automation Archives

What is Salesforce? And 3 Reasons Why it is the Best CRM

Posted on December 30, 2019December 30, 2019 by admin

Growing a business is not just about boosting sales or just selling your product. Or services to existing and prospective customers. A business venture is only successful if it has a well-defined process to efficiently gather leads. That can be converted to sales and finally into loyal customers.

From our experience with various customer relationship management software. Salesforce comes out as one of the best CRM software offering everything a business needs to close sales blazing fast.

In this article, we’re going to be delving deep into Salesforce. And tell you why it is amongst the best CRM software in the market.

About Salesforce CRM?

Organisations needed a cloud-based CRM that will take care of all of their customer’s concerns. From marketing and sales to customer service to streamlining operations and saving valuable resources and time. Salesforce was created with a vision to reinvent the Cloud CRM model. And usher in a new era of cloud computing.

What does Salesforce do?

Salesforce helps businesses run their operations efficiently and profitably by reducing the expense of managing the organizational infrastructure. Not only that, the CRM offers a wide range of features in all the functional areas of a company

In the Marketing Team

Salesforce professional edition enables the marketing team of a company to create and track marketing campaigns while measuring the success rate and automatically provide the leads to sales teams.

In Customer Service

Salesforce tracks various customer issues as per resolutions based on escalation rules such as the client’s priority and elapsed time. This help is elevating customer satisfaction levels as the issues do not fall through loopholes and always get escalated to the next level if left unresolved.

Salesforce in Management

Equipped with visual dashboards and extensive reporting features, the CRM provides the management with real-time reporting and process visibility.

Reasons to use Salesforce

1) Covers entire customer lifecycle:

The CRM has been developed for marketing & sales reps to track the potential and customer lifecycle using tools like Sales Cloud for accessing sales activities, Service Cloud along with Desk.com to anticipate and respond to customer needs, using Marketing Cloud and Pardot to design 1-o-1 customer journeys and drive sales, Analytics to derive customizable insights and gain a deeper understanding of your team’s performance, and so much more.

Salesforce has worked hard for the last 17 years to build their brand’s repute while successfully growing, retaining customers in terms of service and value, creating a unified sense amongst their customers and stakeholders, making Salesforce a brand to be reckoned with in the CRM market.

2) Automate everyday tasks

Closing a sale is never as easy as getting a customer to just agree to commit. Underneath the surface details of any sale, there are hundreds of minuscule tasks that need to be completed in order for everything to function the right way. Forms need to be filled out, reports to be sent, legal issues need addressing — these smaller tasks are a time-consuming yet crucial aspect of any sales process.

Salesforce CRM system is designed to take the burden of most of these tasks off the shoulders of your employees with digital automation. In short, your reps will be able to focus the majority of their efforts towards closing leads and resolving customer issues, while the automated CRM system takes care of the minute details.

3) Improved analytical data and reporting

Miscalculated data analysis should never be the reason you cannot succeed. With Salesforce, this is no longer a possibility. The CRM systems store all the information in one place which leads to an improved and unified analysis of the data as a whole. Equipped with seamless integration with different tools or plugins. You have the capability of generating automatic reports to maximize your time.

You can personalize your dashboard views to quickly access the information needed. Such as client information, sales targets, and performance reports deriving limitless opportunities. With optimized reporting data, you can make resourceful. And impactful decisions to reap the rewards in terms of customer loyalty and long-run profitability.

Few last words:

All the above-mentioned factors make Salesforce a powerful CRM software to have for your business. However, you should also take your business requirement and customer’s persona into consideration while choosing a CRM.

Just in case you have any questions regarding CRM software or need any help in setting them up, please feel free to contact us anytime. We’d love to help you out.

6 Ways Workflow Automation Will Improve Your Lead Nurturing ROI

Posted on April 24, 2018November 6, 2019 by admin

Staying competitive in today’s dynamic world is becoming increasingly challenging, especially for small to medium businesses. The number of possible lead nurturing touchpoints (where consumers can interact with the brand) has increased beyond imagination.

