Tag: Best small and medium business CRM software

6 Reasons Your SMB Needs A Small And Medium Business CRM Software Tool

As a small and medium business, in order to prosper and grow you need to invest pragmatically in the areas that can provide the greatest dividends, that is the reason more and more SMBs are implementing small and medium business CRM tools for generating steady revenue growth. In fact, CRM software is a tool that not only helps businesses to stay organized and build superior relationships as a contact management software but it also pays back $8.71 against every single dollar spent on this tool. And that means a phenomenal 774 percent return on your investments. Hence choosing an automated cloud-based CRM software solution is just not a smart business practice, but a CRM for small and medium businesses can easily transform your operations by increasing sales through lead scoring and thereby helping your employees to understand and support the customers and create optimal workflow processes for your teams.

As a small and medium business, in order to prosper and grow you need to invest pragmatically in the areas that can provide the greatest dividends, that is the reason more and more SMBs are implementing small and medium business CRM tools for generating steady revenue growth.

CRM is considered as one of the most important aspects of business operations as it integrates sales, marketing, customer support, and customer feedback in one system - Super Office (2021) Click To Tweet

In fact, CRM software is a tool that not only helps businesses to stay organized and build superior relationships as a contact management software but it also pays back $8.71 against every single dollar spent on this tool. And that means a phenomenal 774 percent return on your investments.

Hence choosing an automated cloud-based CRM software solution is just not a smart business practice, but a CRM for small and medium businesses can easily transform your operations by increasing sales through lead scoring and thereby helping your employees to understand and support the customers and create optimal workflow processes for your teams.

Still, need further persuasions?

Do not worry, here are some of the other big reason why having a CRM software solution is a must for your small and medium business:

1. It Nurtures Leads and Increases Sales

Do you know that the most basic reason why small and medium businesses adopt a CRM for SMB is that this business growth technology helps to streamline and boost their revenue?

How?

Well, it all begins with lead nurturing and management of the lead after initial lead generation. Modern online CRM permits small businesses to capture more leads from their business websites, social media platforms, emails, etc., and then track those leads throughout the entire sales process.

With your small and medium business CRM stocked up and filled with new contacts, your sales reps can easily start nurturing prospective buyers in the sales pipeline with personalized and targeted campaigns until they are ready to purchase your brand’s offerings.

That means using a CRM your sales teams can not only prioritize the leads but also spend less time trying to persuade unqualified leads who are never going to pull the trigger by taking endless time for closing their deals.

Another big plus of purchasing a small and medium business CRM tool is that the software helps to deliver key insights so that you can make smarter decisions for your company in sales.

This is because a small business CRM software solution can promptly let you know which lead source drives most sales for your brand so that you can allocate more time and money where it is needed. Moreover, it is also a tool that can point out which sales reps in your team are stressed to hit their goals or shed light on what your long-term and short- term forecasts about sales look like so that new business growth ideas and strategies can be tested as per need.

Are you aware that late follow-ups are one of the main reasons for businesses losing customers or failing to convert prospective leads stored in their CRM database?

Now CRM solution helps the sales reps to provide their contacts with appropriate and automated follow-ups to turn present customers into long-term buyers of their brands easily.

2. It Helps You Understand Your Customers

You must be knowing that the best way you can serve your customers is by understanding exactly what they need. Rather say, you must understand your customer’s pain points even though it might seem like a monumental task to gather such information when you have thousands of customers in your database.

Now, this is exactly where CRM comes into play since it is a tool that can gather information about all your customers at a granular level and thereafter even analyze those data to gain valuable insights that might help your business to make more customer-centric and intelligent business decisions for your company.

CRM can track trends, identify opportunities, assess behaviors – all with a few clicks of a button.

Therefore small and medium business CRM tool is particularly useful for SMBs selling complex solutions or for startups with longer sales cycles.

This is because the constant data collection by the Enterprise CRM software allows your business to relentlessly perfect how you interact with each and every customer, since when months of customer-related data is effortlessly recorded and analyzed it allows businesses to understand the different decisions that guided the customers throughout their entire journey.

You can even use this information stored to improve your small businesses’ marketing strategies, tweak your email marketing campaigns, sales approaches, website designs until you can find the optimal way to reach your target audience in the marketplace.

Additionally, another way you can leverage the insight that you have gained through CRM is to create a more personalized experience for your customers.

This is because, when you have accurate oversight into the preferences and behaviors of your clientele, you can easily tailor messages or improve your offerings so that they align more closely with your customer’s expectations and needs, and thereby help develop more meaningful and deeper connections with your customers which can promote loyalty and increase chances of customer referrals for your brand.

3. It Improves Workflow

Irrespective of how small is your business, your marketing and sales processes will always have room for improvements.

Now, the reality here is that most businesses have a plethora of manual processes in their organization and use sticky notes and spreadsheets that kills productivity.

CRM software for small and medium business is a tool that can help to remove the bottlenecks and make it easy to create effective workflows you teams can stick to on a daily basis.

No matter if it is just automating flow-ups on new leads or delivering a reliable onboarding process for new customers, a CRM for SMB can boost your entire team’s efficiency right from lead generation, through sales to customer support – which leads me to my next point.

4. It Escalates Customer Support

Now providing world-class support is one of the strongest pillars for every small business and startup, which not only impacts the retention rate of their customers but also their revenue.

But how can you deliver a consistent world-class customer experience?

Well, you can easily do it by providing your support team’s instant access to detailed information about each and every customer.

Allow your support reps to discover your customer’s online history, their purchase and order information, and their past interactions with your company so that your support reps can truly understand what each customer has gone through.

Now a big advantage of CRM software is that it is a tool that can collect all customer data inside a single repository, which can make it easier to segment your customers based on their specific interests and needs.

5. It Maximizes Resources

We all know that most owners of small and medium businesses are too familiar with the challenge of wearing multiple hats.

In the present business landscape, even mid-sized companies struggle to make the most out of limited resources.

Now as technology does the heavy lifting marketing automation in a robust small business CRM allows a company of any size to do more with fewer resources in their payrolls.

Therefore using a small and medium business CRM tool even companies operating on a skeleton crew can provide high-level service and remain competitive with bigger businesses.

As it has been mentioned even earlier, CRM software can take care of the majority of repetitive admin tasks, keep records and make timely follow-ups with the contacts in the CRM software’s database, while providing you as an entrepreneur to run your business, attend conferences and meetings or provide demos to prospective customers that are ready to buy.

6. It Enables You to Develop Best Practices

Finally, the best CRM software for small and medium businesses can help SMBs to identify and implement best practices to make sure that every employee in their organization remains on the same page and that the business runs smoothly like a well-oiled machine.

Therefore CRM not only helps businesses to find ways to maximize their productivity but also aids in keeping costs down and makes SMBs operate profitably.

It helps in building best practices for making small businesses’ new employee onboarding processes easier, bring them up to speed faster, and provide new entrants with the appropriate information and tools they need to do their job effectively.

Conclusion

Hence with the best small and medium business CRM tool in place your SMB can not only drive more sales, but it can help to delight your customers and make your business more productive.

Therefore with everything, a CRM can do for your business, can you really afford not to have one for finding rapid sales and revenue growth?

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How To Manage And Convert Leads Using A Sales Pipeline CRM Software Tool

Leads are the lifeblood of any business across the globe since without them your revenue will eventually dry up and consequentially you will have to shut off the lights of your company. But there is a problem – leads are not easy to come by as a Starbuck’s Latte. Hence in order to cope with it, businesses turn to sales pipeline CRM software solutions to aid companies to manage their leads as lead management is the first step in the customer journey once the leads have established contact with your brand. Now with competition becoming fiercer in most industries and customer’s demands for personalized experiences increasing every day, businesses cannot afford to overlook the need for lead management anymore, an opportunity that can only be found once companies adopt CRM tools like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions if they want to remain competitive in their marketplace. So in this article let us take a jaunt into the world of managing your leads which can be also called CRM lead database management which can help in building better customer relationships.

Leads are the lifeblood of any business across the globe since without them your revenue will eventually dry up and consequentially you will have to shut off the lights of your company.
But there is a problem – leads are not easy to come by as a Starbuck’s Latte.
Hence in order to cope with it, businesses turn to sales pipeline CRM software solutions to aid companies to manage their leads as lead management is the first step in the customer journey once the leads have established contact with your brand.

