Tag: Marketing CRM

Customer Trust is the New Currency of Marketing Success in 2024 

The marketing landscape of 2024 is a dynamic ecosystem teeming with competition. Flashy advertisements and hollow promises no longer hold sway over discerning consumers. Today’s market demands authenticity, transparency, and a genuine connection with brands. Precisely, customers crave trust.

This paradigm shift elevates customer trust to the cornerstone of any successful marketing strategy in 2024. But how do you cultivate this trust in a way that fosters long-term customer loyalty and drives sustainable sales growth?

This post will explore the paramount importance of customer trust in achieving marketing success in 2024. We will further examine how CRM software can be a powerful tool in your trust-building arsenal.

The Imperative of Customer Trust in 2024 Marketing

The digital age has empowered consumers like never before. Information is readily available at their fingertips, allowing them to effortlessly compare brands, access reviews, and hold companies accountable for their actions. This unprecedented transparency has fostered a generation of cautious consumers wary of empty marketing tactics.

Here’s a closer look at why customer trust is so crucial in 2024

Intensified Competition

 The market is saturated with countless brands vying for customer attention. Trust acts as a potent differentiator, allowing you to stand out from the crowd and cultivate brand loyalty. Consider it a loyalty shield that protects you from competitors offering seemingly similar products or services.

The Power of Online Reviews

 A single negative review can have a devastating impact on your brand reputation. Building trust fosters positive customer experiences, leading to glowing reviews that act as powerful marketing tools. Positive reviews serve as social proof, reducing the perceived risk for potential customers and nudging them toward conversion.

Data Privacy Concerns

 Consumers are increasingly apprehensive about how brands handle their data. Demonstrating responsible data practices through transparency and robust security builds trust and encourages customers to share valuable information that can inform your marketing efforts. By respecting customer privacy, you build trust and establish yourself as a brand they can rely on.

The Rise of Social Advocacy

 Loyal customers who trust your brand become vocal advocates, organically promoting your products or services on social media and through word-of-mouth. This social advocacy acts as a free and highly credible form of marketing, reaching a wider audience through the trusted voices of your existing customer base.

Building Trust: The Pillars of a Winning Strategy

Building customer trust requires a holistic approach that permeates every facet of your marketing strategy. Here are a few key areas to focus on:

  • Transparency: Be upfront about your brand values, pricing models, and product limitations. Avoid misleading marketing messages and strive for clear, concise communication. Transparency builds trust because it demonstrates honesty and respect for your customer’s intelligence.
  • Authenticity: Consumers can detect inauthenticity a mile away. Develop a genuine brand voice and personality that resonates with your target audience. Authenticity fosters trust because it allows customers to connect with your brand on a deeper level, feeling like they’re interacting with a real entity they can relate to.
  • Customer Focus: Shift your focus from selling to serving. Prioritize customer needs by actively listening to their feedback and using it to improve your products or services. This customer-centric approach demonstrates that you value their input and are committed to their satisfaction, building trust through a sense of valued partnership.
  • Deliver on Promises: Follow through on your brand promises. If you say you offer exceptional customer service, ensure your customer service team consistently delivers exceptional experiences. Delivering on promises builds trust because it shows customers you can be counted on to keep your word, establishing brand reliability.

How ConvergeHub Helps Businesses Win Customers’ Trust  

ConvergeHub goes beyond just managing sales leads. It offers a comprehensive suite of features designed to cultivate trust and forge lasting customer relationships. Here’s a deeper dive into how ConvergeHub empowers businesses to become customer trust champions:

1. Personalized Customer Journeys:

  • Data-Driven Insights: ConvergeHub helps you gather and analyze customer data, providing a 360-degree view of your audience. This allows you to segment your customers based on preferences, demographics, and purchase behavior.
  • Targeted Communication: With a clear understanding of your customer segments, you can craft personalized marketing messages and outreach campaigns. Imagine sending birthday greetings or offering special promotions relevant to a customer’s past purchases! These targeted touches demonstrate that you value their individuality, fostering trust and brand loyalty.

2. Enhanced Customer Service:

  • Streamlined Communication: ConvergeHub provides a central platform for all customer interactions, ensuring seamless communication across various channels (phone, email, social media). Customers can easily reach the right team member and receive timely responses to their inquiries.
  • Efficient Issue Resolution: ConvergeHub empowers your support team with powerful tools to track and manage customer issues efficiently. This ensures a faster resolution process, reducing customer frustration and building trust in your commitment to their satisfaction.

Beyond these core features, ConvergeHub offers additional functionalities that contribute to building trust:

  • Automated Workflows: Expedite repetitive tasks like sending follow-up emails or appointment reminders, allowing your team to focus on personalized interactions.
  • Performance Tracking: Monitor key metrics like customer satisfaction scores and response times, providing valuable insights for continuous improvement in your customer service approach.

Final Words: The Trust Dividend

This is a  hyper-connected world, customer trust has transcended the realm of “nice-to-have” and become the fundamental currency for long-term business success.  Simply offering a good product or service is no longer enough. Customers are bombarded with choices, and they actively seek brands they can rely on and genuinely connect with.

Building a Trustworthy Brand: Three Pillars of Success

So, how do you build trust and transform your customer base into loyal brand ambassadors? Here’s where ConvergeHub comes in, but first, let’s explore the three core pillars of building a trustworthy brand:

  1. Transparency:  Customers crave authenticity. Be upfront about your offerings, limitations, and values. Own up to mistakes and actively address customer feedback. Transparency fosters a sense of security and builds trust.
  2. Authenticity:  Don’t try to be everything to everyone. Embrace your brand’s unique voice and values.  Customers appreciate genuine interactions and connect with brands that stand for something bigger.
  3. Customer-Centric Approach:  Shift your focus from selling to serving. Put your customers’ needs at the heart of every decision. ConvergeHub empowers this shift by providing the tools to understand customer behavior, personalize their experience, and prioritize their satisfaction.

By prioritizing these core values and leveraging ConvergeHub’s capabilities, you’ll cultivate a loyal customer base who are more than just satisfied – they become your biggest fans. Happy customers are your organic marketing force.

In the digital age, building genuine customer trust is essential for long-term success. ConvergeHub empowers you to put these core principles into action by providing the tools to:

  • Gather Deep Customer Insights (We’ll explore this further in the next section)
  • Personalize Customer Interactions
  • Deliver Exceptional Customer Service

Let us know your thoughts in the comments. Also, let us know how you are nurturing customer trust for your brand. 

How To Use The Best Sales CRM Software To Segment Customers And Promote Your Brand

In a gist customer segmentation is a powerful strategy whereby you divide your customer base into individual groups that share similar characteristics which can be easily done once you are using any of the best sales CRM software for finding revenue growth. Segmentation of the customers is important because when you try to use the one-size-fits-all approach in your marketing strategies, even the best strategy will come up with mixed results. This happens because while some customers may like one campaign, others may not. Therefore by executing a customer segmentation strategy once you buy the best sales CRM software, you can easily use the tool to divide your customer base into subgroups with similar attributes, after which you can tailor your marketing plans and create contents around those subgroups and personalize your marketing messages to better communicate with different groups of customers for rapid sales and business growth.

What Is Customer Segmentation?