For instance,

consumers can call the helpline,
interact with automated chatbots,
contact business support teams,
Lead nurturing over social platforms, and
possibly fill up some inquiry or feedback forms

It is with this context, the idea of lead capturing and lead nurturing can be well understood. The process of engaging with the leads in a personalized (or targeted) way by providing highly relevant and contextual information at each touchpoint of the consumer buyer’s journey can be termed as lead nurturing. The intention is to provide enough value so that the lead can make a purchasing decision in the end possibly in favour of our business.

Marketers have to make sure they treat each prospect with due consideration irrespective of their source. To overcome the challenge of keeping a track of all leads and engaging with them in a personalized manner, organizations invest in CRM and marketing automation tools like Infusionsoft, HubSpot or others.

These Marketing Automation tools play an integral role in managing leads and enhancing the engagement abilities of the marketers with the leads.

What is the most effective lead nurturing method?

Now, let’s look into several automated lead nurturing strategies that can possibly boost your ROI.

1. The Art of Segmentation

The first step and more importantly the most effective lead nurturing strategy for maximizing ROI is to segment the prospect in a meaningful manner. Segmentation will help classify the prospect as per the personas which will determine the method through which the client needs to be pursued. Although it’s not always possible to segment in an automated manner, you can deploy some of the below lead nurturing techniques for automation:

In tools like Infusionsoft, you can TAG a prospect based on his website behaviour. For example, if the visitor has spent considerable time and action on a particular service page, it might indicate a preferred interest area
For web-forms, we can add an extra field to segment the visitor based on their interest.

Expected Outcome – A prospect list which is segmented based on their interests, behaviour or geographies.

2. Timely Follow-Ups

The second important step is to ensure the prospects are followed-up in a highly personalized and timely fashion. This is where marketing automation yields the best results for lead nurturing. The idea is to create an automated machine (as Ryan Deiss call it) so that you can focus on other value-added activities. The medium of follow-up can be any, email, SMS, or push notification. Some of the examples of timely automated follow-ups

A sequence of three nurture emails (Download – Gain-Logic-Fear template) to request the user to purchase your initial offer
Abandonment Cart Email Sequence say within three hours after the user abandoning the cart
Drip series on a successful sign-up to educate the user about your product

The best part about marketing automation tools is that you can structure your follow-ups based on IF-ELSE logic. If X happens, then send Y email/SMS, or if Z happens, then send T Email/SMS. Expected Outcome – A highly targeted lead nurturing email campaign set-up in your own marketing automation tool.

3. Automating the Consumer Journey

Lucid Chart - Consumer Journey lead nurturing

Consumer journey refers to step-by-step activities (or touchpoints) a consumer goes through in the entire lifetime with the brand. Through automation, you can stay ahead of the curve and literally chart out the funnel (or steps) through which you want the consumers to move, before or after their purchase. For example,

Customer is driven to a landing page from a Facebook Ad -> Prompted to download the e-book -> the ones who have downloaded are requested to attend a webinar -> Ones who have attended a webinar are nurtured to undergo a free trial of your product -> Nurture to purchase paid version of software ->nurture the lead to purchase any top-ups (upsell) for the product -> Request feedback, and if feedback is positive, request to refer friends, provide reviews and ratings.

Having a well – constructed representation of the consumer journey (also known as a funnel) which is specific to your business is helpful in optimizing your marketing strategy.

4. Lead Scoring

The next strategy is to assign scores based on user behaviour and engagement. The idea is to devise a meaningful point-based system (or lead scoring) that can be useful for prioritizing the follow-up with your prospects. You should think through your own lead scoring formula and then implement in preferred marketing automation tool. An activity indicating a higher level of interest in your products or services should get more points. Also note, it is also important to keep analyzing the formula and not be afraid of refining it as you go.

