Tag: CRM

How To Create Click-Bait Newsletters That Make Your Readers Want More

Many of us think that we know how to create click-bait newsletter, as we assume it very simple. However, think again about the number of bland newsletters that we see in our email’s inbox every day. Following these best practices while sending email newsletters will guarantee that your subscribers will actually open and read the newsletters the moment it reaches their mailbox.

Many of us think that we know how to create click-bait newsletter, as we assume it very simple. However, think again about the number of bland newsletters that we see in our email’s inbox every day.

Following these best practices while sending email newsletters will guarantee that your subscribers will actually open and read the newsletters the moment it reaches their mailbox.

  1. Find out if you really need to write a newsletter

Ask yourself before you decide upon writing a newsletter whether you are doing so because you have relevant content and information to share with your audience or if you just want to post a newsletter because you want to follow what others are doing online. If your answer is affirmative for the first question, then proceed. However, make sure that you have set clear and measurable objectives before emailing your content. Do you want your newsletter to close more deals, drive more leads, or boost retention? Understanding what you want to achieve will definitely help you to focus your efforts, measure success and set goals for your newsletter email campaigns.

  1. Set expectations

Do your subscribers know what they are signing up for? Be absolutely clear to your audience as to what they will be receiving from you. Is it special discount coupons, an early view of your new products and services, inspirational blogs, or how-to information? Hence, make sure you are meeting your email recipient’s expectations so that you do not bombard them with contents that they do not want.

It is also wise to let your email recipients know how often they will hear from you. Once a month? Once a week? Establish a routine cadence with your subscribers and stick to your plan. Remember your subscribers shared their email addresses only because they trust your brand. Abusing that trust will soon enough end up all your emails in a spam folder or you will register a very high unsubscribe rate.

  1. Keep balanced content

Unless you have set a predefined expectation, a good thumb rule for any newsletter contents is 10% promotional and 90% educational. This allows room for a focused call to action, however, you must primarily make sure that a large majority of your content is meant to serve your customer first.

  1. Stick to your brand

Like other communication verbiages, your newsletter should also adhere to your brand’s standards for voice, tone, and design. Although you can also at times write just for fun since users who have subscribed to your newsletter are the ones who are most engaged with your brand and are so ready to hear something different from you occasionally.

  1. Think mobile first

It has been found in a research done by Litmus “54% of emails are now opened on a mobile device”. Moreover, the number is growing every day. So get your email templates optimized for mobile devices.

This means, keep your content limited to fit on a mobile screen. Make sure that your CTA buttons are large enough to tap. Additionally, limit the image size in your newsletters to avoid lagging load time.

  1. Make your newsletters exclusive

Remember your newsletter subscribers are likely to be some of your most engaging brand fans. Hence, reward your subscribers with exclusive and early access contents.

  1. Track, test, and refine your newsletter

Measure what is working well and what needs improvement by going back to the goals you defined to yourself at the beginning of your email campaign. If you find that, your goals are met, go ahead, and set a higher one. If not, then question yourself why and keep on testing and tweaking your newsletter’s images, templates, contents and subject line till it meets your goals.

It is beyond any doubt that newsletters are a great way for staying connected with your prospects, leads, and customers. So go ahead and start building an exceptional email journey with the help of your CRM right today.

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See Who Opens Your Email With ConvergeHub (The #1 CRM for Small and Medium Businesses)

We all know being in sales is not always an easy job. Nevertheless, users of ConvergeHub are equipped with the right tools, which help you to start your day guiding you through your most pressing tasks. Taking a step further, how would you feel if you can also see who has opened your emails? ConvergeHub email tracking and delivery status update keep you informed on all emails sent from ConvergeHub, CRM for Small Businesses.

We all know being in sales is not always an easy job. Nevertheless, users of ConvergeHub are equipped with the right tools, which help you to start your day guiding you through your most pressing tasks.
Taking a step further, how would you feel if you can also see who has opened your emails?

ConvergeHub email tracking and delivery status update keep you informed on all emails sent from ConvergeHub, CRM for Small Businesses.

Once your customers have opened the email, using ConvergeHub you will be able to see how many of them have viewed the email.

Pretty neat, right?

Using ConvergeHub CRM, once you know your engaged prospects who have interacted with your email message, you can easily interact with them for cross-sell or up-sell activities.

CRM ConvergeHub

So connect your email account to ConvergeHub now and start tracking your emails to customers. With email tracking, we have left behind those days when you had to speculate if your customers are opening the emails, you have sent to them.

Every email in ConvergeHub has an open and delivery status:

Sent/Attempted: Total number of email sent to recipients.

Viewed:  Number of recipients that opened the email any number of times.

Opted Out: User has chosen not to receive any promotional emails.

Bounce/Invalid: The total emails sent that could not be effectively delivered to the recipient’s inbox.

Click-thru Link: The number of email recipients who clicked on one or more links contained in a given email.

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Hope you find these email statuses helpful. Happy Selling!

Tips to follow for achieving 100% CRM adoption and engagement

We are all aware that CRM is good for business. In fact, the truth is, while CRM increases sales by 29% (SalesForce), according to Nucleus Research the average ROI of any CRM is $8.71, for every dollar spent on this platform. However, having said that, one fact we cannot choose to ignore, is that not all CRM implementations are successful. The main reason behind lagging implementation of CRM is poor user adoption rate. Employee resistance, insufficiency in funds and time, lack of preparation and planning are certainly other reasons that escalate the poor adoption rate of CRM.

