Why CRM is the perfect choice for Marketing Automation?

Marketing is more than attracting people, it’s about creating value within your brand so they can relate to your offerings and approach you themselves. This way you can create long-lasting relationships with your customer and get returning business from them.

Needless it used to require a lot of effort from cross-functional teams to implement optimum marketing strategies. However, with recent technological advancements, it’s possible to automate the majority of your marketing campaigns, and one of the bests tools for marketing automation is a customer relationship platform (CRM).

In this article, we are going to discuss how the CRM platform help in streamlining your business’s automated marketing endeavours, so without further ado let’s get started.

What is customer relationship management software?

CRM is a marketing automation software, designed to take care of all your major customer relations needs, and automate crucial elements within your business. It plays the role of an ideal secretary. It is constantly working for the betterment of your marketing strategies, marketing designs, customer feedback loops, and more.

Some of its major functions include historically tracking historical customer data, including dates and notes of phone conversations, past purchase records, and email interactions as they proceed through the buyer’s journey. Using tagging logic the CRM applies tags on the users when they take certain actions such as adding items to their wishlist or filling out a form and launches email campaigns to direct the leads back into your sales funnel.

Why CRM is the best choice for marketing automation?

The CRM has a wide range of benefits that elevate your automated marketing capabilities such as:

Reduces chances of Human Error

When businesses have an outdated system or process in place for lead tracking, the probability of human error that comes with managing the shortcomings increases which might lead to prospects slipping through the cracks. CRMs marketing automation enables your sales team to have the right tools to close a deal.

Unify Your Database Management

The CRM provides all the user’s information in one place, Marketing teams don’t have to go out of their way to forage customer profile information and instead are able to prepare to approach leads and prospects based on unified data management.

Provide Consistent Messaging

The marketing communication that affects the customer’s experience can be aligned when engaging with the client. It’s not as much of a challenge to provide consistent messaging when you have all the contextual information available in CRM.

Lastly…

The CRM is truly a wonderful platform fully capable of automating all your marketing endeavours. However, to unlock its full potential, you need support from professional digital marketers like QL Tech having over a decade of experience in CRM implementation and customisation.

In case you need help in CRM customisation or have any questions regarding CRMs, please feel free to book a free 30 minutes session with us and we’ll try our best to help you out

Cheers!!

Converting Traffic into Leads Might be Harder Than you Think

Having a beautiful website with great content isn’t enough your website’s design should be in such a way that your leads get registered efficiently. The first step would be to start off with high-demand generation campaigns that generate leads.

The aim of the marketing team for the business is to procure as many leads as that successfully convert to loyal customers who bring repeated business. Any professional digital marketer knows that they need to set up effective lead nurturing campaigns to gather more and more leads for your brand, However, its easier said than done,

This is why in this article we’re to be discussing some of the most powerful lead nurturing campaigns that will capture your audience’s attention, increase their lead scores, and boost the selling potential of your website and your sales team. 

So let’s get cracking, shall we!

1) Segment leads for targetted messages

Your brand might be offering multiple products or services but not all your leads may be interested in everything you’ve got. This is why engaging with your leads through personalised messaging is necessary. When you communicate with your audience with contextual messaging, the success rates of conversion increase exponentially.

Your business should implement a system for grouping your leads into targeted segments. This would allow you to focus on specific challenges and solutions, which will enable you to form a relationship with your prospects on a more personal level.

You can segment your leads either based on their behaviour or demographics and some organisations use multiple buyer’s personas. Now the good news is you don’t have to do all this manually, There are tools like Customer Data Platform (CDP) and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) to automate your contextual messaging and make sure the right messages reach the right people at the right time.

2) Educate more, promote less

Most marketers are so eager to get business from their leads that they get overly promotional. What the need to be focused on empowering the audience with educational content so that the audience truly understands the challenge your brand can help them with.

People don’t want a sales pitch they need to feel enabled so that they can make a purchase decision on their own, If we keep ignoring what the leads really want there is a very high chance that we might lose them.

The main objective should be to provide meaningful and actionable information throughout your email campaign that follows a clear path through the marketing funnel.

3) The first impression has a massive impact

The first email that you sent to your audience becomes a deciding factor that whether your brand would be judged spammy or whether the recipient would look forward to further communications from your side.

It is crucial we always remember the value of a lead, don’t spoil the relationship before you give it a chance to blossom by failing to follow up on an engagement or spamming with too many messages in a short timespan.

In this regard a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) can help your business out greatly, they track the open rate of emails and follow what was the email about. Based on this your Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) can send relevant information to your leads and gently guide them through the funnel.

Final words…

Lead nurturing is one of the most crucial activities of digital marketing and if done correctly it can do wonders for your business’s growth. However, it is not as easy as it seems, it is advised you consider consulting with a professional digital marketer if you wish to implement a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) for your business.

In case you have any questions or need more advice on Customer Relationship Management (CRM) & Customer Data Platform (CDP) implementation feel free to contact us and we would be happy to help you out.

Cheers!!

Inbound Marketing Strategy to Enhance Your Business

First of all Inbound marketing is not a new concept for the business world. According to the surveys and the reports of Hubspot1, 74% of MNCs are following Inbound marketing strategy. And, 75% of their marketing people confirm that their strategies are quite effective in the market.

As the customer experience matures and time passes, new challenges and opportunities emerge for every marketing professional.