This procedure is effective in prioritizing the leads that need to be targeted first. For instance, if the lead is marked as cold, then they would need more engagement with your lead nurturing team. On the other hand, if the lead is marked as hot then they are ready to close the deal and should be approached by the sales team immediately. Expected Outcome – Your prospects are assigned leads cores which in turn will help you segment them as Hot, Warm or Cold.

5. Loyalty through delight

It is an indomitable fact that the most powerful form of marketing is from the word of mouth. And this only comes through loyal customers who have been extremely satisfied with your product or services. With the help of CRM, businesses can collect personalized information of their client and use that to create personalized WOW lead nurturing sequence for their customers.

Now, who doesn’t love personalized experiences designed just for them? Off course this goes without saying that delighted customers turn into a loyal customer and customer loyalty goes a long way into increasing the ROI for your business

6. Analysis and Optimization

Any marketer knows that analysis plays an integral role in the framework of any marketing strategy’s success. Analytical marketing automation tools help marketers quantify the success and failure of their marketing techniques.

As you all know that there is no certainty of success while implementing a marketing strategy. However, with continuous analysis of any marketing strategy, marketers can determine the parts of the strategy which are succeeding or failing.

Once the above-mentioned points are ascertained then strategy needs to be optimized accordingly, thus increasing the probability of its success.

To sum things up it has been made extremely clear how crucial a role marketing automation tools play in the success of a business. From automating client communication to optimizing your marketing funnel, Marketers need to embrace lead nurturing for their business wholly and solely.

Automation in the healthcare industry – Massive Benefits

Posted on November 29, 2017November 6, 2019 by admin

Weeks back, we shed light on the growing importance of digital marketing in healthcare industry. No matter whether you run a corporate day surgery or a clinic, digital marketing and automation are becoming must-have elements for practitioners and medical service providers.

Let’s understand the need for automation in the healthcare industry

If you are from the healthcare industry, probably you would have started taking help of automation. And, if you are little hesitant about why you need automation in the healthcare industry, read through this article. There are numerous benefits of using automation in the healthcare industry.

A small exercise: Which scenario intrigues you more?

Scenario A:

John runs a dental clinic. He has employed 4 full-time nurse navigators. On average, they spend their 12 hours a week in attending phone calls, booking appointments, and maintaining excels of patient data.

Further, both in-house and outdoor patients are highly dependent on nurses for their treatments and related care. Obviously, nurse navigators have dual responsibilities of taking patient care and maintaining data. And hence, John can get very little quantified feedback data from their reporting. Since there is not much of actionable data to analyse, there are no corrective systems in place.

In spite of sufficient staff, John is not professionally satisfied. The reasons were quite a few. Nurse navigators are spending more than required time on repetitive and monotonous tasks. Also, he is unable to provide a personalised touch to his regular patients who lose their track during on-going treatments.

Scenario B:

John is advised to take help of automation to ease his pain. After employing business process automation in his dental clinic, he could lessen his fixed salary costs. Now, he has employed 3 full time and 1 part-time nurse navigators.

Further, when his patients go off track in taking their care from home, through self-service tools, he provides them with automated alerts. These alerts help them bring back on track.

The systems which he employed are user-friendly and provide him with immense ease in knowing real-time patient data. With the help of actionable feedback, he is able to gauge what concerns can be addressed that results in an overall increase in his ROI.

What is your take on these two scenarios? For sure, you will like to have an environment similar to Scenario B for your clinic/practice. The reason behind the differences in the environment is nothing else but “automation.”

It is the right time for you to realise the need of automation and get ready to tackle with new processes. Take a quick glance at some of the most prominent benefits of automation in the healthcare industry.

Benefits of automation in the healthcare industry

Increase in labour efficiency

Whether you run a day surgery or a small clinic, you need to carry out lots of stuff on a daily basis. A large chunk of routine activities is monotonous. Moreover, activities like processing insurance payments, transferring lab reports to the appropriate clinician, scheduling patients’ appointments, and compiling medical records and charts are routine admin tasks.