We are all aware that CRM is good for business. In fact, the truth is, while CRM adoption increases sales by 29% (SalesForce), according to Nucleus Research the average ROI of any CRM is $8.71, for every dollar spent on this platform.

Therefore, as cost-cutting measures are the need of the day, in order to survive in businesses companies has no other options but to outperform their competitors without inflating their budgets, which has made CRM more important than ever nowadays.

To improve productivity and fine-tune business processes several small businesses and enterprises have accepted the gaining widespread popularity of CRM for retaining and finding new customers, as cloud-based CRM software applications are pretty simple to use.

However, having said that, one fact we cannot choose to ignore, is that not all CRM implementations are successful.

The main reason behind lagging implementation of CRM is poor user adoption rate.

Employee resistance, insufficiency in funds and time, lack of preparation and planning are certainly other reasons that escalate the poor adoption rate of CRM.

Moreover, as many CRM vendors have done a good job of touting the simplicity of their applications, many customers have taken the user-friendliness of CRM implementation of their Customer Relationship Management platform for granted.

But, just because something looks apparently simple and easy you must not take it for granted. Since, if you do not learn to implement and neglect the best practices, it will almost inevitably lead to a failure in reaping the maximum benefits from your CRM.

For an example, although brushing your teeth is relatively simple, but if you neglect to brush or do it altogether in the wrong way, this can lead to several maladies and even tooth loss.

Similarly, using your CRM software inefficiently or not using it consistently can cause detrimental consequences for your business.

Ineffective use of any CRM may not only lead to failure in follow-up on scheduled tasks and appointments, but it can also mismanage customer relationships, fail to capture important customer data and insights and in severe cases end up with the loss of potential customers in your business.

Here are some of the crucial low adoption rate statistics on CRM:

  • According to CSO Insights, 43% of CRM customers use even lesser than half the features they have in their CRM.
  • According to Really Simple Systems, 4 out of 5 senior executives say that their biggest challenge was getting their staffs to use the CRM consistently.

Hence, before you buy a CRM, remember employees of your business organization may always have different preconceived notions and perspectives about CRM system. While some may love it, others may hate using it too.

Therefore, before most of your employees get reluctant towards CRM, it is best to make them understand the benefits of this software and show them how it will make their work a lot easier every day.

Here are 7 awesome golden tips to make your CRM implementation a success story.

Give value to business needs and requirements

To make your CRM implementation worthwhile for your business, you must not only possess a good understanding of your business but also understand how your business interacts to satisfy your potential customer’s needs. CRM is more than a mere software solution. Rather Customer Relationship Management is a process of dealing with your customers through intelligent communications that call for a holistic approach. CRM consists of people, processes, and technology that combine to manage business relationships with your customers.

Involve employees from the beginning

Your employees are the ones who are going to use your CRM, and so they play the most significant role in successful implementation of your CRM platform. Hence, it is always wise to involve your employees from the very first stage of your CRM implementation itself. Exhibit to them how the new system is going to diminish their workload and make them understand how CRM is going to take their work on the upbeat.

As an additional gesture for early adoption of your CRM, encourage your employees to provide their opinion and feedback on the system. This will not only help in trimming down uncertainties of the software but also help you to acquire necessary support for proper utilization of your CRM system.

Hire a CRM Project Manager

It is always a good idea to get a CRM project manager on board in your company, who will act as a technical ambassador and a problem-solver of your employees in respect to your CRM system. As your CRM project manager is the one who will be responsible for overall implementation and management of your CRM platform, the person must possess good communication and IT skills. It is the project manager whose steps your employees must follow, as he/she will drive the project and also measure the achievement levels of your CRM related goals.

Remain patient and move one-step at a time

Once you buy the software, do not attempt to achieve too many tasks with your CRM at once or implement the customer relationship solution in a haphazard manner. As it is very natural, like many other buyers of CRM you may always find yourself being carried away and find it absolutely exciting to implement the new system which is capable of streamlining all your business processes but don’t forget all complex projects needs to be broken down into manageable and measurable phases with achievable goals. Hence, for successful implementation of your CRM, go slow with the platform and implement the software without hurrying, one-step at a time.

Train your employees

As every employee in any organization has different capacity to understand and accept changes, it is always advisable that you must arrange training sessions for all your employees. Also, make sure during the course of the training you must train each department, like marketing, sales, accounts and customer support reps, on their specialized needs. Appropriate training on the CRM’s functionalities often brings forth positive momentum of enthusiasm among the employees, for implementation of the CRM.

Set guidelines for your employees

It is really important that you must lay down guidelines in consultation with your CRM project manager, on what kind of data (as per your company’s goals), your employees should input in the CRM. Since, for proper utilization of your customer relationship software, it is utterly necessary that you must manage all tasks and activities with proper reporting structure as a part of your guidelines.

Make the CRM available anywhere

Last but not the least, in case your sales team also includes sales reps working in the field, you must buy a CRM, which has a mobile application in addition to the web-based version of the platform.

User experience should also be taken into consideration while implementing mobile CRM app. As desktop and mobile environments of any app need to be different, the mobile version of your CRM platform should be intuitive and fast. It should also be data contextual, minimizing keystrokes and automating information as much as possible, to streamline workflow.

It is only when your sales team, see that the CRM helps them to sell, and there are little or no difficulties involved in using the platform, it will escalate the adoption rate of your customer relationship software.

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Takeaway

Remember, CRM adoption is a journey and not a destination. By following the tips and guidelines given above, it will be easy for you to overcome the early hurdles to CRM adoption and make certain that your business reaps the best benefits offered by CRM.