As stated in Hubspot’s inbound marketing report, here are the marketing challenges faced in 2019:

Marketing Challenges 2019
  • 61% of marketing professional faces leads and traffic generation issues.
  • 39% of marketers are unable to verify their Return Of Investment.
  • 27% are facing budget problems.

Well, it’s all about choosing the correct inbound marketing strategies for your business to overcome the above-mentioned challenges.

Let’s go further more, and explore the best inbound marketing strategies that you can implement for your business.

Create SEO Friendly Topic Clusters

If your business is involved with the online world then you might be aware that the higher your brand gains in Search Engines results, the better are the chances of gaining the prospect’s attention. One of the potential tactics that you must approach is the topic cluster inbound strategy.

Topic clusters are the set of interlinked blogs or pages which are already evolved with umbrella topics. With the help of a topic cluster, the visibility of content becomes clearer. Basically, topic clusters help Search Engines to cache content easily. As the content is more visible on the Search Engines, automatically your brand value will increase.

Create SEO Friendly Topic Clusters

For creating a topic cluster, a pillar page is a must. Pillar page extensively covers a specific topic comprehensively. It contains topics which address the crucial section of the content including a link that redirects the users to the subtopics containing deeper information.

Combination of blogs interlinked with subtopics listed on the pillar page is the topic cluster. Through topic cluster, you can show the semantic relationship of your content that will allow the Search Engines to crawl your brand name easily. The more your content is visible on Search Engines, the more you can generate traffic and leads.

Utilization Of CRM Tool

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is an approach to manage regular communication between a business and its potential customers. A CRM uses a data analysing process to retrieve the customer’s purchasing history to improve their productivity and user service experience. 

Utilization Of CRM Tool

For the implementation of this approach, there are many CRM tools that provide astounding benefits to businesses involved with the online world. 

A CRM tool will allow you to analyse the data of the customers that are engaging with your marketing activities and to keep a regular track on it. Not only this, a CRM tool can help in campaign management, sales automation, customer categorization, send emails, generate reports and much more.

Let’s take a look at the benefits a CRM tool can provide to your business.

Boost Sales Productivity

Industries using CRM system find out 29% of increment in sales, 34% in sales productivity and 42% in sales forecast accuracy. (Source: Salesforce)

A modern CRM system will help you in closing more leads that will automatically boost your sales productivity. According to the survey by Act!2, 48% of the 700 marketers consider that CRM made them achieve better sales function than before.

Improve Service Experience

A CRM tool allows you to collect your customer’s data from various sources like social media and categorize it in its database. With that database, you can analyse the buyer’s journey and can create an accurate buyer persona. 54% of marketers accept that CRM system allowed them to provide better customer services and also satisfied the customers.

Customer Retention

A recent poll conducted for CRM users shows that 47% of responders believe that using CRM has brought great impact on customer retention. (Source: Capterra)

These same CRM users who responded to the poll also believe that CRM system helped in increasing customer satisfaction. If your customer base is quite strong then a small increment of prospect retention and satisfaction will make you a huge profit.

Analytics and Reporting

A little miscalculation in any business can lead to a huge loss in every aspect. A CRM tool creates a complete statically visual report that will include every minor corner of your day to day business journey. A business report will allow you to enhance and keep a track on your business performance. 

Best CRM tools are:

Zoho Office Suite

Keap (Infusionsoft CRM)

Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Hubspot CRM

Act! CRM

Search out the best CRM tool that suits your business and keep a complete track on ROI.

Perform Organic Marketing Activities

Marketing activities like content marketing, search engine optimization, social media marketing and branding, all come under Inbound marketing. This inbound marketing strategy is a long-term strategy that will keep you and customers engaged for a longer period of time. 

PPC (Pay Per Click) is another internet marketing model to gain traffic quickly as it’s a paid advertising service and also a short-term strategy. Although, it’s not an organic marketing activity integrating organic marketing with PPC can enhance your visibility on Search Engines.

Perform Organic Marketing Activities

Organic marketing activity is a great Inbound marketing strategy because you do not require any investment. Try using different social media platforms like Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, etc. With the help of these social marketing networks, you can save enough budget that can be used for your brand development.

  • Near about 67% of audiences use Facebook as their source of news.
  • 71% of consumers whose social media experience went well are more likely to recommend others for the same.
  • More than 80% of Instagram users are following at least one brand’s business page.

Customer engagement on Instagram compared with other social networks are:

  • 84% greater than Twitter
  • 10% higher than Facebook
  • 54% better than Pinterest

However, this does not mean that you only use Instagram as your social marketing platform. 

  • Twitter mentions that 80% of Inbound advertisers resolve service requests of their customers daily.

For more details, you can consider going through Hubspot’s blog page.

Conclusion

Your customers are already aware of their requirements as 60% of the world’s population is active on the internet interacting with blogs, forums, social platforms, etc. It’s your business which requires changes to make your customers happy. 

These inbound marketing strategies can vary according to your business. Try listing down your marketing problems and then consider implementing these effective strategies.

Also, make sure to choose a CRM tool that suits your business cycle. Therefore, for more in-depth knowledge, do not hesitate to connect us at https://www.qltech.com.au/contact/

FOOTNOTES

  1. The Inbound Strategy, 2019, Hubspot
  2. Act! Benefits of CRM