If you apply automation for these tasks, imagine how easy it would be for you. In addition, the entire labour work can be done in a few clicks and in much better-synchronised manner.

There is a common fear among practitioners and day surgery owners. They fear that implementing automation might hurt employments. But, this is not the case. Reduction in labour costs does not directly imply lay-offs in mass. In fact, medical centres, clinics, and day surgeries will still require people to get trained on how to automate monotonous tasks that result in efficiency and higher productivity.

Reduction in waste

Automation can efficiently boost the connection between nurses and patients. Nurses don’t need to spend their much of time in admin activities. Hence, nurses can better invest this saved time inpatient care.

On the other hand, usage of various papers, worksheets, registers, and others result in immense workload leading to a lot of waste. Automation can save all this is quite an effectual manner. A Texas hospital study found that greater automation in the areas of medical records, order entry, and decision support appeared to result in a reduction in deaths, complications and cost.

Increased certainty of results

Automation not only eases your admin activities, but it also helps patients to remain on track throughout their treatment tenure. With the help of automation in the healthcare industry, you can send your patients regular reminders of their next due treatment of consultation. You can also send them health tips, precautionary measures, or any other dos and don’ts related to their ongoing treatments.

On the other hand, since patients follow a standardised care path as directed by your automation services, most likely they will stay on track. Even if they get deviated, there are high chances of them coming back to track due to regular reminders. And hence, treatment outcomes will be quite close to your predictions.

Insights based on data rather than presumptions

Automation in the healthcare industry can make your lives much easier since you can get data-driven insights. Through properly integrated systems, you can get real-time data and continuous feedback. These two elements play a major role in performance enhancement and process optimisation.

Click to read more on: What is Marketing Automation?

Closing thoughts

The above listed expected benefits are just a glimpse of the overall picture. Once you get started with automation in the healthcare industry, you will be able to enjoy the beauty of automation services.

3 MUSTS to grow your Business

Posted on July 4, 2016November 6, 2019 by admin

Are you interested in entrepreneurship? Are you interested in starting up an entire digital kingdom of your own? Are you enthralled by the prospects of planning, processing and developing an entire market for yourself?

Well, then what is stopping you? Well, it looks like there are some snags that might be disrupting your rise to glory. Your business might be waiting to bloom, but due to the lack of some crucial elements, you might be missing out on a spectacle worth living for! You know what I am talking about. The moment when you realize that your business has broken beyond the bonds of its origin and is free to grow, develop and proliferate on its own.

Oh, wait.

But, where do you start all this? Let’s take an example just to give you an indication of the cardinal laws that govern the digital wilderness.

The 3 Cardinals of Online Business to Grow

#1 Design & Development

The first step that you have to take as far as climbing up the mountain of a task that digital empire building is, involves the planting of a seed of identity in a virtual space that your online business or website will call home. Developing an identity for your business is as important as developing a personality is for a child who matures from infancy to adulthood.

The foundation of your identity is your website- which ultimately becomes your model to develop your app, digital advertisement, etc. There are 2 parts to this:

WEB DESIGN:

Designing is basically made up of everything that the viewer comes in contact with as soon as they land on your website. This includes the overall look and feel of your website. The design of your site gives an apt indication of what elements your business is defined by as well as the inherent conceptualization of business model. We have only started to understand how revealing a design can truly be as far as sending out messages about your business as well as your intentions is concerned. Design is similar to the clothes that you wear, in that they reveal a lot about your personality as well as your mindset.

The seed of identity of your website is sown through the process of logo design, where the intentions behind your business ideals are expressed artistically. The next phases of designing include aspects such as designing of the virtual space that your business calls home, which is embedded in the process known as website design.

WEB DEVELOPMENT:

Development basically takes care of all the background that that goes into making your site that is controlling how every icon, widget, tool works on your site. For this you need programmers who specialize in programming languages such as C++, HTML, Java, PHP. Being at the helm of an online business may involve the need to use special tools and plugins on your site, such as payment processors and API (Application Programming Interfaces).

