Improving the customer experience is simple with automated customer relationship management tools.
When applied correctly, these automated tools can single handedly improve the customer experience, all while boosting your business’ bottom line.
Here’s how.
Why Automated CRM Matters
How do you manage your customer relationships? Gone are the days when business owners turn to unmanageable spreadsheets.
Modern business leaders are increasingly implementing automated customer relationship management tools to better manage their contacts.
Automated customer relationship management comes in many forms, from personalized emails to targeted customer recommendations on a website based-on past purchases or interests.
Today’s CRM tools offer scalable personalization, no longer leaving personalization for a few “best” customers, but to all customers. CRM also leads to higher customer retention rates, which is key.
Returning customers will spend 31 percent more than a new customer, and retained customers are 60 to 70 percent more likely to buy from a business that they already have a relationship with than a customer who’s never done business with you.
CRM can also give you freedom, freeing up time from tedious tasks like data entry and customer information recording.
Essential Webmaster Tools
Customer relationships are the driving force of your company.
An automated and cloud-based customer relationship management tool, such as Infor CRM, can help you maximize the impact of every single customer interaction through industry specific capabilities, flexibility and scale and deep integration.
Infor CRM gives business leaders and their teams a seamless, easy-to-use platform that can be accessed across all teams, helping your company to work smarter, not harder, with a functional user experience.
Make use of Infor consulting services, articles and video tutorials on Infor CRM to ensure that your team is up to speed.
Helpful Automated Messaging
Customers come to your website to learn more about your goods or services. Your website is essentially an online version of a storefront for your business.
Here customers can get a glimpse of what you stand for, learn about your company and browse a selection of your offerings.
But who can they turn to when they have a question?
Think about the last time that you were in a department store.
You were probably looking around, getting to know the company, and then you had a question. You likely found a store clerk to talk to.
Like a store clerk, automated messaging services such as LiveChat can give your customers the chance to get answers to their questions without sending an email or dialing up your company by phone.
Real-time answers can inspire purchases and keep your existing customers returning, and impress your first time clients.
In fact, according to LiveChat data, visitors invited to chat are 6.3 times more likely to convert into customers than those who don’t chat.
Modern Customer Self-Service
Today’s customers are more connected than ever before and these digitally savvy customers often act on their own timeframe and terms. Make sure that you offer what these connected customers need with a self-service portal on your company’s website.
The Salesforce Self-Service portal allows you to design and build mobile-friendly, and branded, portals that can enhance the customer experience. Best of all, the low-code option is easy to use and deploy.
Your customer relationships and your bottom line are related.
However, with a good plan, tools and resources, you can make it more effective.
Using the right content marketing productivity tools should help you achieve that goal.
Here are 12 of the most uncommon content market productivity tools that should help save more time.
#1 – SEMrush.com
You can use this content marketing tool to identify how your competitors are ranking on Google.
Using SEMrush, it’s easy to assess the amount of traffic going to your competitors’ websites as well as the keywords being used to get higher rankings.
What you need to do is enter the web address to your competitor’s website and this tool will reveal the list of keywords used for ranking on Google.
Steps to get started with SEMrush:
Open a free account on SEMrush and register yourself and you can gain access to the top keywords your competitors are using to drive traffic to their websites. You can begin by entering their web addresses (URLs) and watch for both the organic and paid results, traffic numbers, cost per click and more.
If you’re aware of these keywords, maybe you can use some of them to bring more traffic to your own site.
Naturally, you want to create content on your website that gets shared across numerous social media platforms.
Using Buzzsumo, you can find out the commonly shared content and shape your own content around the same topics.
Steps to get started with BuzzSumo:
Using this tool, you should enter your own address or your competitor’s website address and find out which content is mostly shared across different social media channels.
Also, you can search for keywords and find any content related to these specific keywords that’s shared the most.
You can use Buzzsumo to examine the type of content shared on specific social media channels and produce content to similar to what’s targeted on these channels.
You can use this to get statistics about what’s working, and use it to get new ideas for your own content marketing strategies.
#3 – Canva.com
Canva is a power tool used to prepare any promotional visuals to be used on your website. It might be very expensive to hire graphic designers for every image that’s need to go on your website.
Well, through Canva, you can perform any graphic design features needed on your site without the need for graphic design skills. You can produce professional and impressive images using a streamlined and simple interface.
Even better, you can create similar images to be used on the same content rather than using the same image over and over again.
Figure 1 – Easy designer layouts and editing
Figure 2 – Preset sizes and images + custom dimensions
Steps to get started with Canva: Create a free account, and login via Twitter, Facebook or email. Using the app in your browser is free, and many textual and picture elements can be used for free to start. If you want to upgrade, you’ll get additional images and tools to make it even better. There is a team version, starting at $9.95/month, but the first 30 days is free.
#4 – QuillEngage.com
This tool allows you to monitor your results without the need for using Google Analytics which can be quite exhausting and time consuming.
Steps to get started with QuillEngage: Create a free starter account, and connect with your Google Analytics profile.
Pick the template you need, and save. Quill Engage will send a weekly (or daily) email with a complete interpretation of your website’s results which is simple and easy to understand.
QuillEngage has different pricing models for you to start, from free, basic and premium pricing structures:
#5 – EditFlow.org
Using Edit Flow, you can build your own editorial calendar which is an essential part of content marketing.
If you plan your content accordingly, you can become more productive and produce better content for your visitors.
Steps to get started with EditFlow: This tool is a free WordPress plug-in that allows you to view all the drafted posts to adjust dates accordingly, send messages to all the team members and also set custom status updates that match your workflow.
Create an account, and follow the simple instructions.
