Listen to this articleINTRODUCTION
Custom relationship management software can help one manage the business by providing insightful analytics, organizing customer data, and analyzing the sales pipeline. Nowadays there are many more CRM options and features available than ever before. One can choose the best fit for their business and even customize it fully to cater to their specific needs. CRM systems can also provide customer-facing staff members with detailed information on customers’ personal information, purchase history, purchase preferences, and concerns.
ESSENTIAL FEATURES
1- Contact Management
The primary purpose of a CRM is to help the business connect better with customers. From the first point of contact to purchasing and beyond, CRM should have the ability to save and extract all relevant customer data. It also helps in creating follow-up reminders. Customer retention rates have been observed to increase by up to 27% if the CRM is properly implemented.
2- Lead Management
Gather data on potential leads to use them at a later point in time. It enables one to identify leads that will most probably convert, which further helps the sales team to prioritize and customize their sales pitch. This involves obtaining quality leads and monitoring them until the transaction is successfully closed. For example, the Cratio CRM enables its customers to capture leads from a number of online portals, phone calls, missed calls, chats, mail history, etc. These leads are then shared with the sales team to take further action.
3- Interaction Tracking
Details about interaction through various channels such as via phone, in person, live chat, or email are recorded. It helps in analyzing the purchasing patterns and customizing the offers to the preferences of the customer.
4- Workflow Automation
A lot of recurring tasks can be automated, which will save a lot of time for the sales and marketing team. If-then rules can be defined for important yet repetitive tasks. For example, sending mail, updating a record, sending an SMS, or generating an invoice.
5- Analysis and Forecasting
This is very useful for big businesses that have large amounts of well-organized data on customer behavior and sales. Forecasting and analyzing allow companies to make accurate revenue predictions and predict future trends based on past performance. This helps in planning the growth of the company and spotting where the company has scope to improve.
BEST PRACTICES TO GET THE MOST OUT OF YOUR CRM
1. Choose a CRM That Fits Your Need – Not all CRMs are created equally. We should not choose a CRM without researching its capabilities, or we might end up having one unsuitable for our business.
2. Train Your Workforce Well – The employees who are going to use the software should be educated well about using the CRM or it just becomes an expensive filing system. At the end of the day, the best CRM for the company is the one that the employees are most comfortable using.
3. Lay Down Some Rules – To use a CRM to its full functionality, some rules need to be set; for example, make it a rule that every new lead without exception has to be processed through the CRM.
4. Rely on Automation – To free up your employees from all the menial and repetitive tasks, which cause a waste of valuable time, we can automate many of the data entry tasks and let CRM do the heavy lifting.
5. Keep It Simple – To make sure your team uses CRM effectively and takes full advantage of it, choose the features that are uncompiled and effective. The myriad of options and features offered can be intimidating at first.
EXAMPLES
Zoho CRM
It was developed by an Indian software company in 2005. It is said to be the best CRM system for small businesses, it is affordable and contains an all-in-one sales and productivity suite. It has an excellent user-friendly easy-to-use interface. Zoho offers customization options to its users and allows the integration of many social media platforms and third-party applications.
Salesforce CRM
Salesforce is an American software company founded in 1999. Salesforce was the first to launch CRM on the cloud and has been the leader in Cloud CRM since then. It is a more complex CRM, which is good for larger businesses that need more authority over their sales tools. It is not as affordable as Zoho CRM, which is justified as it provides more complex features and an exhaustive list of third-party integrations.
MARKETING AUTOMATION
INTRODUCTION
There are many repetitive tasks such as sending emails, social media posts, messages, and other website actions that are performed to engage online customers. Automating these tasks is the perfect solution to stand among the competitors in the present tech-savvy time. Marketing automation helps in automating all the modern marketing tasks with specially developed software and tools to save the time of the marketing department. Automating marketing has proved to be a huge success for many businesses; it has been found that marketing automation had the following effects:
● A 20% increase in sales opportunities
● 12.2% reduction in marketing overhead
● An overall increase of 14.5% in sales productivity
FEATURES OF MARKETING AUTOMATION
With the shift in the marketing landscape and businesses automating their tasks, marketing automation has turned out to be an effective solution that adds serious revenues and results. Companies employing market automation software have always benefitted from it in numerous ways. Accelerating the sales funnel, streamlining the marketing process and outdated sales, and providing insights into customer behavior are some of the advantages that the companies using marketing automation software have as compared to the competitors not using it. Three major areas in which the return on the marketing automation investment is noteworthy:
1. Aligning Sales and Marketing – Marketing automation tools are designed to increase the efficiency and effectiveness of all the market campaigns created. Often it is seen that the marketing and sales department work individually without sharing any data, and this difference leads to a loss in leads and revenue. But, with marketing automation software, the data collection process is streamlined, mutual goals are set, and proper tracking and reporting of the campaigns are done considering the marketing and sales team as one. The combined team then works towards the shared goals and success, generating high values of ROI for the company.
2. Providing Performance Insight – With the Big Data and other tools available in the market, the marketing department industry no longer faces the issue of lack of data. Marketers have now become reliant on the data for making decisions; it is a challenge for marketers to identify and select the data that actually matters. Marketing automation software provides the marketing department with useful data related to the performance of marketing efforts and customer behavior, generating high ROI on the investment.