Patronage by loyal customers yields 65 percent of a typical business’ volume - American Management Association Click To Tweet

Now with competition becoming fiercer in most industries and customer’s demands for personalized experiences increasing every day, businesses cannot afford to overlook the need for lead management anymore, an opportunity that can only be found once companies adopt CRM tools like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions if they want to remain competitive in their marketplace.

So in this article let us take a jaunt into the world of managing your leads which can be also called CRM lead database management which can help in building better customer relationships.

Now lead management is a technique that focuses on bagging and retaining leads until they become happy and loyal customers with a subscription or purchase or any other business interactions on to the lead’s name.

In other words, lead management with a sales pipeline CRM software helps to guide the leads through a process of qualifying, scoring, and nurturing after which businesses can hand the leads off to their sales reps who are trained to turn them into paying customers.

Now that being said, let us show you some of the most important things that we have learned as one of the most promising vendors of the best small and medium business CRM software about managing sales leads over the last 15 years.

1. Define Qualified Lead

A major disconnect between the staff working in sales and the marketing department in any organization lies in finding a proper definition of a properly qualified lead.
Research suggests that more than even 75 percent of the leads that are passed on to sales departments never get actively worked by the sales reps in most organizations.

This can happen for a plethora of reasons.

We have found one major reason for this disconnect is not being able to define what a truly qualified lead is that can provide business to an organization
Hence for better sales effectiveness, the marketing and sales in an organization need to find a very precise meaning (or rules laid down for measuring engagement) when a suspected contact becomes a definite lead that can be thereafter sent to the sales department, partners, or other channels for nurturing them so that they can convert to a customer.

Now the parameters of this definition of an ideal sales-ready lead vary from company to company, but they generally include the following factors that include:

  • The horizon for purchase
  • Title of the lead
  • The budget of the lead
  • Geography of the lead
  • Size of company (in B2B businesses)
  • Size of the prospected opportunity, and more…

2. Nurture The Leads

Leads that have not fully passed the screen test of a “qualified lead” requires proactive nurturing by the marketers in an organization by using a sales pipeline CRM software.
We have found that most “leads” generated by marketing are doubtlessly not ready to buy based on their first interaction with a company.
Therefore it is best to nurture both suspects and prospects and you will be astonished at how much revenue can be made from nurturing lead in the CRM databases, even with the leads that have been already summarily written off by sales teams.

For this, campaigns need to be run allowing you to touch your prospective leads multiple times throughout the sales process using different sales cadences until they are ready to buy.

Special offers, new product announcements, and promotions are tools that should be set into action to reactive old and long-forgotten leads and even arouse interest in the new ones stored in the sales pipeline CRM software.

Hence nurturing leads is a distinctive sales and marketing skillset that needs to be greatly enhanced, measured, and rewarded appropriately for its successes by the company.

3. Distribute The Leads

According to studies, it is clear that the sales close rate increases phenomenally if you answer back within 12 to 24 hours after a lead initiates contact with your company.

This is because, by responding fast, you truly distinguish your organization and even yourself from other sales reps and your competitors.

For this, the “contact” should not just be an automated email responder, but also a personal phone call from a sales professional.

Obviously, the magnitude of the opportunity and the buying cycle command the persistence and intensity of the follow-up cycle with a lead.

Nevertheless, cloud based CRM systems that are integrated with AI and other cutting-edge business growth technology solutions are great technology in distributing leads quickly and efficiently using round-robin algorithms and more advanced techniques among the right members in the sales team.

4. Track Lead Source

In any business, you need to determine what works and what does not and the only way to know this type of information is to capture the source of the lead.

In an ideal world, this is done using a sales CRM system tool that gets automatically populated when a new contact or lead arrives into the system.

This is because if you are incapable of capturing the genesis or the source of the lead, you have no other way of figuring out what is working to make the lead find out your brand.

Most full-featured sales pipeline CRM software systems have inbuilt reporting systems that aids in understanding the Return on Investment (ROI) on the lead management activities.

Moreover, as CRM systems give you a multitude of ways for capturing and storing leads into the system, your marketing and sales team spends even less time entering and inputting data and more time acting on the stored information in its CRM database.

Additionally, with complete visibility to all leads, there is less chance of multiple people calling the same prospect, which can reduce the efficiency of your sales processes in the long run.

5. Remember Quality Beats Quantity

When it comes to generating new sales, quality definitely supersedes quantity, since significant time can be wasted by organizations and businesses that invest momentous time and energy churning through poor quality leads.

Moreover, the more information you can capture about a prospective lead, the more energized your sales team will be about the lead.

Now this information can be captured in many different ways including things like the search string someone used to get to your website.

This information increases the “quality” of the lead and should be passed to the sales via a simple CRM system.

6. Measure Everything

Lastly, you need to determine what is exactly that you want to measure and the reasons why.

Measurements generally include cost per lead, lead source, cost of acquisition, size of the opportunity, geography, buying cycle, size of the company, and more.

Hence once you determine what you want to measure, you can put the necessary tools like a sales pipeline CRM software in place to capture the information since when you have the right information, you can determine the return on investment of your marketing and sales efforts and focus on the lead generation campaigns that will increase your sales pipeline.

Conclusion

Do not leave money on the table. Invest in CRM database management and take your business to the next level.

There are plenty of easy to use CRM tools to choose from, so take your time when making a decision, ask plenty of questions, and keep your overarching goal in mind, which is – building up a strong customer base.

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How To Create Custom Value Of Your Offerings Using The Best Marketing CRM Software

Would not it be a welcoming fact if you owned the only shop selling your customer’s preferred offerings in town? Now unfortunately when it comes to buying their offerings, consumers are spoilt with several choices nowadays. Hence in order to make your customers feel interested in your offerings, they need to find value as the main deliverable factor of your brand to get them motivated to purchase. Now, this does not imply that your offering(s) need to be the least expensive one found in the marketplace. Since the reality is that the price tag that you put on your products or services constitutes only a small part of its value. We say this as one of the most popular vendors of the best marketing CRM software platforms since the real value of any offering reflects its usefulness, importance, or the worth of something to the buyer of that offering.

Would not it be a welcoming fact if you owned the only shop selling your customer’s preferred offerings in town?
Now unfortunately when it comes to buying their offerings, consumers are spoilt with several choices nowadays.
Hence in order to make your customers feel interested in your offerings, they need to find value as the main deliverable factor of your brand to get them motivated to purchase.
Now, this does not imply that your offering(s) need to be the least expensive one found in the marketplace. Since the reality is that the price tag that you put on your products or services constitutes only a small part of its value.
We say this as one of the most popular vendors of the best marketing CRM software platforms since the real value of any offering reflects its usefulness, importance, or the worth of something to the buyer of that offering.

91% of US businesses with more than 10 employees now use CRM - CRM Magazine Click To Tweet

Therefore, when applied in the context of business, a value is reflected as the worth in monitory terms of the offering, in addition to the social benefits that the consumer finds in exchange for the money or the price paid for getting that product or service in the marketplace.

According to Peter Drucker the famous management guru of the 21st Century:

“The starting point has to be what customers consider value.”

Now to create a way to gauge this metric, we must primarily understand clearly what is meant by the term ‘value’, which Gautam Mahajan (the president of Customer Value Foundation) defines as:

“The perception of what a product or service is worth to a Customer versus the possible alternatives. Worth means whether the Customer feels s/he got benefits and services over what s/he paid.”

How Can You Crack the Customer Value Equation

At its most fundamental level, James Anderson suggested the following equation to explain customer value:

Customer value = Benefits – Costs

Hence, prices and values are the set values and prices of the market offerings presented by the supplier. Now as the differences between that value and the prices proportionately equals to the customer’s willingness to purchase, therefore, the value equation fetched by the customer implies that the customer’s incentive to procure an offering must always exceed the willingness of the customer to buy the next best alternative available in the marketplace.

Hence to formulate a value metric of the customer you need to be capable of answering these four important questions:

  • Why among your existing customers purchase repeatedly and how often?
  • What do your customers breakout by volume, frequency, or the number of products owned?
  • What is the rate of deflection of your customers?
  • What is the likelihood of your customers to buy again?

Maybe to find the right answers to these questions it might take some research, but it is worthwhile to invest time in finding these answers as they provide valuable and actionable metrics that can enable businesses to make better decisions about their customer’s investments.

As one of the most popular vendors of the best marketing CRM software platforms we know customer relationship value is an important leading indicator in any business since once you have these data you can easily create customer relationship value metrics, which you can start by using these three variables:

  • The complete list of all the interactions that the customer had with your company
  • The cost involved in each of these interactions
  • The direction and degree that each of these interactions impacted on moving the relationship forward or backward between the customer and the company

How to Define the Fundamental Mission of Marketing

Marketers communicate, develop, and thereafter deliver value to the customers. Hence creating customer value is the primary mission of marketing, and so the marketing department’s job in any organization is to build the value element of your offerings and your brand and thereafter communicate it to the consumers in the marketplace.

