Categories
B2B Marketing

3 Automated CRM Tools For Your Company Website

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.

Give them both a boost with automated CRM.

Categories
Big Data General

How Your Existing Customer Data Can Help You Predict the Future

Your existing CRM data is a treasure trove. But, you are likely not using it properly. Certainly not in today’s new ways of extracting and positioning that data for online use in your marketing. You are missing a huge opportunity. You can use that data (that you already own) to drive more targeted business using your existing customer data. Learn more about your own data, use it wisely in your marketing, and you can begin to predict the future for potential traffic, sales and bottom line profits.

Gone are the days when print marketing was used to reach existing and potential customers. Today’s marketing professionals understand how using CRM data to synchronize sales and marketing efforts, across various digital mediums, is an imperative part of an effective business plan.

A positive, return-of-investment ad campaign is only deemed so when the click-though and purchase rates are satisfactory enough to justify the time, effort and financial costs associated with them.

This is where the union between measurement, targeting and personalization all come into play.

Measurement

Setting pre-defined goals for each campaign allows marketers to determine whether a campaign was a success.content marketing data metrics strategies

Whether it is through the use of A/B testing, a percentage of views/clicks/submissions or through the use of some other metrics, the goal is to target an audience and have them end up, not as a customer in the monthly/quarterly/yearly sales cycle, but as a life-long business relationship.

Regardless of which type of advertising  medium, or combination thereof, a business will choose; the goal of all effective advertising campaigns is to reach a customer, despite where they are (online, off-line, mobile). An effective marketer can only measure customers he or she has reached.

What about the others that slipped away?

Targeting

Look-alike modeling, also known as a Lookalike Audience, is currently a marketing practice used by social media giant Facebook.  A Lookalike Audience is a group of prospects targeted based on the customer personas a particular business wishes to reach.

look a like modeling crm data

In addition to gaining new followers for your business and boosting your brand’s social media presence, these prospective custom audiences are also an asset when vying for additional landing page sell-through revenues. Other online big data service marketing providers like Liveramp – provides lookalike audiences for CRM.

Targeted groups can be reached during various points of the customer lifecycle stage and look-alike modeling can be used, not only as an inexpensive way to gain new prospects but to test the effectiveness of new calls-to-action.

With metrics factored in, a business can have measurable results based on existing customer bases while capturing new, Lookalike Audiences and evaluating their response rates.

Personalization

To ensure both active and potential customers receive personalized service, multi-channel marketing can be implemented throughout the use of social media outlets. Interactive digital campaigns should be used to deliver online ads to an intended group of consumers previously served by email or direct mail.

marketing personalization avatars campaignsWhen these personalized marketing campaigns are cohesively aligned with CRM programs, actionable results can include:

  • Cost savings from having to pay for direct mail-related expenses and the avoidance of mail not reaching the intended recipient.
  • Reduction of emails being sent to spam folders; thus never being read.
  • Client reporting becomes easier as each specific campaign’s overall performance metrics are actionably measured, reported and archived for future use.
  • Ability to increase a business’ social media presence through the use of instant social media postings, landing page redirects, video marketing and other new-media.

Can Traditional and Digital Media Be Used Together In the CRM Experience?

The answer is certainly yes; if it will help increase your business’ overall bottom line and provide superior customer service. Again, this is where understanding your targeted customer demographic and personas come into play.

When implementing the true form of multi-channel marketing, customer interaction and acquisition are the goals. This means customer engagement and response could come from a direct mail catalog, visiting a business’ retail location, reading updates on a social media site, or instantly connecting with a mobile application.

Since an audience will need to be receptive to campaigns, A/B testing was mentioned earlier, but don’t forget about frequent digital content updates and making them relevant. Remember, the first 160 characters in any message are the most important, especially those delivered on mobile devices.

Attention-grabbing headlines, promotions and calls-to-action are a priority, and when executed effectively, can help increase a business’ CRM database, overall service reputation, attainable digital audience, and prospective yearly revenue.

To learn more about utilizing your existing customer data, and how you can leverage it for driving traffic and real customer engagements – get more information here.