In a gist customer segmentation is a powerful strategy whereby you divide your customer base into individual groups that share similar characteristics which can be easily done once you are using any of the best sales CRM software for finding revenue growth.

The global mobile CRM market will grow 11% to $15 billion worldwide this year. - MarketingDive Click To Tweet

Segmentation of the customers is important because when you try to use the one-size-fits-all approach in your marketing strategies, even the best strategy will come up with mixed results.

This happens because while some customers may like one campaign, others may not.

Therefore by executing a customer segmentation strategy once you buy the best sales CRM software, you can easily use the tool to divide your customer base into subgroups with similar attributes, after which you can tailor your marketing plans and create contents around those subgroups and personalize your marketing messages to better communicate with different groups of customers for rapid sales and business growth.

Now as CRM is a business growth technology that helps in streamlining this workflow and process so that you can reach the leads and customers who are most receptive to your offering(s), here is why combining easy to use CRM software with customer segmentation strategy benefits your brand:

1. Analyze Patterns and Trends

Business CRM software is a tool that collects customer data and stores them in one place for easy reference. Now, since CRM is an important tool for your customer service teams, this lead management software harvests customer data, such as a prospects purchasing behaviors, location, interest and hobbies, age group and more for your marketing staffs, after which the tool can also analyze patterns and trends in this data for providing accurate results needed for proper nurturing of the leads without any guesswork.

2. Determine the Lifetime Value of Your Customers

Once you buy the best sales CRM software and implement it effectively, the application helps the users to create predictive models that aids in determining profitable customer-base based on the CLV (Customer Lifetime Value) of the customers.

Using a sales CRM, the users of this business growth technology can help the users to ascertain which segment of their market has the highest CLV and thereafter send marketing materials that resonate with those customers.

Now, since CRM also helps in discovering customers with a low CLV you can use this tool and use the information found in the CRM database of those customers to find methods that can increase their lifetime value with your brand and company.

For example, Facebook allows its users to filter their posts based on age, gender, interest, relationship status, location and more.

Hence using CRM and integrating it with social media tools you can create posts that target the bulk of your low CLV customer-base and reach a cross-section of your demography instantly and even address a specific audience on LinkedIn and other social media websites.

3. Increase Sales

According to certain research conducted by leading global market research organizations, all in one CRM is a software that boosts sales by 30 percent.
Hence, combining easy to use CRM software platforms with customer segmentation strategy can generate even more successful results.

This is because, using this approach you can easily get to the right customer with the right message at the right time, a thing that you just cannot do with generic “one-size-fits-all” marketing strategies.

For example, once you buy the best sales CRM software you can easily target your customers with suggestions on products and services based on their previous purchase histories.

In fact, one of the biggest brands across the globe relies on marketing CRM software solutions to sift through a plethora of customer data, something that marketers are unable to do manually, or by using spreadsheets, for up-selling and cross-selling their offerings.

4. Increase Engagement

For the most part, engaged customers are always more profitable customers for any business. According to research more than 86 percent of buyers will pay for a better CX (Customer Experience), while customers who are totally engaged represent on an average 23 percent of all premium customers for any brand when it comes to profitability, revenue and growth of relationship when compared to average buyers in the marketplace.

Therefore using easy to use CRM as a business growth technology solution for segmenting customers will not only help you to separate your buyer’s based on demography but also find out other common characteristics as per their sales cadence and collective characteristics so that you can engage your customers on a deeper personal level.

Conclusion

Enterprise CRM is a tool that not only provides you with useful insights into your customer’s attitude and behaviors by tracking interactions and collecting sales data, but it can also send powerful marketing material to smaller groups in the CRM database who share similar traits and comparable sales cadence, resulting in increased customer lifetime value and higher rates of engagements.

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7 Metrics That You Must Cover In Your Monthly Sales Report To Impress Your Employee

As a manager in sales it is ultimately your responsibility to keep your sales team accountable to their or organizational and personal goals- but how? Well, we do agree with you when you say that tracking sales metrics for creating monthly sales report is extremely time-consuming. Hence as one of the award-winning vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions with thousands of easy to use CRM implementations across the global marketplace here are some of the key sales KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you must focus on to create your team’s monthly sales report despite the overwhelming amount of data being thrown on your way. And which can be your secret weapon in developing high-performing sales teams predicting rapid business growth.

As a manager in sales it is ultimately your responsibility to keep your sales team accountable to their or organizational and personal goals- but how?
Well, we do agree with you when you say that tracking sales metrics for creating monthly sales report is extremely time-consuming.

Sales teams that are productive and have effective workflows are 81% more likely to use a CRM system consistently. Click To Tweet

Hence as one of the award-winning vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM solutions with thousands of easy to use CRM implementations across the global marketplace here are some of the key sales KPIs (Key Performance Indicators) you must focus on to create your team’s monthly sales report despite the overwhelming amount of data being thrown on your way. And which can be your secret weapon in developing high-performing sales teams predicting rapid business growth.

# 1

Opportunity-to-Win Ratio

The opportunity-to-win ratio which is also known as the win rate is used for measuring the success of your sales team per opportunity over a predefined time window.

Now to calcite this KPI you need to compare the number of closed and won opportunities against all closed opportunities within the same time frame (both “closed won” and “closed lost”), which can provide you as a manager a high-level view of the overall success score of your sales team.

Managers in sales can even track this KPI in the monthly sales reports to identify strengths and weaknesses among individual reps and thereafter take corrective actions accordingly.

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your sales CRM software:

Win Rate = the number of “closed won” opportunities divided by the number of “closed” opportunities (“closed won” + “closed lost”) in the same frame of time.

# 2

Conversion Rate

This KPI which is also known as the Close Rate is measured to calculate the effectiveness of your sales funnel.

Now we all know irrespective of whether we buy leads from the marketplace or use a free lead generation tool, the process of lead generation starts at the top of the funnel, and thereafter every lead works its way down the funnel which requires the deft expertise of the members of the sales team.

In other words, conversion rate provides both marketing and sales insights to the quality of leads arriving into the sales funnel through the marketing campaigns created by your marketing team.

Hence to measure your teams’ lead conversion rate, primarily you as a manager need to determine what is considered “being converted” in the eyes of your employees.

Now typically any lead is deemed to be converted once the lead becomes a paying customer.

Now the average conversion rate generally varies from one industry to another. Nevertheless, it is critical to track the conversion rate from either side which includes SQLs (Sales Qualified Leads) or MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads).

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your business CRM software:

Lead Conversion Rate = (The total number of New Customers divided by the total number of Leads) multiplied by 100.

# 3

Average Deal Size

This KPI is going to provide you with the initiation point to enlarge the size of your deals.

It is a tool that is going to aid you as a manager to keep track of inflowing revenues and act as a pivotal guideline for how many deals you require to close to reach (or even surpass) your quotas.

This KPI also helps the managers in sales to identify at-risk opportunities.

This is because, if you keep track of this KPI month-over-month as you create your monthly sales report, this metric can help you understand how or when you need to change your sales pipeline.

For example, if you increase the average deal size of your orders you might attract leads with a wider range of needs than what you required in the previous months.