This is because value elements are anything that affects the costs and benefits of your products and services.

Therefore an offering which is of good quality and low cost represents good value, there are even non-price value elements to be considered in the benefits side of the value equation, which includes but are not always limited to:

  • Reliability
  • Customer service and experience
  • Domain, subject matter, industry expertise
  • Delivery
  • Guarantees and warranties

Therefore, we can say in other words that marketing indeed plays a very important role in your businesses’ ability to create customer value, as you marketers are the ones who must reflect how everything that your company does must deliver value to your customers.

Now given the fact that your brand’s marketing teams should always focus on finding and growing the value of your offerings to your customers they are unable to connect with the consumers or do what is needed to create customer value of your offerings, you may need to ask yourself as to why they are feeling this.

Hence under this circumstance, it is advisable that businesses must use a business growth technology like an easy to use CRM software which is in the modern times the best available platform that can aid marketers to better understand the market and also your customer segments by collecting data and creating an analysis of the customers.

We say this as one of the leading vendors of the best small and medium business CRM software as it has often been observed that dissimilar value propositions find relevance to different customers and so marketers need to develop these propositions by analyzing data of previous sales and thereafter creating supporting messages for the future customers, to communicate the value of your products and services through the right channel and at the right time during the customer journey.

Hence your marketing teams once they use CRM software like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM must understand the various buying processes and customer personas, which can help in finding the right solution for business growth.

Does Customer Value Increase Customer Lifecycle Management

CLM or Customer Lifecycle Management is the measurement of several customer-based metrics which when carefully analyzed over a specified period of time, helps in indicating the performance of any business. Therefore, while implementing the best marketing CRM software it is advised that companies must encompass all domains and departments of an organization so that it can help in bringing all the sources of dynamic and static data, marketing and value-added services to a centralized decision-supporting platform like a CRM looping in different phases of customer acquisition, customer retention, up-selling and cross-selling, for creating consistent customer value of your offerings which translates to business growth.

Since at all cost, it must be remembered that business should always focus on creating customer value of their offerings as market value is derived from what exceeds the willingness of the customer to buy the next best alternative available in the marketplace.

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How Will Customer Self-Service Look In 2025 In the Post COVID-19 Era

As of today, self-service has already become a key part of delivering a superior customer experience that the present consumers expect from their companies. Now irrespective of whether they help the consumers to make changes to their accounts themselves or provide answers to routine inquiries over self-service systems, the benefits are clear. In fact, consumers today can get faster and more convenient services that value their time using self-service options, while brands are able to deflect mundane questions that would otherwise be answered by a human being using this business growth strategy, which at the end frees up their precious business hours and also increase efficiency. Now, even though we have witnessed a rapid growth in self-service for the customers in the last five years, but what will the next five bring is a matter of concern. Hence in this article based on our experience as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM for the SMB organizations, we believe that there are key four areas to focus on as we look ahead in time.

As of today, self-service has already become a key part of delivering a superior customer experience that the present consumers expect from their companies.
Now irrespective of whether they help the consumers to make changes to their accounts themselves or provide answers to routine inquiries over self-service systems, the benefits are clear.
In fact, consumers today can get faster and more convenient services that value their time using self-service options, while brands are able to deflect mundane questions that would otherwise be answered by a human being using this business growth strategy, which at the end frees up their precious business hours and also increase efficiency.

Companies that lead in customer experience outperform laggards by nearly 80% - Forrester Click To Tweet

Now, even though we have witnessed a rapid growth in self-service for the customers in the last five years, but what will the next five bring is a matter of concern.

Hence in this article based on our experience as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM for the SMB organizations, we believe that there are key four areas to focus on as we look ahead in time:

1. Superior Use Of More Advanced AI

In the present times, we are already witnessing businesses harnessing AI technologies such as NLP (Natural Language Processing) and Machine Learning in self-service, which either way helps in identifying what questions actually means and thereafter provide the right answers to the customers.

Nowadays this can be delivered either using a Chatbot or a standard web-service question and answer interface.
Nevertheless, what we believe today as one of the best vendors of CRM for small and medium businesses is that AI will develop even further and faster in the days to come.

For example, it will empower self-service to better understand the consumer’s context of an inquiry and use this knowledge to develop a more natural and fuller conversation with the consumers that than engaging in single interactions, like as we find today.

This means Chatbots will be able to provide answers to more difficult, and complex enquires like “Please book me the cheapest flight ticket to Chicago departing today and email me the boarding pass in advance.”

Note: It is presumed that NLP engines in the next few years will become more regional and domain-specific, which implies less training will be required to tune these machines and make them faster to deploy in a pre-packaged way.

2. Self-Service Will Become Easier To Roll-Out And Manage

One of the problems that we face with self-service technologies nowadays is that the system relies heavily on humans to create and manage their interactions.

For example, web self-service and Chatbots presently require a team to write, review, and update relevant and important contents with the knowledge base of the business growth technology that constitutes the building blocks of the software.

Nevertheless, Robotic Process Automation (RPA) is gaining its reputation and strength rapidly which will help in human mapping and understanding the processes used by self-service technologies and thereafter identify those areas that can be automated.

Therefore in the near future, it is apprehended that RPA will act as a relief for hard-pressed customer service teams, where the deployment of the system becomes a barrier as they feel that they do not have the time or capacity to create a knowledge base or manually pick processes that demand improvements.

This implies that self-service is presently focusing on facilitating information rather than going deeper into just solving issues for the consumers.

Hence as one of the best vendors of CRM for SMB organizations, we believe that over the next 5 years AI will even help to transform the back-end processes within self-service, which will, in turn, remove much of the load on customer service teams.

For example, by analyzing customer service conversations AI in the near future will be able to flag where there are any gaps in the knowledge base, and then suggest relevant answers that can be reviewed (if needed) by a human before deployment.

Similarly, AI will even integrate with such systems like an easy to use CRM and billing software technologies in order to flag friction points in processes that can be automated and also suggest ways for accomplishing these.

3. Democratizing Self-Service

Even the best self-service deployments presently need resources to tune, manage and update them, which implies that they have tended to be the domain of large and medium-sized businesses that have these resources available within their organization.

Now, the good news for modern customers is that by using AI within the back-end of the self-service systems, businesses can reduce their management overheads significantly, increase ROI, which will, in turn, put self-service options within the grasp of many more startups and small businesses.

Customers will, therefore, receive a significantly improved self-service experience from every brand they deal with, irrespective of its size or industry.

Well, given the present downward trend in customer satisfaction with businesses across the globe, as it has been found by the Institute of Customer Service, this big improvement will be a welcoming step for the entire industry.

4. Self-Service Will Become More Proactive

In the present times self-service is reactive, which implies it provides service or responses only after a customer asks them, which in the near future we as one of the best small and medium business CRM software vendors believe will become more proactive, and will be able to deliver information to the consumers or trigger processes without a question needed to be asked, whereby a human customer may not be required to be involved at all and will be still notified about what is going on automatically.

For example, a vehicle could automatically identify whether it is going to require service, check its owner’s digital diary, and thereafter book a service in the local garage.

Now even though all these might sound like a page from a science fiction novel today, it is an approach that is already being explored by innovators like Tesla.

Therefore, by identifying what consumers are trying to do, self-service will be able to predict the support and the information they need, and thereafter automatically supply it logically.

Conclusion

However, to end this discussion, all these advances rely on one factor- Trust.

Now, customers use self-service today because they trust that self-service options will be capable of delivering the answers that they need and thereby make their lives easier.

Hence, if trust in self-service technologies fails to provide this most necessary payback, consumers will surely abandon the channel, which will reduce efficiency and destruct the customer experience, and so transformations in self-service over the next five years in the ‘post-COVID-19’ era businesses need to ensure that every step they take must revolve around the customer needs if it has to deliver ROI for the companies and improve the satisfaction of the consumers.

