. A lot of data, a lot of channels, things are always changing. We’re trying to do marketing for people who don’t know how to do marketing.”
Lumiary has a sub-site called Lumiary Academy that is a repository of expert advice and tips on small business marketing topics, as well as lessons from successful brands. But the two main areas which Lumiary offers help with are social media and targeted email marketing.
Social Media
If you are doing social media for your online business, you need to know everything from how many people responded positively to your post, to how each post impacted your company’s overall sales.
Lumiary collects data from your Facebook page, Twitter page, Tumblr blog or other channels. It also collects data from Google Analytics and your online store. Valentine says Lumiary then pulls all that data together and shows you insights that will help you create better social media engagement and drive more sales.
The service provides a Buffer-style app letting you create your updates all in one place then post them via Facebook, Twitter, and other channels all at once. Lumiary then tracks those posts to measure the number of likes, how many people visited your store as a result, how many pages they looked at, and how many visits resulted in a sale.
Targeted Emails
The service also claims it can help you hone your email compaigns to be more targeted and more effective.
For example, if someone buys a shirt from you, you may want to email them and suggest a pair of trousers that might go well with the shirt. Or, if you are going to be in New York or Chicago for a conference, you can email all of your customers in New York and Chicago and tell them you will be in their area, if they would like to meet you.
Lumiary utilizes MailChimp and collects data from the service to help fine tune your email marketing efforts. This includes making sure that most of your emails don’t wind up in your customer’s spam folder.
Marketing Made Easy
Among the insights Lumiary will provide in connection with your social media and email marketing efforts are:
- The identities of customers most in need of followup based on previous orders and other factors.
- The identities of your most valuable customers and repeat buyers.
- An overview of which of these customers spent the most in your store and over what period.
- The number of people engaging in your social posts, and how much of of this engagement is resulting in sales.
- The names of your top selling items.
- The identities of your newest social followers, and more.
Valentine explains the company’s mission as follows:
“Help people focus on their core audience – consumers feel more connected to small independent brands. Focus on those people, communicate with them, make it two-way communication, and help them share the story about your brand. Make it more like a network effect rather than a funnel effect.”
Images: Lumiary
While I agree that Lumiary can be a useful tool for marketers, there is still a question on whether it can be used without marketing skills. After all, you said that it is the tool that you should use if you don’t have the marketing skill. I don’t think of it that way though. It can only help in marketing but you cannot really use it if you don’t know how to market – if you know what I mean.
Thanks for the comment Aira. I am co-founder of Lumiary, and I assure you, we grapple with this issue everyday. The existing Do This list, pictured above, provides instructions for anyone – marketer or not. Better yet, in about a month we’re re-vamping the site so those recommendations/instructions are front and center AND much more holistic….Holistic in that there’s a wider range of impactful recommendations. These will be one-click actionable instructions. Follow the progress on our site or email me cw [at] lumiary.com if you’re interested in providing input – I’d love that :). Thanks again for commenting.