# 4

Average Days to Close

This KPI is based on how long your sales reps take to close a deal right from the lead’s first point of contact to the conversion of the lead into a loyal customer.

In other words, this is a metric that can provide you insights as a manager as to how fast your sales reps are capable of moving prospects through their sales pipelines and turn them into revenue for your company.

Now different sales cycles are needed to close different deals. For example, a bigger opportunity might take a significantly longer time to close than one which will generate lesser revenue.

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your all in one CRM software:

Average Days to Close = Add all days it took to close deals for the month and after that divide, the number by the number of deals closed that month.

# 5

Time Spent In Each Stage Of The Pipeline

Knowing about the number of deals that are there in each stage of your business growth tool’s sales pipeline will help to reveal how your prospects are moving through your pipeline and also where there are facing bottlenecks.

In other words, this metric provides deep insights into developing different sales techniques to push prospects from one stage to the next.

However, as a sales manager, you must ensure that the stages in your sales pipeline are based on what is actually happening in the sales arena, and not on how your sales reps feel, since you can always feel confident about a deal, but it never means that the prospect will obviously close.

# 6

Customer Churn Rate

This KPI in the easy to use CRM answers the question: How good are you at keeping your customers?

Therefore, if there is just one sales metric that you want to show to your employees in your monthly sales report and focus on every month – CCR would likely be the only one.

This is because knowing your brand’s churn rate means knowing why or how often your customer is leaving you for another in your marketplace.

Remember once your brand’s churn rate becomes too high, it means you surely need to make improvements in your sales tactics and find new business growth ideas, for the future success of your company.

# 7

Average Lead Response Time

According to research, it states that more than 50 percent of buyers choose the vendor or seller that responds first.

Therefore, learning this metric helps to understand the average time your sales reps take to reach out to a lead after they have been identified as a prospective contact for your company.

Now even though each company will have their own description of what a lead means to their business, but typically in general a lead refers to an individual or organization downloading a piece of content or fill out a request for a demo.

Here is how you can calculate this KPI using your marketing CRM software:

Average Lead Response Time = Sum of the number of minutes/hours/day to respond for all contacts divided by the number of contacts in your CRM database.

Conclusion

Now even though there are in reality endless sales metrics that you can use for filling up your monthly sales report.

These metrics and KPIs illustrated above will not only scale productivity but it will help to easily boost the performance of your sales team and so make you find respect among your employees as an ideal “Boss” – showing them the path for rapid and sure business growth.

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Killer Strategies On Email Customer Engagement Policies That Can Fuel Business Growth

Email marketing is most probably the most popular customer engagement strategy and the most widely used terminology of today’s digital marketing world. Thanks to the rapid swell in internet usage across the globe, this term has become nowadays a familiar word even for ordinary people living around us. In fact, email marketing is the hottest and the most potent trend in the digital marketing field which can make or break any brand’s presence in the marketplace. This is because email marketing when done with the help of an easy to use CRM software, is not only budget-friendly, but it is an effective digital marketing practice, which has undoubtedly become any digital marketer’s weapon of choice to make their brands stand out in the crowd.

Email marketing is most probably the most popular customer engagement strategy and the most widely used terminology of today’s digital marketing world.
Thanks to the rapid swell in internet usage across the globe, this term has become nowadays a familiar word even for ordinary people living around us.
In fact, email marketing is the hottest and the most potent trend in the digital marketing field which can make or break any brand’s presence in the marketplace.

Nearly 60% of organizations increased IT spending in 2020. And it remains the same in 2021. Click To Tweet

This is because email marketing when done with the help of an easy to use CRM software, is not only budget-friendly, but it is an effective digital marketing practice, which has undoubtedly become any digital marketer’s weapon of choice to make their brands stand out in the crowd.

What about- Assurance of Success

For boosting customer engagement of any brand, email marketing as a strategy holds immense importance in a sender’s or user’s life. Nevertheless, this process is not entirely faultless nor reliable. This is because the senders of these emails may need to face some unpleasant experiences at times since recipients of the emails can tend to unsubscribe to the list or change their registered email id or even the email that you send can inadvertently land into the recipient’s spam-box.

Hence, since these paramount challenges can often remain there, as an email marketer, you are required to come up with a spotless email marketing strategy to overcome these trivial yet of consequence hurdles and find success over time.

Build your Email List

Any weathered email marketer well understands why building a potential database of their customers with the help of a business CRM is a critical urgent cry.

Now, if you as an email marketer have a long list of subscribers who are all enthusiastic to know more about your brand and your offerings, it can be a boon for the marketer, as the mindset of the recipients is the ultimate factor for deciding the success in sending the emails to your customer base.

Hence, in other words, the efforts of an email marketing strategy for boosting customer engagement can go in vain overnight, if the recipients of the email are reluctant to open and view through the emails shared by your company.

In fact, a fall in open rate while doing email marketing can not only affect your CTR (Click through Rate) but it will also increase Bounce Rate whereby your overall customer engagement strategy may come to a standstill.

Now to grow your email list, you can use lead magnets and opt-in forms, which are the two most essential elements that work hand-in-hand to help grow and sustain your subscribers list substantially over time.

Time of using Email Marketing

Even though to most in common, email marketing might sound simple, however in reality only the digital marketer understands how hard it can be if the sense of creating perfect timing is found to be missing from their email marketing plans.

This is because as one of the most popular vendors of small business CRM software, we know that a sender of the email must have a clear understanding of when to start sending emails to increase customer engagement activities.

Therefore, here are a few important practices which any email marketer must adhere to while sending their emails which are mentioned below:

  • As personalized mailer contents tend to find more views and thereby customer engagements, try to personalize the communications that you have with your prospects and customers.
  • Since the main motive behind pursuing an email marketing practice is to let people get aware of what kind of offerings that your brand provides to the consumers in the marketplace, hence try to deliver messages in such a manner that it will help to enhance brand awareness among your consumer base.
  • Take out time to invite your email subscribers to provide their personal information once they are receiving your emails, and so brainstorm and come up with unique ideas that can be beneficial to your subscribers, since you will only get your desired information from the consumers if they find your click-bait plans too tempting to resist.
  • Lead nurturing is another important factor for conducting a successful email marketing strategy that boosts customer engagement. Therefore see that your users remain happy with the type of content that you are sending to them (which must be useful and pertinent) that can solve their pain-points and issues.
    Hence, as email marketing can do wonders in relation to your content management strategy, email marketers can use this tool to share relevant assets, case studies and articles to provide a more realistic approach to his or her email marketing skills.

USEFUL EMAIL MARKETING STATISTICS THAT CAN SURPRISE EVERYONE:

  • More than 86 percent of marketing professionals prefer email as their primary mode of communication.
  • A well-researched email copy can fetch more than 47 percent higher CTR.
  • Emails that include emoji(s) fetch higher than 56 percent open rate than any normal emails.
  • More than 60 percent of marketers believe that email marketing when done with an all in one CRM software can bring in more ROI without investing an excess amount on other business growth technologies.

Conclusion

Do you know according to Google there are more than 3.8 billion active users across the globe who uses email to stay in touch with others?

Therefore, you see, it is too simple to understand why email marketing is one of the best digital marketing strategies nowadays that can really boost customer engagement without allocating more budgets.