If you have found this article helpful, let us know about your CRM adoption success story in the comments below.

The Past, Present, and Future of AI in Customer Experience

It can be debated, for all the good things that technology has provided to businesses over the last few decades, it has also compromised on customer experience, which is a key element, responsible for growth in any businesses. Nevertheless, at present we have just starting to realize the potential of AI and understand the potential implication for Artificial Intelligence applications, to make a more than welcome impact in the field of customer experience.

You can thank IBM’s Watson for creating an artificial intelligence (AI) platform that was integrated into a plethora of businesses and customer facing applications. You can credit Facebook and Skype for their recent buzz about chatbots and the gold rush of venture capitalists and developers creating an onslaught of bot developing companies. You can laud Amazon’s Echo and Apple’s Siri for applying intelligence into mundane everyday devices and bringing to life; voice, as the new user interface.
Nevertheless, the truth remains that we have also at present just starting to realize the potential of AI in customer experience.

The-Past-Present-and-Future-of-AI-in-Customer-Experience-CTA

It can be debated, for all the good things that technology has provided to businesses over the last few decades, it has also compromised on customer experience, which is a key element, responsible for growth in any businesses.

Websites, call-centers, apps, emails and other offspring of modern digital technology have offered companies scopes to scale and automate customer engagements, while also ushering in process efficiency and cost management systems. However, this also came at a price. As over the years, numerous customers have complained that these very processes and systems were the very elements that undermined and hindered satisfaction for the buyer’s community.

Think about it now. When was the last time that you enjoyed calling up and talking to customer service representatives? Or, for that matter, when was the last instance you were transferred between customer support executives, where the next support personal was already plugged-in into your customer account details and had the precise knowledge as to why you were calling?

It is really a matter of grave disappointment even today that many aspects of the customer journey are still disconnected. A symptom of outdated business models, where many important touch-points are independently run, in many businesses. Of which, many of these touch-points do not connect or even talk to each other, the way customers expect them. Pragmatically, in several cases, they even actually compete or conflict with one another, over the course of the customer journey.

The main reason behind this slow growth for improving customer experience is that businesses are most often viewed as cost centers rather than long-term investments.

However, in the recent times with stellar improvement in Customer Relationship Management (CRM) technology, AI opens up an unforeseen opportunity for introducing more personalized intelligent and scalable engagements with the customers, to help them solve problems and accomplish tasks, which contributes to improved overall satisfaction for the buyer’s community.

However, for AI to break new grounds and introduce new values, customer support and marketing strategists must step into an innovative approach regarding CX and so consider its impact beyond its novelty. Moreover, this growth of AI in CX cannot be hampered or throttled by existing CX perspectives and processes that abound today’s customer experience analogies.

AI applications in CX

Whether you are a CEO (Chief Experience Officer), CIO, CCO (Chief Customer Officers) or CMO in marketing, IT or service industry, Artificial Intelligence represents a blank slate for ushering improvement and innovations in CX. For, with a mix of right vision and intent, customer experience can thrust businesses into an accelerated path of maturity that can guide any organization with a new purpose, which is based on customer centricity.

Here are some of the ways by which you can apply AI to CX:

Chatbots

Chatbots are virtual agents that can perform intelligent conversation, which can be applied to various customer engagement scenarios. Under their hood, chat bots are just sophisticated computer programs that are  developed to simulate conversations with humans online- and they are a long time in the making.

Recently, Mark Zuckerberg the co-founder and Chairman of Facebook, in partnership with 1800FLOWERS, demonstrated a Chabot application at the F8 development conference. In this demonstration, Mark Zuckerberg used Facebook Messenger to show how a consumer can talk to a virtual agent and order flowers of his/her choice, without leaving the window.

What was unique with this demonstration is that the Chabot was capable of picking up conversational cues to suggest floral arrangements that meet the customer’s personal needs and goals.

Although, other Chabot applications that have hit the market have borne witness to some of the challenges, such as poor design and execution, and a universal emphasis on transactions over experience, but in reality, bots can be truly so much more if we allow our imagination to unlock new possibilities.

Virtual concierge

Whether they are docked in hardware devices or messaging platforms, virtual concierges are bots that are designed for providing personalized services. In certain instances, these bots are partnered with human counterparts to perform the task as a ‘digital-butler’ to aid us in booking travels, buy or find gifts and commodities, coordinate with a human on specific experiences and others.

A recent example of using on-demand virtual concierge in the retail business is Operator, which is developed by Garrett Camp, who is also the co-founder of Uber.

Operator aims to build a new front door to eCommerce by using messaging app.

Another example of using virtual concierge in the travel business is Lola, which is developed by Kayak’s founder Paul English. Lola is a new travel app that personalizes engagements with human thoughts along with AI.

Virtual assistants/attendants

While virtual concierges are designed to aid users in achieving simple-to-complicated tasks, virtual assistants and attendants make use of Artificial Intelligence to help users with commands and questions. Microsoft Cortana, Amazon Echo, Google Now, and Apple Siri are some of the examples of virtual assistants/attendants, among others.

Recently, each of these applications is vying each other to become a platform for its implementation in common devices and appliances, collaborating with the developer communities to help extend the functionalities of these applications in horizontal and vertical planes.

Cognitive computing

Cognitive computing is the simulation of human thought process to augment human engagements. One of the most well-known platforms in this space is IBM’s Watson, the AI platform that is famous for beating-down human contestants on the wildly popular American TV show “Jeopardy”.