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Proven Email Marketing Tips That Works For Small Businesses

Generating a noteworthy email marketing campaign can make your business reach the place where your consumers visit every day- and that is nowhere else other than their “email’s inbox”. We say this because according to an estimated report published by Statista (a German online portal for statistics) it has been stated that there will be approximately 255 million users in the U.S.A by the end of 2020, which is enough data to provide us with an idea as to how much email marketing techniques are going to be beneficial this year and the times ahead for generating new leads. Therefore, irrespective of whether it is an SMB website or an online store, email is not only a great way to retain old customers but it is even a great tool to acquire new ones for consistent business growth. Hence businesses that in 2020 are avoiding email marketing will for certain lose many glorious opportunities of converting new website visitors into loyal customers, for which we have noted down 10 most important email marketing tips exclusively for the benefit of small businesses and startups in this blog.

Generating a noteworthy email marketing campaign can make your business reach the place where your consumers visit every day- and that is nowhere else other than their “email’s inbox”.
We say this because according to an estimated report published by Statista (a German online portal for statistics) it has been stated that there will be approximately 255 million users in the U.S.A by the end of 2020, which is enough data to provide us with an idea as to how much email marketing techniques are going to be beneficial this year and the times ahead for generating new leads.
Therefore, irrespective of whether it is an SMB website or an online store, email is not only a great way to retain old customers but it is even a great tool to acquire new ones for consistent business growth .

40 percent of B2B marketers say email newsletters are most critical to their content marketing success. Click To Tweet

Hence businesses that in 2020 are avoiding email marketing will for certain lose many glorious opportunities of converting new website visitors into loyal customers, for which we have noted down 10 most important email marketing tips exclusively for the benefit of small businesses and startups in this blog.

Great 9 Email Marketing Tips for Small Businesses

To get started with email marketing campaigns, creating a high-quality email list in your easy to use CRM that drives in more customers to your company is one of the most important parts to begin an effective email marketing strategy for business growth.
Now even though it might take a long time to grow this list, nevertheless to achieve it early here are nine solid tips that can help you to do so.

1. Create an alluring and easy sign-up form

If you wish to use email for marketing your brand and business, you must build and include a sign-up form which should be incorporated inside your website.
Therefore create an appealing sign-up form and attach it on your website’s homepage, blog pages, Facebook page and other places of the website where customers are likely to visit, and thereafter using the sign-up collect their name, place of origin, birthday and anniversary dates, to offers exclusive discounts or invite them to join a group or a webinar.
Now, irrespective of the fact that whether you plan to send company updates, blog tips, deals, or e-commerce sales discounts it is most essential that you must meet your email campaign’s reader’s expectations for this is the only means they can decide their interest in your offerings.

2. Segment the email campaign’s list

As your email list starts to grow, segment the list according to its marketing needs since you must be having a different and unique proposal to offer for each of your prospective customers for business growth.
For example, the marketing email that you wish to send to an octogenarian customer cannot be the same that you wish to send to a teenager.
Hence segment the list according to your prospect’s gender, age, location preferences, previous purchases made, social values, and more.

3. Design new email templates

Design visually appealing email templates and do not forget to add a business logo on it. Making a great look and feel of these email templates helps in spreading your brand name to the recipients of your emails. Therefore send these logoed email templates that you can easily create once you are using a CRM like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM tools consistently so that your readers become more familiar with your brand name and your business website from the very beginning.
Now according to reports published by Campaign Monitor almost more than 41 percent of the emails in 2019 were opened on a mobile device.
Hence test your email templates design for mobile-friendliness, else you might find a fall in your email campaign’s open rates right from the very beginning.

4. Try to create emails that are easy to read

Stick to email template themes that generate great user experience. For this, try to avoid adding large text data and structure your email contents in a way that becomes easy for perusing by the readers of your emails.
Now as most of your prospective email recipients must be busy people, therefore, provide them a summary of the content ideas using subheadings and images by which your emails will find a greater chance to stand apart from other emails hitting their inbox.

5. Ideate stunning subject lines

Creating catchy and stunning subject lines is one of the most important aspects of building an email. This is because according to statistics in more than 85 percent cases the subject line of your emails is what helps in deciding its open rates.
Now creating a click-bait and engaging subject line is not as easy as you think. Hence, use A/B testing methods after developing a good number of ideas on your email’s subject lines and find which one works the best for the readers of your emails.

6. Add social media links

Now, when users on your website are subscribing to your email campaign’s list, it shows that they are interested in your content.
Hence in the present times for business growth as we all know that social media is a great source for gathering information about your offerings, hence include your businesses’ social media link in the emails so that your subscribers will be able to know more about your brand’s products and services and also help build trust for your company.

7. Encourage personalization

Address the recipients of your emails with their first names, keeping the email style friendly so that it impacts positively on your subscribers.
As such emails are personal communications, therefore the recipients expect a human touch in your emails, since only when you a capable of developing an informal correspondence with your readers it helps in driving strong and long-lasting loyal relationships.

8. Create an editorial calendar

Create a schedule for sending your event details or newsletters on the appropriate time to the subscribers of your email. It is very easy to do this once you are using an easy to use CRM and integrate it with a calendar to plan in advance for all your events.
Remember your subscribers are likely to forget about your brand if they do not hear or get your business emails from time to time.

9. Test, analyze and optimize

Finally, test your emails on different browsers, screens, and devices before sending them the subscribers of your email campaign’s list stored in your best small business CRM software’s database.
Once you have sent your emails there are three key things that you must analyze for your email campaigns, which are open rate, click-through rate and unsubscribe rate, which can be found easily in all best small and medium business CRM software platforms irrespective of whether it is Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM that you are using for your SMB for your business growth.

Remember, if you find any particular email that is responsible for generating a high unsubscribe rate, change it immediately and never use that template, content, or subject line in your next upcoming emails.

Conclusion

Therefore even though email marketing campaigns are one of the best ways to boost website traffic, build more social engagements and thereby drive more sales and revenue for small businesses, nevertheless, for optimal performance of your campaigns you must keep your CRM database in order, by cleaning and updating it at a regular interval, so that your emails do not go to the wrong places or get lost for not being able to find the right addresses of your prospective leads and customers.

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Six Inexpensive Strategies For Lead Generation To Follow For Small Businesses

Generation of leads is basic as well as one of the most important stages of a sales cycle for consistent business growth. In fact, lead generation can be termed as the “sales engine” that helps in the growth of any business. This is because the strategies used for lead generation that followed at this stage reflects directly on the sales revenue. Since, if the generated leads are not of superior quality, which means if they are not appropriate for your brand’s profile of an ‘ideal customer’, your sales funnel and the pipeline could end up to be extremely frail and vulnerable resulting in a dent in your company’s bottom line. Hence lead generation incorporates the technique of accumulating a database of potential leads along with their contact information. Now since, for SMB organizations strategies circles around the principals of spending less and gaining more, hence lead generation strategies for small businesses and startups should never become an uneasy overhead for your company.

Generation of leads is basic as well as one of the most important stages of a sales cycle for consistent business growth.

In fact, lead generation can be termed as the “sales engine” that helps in the growth of any business. This is because the strategies used for lead generation that followed at this stage reflects directly on the sales revenue. Since, if the generated leads are not of superior quality, which means if they are not appropriate for your brand’s profile of an ‘ideal customer’, your sales funnel and the pipeline could end up to be extremely frail and vulnerable resulting in a dent in your company’s bottom line.

Increasing quality leads is the top priority for 68% of B2B professionals, followed by increasing lead volume (at 55%.) - B2B Technology Marketing Community (2019) Click To Tweet

Hence lead generation incorporates the technique of accumulating a database of potential leads along with their contact information.
Now since, for SMB organizations strategies circles around the principals of spending less and gaining more, hence lead generation strategies for small businesses and startups should never become an uneasy overhead for your company.

As a procedure, lead generation helps to move focused prospects into your sales funnel whereby you can target those leads for nurturing and eventually generate a sale for business growth.

Therefore keeping in mind the budgetary constraints faced by small businesses here are a few low budget lead generation ideas for SMB organizations, which we found interesting enough to share for your business growth:

#1. Exit-intent popup

Designing and creating an exit-intent popup for your business website hardly requires no more than 10 to 15 minutes. Exit intent popup helps brands to monitor the movement of the visitors on the website and mobile application users by providing an opt-in form when they are about to leave your website.
Once you find your website visitor is leaving your site, by creating exit intent pop-up, without taking any action on a CTA (Click to Action) button like registering or buying, you can easily butt-in and interrupt your visitor and re-direct them to take a specific action.
Several large organizations have been using this technique for long and have achieved exemplary results by implementing this as a part of their marketing strategy for business growth.
Therefore, following their strategies you can even make use of exit-intent popup when people are leaving your landing page, pricing page or abandoning your shopping cart, because these sections of your website are the places where people take their most important decisions before buying your offerings.