It has been found in research that email generates 3,800 percent ROI in general, and for that, all that a marketer requires is access to an email marketing tool like a marketing CRM and the list of subscribers to make it a success any day.
Additionally, as this same research also states that emails are capable of fetching 40X more traffic in comparison to social media platforms like Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn or Facebook, hence building a proper email marketing strategy can not only boost customer engagement but also increase the turnover of your organization rapidly.

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How To Increase Lead Conversion Rate in Small Businesses Using The Best Lead Management Software

Do you know how your sales teams are winning your prospects and making them your customers? Does your company have a defined process in place to help your teams qualify their leads so that your salespersons can concentrate their resources and time on the most sales-ready leads in the database of your best lead management software? Are you converting enough MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) sent by your marketing teams? We all know lead conversion is the key to revenue and business growth in any organization. Therefore, here are a few best practices that you can follow for increasing the lead conversion rate of your best lead management software and expand your business more sustainably.

Do you know how your sales teams are winning your prospects and making them your customers?

Does your company have a defined process in place to help your teams qualify their leads so that your salespersons can concentrate their resources and time on the most sales-ready leads in the database of your best lead management software?

Are you converting enough MQLs (Marketing Qualified Leads) sent by your marketing teams?

If people like you, they’ll listen to you, but if they trust you, they’ll do business with you. - Zig Ziglar Click To Tweet

We all know lead conversion is the key to revenue and business growth in any organization.

Therefore, here are a few best practices that you can follow for increasing the lead conversion rate of your best lead management software and expand your business more sustainably.

Publish A Blog

Blogging is an excellent means to build trust as according to an article published in Forbes:

“The fact is that in the world of today you cannot become an authority simply by declaring yourself as one. Customers are more suspicious, and they want to see you prove it. By producing quality information that’s true and reliable in every blog, you are making sure that you can become that authority.”

This is because we are all aware that converting leads lies at the end of the sales cycle. However, to get to that point whereby the leads will find enough interest to buy your offerings, you first need to acquire the trust of your leads. Your leads need to see your business as an authority in your space and find enough trust that you can support them and ensure their success after using your offerings.

Therefore, with the help of blogging, you can easily make your leads and prospect get engaged with your business once you can solidify your reputation as a subject matter expert or an authority in their mind, which will eventually lead to a higher lead conversion rate.

Integrate Your CRM Software With A Marketing Automation Platform

Most of the sales teams today use easy to use CRM software platforms to move opportunities through the sales pipeline and win deals.
A CRM database stores a gigantic amount of information about every leads in your best small business CRM software system, which includes behavioral and demographic data of your leads, prospects, and customers.

Therefore, when you use an MA (Marketing Automation) solution in conjunction with your business CRM platform, you can easily pull all that contact data stored in the CRM database to personalize your messages that you send to your prospective leads.

This is because, once you send highly relevant messages to your prospects rather than sending one-size-fits-all general messages to everyone in the database of your best lead management software it helps you to better engage with your prospects and increases the likelihood of conversion, as you make your personalization based on the interests, past buying behaviors, and social media activities of your leads.

However, to do this you must integrate your marketing CRM with an MA system, and let them share data in real-time, or use an all in one CRM which comes with inbuilt sales, marketing, and customer support automation, on a single platform.

Set Up A Lead Scoring System In Your CRM

Lead scoring is a process that helps you to identify the most prospective and sales-ready leads in your CRM software’s database. Using a ‘point system’ that aids in indicating the value every leads and prospect represents to your small business organization, you can very easily hone in on the sales-readiness of your leads.

Using the lead scoring process, in your best small business CRM software you can award (and also deduct) points to leads for the actions they take like visiting your website, clicking and opening your emails, downloading your contents, and others.
Additionally, you can even award points to your leads for demographic data (like job titles).

Now as the scores accumulate over time, you need to set up a scoring threshold at which a lead should be considered as an MQL (Marketing Qualified Lead). When any lead cross that predefined threshold, those leads are then passed over to the sales teams for immediate follow-ups.

Doing this activity aids the sales teams to prioritize their outreach to the most sales-ready leads, and not waste their efforts and time on dead-end leads that are not yet ready to make a purchase.

In other words, lead scoring is a process that improves the quality of your leads.

In a study done by TrackVia in 2018, it was found that 42% of businesses experienced a higher lead conversion rate with lead scoring in their small businesses.

However, it must be remembered that your marketing teams must get buy-in from your sales teams to fine-tune your scoring system and consolidate the alignment between the two teams for developing an effective and successful lead scoring process.

Moreover, you are also advised to reevaluate your lead scoring mechanism once every month since if you find that your marketing teams are passing a lot of MQLs to the sales, of which only a few are getting converted, it can be that you are qualifying your leads to soon. In this case, you must increase the MQL threshold score in your scoring mechanism and fine-tune your lead conversion mapping processes.

Run Lead Generation And Nurturing Campaigns

In order to convert leads, you must primarily generate leads. You can generate leads in many ways, right from using social media to making use of email drip campaigns or even use free lead generation software which you can find in certain lead management software tools.

Now, once you generate new leads, and store them in your CRM platform’s database, you need to nurture the leads through the sales pipeline with a series of touchpoints that will move the leads closer to conversion.

Set Up Killer Landing Pages

As your leads move through the sales pipeline, you need to find a means to capture more information about the leads which will help to increase their engagement with your business over time.

Irrespective of whether you are using an enterprise-level, highly expensive and robust CRM like Salesforce or mostly used by small businesses and startups a Salesforce Alternative CRM software, one of the most effective ways to do this is by creating simple landing pages, with only one objective, to encourage your leads to take an action like register for a webinar, download specific content, request a demo, and others.

Use examples from peers in your industry; check their format, images, contents, and CTA (Call to Action) buttons for creating killer landing pages.

However, always remember to make it amply clear to the visitors in your landing pages, which action you want them to take, how they should take it, and what they will receive in exchange for sharing their personal information with your brand.

When done rightly, using an effective CTA can significantly increase your lead conversion rate.

Incorporate Data Verification

Typically, all landing pages will have forms to collect information about the prospects to store them in the CRM database.

Now, it is also most often found that many people will provide you with false information, like fake email id, or phony mobile numbers to receive your offers.

To avoid this include data verification measures in your lead generation forms, like using reCAPTCHA, and other data verification processes to reduce the accumulation of fake leads in your database, and increase the ability of your sales teams to qualify high-quality leads in the CRM system.

Use Social Monitoring To Find Brand Advocates

Using social CRM which is also known as SCRM software you can practice social listening and social monitoring which will help you to find instant alerts when someone mentions your brand or offerings on the social media platforms.

Therefore, if you find someone speaking positively about your organization or brand and are happy about your products or services, reach out to them to demonstrate your appreciation.

Treating these people with respect and catering to their needs can help you to find brand advocates, those who can be super helpful in promoting your brand and increase conversion rates.

According to a survey done by Nielsen and Forrester Research, it has been found that:

“92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates while only 18% of consumers trust recommendations from industry influencers.”

Routinely Measure Your Lead Conversion Ratio

Routinely measuring your lead conversion ratio aids in keeping track of your efforts. The lead conversion ratio is most essentially the ratio of the number of Marketing Qualified Leads (MQL) that your sales teams have converted to customers over a specific period of time.