Cognitive computing involves self-learning systems to recognize patterns, mine data, process natural language and interact with people in a way that is intelligent, value-added and complementary.

One such example is Softbank’s partnership with IBM, for adding emotional and cognitive intelligence to its line of robots, named “Pepper”. These robots are deployed in financial, retail and hospitality settings for proving an enhanced personal form of engagements to the visiting customers.

In the present times, self-service options are limited to ATMs and kiosks, where the abilities of these platforms are limited to nurturing customer relationship up to transactions. With ongoing researches on cognitive assistance, people will soon be able to have a natural conversation with machines, where their words, gestures, and expressions will be understood by these systems.

Initial applications where AI can improve CX

Although AI pilots can be used for, testing and learning everywhere, in a customer journey mapping exercise- here is a list of where AI applications are implemented today.

  • Personalization
  • Questions/answers
  • Customer self-service
  • Pre-emptive routing
  • Product/service innovation
  • Task performance/management
  • Predictive service/sales
  • Augmented engagement
  • Digital concierge/assistant collaboration

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Takeaway

Today’s customers live in an omnichannel world, where AI provides a means to facilitate up to date and precise responses across all platforms, at any and every point in the customer journey.

This represents a new ground for what is referred to as ‘conversational commerce’. Where as an alternative for resolving disjointed touch points and instances, AI will aid the enterprises to stitch together a more natural and complete customer journey to integrate, improve, and re-imagine customer experience.

Customer engagement is not a cost center, but it is an investment in customer relationship. So whether it is integrating back-end CRM, introducing new touch points; predicting trends, behaviors and expectations successfully, AI implementation needs a new blueprint with imagination and ingenuity, which will not only enhance CX but can improve every aspect of any business in the long run.

Why Startup Companies Need A CRM System?

Even before asking why businesses need CRM system, it is really important to understand exactly what a Customer Relationship Management system is. In short, CRM is the practice of managing and analyzing customer interactions and feedback, with the ultimate goal of executing better customer relationship leading to customer retention in the long run. Although CRM is a fairly new concept, this SaaS technology has so many inherent advantages, that most organizations of all sizes, from startups to big enterprises are quickly catching up with this platform. Now the question we need to ask is, does your start-up establishment needs a CRM? In this article, let us review a few points from this aspect.

Even before asking why businesses need CRM system, it is really important to understand exactly what a Customer Relationship Management system is.

In short, CRM is the practice of managing and analyzing customer interactions and feedback, with the ultimate goal of executing better customer relationship leading to customer retention in the long run.

Although CRM is a fairly new concept, this SaaS technology has so many inherent advantages, that most organizations of all sizes, from startups to big enterprises are quickly catching up with this platform.

Datachart from Salesforce Showing the Top 5 Marketing Metrics

Now the question we need to ask is, does your start-up establishment needs a CRM?

Why Startups Need a CRM System

Let us review a few points from this aspect:

  • Understanding a customer’s point of view often becomes difficult, due to several mismanagements of the communication chain. However, CRM ensures that literally nothing is lost in transition.
  • The latest research on customer experience shows that 88% of high performing marketing team acknowledges that in a customer journey strategy is essential for the success of overall marketing endeavors.
  • A workforce that comprises of all different aspects of any company is primarily important when you are dealing with any customer. CRM system helps this by unifying Marketing, Sales, Management, Finance, and Customer Service, which are of prime importance in this respect.
  • A dynamic converging CRM, like ConvergeHub, ensures that you can keep track of your progress with the customers no matter what devices you are using (PC, Tab, mobile etc.).
  • A CRM system can easily keep your organization up to date on sales and revenue aspects with the timely reports and since all these processes are completely automated, you can be very sure that you will never miss-out on an important benchmark once you use a CRM.
  • CRM is a scalable system, which ensures that you will never be at a disadvantage for want of more computation power.

Why your startup needs a CRM now?

The primary question lies not in whether you need a Customer Relationship Management system, but in why you do so. For example, ConvergeHub CRM, as opposed to pen and paper, is much easier to work.

To be honest, no company wants to remain as a startup forever and this is the main reason why CRM is important for all budding organizations.

As companies grow bigger, it slowly becomes inefficient in manually handling data and needs a platform that will help them to quickly organize and analyze data and identify their ideal customer base.

This is where CRM comes into play. CRM is also a platform for your sales team to meet and discuss central ideas, which are needed for identifying potential areas of growth that is most crucial for the development of any start-up organization.

Besides, CRM is also extremely useful as it brings everything from prospects, dashboards, sales orders, and invoices to automatic inventory under one roof.

CRM and Startups

As a startup, your main focus should be on finding the right prospect for your products and services and then maintain those valued customers for a long run.

According to Forrester, both large and small companies have shown more than 52% growth in lead volume after collaborating with a CRM service.

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Hence, it is now an established fact beyond any doubts that CRM services actually leads to lead value generation over time, which gradually lowers the cost of operation in start-ups compared to manual safe keeping and representation of customer and sales data.

Why mobile CRM is Crucial for Your SMB

We all are aware how indispensable CRM strategies are in today’s business world. From reduced marketing expenditures to superior customer retention rates- the benefits of CRM are never-ending. With the speedy rise in telecommunication and mobile technology, mobile CRM is a perfect tool for those who are on-the-go, since mobile CRM provides essential access to sophisticated data and customized information on the field. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 24% of employees did their work from home in 2015, which shows a formidable rise of more than 20% since 2003. According to the same source, BLS predicts that more than 106 million Americans will telecommute within 2020.

