Last week, we discussed 5 web marketing tools that are essential to helping small green businesses establish their web presence on a low-cost budget. This week, we’re going to look at five   online marketing tools that will help you grow your green consumer base, communicate with your customers, and convert your website traffic.

Use Google Alerts to Capture More Customers

Google Alerts is a great keyword tracking tool that can help you stay on top of your industry and understand what your customers really want. You can set up Google Alerts to be delivered to you by email or RSS, so that time a particular keyword gets indexed by Google, you are notified.

You can use Google Alerts to monitor online mentions of your brand, products, your employees or your competitors; track green business trends; track search keywords, and more.

While Google Alerts is great for industry research, you can also use it to grow your online brand presence and your green customer base.   Google Alerts shows you what blogs are publishing content related to your niche, which allows you to head over there and comment, which increases your visibility and drives traffic.

You can even set up specific queries related to the kind of questions your target green consumer would ask, such as “what’s the best residential solar power system” or “what’s the best solar heater”? These questions often show up on Q&A sites like Yahoo Answers, or even on Twitter. You can then reach out to the individual, educate them on your products or services, and even land a sale!

Campaign Monitor – Email Marketing Made Easy

If you’re looking for a way to launch an email marketing campaign, then Campaign Monitor is a very popular choice. Use Campaign Monitor to tie your email campaigns in with your online marketing strategy – send email newsletters, product launch emails, press releases, and more. Then track the results (who opened, demographics, click-through rate, and so on) and manage your email list. One of the best features of this program is that it allows you to test the layout and design of your email marketing campaign in multiple different email providers so you can ensure a consistent, professional appearance. Though Campaign Monitor is not free, it produces a much more flawless, simple method for initiating email campaigns than simply throwing images and text into your email software program and clicking send”.

Aweber – Another Email Marketing Option

A standard in the email marketing industry, Aweber is another very common choice for green small businesses in need of help with their online marketing strategies. Though not as user friendly as Campaign Monitor, they do offer plenty of tutorials for navigating your way through the process.

Their pricing is a bit different as well – they charge a flat $19 per month for up to 500 members, and $49 for 2,500-5,000 people. Campaign Monitor, on the other hand, has a flat $5 per email and 1 cent per recipient, bringing the cost for a 500-person email campaign to $10, and one for 2,500 to $30. Great features of Aweber include advanced autoresponder options, integration with things like e-commerce shopping carts, and hundreds of templates you can use for sign-up purposes.

Google Website Optimizer – Tweaking Website Content

A free online marketing tool from Google, their Website Optimizer puts the power to increase conversion rates from your website into your hands. If you’ve ever wondered what website design and copywriting generates the greatest sales or sign-ups, this is the tool for you. By testing various changes in content – text, images, video, polls – you can quickly learn what works best to attract your green consumers. It’s a very simple system that helps you tweak your green content until you’re achieving the highest conversions possible.

Highrise – Professional Customer Relationship Management

Keeping track of your eco-conscious consumers is a must if you want to gain customer loyalty and build a big following for your green business. For that purpose, you’ll want to look to a customer relationship management (CRM) system like Highrise. While not technically an online marketing tool, a CRM application helps you manage your customer relationships in important ways. And we know that happy customers make great repeat customers.   With Highrise, you can pool all of your company’s contacts into an online software tool where you can track current customer information, log communications (including email marketing campaigns), and review conversation histories so that you maintain a personalized approach with your clients. This is an absolute must if you endeavor to create a professional online marketing campaign for your small business.

These 5 awesome online marketing tools are great resources as you set up your small green business and get it going full steam ahead. Useful for small virtual offices for any eco endeavor, they should help you develop your green enterprise on a small budget with limited staff.

With these internet marketing solutions, you’ll find the job of promoting your green business from your virtual office inexpensive and simple, even if you’re your only employee!

Best of luck!

Main Image Via Flickr – Ed Yourdon

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