Therefore, create and keep a monthly scorecard that can help in tracking these metrics from your easy to use CRM. This is because; maintain insights on how well your lead scoring process is working will aid you to make data-driven decisions, and also find which processes are working and what is broken in the lead conversion workflow.

Takeaway

Lead conversion is what allows you to grow your business. However, you need to carefully plan and execute various tactics to increase your conversion rates.

Therefore, if you are running a small business following the above-stated points and using the best lead management software (which integrates MA and an easy to use CRM), will not only help you automate your lead conversion processes but also aid in streamlining your efforts for rapid business growth.

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Need For Sales Automation CRM Tools – The Forerunners of Your Business

Before we begin discussing future-CRM solutions and Sales Automation CRM tools there is no denying the fact that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become the build-block for all industries which is absolutely data-driven to make lives better for entrepreneurs and the consumers of the modern times. Now, every CRM users across this planet shall agree to this fact irrespective of where they use an enterprise-level or a Salesforce Alternative CRM solution for their SMBs that nothing much has changed in the CRM space since the 1990s except for the fact that it had moved from on-premise framework to the cloud. Still today in most enterprises, customer data is still isolated, and therefore manually entered in the software.

Before we begin discussing future-CRM solutions and Sales Automation CRM tools there is no denying the fact that Customer Relationship Management (CRM) has become the build-block for all industries which is absolutely data-driven to make lives better for entrepreneurs and the consumers of the modern times.

63% of companies outgrowing their competitors are using automation. Online competition will always be tough, but with automation, study has shown that companies can have the edge. Click To Tweet

Now, every CRM users across this planet shall agree to this fact irrespective of where they use an enterprise-level or a Salesforce Alternative CRM solution for their SMBs that nothing much has changed in the CRM space since the 1990s except for the fact that it had moved from on-premise framework to the cloud.

Still today in most enterprises, customer data is still isolated, and therefore manually entered in the software.

Hence given the fact that this new “Experience Economy” is entirely becoming sales-driven where prioritizing the customer is becoming more tough and crucial every day –CRM software is still considered inefficient and there are ongoing researches which are trying to make the future-CRM of tomorrow relying more and more on AI, Big Data, Deep Learning, NLP (Natural Language Processing), and other bleed-edge technologies.

In other words, it might also imply that CRM has not been evolved or rather its total capabilities have not been yet explored and leveraged as of date.

Now undeniably easy to use CRM is a vital tool in sales and marketing which has already changed the perception of the consumer world.
This is because retailers now can analyze data and apply it in real-time in several areas, which has given rise to seamless and easy processes, which otherwise would have been really difficult to quantify and measure.

For example, finding purchasing behaviors and making market predictions are now within fingertips of the marketing executives using marketing CRM for their enterprise.

Financial organizations using CRM software for financial services industry are also able to pinpoint and stop fraudulent transactions in seconds.
Additionally, health care services are also using CRM to keep an effective track of their patients enabling easy treatment and diagnosis.

Nevertheless, in spite of its dynamic features and instant benefits that an easy to use CRM provide to various industries, the CRM software by large still remains ineffective as major tasks are done manually.

For example sales executives who are relentlessly monitoring their high-volume deals in their sales CRM solutions pipeline have to invest extra hours to enter a large volume of data manually.

Clearly, it is a cry for help, a stark indication to the future of CRM software- more Sales Automation CRM functionalities is the need of the hour now.

How Will Sales Automation Help?

With CRM software, sales management is still a burden, as far as time and energy are concerned. Thus, Sales Automation CRM can generate a process where a salesperson can connect with potential customers and accelerate the journey throughout the sales pipeline.

Prioritizing customers will be the sole purpose to drive growth while the sales automation will take care of the administrative task.

Hence Sales Automation in CRM is all about removing the barriers for human contact and make sales a more integrated process. Thus, the benefit is two-fold.

The future is digital and the future is now – so there is no better time for the need of CRM automation like the present.

The features of the sales automation in CRM perfectly fit the need as it should be more directed towards the broader concept where the data must serve an organization and not the otherwise.

This is because it is important for easy to use CRM to shift to the more focused and human side of selling where more data and algorithms should be working for people.

Enterprise workflow needs to be smart and easy. This would allow the sales reps to use the automated CRM more often and leverage its complete set of features.

Some of the necessary features of the automation include customer-targeted recommendations based on, personalized communications, activity records, and much more. This would even ease the tricky job of lead generation for the sales representatives.

Predictive analytics is another helpful feature that can be used in the process of sales.

We say this as research shows that higher customer retention depends on the right customer information and their habits – which ultimately even drives the sales. Hence predictive analytics can have a big role to play in giving the valuable customer information that the sales reps can use to their benefit.

It can also be said that the future of CRM is also determined by the ability of software to determine, which steps to take.

The future holds great potential for CRM software with the specific knowledge and understanding of each industry and the business process is crucial for functioning and workflow.

As the aim of every company remains the same- to get and keep customers, all-in-one CRM software with such smart features will readily be accepted by the industry, which will be the key to customer retention as it is the returning customers that mostly spend more money than the new customers.

Wondering what is the role of predictive data and artificial intelligence in the future of CRM?

They are helpful when the CRM requires data-driven solutions to influence the productivity of the sales representatives, whereby the salesperson will get more time for the crucial tasks while automating repetitive tasks that can be taken care of by AI and predictive data.

With the right Sales Automation CRM salesperson can now invest more time in other definitive work processes like studying customer behavior and build a relationship with them. This will also help to reveal the more humane side of their business.

Conclusion

Thus, the future of CRM software lies in customer relationship automation, which can take customer experience and support to a new level.

The sales reps can leverage the future CRM’s potential by compiling different data from disparate sources allowing them to have all the information about the customer while approaching them. The approach will also be more personalized than formal.

And the right approach at the right time will help the sales surge potential increase exponentially.

This is the reason, features like artificial intelligence and predictive analytics will give the sales reps a crucial understanding of customer information to work with by creating a business CRM software, which is more proactive and so helps in saving time and increase productivity.

Hence the future of easy to use CRM is the need of the hour, since it will not only simplify the sales process and but it will also make customer relationship management a much more exciting and humane job.

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Tips for Managing Digital Events Using The Best CRM Software For Small Business And Startups

So now that you have spent money, resources, and time creating the impeccable marketing strategy for your business, you want your marketing message to resound well with your potential lead and customers-right? However, communication is a form of art and without the right moves, it is unbelievably easy for your messages to get lost, or shunned altogether as the size of your addressees grows with time. The larger is your audience, the broader are their needs, preferences, and opinions, which can put your marketing messages at risk of becoming irrelevant to the majority of the people that you are attempting to reach. This is exactly where market segmentation strategies come into play, as segmenting is a crucial factor to reach your target markets globally.

How do we use my best CRM software for small business for managing our digital events?

How can our present business CRM also aid in leverage the information and data that we are gaining from organizing free events?

Can we exponentially grow our mailing list be attracting the best speakers for our online webinars?

Now, if all these myriad questions are racing through your mind, read on for finding some of your answers.