We all are aware how indispensable CRM strategies are in today’s business world. From reduced marketing expenditures to superior customer retention rates- the benefits of CRM are never-ending. With the speedy rise in telecommunication and mobile technology, mobile CRM is a perfect tool for those who are on-the-go, since mobile CRM provides essential access to sophisticated data and customized information on the field.

According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, more than 24% of employees did their work from home in 2015, which shows a formidable rise of more than 20% since 2003. According to the same source, BLS predicts that more than 106 million Americans will telecommute within 2020.

The great news from these stats is that ConvergeHub CRM offers both Android and iOS app for SMBs. However, if you are still indecisive and sitting on the fence about downloading our CRM app from iTunes or Android stores, here are four solid reasons why you should not wait for anymore.

More Work Completed

Constant and seamless access to customer information means that time away from the office does not necessarily mean you have to be “away from the office.”

Being able to be connected to CRM software from remote locations allow your team to be far more productive than ever before.

In a recent study done by Nuclear Research (an information technology research firm specializing in investigative research) is of the opinion that mobile access to a CRM increases team productivity in SMBs by more than 14.6% with a further 4 in 10 mobile users of mobile CRM reporting improvement in productivity by more than 22%.

So how are teams using ConvergeHub on the go?

Using our app, users can update information and notes in between meetings or on the road, and assign tasks to their colleagues straight from their device. Moreover, if needed, users can also tag their bosses to make them remain in the loop on all events of the day.

Close More Deals

At the end of the day with all businesses, a more productive sales team signifies a healthier sales pipeline.

In a research conducted by Forrester, it has been found that more than 70% sales reps employed with companies those who have invested in CRM technology have successfully accomplished their sales targets, as opposed to just 21% of sales reps working in non-mobile Customer Relationship Management enabled companies.

With tools to respond fast along with customer data always at your fingertips, mobile CRM helps employees close more deals with fewer interactions and less time.

This allows sales reps to spend more time prospecting or find new avenues for exploring untouched sales opportunities.

Find Real-Time Information

In the present times, many companies allow their employees to work on the go or complete tasks while they are away from the office.

This could have meant in the past, that any information about a deal is not updated until the sales reps get back and log his or her activities on the CRM platform.

Mobile CRM prevents this from happening. With the help of cloud technology, any interaction an employee has with the prospect or customer can be now documented immediately in the mobile CRM. Hence, users of mobile CRM do not have to wait for information to be uploaded on site.

For an example, if a sales rep is out of the office, every other rep working in the organization will readily have access to the customer’s updated data as the rep who is out can log these changes while on the go.

Users can also refer to their contact activity feeds in the ConvergeHub app, before heading for a meeting, which helps in refreshing their memory on previous interactions with the customer making them fully prepared for strategizing a rewarding meeting plan.

Faster Data Collection

Before the age of mobile CRM technology, orders taken on the road had either to be called-in or put on hold until the orders could be entered at the office.

Now with the advent of mobile CRM, you can place orders remotely right into the system as soon as the customer agrees to the deal.

This, in turn, helps the production and shipping departments to get immediately started so that the customers can receive their products or services just in time.

Hence, we see as CRM has made its way to mobile, so businesses that hope to grow most must make a move with it.

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Therefore, not to ignore important business trends, download the ConvergeHub mobile CRM app before you scale up any more lost opportunities and get your team on the path to success now.

Customer Relationship and A Dozen Tried Tips to Better Know Your CRM

Perception Gap a word coined by Brian Solis and his team at Pivot is the breach between what the customers need and what the company executives think that their customer wants. A pretty fascinating topic for discussion. Just as making an assumption about your customers can prove to be costly, similarly, on the other hand, understanding what your customers need can enable any business to leapfrog their competitions. If you are of the opinion that you understand your customers, can you answer these few questions to find out if your assumptions are true?

Veteran marketers mostly pride themselves on their connections and of the capabilities in understanding their customers.

However, on the flip-side research on this subject shows that although 76% of smart marketers claim that they are aware of their customer’s requirements, only 34% have ever asked their customers as to what their customers want.

This Perception Gap a word coined by Brian Solis and his team at Pivot is the breach between what the customers need and what the company executives think that their customer wants.

A pretty fascinating topic for discussion.

Just as making an assumption about your customers can prove to be costly, similarly, on the other hand, understanding what your customers need can enable any business to leapfrog their competitions.

If you are of the opinion that you understand your customers, can you answer these few questions to find out if your assumptions are true?

Here we go:

  • What are the three most common problems that keep your customers up at night?
  • What are the three most sought after services or products that you provide, that can solve your customer’s greatest woes?
  • When was it last that any customer purchased these three products or services from you?
  • How long did it take to complete your sales cycle in selling these products and services to your customer?
  • How many touches did this sale require from your sales reps?
  • What are the opportunities that you have for shortening your sales cycle?
  • What are your up-sell opportunities?
  • How many up-sell opportunities did you lose?
  • How satisfied are your customers with your buying process?
  • Do you have any other contacts for building a new relationship in your customer’s organization?
  • Do all your team members have the access to the data to collaborate and nurture leads that will ensure the best possible experience for your customers?

It is unfortunate that although many small and medium businesses may have this information in their head, this data is not tracked anywhere. Hence, this information most often remains in the minds of the product-marketing managers, sales reps, CEOs, and customer support representatives.