#2. Add call-to-action button

In general, known as CTA, call-to-action buttons are created for luring people to make use of a particular product, application, or service. CTA is meant for provoking instant responses. For example, they provide the consumers with compelling reasons to make an immediate purchase with click-bait verbiage like- “This offer expires in the next 2 hours”.
You can incorporate call-to-action buttons in your catalogs, digital brochures, emails, and other forms of outbound communications. Hence, a CTA needs to be designed in an effective manner that incorporates click-worthy content. For instance, you can include in your CTA content what your products or services can offer and how the consumer can actually sign-up and use your offerings for free.
Always make sure that your “Sign up for Free” button in the CTA should be jazzy enough to stand out as a predominant and highlighted element over everything else on the web-page.

#3. Share best practices or success stories

The majority of your consumers would always be happy to know if your offerings really stand up for what you claim or can it rightly deliver the solution your customers are looking for.
The ideal way to answer this query is to showcase and provide proof of what your brand did even before for your customers, and how their business benefitted by purchasing your products or services.
Therefore, while sharing your success stories, write a small compelling introduction, with a CTA that requires your prospects to fill in their details, once they want to download them.
This way, you will understand that your prospects are trying to find a solution to the challenges you noted in your story and might be interested in purchasing your products or services for solving their issues.

#4. Guest blogging

Guest blogging is a roundabout way for generating leads and storing them in your best small and medium business CRM software platform’s database.
Guest blogging on other people’s even websites boosts your web traffic dramatically and thereby introduces new prospects to your solutions, by using back-links placed within the blog contents to redirect traffic to your website.
Guest blogs are mostly published on high DA (Domain Authority) websites that attract a very large footfall of traffic.
However, even before you begin blogging on different websites here are a few points that you need to remember:
• Deliver contents that are compelling and focused only on your niche
• Publish contents only on those popular websites where the audience exactly fits your niche
• Ensure that the owner or editor of the blog is proactive on social media websites

#5. Add testimonials

Testimonials are similar to success stories but while success stories are written from your end, testimonials are provided directly by your customers, in their own words.
Therefore, you shall often find consumers who reach out on social media to appreciate different products, customer support endeavors, or even an organization.
Now once your business has a social media presence, you can always leverage and take advantage of these testimonials and publish them on your business website for business growth.
Illustrating testimonials are a highly effectual way of showing your success that can help your potential leads and customers to decide on making a purchase.

#6. Add social proof

According to a report published by Nielsen Survey, it states that: “84 percent of US consumers have faith and trust the recommendations made by their friends, colleagues, and relatives.”
Hence, word of mouth marketing done on social media platforms is one of the most successful ways of generating leads. There are many web portals that permit you to get connected to your potential leads and the most popular among them is LinkedIn.
In LinkedIn, once you are connected with the leads and have perceived their level of interest, you can initiate a conversation with the prospective leads or even create LinkedIn Groups, which permits people with likewise interests and tastes to react or comment on your postings on the group.

Conclusion

Therefore if you are using a CRM for small and medium businesses to augment your lead generation skills using these inexpensive strategies for your small business or startup can boost your lead generation process and thereby increase sales which will consequentially lead to rapid business growth.

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Steps For Creating Effective And Successful Marketing Campaigns In SMB

If you are like several of our customers using our easy to use CRM software, and you are in the thick of developing and executing numerous marketing campaigns at once, it is natural you must be using different forms of contents for a variety of selling channels to address your leads, prospects, and customers. In a recent marketing event where we were discussing about measuring Marketing, a participant asked for a list of metrics that can be used to measure the campaign’s performance.

If you are like several of our customers using our easy to use CRM software, and you are in the thick of developing and executing numerous marketing campaigns at once, it is natural you must be using different forms of contents for a variety of selling channels to address your leads, prospects, and customers.

In a recent marketing event where we were discussing about measuring Marketing, a participant asked for a list of metrics that can be used to measure the campaign’s performance.

65% of the users of mobile CRM are achieving their sales quotas. While only 22% of reps using non-mobile CRM have reached the same targets. - Nucleus Research Click To Tweet

However, if you are not aware in the very first place at what you are aiming at, how is it possible for you to measure whether you are hitting the right goals?

Therefore, just as a pilot works through a pre-flight checklist before hitting the runway, similarly, every marketer should adhere to these three pivotal steps when creating and executing marketing campaigns to measure its goals.

1. Know Where You Are Aiming

There is no marketing organization that has unlimited resources. Hence, every marketing campaign must serve a clearly defined specific purpose that will bring a positive impact on their business.

Therefore, before creating any campaign, you must recognize what the campaign is expected to impact and how this impact can be measured using your easy to use CRM software.

In other words, do not execute any campaign if its business outcome is not well-defined in advance.

2. Define Performance Targets Before Executing

Next, geared up with a solid business outcome, since your subsequent step is to set each campaign’s performance targets, which can be illustrated as a specific goal the campaign will accomplish within a set period of time.

Executing on time and within (or under) budget is not the performance target. Rather, create measurable and relevant performance targets that you want to relate to your business needs, which you are trying to move.

For example, if your desired business outcome is related to expanding your market share among a particular customer segment, or acquire a specific set of customers in a new market, your performance target for this campaign (taking into consideration the buying cycle that has been deployed)  may consist of a certain number of inquiries, appointments, and quote requests.

Nevertheless, whatever be the performance target, the target should be defined in advance, so that all can understand what result the campaign is expected to bring. It is only by pre-setting your campaign’s performance targets you can understand if your aims are viable and true.

Therefore if you are using the best small and medium business CRM software and you do understand the importance of Sales Force Automation, be sure that you remember to incorporate your performance targets before firing your campaigns.

3. Plan How to Measure Your Results

Measurements cannot remain as an afterthought. Your performance targets and business outcome provide insights into what data you will require to measure your campaign’s performance, and how you will strategize to manage that captured data, in addition to what analytic parameters you will apply on that info.

Therefore, to apply any cloud-based business growth technology  to support your measurement reports, such as a CRM like Salesforce or any other Salesforce Alternative CRM tool, you need to do your planning in advance, put your elements in place, and thereafter test your performance before you hit the “send” button. Since the only way by which you can truly determine whether your campaigns are moving the needle is when you view their analytic reports.

Takeaway

Following this above-stated process for each of your campaigns will do more than just enable you to measure the success of your campaign, but it will also ensure that each campaign is linked to a business outcome and therefore help you to find out the expenses the campaign will incur accurately.

As per our knowledge, most easy to use CRM users follow this process during budgeting and marketing planning, for this process can be used to justify your budget, renegotiating goal and for applying bonus components to the employees of your company as a result of business growth.

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How The Right QuickBooks CRM Can Help Generate More Sales And Revenue

Typically, sales managers of any small and medium organization find it easy to see the benefits of adopting a CRM system, which becomes more effective if they use the best small and medium business CRM software that offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, and is so most often also accepted as the best CRM software for QuickBooks. They appreciate that in QuickBooks CRM their sales data is going to be centrally stored and presented in an easy-to-follow format, permitting them to monitor staff performances, sales processes, purchases, billing and invoicing, and as a result, optimize sells. But what about the sales reps? Therefore, more often than not, unlike sales managers, sales reps are not all that “happy-go-lucky” about Customer Relationship Management solution in the beginning.

Typically, sales managers of any small and medium organization find it easy to see the benefits of adopting a CRM system, which becomes more effective if they use the best small and medium business CRM software that offers QuickBooks CRM integration free, and is so most often also accepted as the best CRM software for QuickBooks.

They appreciate that in QuickBooks CRM their sales data is going to be centrally stored and presented in an easy-to-follow format, permitting them to monitor staff performances, sales processes, purchases, billing and invoicing, and as a result, optimize sells.

Consumers in the US ranked Intuit (QuickBooks) on number 8 in terms of privacy trustworthiness among all companies - Colvin (2017) Click To Tweet

But what about the sales reps?

Therefore, more often than not, unlike sales managers, sales reps are not all that “happy-go-lucky” about Customer Relationship Management solution in the beginning.

Primarily, the extra time that the sales rep has to spend on entering data into the CRM software application adds to the irritation of the sales teams since they think that their main job is primarily selling.

However, this article is not about why sales team do not always find the goodness in easy to use CRM software, but rather it is all about how a QuickBooks CRM can improve the performance of the sales reps, and more importantly why they need a CRM for revenue growth.

So why do salespeople need CRM, preferably a QuickBooks CRM software?

