If you wanted to generate the data of customers who filled out your website form, but did not convert, how soon will you be able to get it? Is it buried in elaborate Google sheets with multiple filters and multiple access permissions?
Google sheets can store customer data to a point, if your business is small and has a limited number of customers. But once the number of customers grows, most businesses struggle to organize them well, allocate them to the right person, and follow up regularly.
At what point do you need a CRM solution?
Small, but ambitious organizations can start organizing customer data in CRM to automate their marketing efforts since many CRM solutions allow sending emails or SMS to customers.
If your customer data is in multiple places or in large, cumbersome spreadsheets, you need to implement CRM urgently to make sure that you optimize your sales process.
What is a Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution?
CRM solutions help you collate, organize, and manage your customer information so that you can create insightful reports, convert customers better, upsell and cross-sell effectively.
You can bring in data from your different sources to the CRM.
Leads from Web Forms
CRM platforms allow you to create your own web forms for the website or campaigns with standard and custom fields. These forms can then be added to your website through frames or HTML code. Leads that come through these web forms are directly added to the CRM:
Leads from Paid Campaigns
You can create custom landing pages with drag-and-drop blocks of images, text, videos, forms, surveys, etc. These landing pages are created as a subdomain to your main domain enabling faster page creation and better conversion.
Some CRM platforms also allow you to run campaigns on different search engines and social media platforms from their interface. You can use the CRM platform to run campaigns on Google Ads, Facebook, Instagram, Twitter, LinkedIn, YouTube, etc., giving you a comprehensive view of your entire media spend and performance in one place, instead of logging in to individual platforms to run your campaigns and fetch reports.
Leads from Phone Calls
The integration between phone calls to your organization and CRM is done through VOIP telephony platforms like Twilio, Exotel, Knowlarity, etc. where the calls are redirected to your CRM from where they can be answered. The leads are also created immediately on the platform helping you quickly assign and address new leads coming into your business.
Email Leads
Email integration with CRM allows you to create leads on the CRM as soon as a customer sends an email to your corporate email id. Emails can then be accessed, and replied to, from the CRM interface itself giving you the complete history of your communication with a customer.
Leads from Chat
CRM platforms have integrated chatbots that can be customized and taught to answer your customers intelligently. They can also redirect that chats to your agents who can then answer the questions that cannot be handled by chatbots.
Leads from Cold Calls
Leads that are not qualified by marketing or sales teams (MQL or SQL) can be added to your CRM as prospects. Depending on lead scores, they can then be assigned and entered into the marketing or sales funnel. Manual and automated processes are available in most CRM tools to handle call dispositions easily and effectively.
andled by chatbots.Leads from Third Party platforms
If your business uses third party platforms for LMS, Analytics, ERP etc., the leads acquired from these platforms can be added to the CRM through APIs or bulk uploads.
In short, the aim of the CRM system should be to bring together each individual nugget of data you have about customers, prospects, visitors etc. so that your customer profiling is systematic and thorough.
What are the top CRM solutions available?
There are hundreds of CRM solutions to choose form, each their areas of expertise and unique features. Here are some of the top CRM tools you can look at:
- Salesforce CRM
- Hubspot
- Zoho CRM
- Microsoft Dynamics 365
- Pipedrive
- Monday.com
- Oracle CRM
- Zendesk
- Bitrix24
What are the benefits of implementing CRM?
Bring together your customer information from all sources
Leads from campaigns, websites, apps, phone calls, emails, walk-ins can all be brought together in a single platform through the CRM. This enables you to better organize and profile your customers, making it easy for you to contact them, or to fetch their history of interaction with your organization.
Streamline your sales process
When your customer database is well-organized, searchable, easily accessible, and assigned to the right salespeople, you can respond quicker to customer inquiries enabling your sales team to close leads sooner. History of a customer’s interaction with you is easily accessible to the sales team helping them make informed decisions on what pricing to offer and whether to give discounts based on how likely a customer is to convert.
Automate marketing processes
As any salesperson can tell you, it’s way easier to sell to a customer who has already heard about than, than making cold calls. Using CRM platforms, you can nurture prospects with emails or messages, gradually nudging them to become your customer.
Marketing automation is built into many CRM tools allowing you to segment customers, create lists, and target customer groups with specific messages at pre-defined time intervals.
Cross-sell and Upsell effectively
Once you are able to filter out customers by the products or services they have purchased, and the ones they are interested in, you can pitch other products or services more effectively.
Use email campaigns, direct messaging, or even phone calls to reach out to prospective customers with just the products they are looking for.
Build good Remarketing lists
Most ad platforms allow you to upload a list of email ids to whom you can advertise using display campaigns. Segment and profile your audience from the CRM platform to target them in your remarketing campaigns.
Nurture your Social Media audience
CRM platforms allow integrations with social media platforms to bring in all customer interactions on social media into the CRM. These can then be converted into leads based on their requirements and interest levels.
Dashboards and Reports
CRM dashboard builders help the management to have a comprehensive view of the number of leads, conversions, lead sources at one glance.
Most CRM platforms allow multiple reports to give you granular data on the metrics you want, the way you want it. Filter, slice, mine, deep dive, segment, and analyze to understand your business health.
Increase employee and customer satisfaction
The ultimate aim of any organization is to keep your employees and customers happy. Help your sales and marketing teams get more organized and productive with the CRM platform. Help you customers by addressing their queries and concerns quicker with the CRM platform.
More conversions would mean happier employees, customers, management, and stakeholders.
Reach out to Tagbeans if you need help with implementing the right CRM for your business. Make sure you analyze the pros and cons, features available, and above all, your business requirements before deciding on the CRM platform to go with.