#6 – Do Share (Google Chrome Web Store)
This is a Google Chrome plug-in that allows you to post content to your personal Google+ profile. Currently, it’s not possible to schedule any posts through Google to your personal profile.
However, by using Do Share you can hold any content until the time for posting it arrives. Of course, your browser must be open when posting time comes around in order for the tool to work properly.
Also, you can pick content from Google+ and send it to the tool for later posting.
Yet another Google Chrome Plugin, Momentum allows you to plan your tasks and provides daily reminders.
Momentumdash.com – chrome plugin for productivity
Therefore, if you plan on updating your website’s content on any particular day, you can use this tool to keep everything in check and make sure that everything is completed in time.
You can also use this app to monitor the rest of the tools you’re using for your content marketing efforts. Once you confirm your account, you’ll be ready to go.
Combine this plugin with calm.com and get more work done with less distractions.
Also recommended: A good summary of tools and techniques as a companion guide, was done by HealthAmbition.com You can find this here.
#10 – Self Control App.com
Do you always find yourself distracted every time you are on the internet?
Do you need an app that blocks your access to other distracting websites when you’re working on your site’s content?
Self Control App: Block distractions and get more productive online (Mac Version)
Well, thanks to Self Control , you can achieve exactly that.
Specifically for Mac users, the app blocks your access to any distracting websites allowing you to allocate more time to your site.
Basically, you set a period of time and a number of sites to be blocked then your access to these sites will be blocked during that time.
Regardless of whether you delete the app and restart your computer during that time period, nothing changes.
#11 – Slack.com
If you’re working with a content marketing team, you need a platform where communications are easy and effortless between all the team members.
Slack.com – better communication and productivity across channels and teams
Here, everything is in one place and you can search for it very easily.
It’s the best communication tool for most modern content marketing teams.
#12 – Evernote.com
When creating and marketing content for your website, you’re likely to create notes and comments you need to add or follow-up on.
Evernote.com – turn on your team collaboration and productivity
Keeping track of these notes can be very difficult.
Well, if you’re using an app like Evernote, you can easily get access to these notes whenever you need them.
BONUS: Don’t forget to include the amazing co-schedule product when discussing calendaring and team work for your content marketing and social media projects.
Coschedule.com – WordPress productivity tools and calendaring functions for social media and more
It fits right into your WordPress CMS, and has a nifty Chrome browser plugin too. It’s our mainstay product.
BONUS:Get the free lead generation guide that will show you how to quickly get more leads from traffic. Includes 2 bonus strategies not found in this post.
We also hear great things about hipstersound and defonic, but have not installed/tested them yet.
Business owners are limited in what they can personally handle for every day tasks in their business. While most would prefer to see each task through from start to finish, it’s just not feasible.
To-do lists grow just as a company does, and owners are forced to delegate even more responsibilities to others. It can be hard to offload duties, since you still want to be sure they’re being done properly.
For this process to work smoothly, you’ll want to entrust some online solutions and resources to help you.
Here are a few key areas to focus on:
Be Secure
Whether you’re in a technology business or not, most facets of your business are run online. With your sensitive details and most important information housed in a virtual environment, you can be left vulnerable.
There are various solutions that can be used to safeguard your data; MozyEnterprise is one of the most trusted. This type of tool can help you stay on top of file backups and online security.
Oversee the Books
What is a business without a deftly run accounting department? You may get by as you playing CFO at the beginning, but if you don’t have a strong background in finance, you – and your business – will inevitably flounder if you do this long term.
Be sure whoever is managing your company’s money is well educated and highly experienced in corporate finance. This individual should regularly report to you with past reports, current status and future projections.
For most owners though, this sort of reporting isn’t enough. You launched this company, you want to have your finger on the pulse of its fiscal health.
If this mindset resonates with you, consider a tool like QuickBooks Online Plus for your accounting needs.
With this tool, your company can take advantage of double-entry accounting, a deep level of customization, easy usability and comprehensive reporting. With its Web-based nature, you’re never more than a click away from checking in on how things are looking from a financial perspective.
Analyze Your Strategies
If you’ve handed over the responsibility of marketing to another leader on your team, kudos to you for taking that important step. But just because you’re trusting your marketing department to brainstorm strategies and see them through to execution doesn’t mean that you need to completely drop the reins.
As the business’s chief leader, you should be up to date on how marketing initiatives (and sales efforts) are performing. One of the best ways to gauge the effectiveness of campaigns is by turning to Google Analytics.
Use this service to monitor your traffic, get insight into how effective your mobile apps are and boost sales.
Notice: Video and story-based messaging is extremely powerful when used within a well developed business strategy. Lumen5 is a social video marketing tool which has been noted by Social Media Examiner as one of the best tools to make videos. Try it for Free.
Manage Your Reputation
Last, but not least, how do you do your best to control your brand’s precious image in the eyes of consumers (and competitors)? The best (and hardest to swallow) answer is that you craft and keep this image by doing reputable work, following through on promises and always keeping integrity as your focal point.
Beyond this, you can employ a variety of tools to see how others perceive your company.
Try using a solution like SocialMention to search for your brand’s name and other related key words and get real-time feedback.
By seeing what’s out there, you can nimbly handle any problematic situations that arise. Your reputation is everything, so you’d be wise to be consistently aware of it.
As you seek to maintain control of your business, while simultaneously empowering other leaders to handle some of the duties you can’t, it can be hard to find a good balance. Use online tools that benefit your business and allow you to still have a bird’s eye view of your company’s functions without micromanaging.
Keep your data secure, your finances functional (and visible), your strategies evaluated and your reputation intact.
With some help from these systems, you’re sure to stay appropriately involved while letting your business flourish under a healthy amount of autonomy.