3. Accelerating Your Sales Funnel – With the advancements in technology, companies get millions of potential leads. But the actual success does not lie in having millions of leads; it lies in quality leads that actually make a purchase. Using marketing automation software, this distinction can be made easily, and qualified leads can be generated without wasting the budget.
MARKETING AUTOMATION BENEFITS
Marketing automation software not only saves the time of the marketing department but also offers many other benefits. Let’s take a look at a few major benefits which marketing automation software has for businesses.
1- Improved Lead Generation:-
Lead generation is of foremost priority of every business to grow in their respective fields. Automating maximum marketing tasks gives time to the marketing departments to focus on generating more leads for the company. The deep insights into customer behavior provided by the marketing software also help marketers to understand their customers’ behavior and plan marketing strategy accordingly to generate leads.
2- Smarter Decisions:-
Marketing automation provides a single platform for collecting and storing data, dashboarding and analytics, and reporting, which makes it possible for marketers to understand consumer behavior and accordingly organize campaigns on a small budget. It also enables marketers to collect valuable information and embrace Big Data effortlessly for use in running successful marketing campaigns. All the useful and in-depth information collected using the marketing automation software helps marketers to make data-driven smarter decisions as compared to the analysis done on a manual basis.
3- Personalization of Customer Experience:-
Personalization of the customer journey is the key to increasing leads. It has been proven by various studies that buyers want unique and targeted content at each stage of the research. The availability of the targeted content increases the conversion rate. Market Automation software captures data like the number of posts performing well on social media channels, emails customers are opening, and other actions, etc. This data captured using the automation software enables the marketers to understand customer behavior deeply and plan the marketing strategy accordingly to personalize the shopping journey.
The importance of marketing automation software can be better understood from the benefits Dell, the computer-making company, experienced after implementing it. The company witnessed a heavy volume of traffic landing on its website but a low conversion rate. Dell then leveraged behavior analysis and then created new ads on the basis of customers’ web history, and products viewed, and stored in the cart. Their move to personalize the marketing strategy resulted in a 70% click-through rate, which resulted in an improved and increased conversion rate. This clearly demonstrates the benefit of using marketing automation software.
4- Reduction in Staffing Cost:-
Marketing automation software automatically triggers the marketing and lead nurturing campaigns, thus saving time and manual effort. It completes the work of a number of marketing employees, reducing the staffing cost for the company.
5-Automatic Follow-up of the Leads:-
It has been found that if a potential lead is followed up within a few hours of their research, then there are high chances of lead generation. By implementing the marketing automation software in the business, the worry about follow-up potential customers remains no more. Whether it is 6 am in the morning or 6 pm in the evening, marketing automation software immediately follows up the potential lead and increases the chance of a conversion. Marketing automation software benefits the business in numerous ways and if you are still not using it for expanding your business, then it is high time to rethink and select the right software for your business.
SOME MARKETING AUTOMATION TOOLS
The majority of businesses have now invested in automating repetitive marketing tasks and have even benefitted from the same. The number of companies using automation software is expected to grow in the future because of the increasing competition. Even when it is known that automation software is necessary, selecting the right software is still a daunting task. Let’s take a look at the list below containing the best tools that provide maximum benefit to organizations.
HubSpot Market Automation
One of the most powerful and popular tools is HubSpot’s Market Automation functionality. It has a full suite, which includes marketing software, sales software, and support software. The software integrates automatically with HubSpot’s CRM. This combination allows all the data and growth activities to take place in a single place, unleashing many new creative automation possibilities, which would be difficult to create using separate tools. This marketing automation functionality includes an easy-to-use visual board, which allows users to craft simple or highly sophisticated conditional workflows. The workflow tool automates emails and much more. It even allows scaling the growth and spending the least time on repetitive tasks.
Ontraport
If you are an entrepreneur or a small business owner, then Ontraport is the best marketing automation software for you. Along with having a CRM and marketing automation facility, Ontraport offers a variety of features like reporting, email marketing, landing pages, and e-commerce to grow the business. The main feature of this business automation software is the focus on reporting and insights and gives a clear look at the performance of campaigns.
Pardot
It is a part of the Salesforce empire and primarily serves enterprise clients. It is a powerful cloud automation solution with tonnes of features like CRM integration, email marketing, lead nurturing and scoring, valuable ROI reporting functionality, etc. to ensure the success of marketing campaigns. It also allows tracking of interactions on the website and the building of predictive lead scoring based upon the parameters set. These tools have helped many big enterprises and small businesses in expanding their businesses by automating repetitive tasks.
Things to keep in mind while crafting your marketing automation strategy:
1. Decide and present your goals.
2. Get into collaboration with other departments, as the automation strategy will involve their involvement at separate stages.
3. Visualize the automation process and describe it using detailed diagrams to present the strategy to other teams as well.
4. Segment your customer data while keeping in mind who you’d like to target and why.
5. Prepare a content strategy and create your content library. Craft relevant and interesting messages made for all stages of a customer journey.
6. Take time in implementing the automation strategy; even the world’s most successful marketing automation firms stagger their launches.
7. Analyse and optimize as you proceed with the strategy. Observe what is working and what is not.