If you want to dive deep, here is the infographic developed by Brian Solis and Pivot based on their Perception Gap research:Perception Gap
Image Source:
https://visual.ly/community/infographic/business/perception-gap

The power of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system can make or break your business. CRM offers most basic insights that can improve collaboration and revenue while decreasing the length of sales cycles in the fields of marketing and sales of a company.

It is a commonly known fact that it is always much easy to sell to a happy existing customer than to acquire a new one.

So, why so many marketers skip the most important thumb rule of sale-retaining ongoing customer relationship management?

Do you have any idea about what businesses you are leaving behind on the table for not being proactive in doing your homework about knowing the needs of your customers on a daily basis? How many relationships could you have not nurtured properly with your customers because of broken communications and unavailability of data to identify your customer’s needs that stopped you from embarking on the next step?

Knowing your customer do not just mean understanding their buying patterns and social behaviors or simply reading industry reports on what your customers may need now.

It has been often noticed that marketers get so busy doing upfront market research before a product launch, that they lose sight of the importance that nestles beneath continuous understanding of the customers, which keeps any business relationship thriving.

All businesses have a multitude of opportunities to gather customer data throughout the customer lifecycle.

However, the secret to success lies in interpreting those data to better serve the customers, retain them and ultimately sell the customers more products and services.

CMS platforms enable business leaders along with their sales and marketing teams to stay on top of the customer buying patterns, a trend that can directly affect their sales, delivery, and customer service successes.

Even an unimportant customer data can prove valuable over time, particularly when it is coupled with additional data sources.

There are many organizations those who invest in complicated or complex CRM systems, only to find they do not have sufficient in-house resources to manage these platforms.

Therefore, before buying your CRM for small and medium businesses, focus on right sizing your CRM system, and buy a CRM built exclusively for SMB processes.

Here are 12 killer tips for buying a CRM that will help you to take your customer relationship to the next level this year:

  1. Before purchasing a CRM system, identify your tactical and strategic needs. Research and find the best platform that will suit the requirements of your business. Not all CRMs are meant for everyone- as one size does not fit all.
  2. Know what you expect out of your CRM. Identify your goals and metrics that will help to guide your transformation to the new customer relationships that your desire.
  3. Get a real feel about your available resources to acquire, prepare, implement, and maintain your new CRM.
  4. Ask hard questions to your CRM vendors so that you can be certain about knowing what you are getting regarding all cost and time considerations.
  5. Find out if you need to outsource additional help for implementation, maintenance of the CRM or for any other kind of CRM related strategic guidance.
  6. Ask for additional customer testimonials from your CRM vendors even if they have readily available testimonials of their customers from your industry niche on their website. Once you are in possession of these extra testimonials, call those references and ask them what challenges did they experience while implementation of their CRM.
  7. Never underestimate the power of your peers. Ask them what CRM platforms they use and why they admire their CRM. In addition, read online reviews of different CRM, search for forums, and groups those who are devoted discussing CRM related issues.
  8. If you are migrating from an existing CRM system to another, find out what are the necessary steps, cost and time that is associated with the transfer process.
  9. Even before buying a CRM, prepare a detailed plan for execution of the system. Set solid goals, timelines, milestones, SLA responsibilities and encourage absolute collaboration across your organization for implementing the system.
  10. After implementation of the CRM platform, continuously manage your progress. Find out if you are utilizing your CRM to its fullest potentials.
  11. Find out if your agents and other employees are filling the CRM with every single valuable customer data, as you instructed them during installation of the system.
  12. Most of all, after installation of CRM, evaluate how or what you are continuously learning about your existing and new customers so that you can enhance your customer relationships using the system.

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The more you do this upfront pre-sales research, the greater will be your satisfaction and happiness with whichever CRM you choose as an ideal customer relationship management platform for your business.

Nurturing customer relationship is not just a one-time event. In other words, excelling in customer relationship is not a destination but rather a journey.

Remember, the more you can learn about your customers, the better you can serve them, which is directly proportional to your company’s growth and ROI.

Does Investing In CRM Lead To Betterment In Permission-Based Marketing In 2017

It has been recently observed that although ad growth in slowing down, investments in CRM are growing. This makes total sense as it points to further growth in permission-based marketing channels such as email marketing.

In a report published by eMarketer after conducting several outside studies indicates that companies of all kinds, particularly SMBs are nowadays spending more on CRM technology- because CRM improves sales and customer service.

Also in a study done by Duke University, located in Durham, North Carolina, it has been noted that spending on CRM systems is outpacing brand spending over the last two years, since 2014.

More to say, eMarketer matching Duke’s findings did a research from Gartner, which showed that among SBM professions in the creative industries (Advertising and marketing, IT, Software and computer services, Publishing, Film, TV, Video, Radio, Photography etc.), sale of CRM has increased between 10 to 49 percent.

This is why it has happened:

Adv Spend Uncertainty

Let us put in the context of the ongoing worries advertisers are having about fraudulent ad viewability. In a recent conversation with Omnicom’s CEO John Wren with Gartner’s representatives, he stated that in a most recent investor conference, he has noted a slowdown in the growth of client’s digital spending, as he feels that clients are tapping their brakes because of the lack of clarity about these issues.

Media Life echoed this same concern after they observed in an independent survey that 96% of the surveyed professionals at digital publishers said that viewability is the most pressing problem, while an equal number was worried about advertisement campaign’s attributions and measurements.