Without the fear of oversimplifying the facts, the two greatest challenge that sales reps face in sales are:

  • How to follow up and qualify on leads?
  • How to prioritize sales activities?

And CRM is the only business growth technology and tool that can solve these key problems in sales, and this is how best small business CRM when used in SMB organizations, does it:

  1. Enjoy a safe storage space

Best CRM software platforms aid the sales teams in small businesses and startups to centrally store their sales opportunities, contacts, activities and schedule plans in one central place so that they can find seamless access to their CRM database from multiple locations, and never have to fear that their data will get lost.

For example, once you use a QuickBooks CRM, in your CRM for SMB you can also view the purchase history of the customers, create invoices for your prospects and leads without leaving your easy to use CRM platform, and store them in the CRM database for future use.

  1. Plan and manage time just like a ‘Pro’

Best CRM software for QuickBooks helps salespeople to optimize their day-to-day schedules and prioritize their tasks to make them remain assured that none of their prospects and customers are ignored and they are instead contacted on time. Though it may sound like an oxymoron easy to use CRM software, as a matter of fact, allows sales reps to spend more time with their customers, which results in closing more deals and creating stronger relationships.

  1. No brainer activity reports

The best CRM software for SMB organizations also helps the sales reps to quickly and easily create their weekly, quarterly, or monthly reports for the management and higher-ups in their organization. The process of creating these reports is transparent and automated with business growth technology applications like CRM as it takes just a few minutes to inform other members of the team and the mangers about which sales have been won and those that are currently in progress.

  1. Stay up-to-date on what is happening

Easy to use CRM offers document templates, shared calendars and email integrations, which helps to unite all team members in sales, marketing, accounts, and support and keep everyone up-to-date. Sharing selling patterns, and selling processes, and purchases made by the customers (if you are using a QuickBooks CRM) allows sales teams to see what works best.

This is because once you integrate easy to use best sales CRM software with Intuit QuickBooks, there can be a seamless exchange of all data between these two software application platforms.
This way, you can continue using your accounting software, at the same time see customer details, payment, invoice information directly on your easy to use CRM dashboard, and thereafter use this data from QuickBooks CRM for follow-ups, customer support, and business process automation to remind your prospects and customers of their needs.

Moreover, as there are several information that overlaps between sales, accounting, and customer service as the prospect moves through the sales pipeline from being just a lead to a paying customer if different teams use different software in the organization to store their data, it will undoubtedly result in double data entry causing waste of money, time and efforts.

Hence using a QuickBooks CRM for sales not only helps in eliminating double entry but also as when the customer data in the CRM database is updated it also changes in the financial application and vice versa.

Conclusion

Therefore, the best small and medium business CRM software for sales teams when integrated with QuickBooks correctly it will certainly help salespeople to excel in four areas that are critical to them, which include:

  • Reach sales targets faster
  • Better search, segregate and qualify leads
  • Prioritize follow up activities as per the urgency
  • Follow up on leads and customers systematically and on time

However, to achieve all these, sales reps have to unanimously understand that updating their CRM database is central to their success, which is only possible through absolute understanding and determination from the sales rep’s side.

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Three Exclusive Tips for Cultivating Customer Loyalty Over Time

Pursuing new business can indeed be a pretty exciting opportunity. Capturing a qualified lead and then guiding it through an immersive and compelling customer journey that leads to a lucrative sale can be an extremely satisfying experience. This is because it is always rewarding to know that you are playing a major role in generating revenue for your brand and company and this is what keeps you motivated to find new customers for your business growth. Nonetheless, unfortunately marketing to prospective customers collected in your easy to use CRM tool is also a little overrated (at least in the grand scheme of things), that we do for our businesses. This is because, there is a lot more to marketing than just acquiring new customers since successful brands are always focused on the bigger picture, which implies that they concentrate on the LTV (Lifetime Value) of each and every customer.

Pursuing new business can indeed be a pretty exciting opportunity.
Capturing a qualified lead with the help of an easy to use CRM  tool and then guiding it through an immersive and compelling customer journey that leads to a lucrative sale can be an extremely satisfying experience.

43% of U.S. customers spend more with the brands and companies they are loyal to - Fundera Click To Tweet

This is because it is always rewarding to know that you are playing a major role in generating revenue for your brand and company and this is what keeps you motivated to find new customers for your business growth .

Nonetheless, unfortunately marketing to prospective customers collected in your easy to use CRM tool is also a little overrated (at least in the grand scheme of things), that we do for our businesses.

This is because, there is a lot more to marketing than just acquiring new customers since successful brands are always focused on the bigger picture, which implies that they concentrate on the LTV (Lifetime Value) of each and every customer.

Hence (do not get us wrong) even though Top-Of-Funnel marketing and lead generation strategies are extremely critical for all businesses, nevertheless the existing customers are the most dependable source of revenue for brands, and so they should remain as the number one priority since your business just cannot grow and scale-up if you are constantly losing customers because your company provides poor or ineffectual experience to its customers.

Hence, in this article let us today step beyond just prospect marketing strategies and explore how to inspire customer loyalty using three proven methods that reduce churn and boosts business growth.

  1. NURTURING IS NOT JUST FOR PROSPECTIVE LEADS

Most of us in business, associate nurturing with pushing and nudging prospects through the sales funnel. Nevertheless, while that is also certainly one example of nurturing, but in reality nurturing is not just for prospects.

This is because, the truth remains in the fact that since your customers are already investing in your company’s offerings, they are more primed for nurturing than even the hottest lead in your easy to use CRM tool.

Therefore, that being said here are a few ways you can nurture your existing customers to inspire customer loyalty.

  • Welcoming/ Thank You and On-boarding Emails

Whenever you make a new sale or sign in a new customer, ensure to follow-up immediately over email or SMS, thanking the customer for their purchase.
Now, if your business is using a CRM like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM you must also launch an automated drip campaign using the software, providing the new customer simple directions on how they can get started with your offering(s).
Additionally, as the campaign progresses you can even add conditional logic and more details to the program to make sure that your customers are getting the very most out of your offerings.

Finally, ensure including recommended contents in all your outbound communications to take advantage of cross-selling opportunities which can help in further galvanizing your brand’s relationship with the customers.

  • Celebrate milestones with awesome promotions

It is extremely important that as an entrepreneur you must know a few key bits of information about all your customers, like their work and marriage anniversaries, birthdays, and obviously the history of their purchases.

Now armed with this knowledge, you can send emails celebrating these milestones and offer special discounts or any other perks based on the products and services that you offering to your customers.

For example, while an auto insurance firm might offer discounted renewal rates after three years of safe driving, restaurants and online apparel stores can provide BOGO (Buy One Get One) promotions on their customer’s marriage anniversaries and birthdays.

This is not only a great way to stay top of mind with your customers, but it also provides a signal that you care about your customers and are happy to invest in them in their success and/or for continuing business with your company.

  • Send new product and service announcements

Great brands always diversify and add new products and services to the offerings. This sort of innovation proves that they are serious about improving their existing business and are always eager to provide the best goods and services.

Therefore, whenever your business rolls out a new launch, ensure that your existing customers are the first to know.

You can also consider offering discounted pricings or free trial offer for early adopters of your brand’s new products and services.

Moreover, you can even ask your existing customers if they are willing to sign up for a waitlist, which is an excellent strategy that not only helps to build anticipation among your customers for your new launch but it also helps businesses to measure the demand for their upcoming products and services.

As a popular vendor of the best small and medium business CRM software we have observed in several surveys and studies that customers appreciate this sort of preferential treatment, therefore make sure to show your customers that they are valued by your company whenever it is possible, and at all times.

  1. PRODUCT EDUCATION AND ADOPTION IS CRUCIAL FOR LONG-TERM RELATIONSHIPS

In several instances, businesses are so used to their own products and services they offer to their consumers at large, that they take their offering’s ‘ease of use’ for granted.

Another common mistake that brands most often make is to assume that their consumers are using their offerings to the fullest potential.

However, in most cases, this is not true.

Therefore to keep away from this, you can build several different campaigns for marketing to your customers to ensure sound practical knowledge and the most favorable usage of your offerings.

  • Automated triggered campaigns

Earlier in this article, we discussed creating on-boarding campaigns to aid the consumers to get a hang of their products and services. Nevertheless, despite our best efforts as marketers, there are several consumers who do not open those text messages or emails (much less click on the helpful links therein).

Therefore persistence must be your key to ensure optimal adoption of your products and services.