Sales teams that are productive and have effective workflows are 81% more likely to use a CRM system consistently. Click To Tweet

It is a true fact that when these COVID-19 restrictions will be lifted, the event industry will once again see a beacon of light at the end of its dark tunnel.

Nevertheless, in the meanwhile, live events have been replaced by digital events during this pandemic, with so many proficient speakers now being available right at their homes and are ready to speak, which is making digital events find its way into the lives of so many professionals across the globe.

Hence in this article, let us see how we can not only save time but even find more conversions, achieve the highest engagement/attendance for digital conferences and webinars by using the best CRM software for small business for revenue growth.

There are many we have seen in the recent times as one of the most popular vendors of Salesforce Alternative CRM tools who says: “We are already having an event software of our choice, do we still need a CRM?”

The answer is – Yes.

Additionally, we would like to mention over here that you will also need a suite of software products to organize an online event that will not only provide you the necessary help before and during the event but also after the event has been completed successfully.

Now an event irrespective of whether it is conducted live or online is primarily a lead generation tool, which helps businesses to attract new customers, spread their brand awareness and add weight to your company’s authority as an expert in any chosen niche.

Hence, ideally, for achieving success through online conferences and webinars, your business needs an arsenal of event hosting software that includes:

– Event planning software

– Easy to use CRM solution

– Marketing automation apps

– Ticketing software

– Performance management solution

– Waiver software

Therefore, it is unneeded to say, that to make all these data flow impeccably from one solution to another, you will need tools like PieSync or Zapier which can help the free flow of information while including a CRM for small and medium business into your event management routine will not only optimize the process itself but also enrich your database for further marketing and ticket sale.

REASONS TO USE AN EASY TO USE CRM FOR DIGITAL EVENTS

If your business is already using the best CRM software for small business you must be knowing the value of email marketing.

Enrichment of an email list is one of the biggest priorities of any marketer for the promotion of their digital events.

Apart from this CRM also helps in task assignment which is another important reason to integrate a business CRM into your preferred technical stack while conducting an event digitally.

Analytics and reporting is another feature that calls for using a CRM for managing small and big events, irrespective of whether they are digital or live, which is specifically important when an event is recurring since the information of the past events stored in the CRM database can help provide insights into the ticket booking process and also optimize a lot of other processes that can cut costs for the next events.

This is how you can do it.

Put Marketing On Steroids

When you decide on using an easy to use CRM along with your event managing software, you can make your marketing more efficient.

This is because the best CRM software for small business CRM is a tool that allows the user of the software to send mass emails, monitor open rates, upload existing contact lists with just a few clicks, help create a series of automated emails, create different segments by assigning custom tags, and more.

It has been observed that drafting emails that are appropriate for the audience increases email open rates which ultimately results in more ticket sales.

For this, you can segment the profiles of your customers in the CRM software’s database based on their location, interest, gender, and any other custom parameters, and thereafter send personalized messages for higher conversions.

Use CRM For Team Management

You will always find that your team members are never on the same page unless they are using a business growth technology like CRM.

This is because team members for any event come from different backgrounds, whereby some might be new, while others might have done dozens of events with your company.

Hence for streamlining all processes, delegating tasks, controlling their execution, assigning teams to work on a project, it is only an easy to use CRM that can provide the overview of the progress of your teams easily in a dashboard, which can act as a mission control center for your live or online events.

Target Event Attendees By Location

Attendees are the raison d’etre of why brands and businesses organize live or online events in the first place.

Therefore using a CRM for SMB you can separate the locals from the non-locals and offer them different packages.

Using lead and customer segmentation in a CRM you can also market in different languages based on the country of origin of the attendees will participate in your online events.

Apart from it if you are using specific colors, fronts, or using a mascot for your branding, CRM is a tool that can even help in choosing the branding elements that will resonate with different cultural values of the selected audience that your business is addressing.

Know Your ROI

If the C-Suite executives of any organization want to know about anything- one of them would be ROI.

Hence having invested in an event, the management would always want to know:

– Was it worth doing it?

– Is it worth repeating the event?

Now, ROI is one of the most important metrics that can help answer these questions.

Therefore when you integrate your event management software with an easy to use CRM, not only it helps you to track the timeframe, efficiency, and costs incurred at every leg of the customer’s journey, but you can utilize this data forever, to perfect the patterns of your event workflows once the information is stored in a CRM.

Reduce Manual Workload For Digital Events

The best CRM software for small business is a tool that is popular across all industries since it creates efficiencies and saves time. This is also relevant to the event management niche.

Hence once you use a CRM with your event management tool, you can bid goodbye to sending guest invitations individually or keep remembering not to miss sending out reminders to all your prospective audience at the right intervals and on time.

This is because CRM is a tool that will easily ensure all routine processes for your online events are routine processes and are automated and scheduled in advance.

Moreover, business CRM can let you set up alerts if any deadlines are broken.

Take Charge Of Lead Quality

Understanding the journey of the leads, audience, or the customers is fundamental to the success of any business.

Therefore if you are conducting an online or even a live event, you must look into the quality of your leads at every stage of the conversion which can help to convert more leads and also understand better why any leakage has occurred whereby some of the leads have fallen through the crack.

Nevertheless, when you use a CRM and allocate your leads to the next stage of the funnel, marketing automation in a marketing CRM software is likely to start sending the content required respective to that stage of the customer’s journey.

Moreover, reporting based on data found around these activities can also provide actionable insights that have the power to advance your sales process now and keep it tight for the next events.

Measure Success Of You Digital Event

Finally, as reporting and analysis are a pivotal piece of the puzzle of any successful business, if your company knows how to read insights and translate them into actionable insights, you can easily use the completive edge of the analytical data stored in the best CRM software for small business CRM for boosting your event’s lead generation or work better with the attendee management features that are available in most event management software.

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What Is The Nuanced Difference Between Influencer Marketing Vs Brand Advocacy

We all have probably heard the terms “Brand Advocacy” and “Influencer Marketing”. Apparently, they can sound like the same thing. Nevertheless, that is not the truth, as in reality each one of these terms can occupy two different specific niches in your digital marketing strategy. Each of these two digital marketing endeavors is important for different reasons, whereby each of them fulfills a unique need and so can be utilized for two distinct purposes. However, the question remains, in spite of their differences can they be utilized together for moving your marketing efforts? So, here we are to dig into this topic to shed some light on the nuanced differences between brand advocacy and influencer marketing.

We all have probably heard the terms Brand Advocacy and Influencer Marketing. Apparently, they can sound like the same thing. Nevertheless, that is not the truth, as in reality each one of these terms can occupy two different specific niches in your digital marketing strategy.

Each of these two digital marketing endeavors is important for different reasons, whereby each of them fulfills a unique need and so can be utilized for two distinct purposes.

92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates- Nielsen Holdings PLC Click To Tweet

However, the question remains, in spite of their differences can they be utilized together for moving your marketing efforts?

So, here we are to dig into this topic to shed some light on the nuanced differences between brand advocacy and influencer marketing.

What is brand advocacy?

Brand advocacy refers to the promotion of the company by general people who are in love with your brand. Brand advocates can include not only your satisfied customers, but they can also be your employees, or per say, anyone else who has an affinity for your products or services.