CRM As an Antidote To Adv Waste

In our view, the solution to this industry woe is to double-down on permission-based marketing. According to Terence Kawaja, the founder, and CEO of Luma Partners, connecting CRM data management platforms let marketing professionals merge first, second and third party data to reach customers on a closer one-to-one basis.

Hence, used skillfully, CRM systems and email communication can create a virtuous cycle.

Finding the consumer’s email address is generally the very first step in permission-based marketing, while the email itself becomes the foundation of that CRM profile.

Now, once the relationship with the consumer has begun, email becomes an outstanding channel for availing more relevant information about the person. These emails can include multiple-choice questions, surveys, and other brand marketing strategies that can be used for further promotions, via email and other channels. CRM can also provide purchase history of the customers, which also helps in establishing a stronger relationship with the buyers at large.

From the other end, once all the information of the customer is appended into the CRM system and the system is filled with people-based prospective profiles, powerful emails can be designed that comprises of dynamic content, which is personalized to the likes of the recipient. The greater the CRM system is made knowledgeable about an individual with information like location, product and information preference, ideal time of the day to receive offers, the more the email can deliver the best mix of offer and information to the customer.

However, marketers can avail these benefits only if they have a robust technology for both CRM and email, which is found in converged CRMs like ConvergeHub.

This is why the increase in investment in CRM platform is healthy, which will make email marketing better and help provide a single view of customers across channels, which remained unexplored hither before.

References:

Bush A., , Bush V., , & Harris S. (1998). Advertiser perceptions of the internet as a marketing communications tool. Journal of Advertising Research

Karson E. J., , McCloy S. D., , & Bonner P. G. (2006). An examination of consumers’ attitudes and beliefs towards web site advertising. Journal of Current Issues and Research in Advertising,

MacPherson K. (2001). Permission-based E-mail marketing that works.

What Is CRM Marketing and How It Can Boost Your Marketing Plans

The answer to the question what is CRM marketing lies in the process by which marketing managers can track customer’s interests, record their behavior, watch the customer’s interaction to the campaigns to ensure campaigns and marketing messages are meeting their needs in the best possible ways.

Many in marketing and sales industry are familiar with the word CRM; however, few understand what is CRM marketing, as customer relationship management is often illustrated as a sales tool.

CRM as we know generally helps to track the outreach of your sales team, provide in-depth information about each prospective and current customer, and help your sales representative plan out strategies to close the deals.

However, CRM marketing is a newer breed of technology, which is developed to facilitate relationship-building activities for the marketing team, and often at a much larger scale, permitting both B2B and B2C organizations to plan and track interactions with their customers.

With the ability to track customer interactions across multiple channels and customize marketing plans according to those data, multichannel CRMs marketing (also known as Social CRM or SCRM) are essential for building a real 1:1 customer relationships at scale.

Therefore, the answer to the question what is CRM marketing lies in the process by which marketing managers can track customer’s interests, record their behavior, watch the customer’s interaction to the campaigns to ensure campaigns and marketing messages are meeting their needs in the best possible ways.

However, since every customer’s interest and behaviors are different, using personalization in campaigns leads to increase the conversion rates and encourage happy customers to stick to your brand.

CRM Marketing is most needed today as nowadays consumers are bombarded with all sorts of offers and messages that springs out of every corner of the business world.

Everyone is marketing these days.

Have you ever noticed how many times you receive promotional emails every single day, from a brand that you signed-up for? And more importantly, how frequently do you actually read them?

So consequentially, it has never been as difficult as it is now, for marketers to win customers, as everyone is on social media and everyone, as said before, is marketing their brands.

The rate of content generation is simply incredible these days. According to a report published by Science Daily, it has been suggested that more than 90% of all the data that is found on the internet now has been generating in these last few years.

Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google has been quoted as saying that more content is created now in 48 hours than it was ever produced between the advent of internet technology up until 2003.

Since everyone now has a blog so, all can comment and share their ideas. According to WordPress, every minute WordPress users alone posts 347 blogs in their platform.

So, this mind-blowing acceleration of information affects the way we go about marketing in this digital world.

Bid Goodbye to One-Size-Fits-All Approach

With the spread of social media channels as a natural outcome of the rapid boom of modern technology, customers have become tech-savvy, discerning, and increasingly fussy. Modern customers are well aware of what they want, have wider choices and so they cannot be fed with just anything. Instead, modern buyers want personalization and demand ways of engaging with their desired products and services.

Hence, the good old method of targeting everyone with one message does not work anymore. According to a survey done by Gartner, it has been found that 78% of online consumers get irritated with the website and promotional email contents, ads and offers when they have nothing to do with their interests.

There have also been many instances when customers got so frustrated with irrelevant contents, that they were also willing to leave the site forever.

So what do all these mean for marketers today?

This means- RELEVANCE.

Now, that we need to discuss what is CRM marketing, we must understand the rise of highly individualized content marketing approach, which is primarily driven by data and technology, and it only a CRM system that can aid marketers to stay on the top of this game.

Hence, let us take a look how customer relationship software can help the marketers to improve their activities and create better marketing campaigns.

Focused Targeting

One of the toughest tasks for marketers is to look through all the customer data. In order to receive a response from potential customers and find out what they are most likely to buy, marketers must send messages that appeal exactly to them.

CRM software helps marketers to sift through thousands of contacts and find out the potential customers who will be interested in buying the products. It aids in targeting potential customers. As CRM contains several information on the customer behavior and buying preferences it allows the marketers to take informed actions, which results in improving prospect awareness and customer satisfaction.