Now, with marketing automation integrated within your easy to use CRM tools, you can track the behaviors of the users in your CRM app or even on your website, after which you can segment these individuals based on their purchase history and/or usage and then launch an automated email campaign to familiarize them with your offerings and thereby encourage adoption.

In the contents of these campaigns, you can include direct and concise instructions and even add links and prominent CTA (Call To Action) to helpful resources that can boost usage of your offerings.

Additionally, you can even A/B test your emails to learn what is working and what is not to optimize your onboarding campaigns, which will help in making sure that your CTAs, subject lines, and contents are all resonating properly with the targeted consumers of your offerings.

  • Training and pro tips

Depending on your offering, your customers even might need some advanced training.

Hence it is best to make use of progressive profiling and create adaptive forms to make it easy for your customers to sign them up for a session on digital training across your preferred marketing channels like social media, on your business website, in your monthly newsletters and login page of your app.

However, remember never to overcomplicate the training materials, but just ensure that your customers just have fundamentals they require to find great usage out of your offerings and remain loyal when their date of renewal comes around or they are ready to make another purchase from your company.

Now, if your company does not have enough resources or manpower to host training sessions regularly, consider creating short videos of your weekly pro-tips and thereafter share those videos clippings on your preferred social media platforms and in your monthly newsletters.

  • Customer webinars

Apart from the above-stated activities if you want go beyond, holding customer webinars can be of extreme help in improving product education and adoption of your products and services, as these digital events provide an excellent opportunity to dig in deep regarding more complex features of your offerings and guide customers through salient functionalities or use cases they might not have tried to do without your help.

We have observed that as a large portion of consumers would rather like to learn by watching than by reading through pages, webinars usually draw a lot more visitors, which even provides businesses to promote additional products and services in real-time.

Lastly, the best part of holding webinars is that you can reserve some time for Q&A sessions, where as a brand you can interact directly with the consumers on a personal level and thereby discover their frustrations that you can work to solve internally.

  1. PROACTIVELY LISTEN TO WHAT YOUR CUSTOMERS ARE SAYING

Without any arguments, the customer feedback loop is any businesses’ proverbial ear to the ground, which allows brands to identify their biggest fans and thereafter leverage them as advocates.

Proactive listening also allows businesses to feel the pulse of dissatisfied customers so that they can reach out to them directly to correct the issues and show that their company cares.

On a larger scale, the said customer feedback loop is the best means to collect information about your brand’s reputation, and the usability and the real value of your offerings, which is an excellent way to determine if updates or changes to your business model are having a positive or negative effect on your customers.

Now once you have a clearer understanding of the public’s perception of your brand, you can easily leverage this knowledge to boost that perception and your offerings.

This model is pretty simple (at least on papers):

Collect customer opinions via social media listening, surveys, NPS (Net Promoter Scores)  and third-party review websites such as G2 and Yelp.
Next consider creating a master spreadsheet that can aid you to visualize positive, optimistic, and negative feedback.

Analyze the information by digging out patterns in the responses and then begin to map solutions to the core problems., as understanding your customer feedback will aid you segment and group your audiences when you decide to take actions based on your findings.

Apply what you have learned through sound customer outreach strategies and product and service improvements.

This whole exercise might take the form of a comprehensive public relationship initiative or a basic email campaign to improve or restore the confidence of your consumers on your business and offerings.

It is important to note over here that the customer feedback loop is both a model and an ongoing process, therefore businesses must apply this method times and again to promote a culture of excellence and thereby build a more positive perception of their brands.

Now what works for one business might not work for another, hence be sure to research multiple feedback channels and only use the ones you feel are more informative and accurate for your company.

Conclusion

USE EASY TO USE CRM AND LAUNCH GREAT CUSTOMER MARKETING CAMPAIGNS

It is a proven fact that an effective marketing campaign using an easy to use CRM transcends lead generation and passing MQLs (Marketing Qualified Lead) to sales.

Therefore, in a nutshell as sustaining and boosting growth across the business is the name of the game. Hence focusing on customer loyalty in the present times is truly the real terra-firma of this strategy.

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Tips For Avoiding Footfalls In Data-driven Marketing

For reasons that deliver better outcomes, marketing in the present times is all about working with a plethora of data. Hence if your business is using a CRM solution as a business growth technology and having data for backing up the strategies in your business, it is best to provide marketing a place in the table which will help them to create more successful campaigns for boosting lead generation and revenue growth. Nevertheless, as one of the best small and medium business CRM software vendors, we have experienced that in modern times there is a mad rush to get recognized as marketers who are data-driven, using software platforms like Salesforce or even Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms in the marketplace.

For reasons that deliver better outcomes, marketing in the present times is all about working with a plethora of data.
Hence if your business is using an easy to use CRM solution as a business growth technology and having data for backing up the strategies in your business, it is best to provide marketing a place in the table which will help them to create more successful campaigns for boosting lead generation and revenue growth.

The average CRM user adoption among sales professionals is 73% and the average ROI period is 13 months. Click To Tweet

Nevertheless, as one of the best small and medium business CRM software vendors, we have experienced that in modern times there is a mad rush to get recognized as marketers who are data-driven, using software platforms like Salesforce or even Salesforce Alternative CRM platforms in the marketplace.

Therefore here are some to the three most critical errors that businesses do while handling their data and things that you can accomplish to rectify them:

  1. Concentrating Just On Vanity Metrics

Not all metrics found in the CRM database are tied to business results. Since there are many data points that are totally superficial and may make the performance of the marketing, and sales departments in the company look good, nevertheless, it does not necessarily imply or indicate that a campaign is effective in generating quality leads that can predict sales.
For example, the number of downloads of content, followers on social media websites, are mostly considered as vanity metrics by most companies.

Now, let us state one aspect very clearly- vanity metrics found in the easy to use CRM platforms are not essentially bad.

There is utterly nothing ‘wrong’ if you want to track your businesses’ shares, likes, or followers on social media websites since it obviously aids in gaining a wide-ranging view of brand awareness of your business in the marketplace. Likewise, tracking the number of total page views of your business website or the number of content downloads can help you to see which topics and messages resonate with your targeted audience most effectively.

Nevertheless, the main lacuna that comes into play when you use vanity metrics as a marketer and permit these metrics to represent more meaningful information that denotes the rise and fall in your business.
Per say, having a very large number of page-views of your website actually means nothing for highlighting your revenue goals, if most of those visitors immediately bounce off, or seldom make any purchase.

-Tips For Avoiding This Mistake

The solution to avoid this above-stated mistake lies in focusing on clarity metrics, which is, in fact, the real operational data in the CRM database that can make a difference to your businesses’ bottom line.
For an example, the amount to time your prospective customers need to wait before they are contacted by a sales rep from your organization, or the number of new leads being generated, is what counts as clarity metrics.
Therefore, the most important thing that you can do to keep away from focusing on vanity metrics is to repeatedly ask yourself how each of these data points in your easy to use CRM directly relates to your business outcome.

Always keep in mind that what counts as vanity metrics depends on whether or not that data supports a business outcome for your specific industry.
Like if your company is a media house that makes it revenue advertising to followers on social media, then the number of shares or the number of followers can also be a very important metric that plays a big role in your digital marketing strategy.

  1. Never Questioning “Why”

Now without relevant and proper context, data is just a cluster of number in the database of your easy to use CRM software. Hence, if any of the email campaigns that you have sent had an awfully low open rate that for sure does not necessarily mean that it was really a bad email. We say this because it can also suggest that the campaign was fired at the wrong time. Similarly, if a blog post did really good, it can also mean that it could have happened due to a sudden growth of subscribers from your previous day’s blog posts, else it can also be due to an unexpected rise in Google searches for that topic.
Therefore, if you never look for reasons why the numbers in your metrics have turned out in a certain way, you will never be able to avoid mistakes from occurring times and again or might not even be able to take the benefit of some action that has turned out to be really successful and good for your business.

-Tips For Avoiding This Mistake

Question every action. Since in order to find the context you need to really understand what your marketing data is telling you in-between the lines. Therefore constantly ask yourself and brainstorm with your teams, why the data in the CRM database is what it is. Hence do not play with your assumptions that are based on a single data point in your CRM for small and medium businesses.

  1. Failing To Meander Course

Finally, the biggest mistake that marketers most often do, is not being able to adjust their preset course based on what the easy to use CRM data say to the data-driven marketers.

As marketers, it is easy to find yourself accustomed and acclimatized to a certain course of action, and therefore focuses on the CRM data or the metrics that support your activities.