Anyone who loves your brand can be your brand advocate and may talk about your product or service in conversation with their family, friends, peers, and relatives.

In other words, any person who is willing to recommend your brand to another individual can be an advocate of your brand.

Although influencer marketing is a hot topic nowadays, nevertheless, brand advocacy indeed has a bigger potential to drive a larger ROI and have a greater impact on the success of your brand’s marketing campaigns than influencer marketing.

Here are two statistics to prove the veracity of our statement:

  • 18% of consumers trust good word and testimonials from industry influencers. (Forrester Research)
  • 92% of consumers trust recommendations from brand advocates. (Nielsen)

What is influencer marketing?

An influence, on the other hand, is an individual who is considered as a thought leader and an authority in their industry. For example, Paul Greenberg (author of the book “CRM at the Speed of Light“) is certainly an influence in the CRM industry. People look to him for expertise and advice to help guide them along the road to success. Paul Greenberg, Warren Buffet, Kim Kardashian, Gary Vaynerchuk are some of the examples of big league influencers- persons you are not likely to get a response from easily if you want to engage your brand and is new in influencer marketing.

How do you identify an influencer?

You can find plenty of influencers in your specific industry, individuals whom people look to for suggestions, guidance, and advice.

Find those individuals who run a widely read and highly successful blog in your industry. Else, keep an eye out for people who have enormous social media followers pertaining to your industry. These individuals are easy to spot if you know what to look for. Influencers are mostly semi-famous in their niche industries and many even charge fees for their collaborations.

Influencer marketing, when performed in a proper manner, can generate a significant return on ROI. According to an exclusive survey done on influencers by Tomoson :

“Most businesses today are making $6.50 for every $1 spent on influencer marketing.”

However, as a word of caution from our end, if you are a newbie in this game, you should be careful with influencers. As most influencers decide to be influences, so they can earn money. Therefore, watch out and remain beware of those influences who may not be interested in your industry and topic as they might appear to be, but are rather in the game just to make an easy buck.

How to generate and utilize brand advocates?

There are many ways to generate brand advocates. Here are a few basic methods for generating and leveraging brand advocates for any industry:

  1. Focus on customer satisfaction

One of the most successful ways to generate brand advocates is to maintain a high level of customer satisfaction among your consumers by delivering an excellent customer experience. You as an owner of a brand must make all the efforts that are needed to keep your buyers happy since if you do so, they are more likely to become advocates of your brand.

Maintaining customers over a long period of time using an easy to use CRM like ConvergeHub, who are satisfied using your products or services also results in building brand loyalty. An activity that other than generating additional revenues also helps to generate brand advocates in your established markets.

  1. Maintain happy employees

Remember, all the employees in your organization have the potential to be awesome advocates of your brand. Therefore, treat your employees well, and you can be sure that they are most likely to recommend your brand to their friends and family. Running employee engagement programs are an excellent means to make your employees feel like they are a part of a family. You can also run a workplace satisfaction survey among your employees and implement changes in your organization based on its results to make your employees feel heard. Praise your employees and reward them for a job well done to create a positive work environment around your business.

All these gestures will definitely make your employees feel more motivated to work harder, provide them morale boosts, and so they will naturally speak to their friends about your brand.

  1. Find them on social media

Once you use social listening and monitoring tools, you can easily get an alert in real time, when someone mentions your brand’s name on the social media platforms. Now, if you can engage them immediately and praise them for their kind words, they will for certain appreciate your gesture and so when they return to social media and continue to talk about how awesome your brand is, you will be successful in creating your social media advocates.

How do you leverage industry influencers?

Primarily if you want to identify the right influencer for your audience and your brand, then think about how you can reach them out to propose a mutually beneficial collaboration.

Here are two key strategies for leveraging influencer in your marketing efforts.

  1. Mutually beneficial collaboration

Once you have established a relationship with an influence, you can propose things like interviewing them for podcasts, exchanging guest blogs, co-authoring blogs with them, and more. Blast the results everywhere you can, once you have produced any type of deliverable or content in collaboration with your influencer. This blasting outreach can span across social media, press releases (if the resulting product is newsworthy), email newsletter campaigns etc.

  1. Tapping into your influencer’s network

However, the real value of influencer marketing comes in when your influencer shares the result of your works on their social media platforms. Doing so, your influencer provides you an exposure to their entire network, which considerably increases the reach of your content and gets your brand recognized to a mostly new audience. When your influencer’s followers see that, the influencer is working with you; they will most often navigate to your website or landing pages to learn more about what you do or about your products or services.

Conclusion

Therefore, as you can see both brand advocates and marketing influencers have their parts to play in growing your business. However, while influencers are more difficult to obtain, brand advocates fill a different need, word of mouth advertising, an advice that comes from someone they know and trust personally.

Hence, in a gist, although your brand can only have a handful of influencers, you can have thousands of brand advocates, those who can do the work of promoting your brand on their own.

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Do you have any lessons or tips learned from any marketing influencer or brand advocate? Share them with us in the comments section below!

How to be successful with a VoC (Voice of the Customer) Program with CRM

VoC (Voice of the Customer) programs have gained momentum as a strategic asset for most customer-centric business minds and forward thinking CMOs, CEOs and customer experience leaders. In fact, according to 2016 reports by Forrester the Chief Marketing Officers, whose performances ranks them in the top quartile, mostly access VoC programs more often, than their lower-performing peers. If you are not using VoC program now, here are 7 infallible steps and some best practices to get you started and going.

VoC (Voice of the Customer) programs have gained momentum as a strategic asset for most customer-centric business minds and forward thinking CMOs, CEOs and customer experience leaders. In fact, according to 2016 reports by Forrester the Chief Marketing Officers, whose performances ranks them in the top quartile, mostly access VoC programs more often, than their lower-performing peers.

From our experiences, we have found that most business establishments consider that they are aware what the customer’s want, but unfortunately, in spite of all tall claims, they are more often either partly correct or imperfect in their judgments.

The Chief Marketing Officers, whose performances ranks them in the top quartile, mostly access VoC programs more often, than their lower-performing peers.- Forrester (2016) Click To Tweet

In either of these scenarios, the results culminate to a cascading outcome that demeans marketing communications, R&D, sales effectiveness, delivery, and customer experience (CX) goals. Nevertheless, the diminishing financial impact incurred in any of these mentioned areas, are never discovered, as these significant hidden losses go unrecognized by most establishment owners across the globe.

A recommended approach if you are not using VoC program now, here are 7 infallible steps and some best practices to get you started and going.

1# Assess Culture

Despite strong self-proclamations of companies being customer focused, contrary to their marketing rhetoric, most businesses are product-centric. Since, just by calling yourself customer-centric, does not make it so. It must be recognized primarily to achieve sustained VoC success in any organization; the establishment must essentially be customer-centric or be on the path to becoming customer-centric in its journey.
Therefore, in case your company is not yet ready, it is best to defer your VoC program, and rather consider how you can adopt a CX (Customer Experience) strategy, and revert to some simple survey analysis tools.

2# Assign a Champion

Like all strategic commercial initiatives, executive sponsorship is a pre-requirement. Moreover, an allocated resource must be entrusted to plan the VoC methods, business processes, data schema, as well as collect and take action upon customer feedback. As data most often resides in multiple systems, consider appointing a business analyst to undertake this job with experience in cross-departmental relationships as an ideal resource for this work.