Segmentation

It is a clichéd saying that those who can predict, instead of reacting, win. This is very much true for marketers as to sell online marketers need to observe common buying trends before offering anything to the customers.

Today marketers not only need to segment their customers only by industry, job, or age, but they also need to be aware of such factors like the customer’s recent activities, their purchase history, their personal likes and dislikes, emails opened and replied, social media activities and others.

Hence, the sharper and focused is the potential customer’s profile; greater are the chances and opportunities for personalized marketing messages, which can bring sales for the organization.

So segmenting customer profile and email subscriber’s database with the help of a CRM system, not only aids in growing revenue but also improves the metrics in email marketing.

Personalized Contents

Once you have segmented the CRM database into meaningful groups and know whom to target, it is the time that you must individualize your marketing messages.

Mass marketing is outdated today. Today’s CRM allows markets to address their potential and existing customers by their name. You can even impress your customers by knowing what industry they work for, which will consequentially help you to tailor your email campaign messages according to their likings and needs.

Therefore, CRM marketing can shape the entire communication strategy in such a way that it can suit a particular customer or a group of customers who have one or more than one things in common.

Personalization of content helps in improving response rate, creates a stronger brand perception, and increase revenue.

Knowing what is CRM marketing, hence helps online marketers to focus more on the customers rather than on products.

Recycling The Process

Using CRM software marketers can analyze whether their campaigns were successful and they yielded any results. For once, you can find which content performed best; you can recycle the content and that email campaign’s template for converting new contacts and customers.

Hence, instead of starting from the scratch when you remarket your ideas, taking out all opinions and guesswork, you can curb your leads to marketing costs but focus on resending campaigns that performed the best.

Use ConvergeHub CRM for FREE

Hence, marketing CRMs are more than the just inert database and market automation tools, because marketing CRMs helps in putting everything together for a truly personalized marketing effort. ConvergeHub’s founder and CEO Shampa Bagchi, speaking of CRM technology, sums it all up like this:

It’s been about propelling at the speed of mobile, digesting information and humanizing the data for the marketing team, building up the scale, and developing a product that conforms to the requirements of the marketer in this ever-connected digital world.

If you want to know more about how a CRM system can support your marketing efforts, please write to us in the comments below.

5 Proven Practices for Building Client Relationship with CRM

The success factor of any good B2B (Business-to-Business) company depends largely on strong client relationship, which is especially applicable for small companies and organizations in its early stage. Here are lists of points, what we believe it takes companies to transform them from a vendor consideration set to trusted partners of an organization.

The success factor of any good B2B (Business-to-Business) company depends largely on strong client relationship, which is especially applicable for small companies and organizations in its early stage. Exceptional client service marks the core value of any business, whereby the organization aims to become a trusted partner of the customer, rather than viewing them as a vendor for their buyers.

Client relationship helps to differentiate companies from their competition by building strong relationships, whereby the level of service is one of the primary reasons customers prefer working with these organizations.

Here are lists of points, what we believe it takes companies to transform them from a vendor consideration set to trusted partners of an organization:

1. Be patient while building relationships

Whether you are using a CRM or using other means to develop a relationship with your clients, building relationships take time. Do not indulge in insincere schmoozing, as it can sidestep your objectives. Rather, take the time to understand your client, and in the process share a little bit of yourself. It is always important to remember that what you serve to your client, your work, is paramount in building a relationship. For at the end, no amount of personal connections can substitute for a great work.

2. Get to know your client’s industry and company

Always keep yourself updated with information about your client’s company as well as news and reports of their industry. You do not always have to be an expert, but knowing your client’s business will not only help you to speak the same language as your client but also understand the factors what are keeping them up at night. Knowing your clients better will help you to cater your interactions and offerings accordingly.

3. Go the extra mile

As you are growing your business and your client relationship, many times you will reach crossroads when you will have to make a decision on when to expand or adjust your core offerings to cater to the need of a specific client. The advantages of offering customized solutions to your clients are mainly two-fold:

  • Clients remember and always appreciate when you came through for helping them
  • It can open up additional avenues for new product offerings that you have never thought of, leading to increase of your revenue

However, it is best to remember over here, if you are making a noteworthy departure from your primary offerings always see that you are sufficiently compensated for rendering your services.

4. Treat every client as your most significant one

This is no brainer that happy clients are more likely to provide you with referrals. Provide all your clients with your best services regardless whether they are a small business or a Fortune 500 company. You can never identify whom your clients know or whom they can refer you. We have observed it on several occasions, when clients switch jobs, be it within the organization or to a new company if you have nurtured a good relationship with your client they often recommend your products or services to their new teams.

Also, remember that today’s small companies could be the big companies of tomorrow and it feels amazingly fulfilling to be trusted partner fueling your client’s growth.

5. Be more than just an email address

Despite the prevalence of using email communication for maintaining client relationship while using a CRM, email communications can be misconstrued, during taxing and stressful situations, especially when the recipient and the sender do not know each other well.  Hence, consider calling up your clients over a phone call, Skype or meet them in person to put a face to your name. Calling up your client for informing a good news, is a great way to build a better relationship.

Summarize your next steps

No matter how unimportant or quick a client meeting seems, always recapitulate the conversations with next steps. You may think that you will remember all the details (maybe you certainly will), but your client may not. Using a CRM platform helps a lot in keeping recorded history of your past conversations with your clients so that you are always aligned with them on the same page. This prevents a lot of confusion down the road while building a great client relationship.

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Now that you have learned how you can build a wonderful client relationship with your CRM if you have anything to share from your own experiences, write to us in the box below.