Most often, this occurs owing to pressure from the management or simple stubbornness on their part that if an email campaign can just run its course, as planned, like many others it will also work out well.

-Tips For Avoiding This Mistake

Never be too proud to admit that something is just not working. Always keep in mind that a major part of working in a data-driven manner in sales and marketing is to have an objective resource to guide you with your strategies.
Therefore, be open to accepting what the data reveals- even though it can be not all that favorable. Additionally, it is even more important, that you must remain bendable enough to flex and change your strategies and make alterations when it is required. Since by being open to changes, your flexibility will certainly pay off, as your future campaigns will be more effective that can user in stellar business growth.

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How To Recapture Dormant Customers Using The Best CRM For Small Business

Smart business owners and sales representatives in all businesses using the best small business CRM system know the necessity to focus their efforts on retaining customer that are loyal as much as they need to pay attention to the acquisition of their new ones. We say this because it is much convenient to sell to the present customers rather than hunt around for finding new ones.

Smart business owners and sales representatives in all businesses using the best small business CRM system know the necessity to focus their efforts on retaining customer that are loyal as much as they need to pay attention to the acquisition of their new ones.

We say this because it is much convenient to sell to the present customers rather than hunt around for finding new ones.
According to Forrester reports, the chances of selling to previous customers of your brand are 60- 70%, while the chances of selling are 5-20% for new ones.
Moreover, in the same report, it has also been suggested that existing customers are also likely to spend on an average of 31% more than customers who are new.

Nevertheless, it is a common trait with several organizations, to abandon the existing buyers of their products and services when customers stop responding to their marketing efforts.

But, why should you abandon a customer who has already done business with you?

Hence, even if an existing customer has not responded for a long time, marketing expenses are still better spent on wooing existing but dormant customers than finding new ones.

The chances of selling to previous customers of your brand are 60- 70%, while the chances of selling are 5-20% for new ones - Forrester Click To Tweet

Now as finding new business is 4-10 times more expensive than reactivating dormant customers, here are three unique strategies that startups and small businesses can make use of to recapture the unresponsive customers stored in their CRM database:

Strategy #1

Email retargeting

By using email-retargeting strategy, you can use retargeting-cookie to set off ads on the web pages that your customer visits, after they click on the emails that you have sent them.

However, what happens if your customers are not clicking on the emails that you are sending or ignoring them completely?

Well, for this you can create a special email list of all your existing dormant customers and start an ongoing email campaign using your best small business CRM system just targeted to your inactive customers.
You can even upload this list to your retargeting program, so that people who are included in the list in your best CRM for small business will start viewing the ad’s of your brand’s across their social media websites and other web pages, without even having the necessity to click on your emails.

Strategy #2

Personalized Messaging

There are even instances when a dearth of customer activity can also occur because of your fault.

Hence, once your customer makes a purchase, always make sure that you follow up on that customer with targeted personalized messages using your best small and medium business CRM software that reflects your customer’s preference and add value to the customer’s experience with your company.

The entire point of collecting and analyzing your customer’s data with the help of the best small business CRM platform is to find out what makes your customers buy and then launch an effective marketing campaign that targets the interests of your active customers.

Using business growth technology like CRM you always have the advantage of understanding the habits and obtain the purchase histories with your existing customer. Occasionally, you can even remind your dormant customers as to how much they wished for a specific product, and send them communication with a money-off for that offering.

Additionally, you can also put forward new services and products that your existing customers might like which can be easily assumed based on their past behaviors and previous purchases.
Hence the more pertinent are your approaches in marketing, the bigger the chances you will have to recapture their businesses using your best small and medium business CRM software platform for rekindling your sales growth.

Strategy #3

Deep Linking

When you are trying to reactive your dormant customers, try to make it as easy as it is possible to make your customers take their desired actions. For this, while doing in-app marketing, always remember to include ‘deep linking’, which generates a shortcut connection to the product page that your customer is interested, without making the customer even reach on your businesses’ homepage and then search for the required product using the search bar.

It is of utmost importance that for customers who have remained unresponsive to your marketing efforts, you must primarily remove all the obstacles from their path, to make them purchase your products easily once again.

For this, many small and medium businesses also trust in sending app notifications or SMS messages with an exact link to the product that a particular customer was interested to buy in the past using SMS sending applications integrated with their best CRM for small business.

Takeaway

As re-engaging inactive ‘gone-but-never-forgotten’ customers is at all times more worthy as an investment, we are sure you will find these three strategies extremely helpful, and as a user of best small business CRM, find rapid business growth.

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Mistakes To Avoid For First Time User Of The Best Small Business CRM Software

So, you are a new user of the best small business CRM software and you want to bypass any roadblocks that could impact the successful implementation of your new and the best CRM for small business. Well, do not worry; you have come to the right place for finding some insider tips and tricks on using your easy to use CRM software platform. Therefore, here are the five most common rookie mistakes that we want beginners to avoid while working on their newfound business growth technology like a CRM tool.

So, you are a new user of the best small business CRM software and you want to bypass any roadblocks that could impact the successful implementation of your new and the best CRM for small business.

Well, do not worry; you have come to the right place for finding some insider tips and tricks on using your easy to use CRM software platform.

Therefore, here are the five most common rookie mistakes that we want beginners to avoid while working on their newfound business growth technology like a CRM tool:

Let us get started!

  1. Specifying Incorrect Account Administrator

While using a CRM when the first account is created, the member of the core CRM implementation team who pioneers the account making process will become the administrator of the account by default. Therefore, we suggest you to select an appropriate administrator to set up your CRM account, before simply jumping into the system.
Keep in mind that the administrator will be the designated license creator, bill receiver, user selector, and the gatekeeper to assign who receives permission for using specific features within this cutting-edge business growth tool.

44% of businesses planning to increase IT budgets in 2020, up from 38% in 2019 - SuperOffice(2020) Click To Tweet

However, if anyone other than the right person among your teammates has been accidentally assigned the role of an account administrator, you can even, later on, switch their roles by modifying your settings.

  1. Importing Your Entire Contact List

It has been observed that more common than not, new users of CRM will mostly import all their contacts from Facebook, Gmail, Twitter, and other applications once they start working on their brand-new CRM platform. Now, when we use the phrase all contacts, we actually mean ‘all contacts’, which most often even consist of outdated, and irrelevant personal data. However, once that is done, when the user enters their Contact tab, they most often feel and realize that they need to clean up the list in the newly created CRM database.

Now, this can be an incredibly time-consuming process, like going through and selecting the inappropriate data, which may no longer be important to the user or to their company.

Save yourself this headache, by creating a list of contact within an Excel file in order to build a well thought out list of important connections that are presently required for your business. Save the file as CSV (Comma Separated Values) and simply import it to your CRM using the “Import a File” functionality. This process could save you a lot of time, and help you to get started with the best small business CRM software quickly.

  1. Forgetting To Tag Contacts Upon Import

It is most natural that after creating new contacts, the new information can always get blended within the rest of the customer database in the CRM. For this, we suggest you tag your contacts as soon as you import them, in order to classify where the contacts came from, whom they work for, or why they are being added to the easy to use CRM software solution’s database.

Hence, while a contact is being added to your team’s accounts, each member of the teams can tag their individual contracts with their name so that they can easily locate individuals that are significant and important to them while working with the software.

  1. Using Incorrect Email Addresses

All product updates, marketing promotions, and webinar news will be always sent to the email address that your CRM account is registered with right from day one after installation of the software.

Hence, using the right email address comes in handy when you are concerned about exporting your deals or contacts from your CRM account. Since CRM will automatically send these exports that have been requested to the registered email address that you confirmed while setting-up your best small and medium business CRM software platform.

Therefore, when selecting an email address for your CRM software’s account registration, be aware that all the important CRM-related outreach and data export will be received in that location.

Remember at any time if you need to reach out to your CRM provider be it a robust CRM like Salesforce or even any other Salesforce Alternative CRM platform used mostly by SMB to talk about your billing specifications and your account, it may be noted that you will need to write CRM vendor from your registered email account for adhering to security protocols. However, you can change your registered email address multiple times in your CRM settings whenever it is needed, as a safety measure or for other similar purposes.

  1. Duplicate Contact Creation Within Your CRM Account

Finally, oftentimes, contracts are listed with more than one email accounts and social platforms. Therefore importing various lists from all of your accounts unavoidably create duplicates in your best small business CRM software’s contact list. Nevertheless, most CRM platforms combine your contacts based on their individual email addresses and other specific options you can always specify to stay away since doing so creates redundant contacts and irrelevant company records.

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