The integration of plugins and templates is an especially significant point of consideration if you are nurturing your website on a CMS platform like Joomla or WordPress. CMS stands for Content Management System, a platform that enables users to create digital content equipped with low-level details and user-friendly interfaces. We can use this for controlling formatting, history editing, updating versions, managing search bars, integrating plugins, and more. This process of development changes and fluctuates on the basis of the CMS platform on which you are building your website, which means that Joomla development might differ heavily from WordPress development or Magento development.

Development of entire websites and digital empires can be done through the use of frameworks as well. These frameworks provide much greater freedom and flexibility as far as development is concerned, owing to the fact that they are made up of fixed patterns of methods and classes of code. The process of using frameworks for the development of a website includes the practice of Laravel development, Smarty development, Drupal development, Zen Cart development and Zend development.

#2 Marketing

Let’s face it, your business or website needs to have numerous channels through which it can express itself and reach out to people. A website or business without a dedicated target audience or consumer base is good as a tree without roots. The only way the website or business can grow is if it receives the nectar that all majestic digital creatures crave on the online medium, traffic!

Know your message- This is the foremost thing you need to be clear about. What are you really advertising? What is it that you are putting out to your consumers? Always remember, what you are producing isn’t always the same as what you are advertising. The lack of proper communication can ultimately be the end of your business or website. Without a voice and an intention, your website will be left out in the vast market of the digital space, with no one to notice it or to acknowledge its presence.
Know your audience– The motive or intention behind your website or product determines your target audience. A matte lipstick brand will target women in their 20s-30s, while a domestic drill will target husbands. Therefore, once you get the statistics of the specific target population to which your product/service appeals the most. You can initiate the process of increasing connectivity and strengthening the bonds within and without the business.
Know your medium– In order to truly allow your business to grow beyond the bounds which it was created within during the inception phase. You need to understand how your customers interact and grow with the content/product/service that you offer them. This is of special significance as far as choosing a platform or medium of advertising is concerned. By using different mediums of advertising, you can start paying attention to the various aspects that your audience pays attention to. The medium you use defines the criteria that audiences employ to consume your product or service. Hence, by understanding the behaviour of your audience on different mediums, you can play around with the various tactics and techniques by tailoring them according to the differences that are evident among different mediums.

The techniques, in this case, include aspects such as digital marketing, content marketing and social media marketing.

#3 Automation

Automation is another word for response, and is a distinct process which involves both users and producers on the same platform. To be more specific, it is a process that often blurs the lines between plain digital marketing. And more advanced software-based techniques of monitoring and analysis. Marketing Automation refers to the use of various software-based tools. Which can be used to convert repetitive processes into fully automated processes within the body of the business or the website. This is similar to converting certain processes involved in the development and marketing realm of the businesses into functions which occur involuntarily. Imagine this to be similar to shaping involuntary functions of a living organism, such as breathing, pumping of the heart as well as aspects such as digestion.

How can you make use of this?

Marketing automation is the ultimate tool for any aspect of online business development. Often defined by optimum assembly-line software, marketing automation lets you effectively handle your consumer base. Right from targeting the right audience to market integration. This helps you to be constantly connected with your consumers. Through offer-announcing SMSs, appraising emails and active polls, social campaigns and market funnelling techniques. Without the need to worry about maintenance and management.

Marketing automation

by making use of tools like Infusionsoft can cause immense returns for your business. This is possible due to the fact that it creates the opportunity for business owners to automate processes such as market funnel management, API integration, sales cart automation, and more. There are several other tools and practices for ensuring that you gain mastery over the process of automated marketing.

So, there you go mate- you have successfully summed up the stepping stones of online business development. Although reading material isn’t all that goes into building your empire, it is better to know the depth of the water before you cross the river, isn’t it?

Do let us know your queries, insights and opinions on these aspects that we have explored.