3# Set Objectives

For most businesses, VoC Process seeks to capture and prioritize customer preference and expectations after categorizing them so that companies can orchestrate the right mix of people, culture, technology, and process in a coordinated effort to delight their customers times and again. Moreover, in addition to prioritizing your customer preferences, we have found that organizing preferences in a hierarchy along with similar preferences linked together prove extremely helpful. This aids business processes in a way, that by achieving one customer preference you will add value or jump start on relative objectives.

4# Design Processes

Voice of the Customer Process can be done both manually or aided with technology, using inbound and outbound methods. The manual method of VoC process mostly includes reference programs, customer interviews, focus group and contextual-design techniques (like user-centered design ethnographic research). Although these methods are capable of delivering qualitative analysis, they do not scale well and so you need to use technology to attain VoC automation in a manner that you are capable of gathering continuous customer feedback and then easily analyze and act upon it.

5# Segment Customers

Customers are never homogeneous and so VoC process should be based on compactly defined customer segmentation. Business-to-Business organizations must segment their customers by personas and objectives deploying both implicit (i.e. behaviors, transactions, and activities) and explicit (i.e. demographics) criterions. However, Business-to-Consumer customers will further include criterions, which include key performance indicators like ‘Recency Frequency Monetary’ (RFM), loyalty program attributes and a significant amount of social media behaviors. For proper implementation of VoC process, you must also create a category for lapsed customers. This group, which often holds the biggest customer segment, can offer valuable advice to business organizations. For when this advice is acted upon and are followed with a reactivation strategy can also bring in some big revenue for the companies.

6# Data Governance

You need to leverage on as much customer data as possible to truly understand the voice of your customer. Several companies manage their customer data in disparate software applications like service management, marketing, billing, email apps, Excel, shadow systems, survey tools and more. More often than not these incongruous data silos needs to be bridged to make sense of the customer relationship, which often becomes the biggest challenge for business organizations trying to implement VoC process in their company.

Using a Converged CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform (like ConvergeHub) for MDM (Master Data Management) is a popular data governance approach for managing 360-degree view of the customers by consolidating and distributing customer data throughout the organization so that the information is complete, accurate, and consistent for everyone working in the company.

When VoC questionnaires are sent from and returned to the CRM platform, not only the process can be automated but the correspondence and surveys can be personalized using customer data (i.e. prior VoC feedbacks, purchase histories and others). CRM software can also tabulate data received from multiple sources, distribute alert notifications when customer problems and exceptional behaviors are identified, create and assign tasks for follow-ups, create reports based on KPIs, reveal correlations and patterns out of customer feedbacks and much more.

Never begin a VoC program before you have teamed up with your IT department and have installed a system that can help you to abolish this data complexity.

7# Engage Customers and Measure Results

For optimal implementation and success of VoC process used open-ended questions designed to understand the customer’s vision, partnership preferences, objectives, frustrations for measuring VoC and use it for contributing to a holistic view. While there are many organizations that use NPS, CSAT for measuring customer satisfaction, we recommend performance metrics like CLV (Customer Lifetime Value), up-sell/cross-sell, customer retention measurements which show revenues and demonstrate clear ROI.

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Takeaway

VoC benefits include improvement in CX (Customer Experience) as evident with metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score).  Since when you know what your customers really want, you can create messages, design business strategies, offer solutions that truly resonates with your customers, and therefore provide a considerable uplift in sales conversions, marketing effectiveness, and ultimately enhances the Customer Lifetime Value with your brand, which results in faster organizational growth.

5 Secrets of Marketing and Business Automation with ConvergeHub CRM

The more your business can cultivate leads and succeed in creating long-term relationships even before your prospects are ready to purchase your products or services, the more likely you are to win your lead’s approval and thereby increase your sales pipeline’s conversion rate. To help cultivate and nurture leads to move through the marketing funnel you need marketing and business automation software which helps you to take the tedious work out of connecting with leads as they move through the customer journey.

The more your business can cultivate leads and succeed in creating long-term relationships even before your prospects are ready to purchase your products or services, the more likely you are to win your lead’s approval and thereby increase your sales pipeline’s conversion rate.
To help cultivate and nurture leads to move through the marketing funnel you need marketing and business automation software which helps you to take the tedious work out of connecting with leads as they move through the customer journey. Nevertheless, marketing and business automation should not be dealt with a “set-it-and-forget-it” manner. Since for correct utilization of marketing and business automation you are required to properly setup and maintain the objective of your marketing campaigns to achieve specific objectives and goals.

On average 51% of companies are currently using Marketing automation. With more than half of B2B companies (58%) plan to adopt the technology.-Emailmonday Click To Tweet

Let us take a look at 5 secrets of successful marketing and business automation below:

#1.  Prepare and Organize Your CRM

Make sure that you clean your CRM database since it will synchronize with your marketing and business automation software. Hence, if your database has a lot of outdated or duplicate information, you are sure to land up with a bad problem on your hand.  Always go through your CRM database, clean up the names of your contacts, delete duplicate entries, and associate contacts with the right accounts.

#2.  Validate Email Addresses

Another vital step in making business and marketing automation software work for you is to verify all the email addresses in your CRM’s database. For this, you can run all your email addresses through an email verification service and fix the emails those are not approved. In several instances, these are small errors that can be easily fixed (i.e., gmil and gamil to gmail). In other circumstances, you may find many emails those that may no longer be active. So be careful about deleting them before importing your emails into your marketing and business automation platform.

#3. Get Everyone on Board

Before doing your marketing campaigns using business and marketing automation software, address how the software will affect your marketing and sales processes. Will it change the way your leads are presently assigned? Will it take the place of your sales outreach strategies? For this, you need to check out with the other resources in your business, including your IT department, webmaster, marketing and creative team leads, SEO team, and your CRM administrator. Since, to make your business and marketing automation software work most efficiently, you need the help of these teams with tasks such as creating contents, make email authentication, track codes, and integrate the software, if it is a third-party application with your CRM database.

Take to your automation provider if you are not sure with the answers, but answer questions early on, so that you can you can fetch the maximum from your business and marketing automation system.

#4. Test, Analyze and Update

When your business and marketing automation system is up and running, it is necessary that you continue to test and analyze the output of the software. Every aspect of your lead nurturing and marketing campaigns to your lead scoring can be a lot improved when you are aware what results you are expecting to see out of the software. Therefore, by testing, analyzing and updating the results, you can make the necessary corrections and create better strategies for your business growth.

#5. Continue Education

We are sure like most of us; you will not learn everything about business and marketing automation and its best practices in your first few months. Therefore, in order to continue getting the most from your business and marketing automation experience, you must continue to educate you staffs and yourself on the latest updates and best practices and more. There are several places wherefrom you can find this information, which includes forums, webinars, and user groups of the software.

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Conclusion

Business and Marketing automation is a wonderful tool that can easily bring success to your business. We are sure that by following the above tips, you will be well on your way to accomplish a successful business and marketing automation experience.

Wait! If you have 2 minutes to spare… leave a comment below letting us know what was your biggest takeaway!

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.