The year 2020 might have been awful in so many ways from start to finish. But one thing is for sure, we have made great strides in the development of the latest innovation in digital marketing platforms that is the Customer Database Platform (CDP).
Every entrepreneur is trying to utilise this technology to gain an edge in the world of online marketing and customer service. Which is to be expected as the Customer Database Platform can really help in transforming both the aspects of the business.
But before we jump the gun talking about the latest trends in CDP, for those who a fairly new to the platform, we’ll discuss a little bit about CDP and what it can do?
So, let’s get cracking shall we…
About Customer Database Platform
In short, a CDP is a Digital marketing framework that helps present a centralised, diligent and individual perspective on the customer, consolidating data from numerous channels, platforms, and tools.
Not only this the Customer Database Platform lets the data migrate to and fro between different customer data frameworks to streamline communications and oversee customer engagement. The information it consolidates can be easily customized that enables businesses to implement contextual marketing strategies.
Some of its main features
1) Reporting via customized dashboards
CDPs display strong utility in terms of customisation. With real-time notification capabilities, This platform can auto-generate highly refined reports for end-to-end visualisation. Its unifies dashboards will permit you to choose what data that meets your specific business requirement.
2) Automation across channels
The CDPs improve automated advertising capability by re-arranging rough data. The platform’s programming can execute cross-channel in a systematic and easy to visualise manner.
3) Multiple Integrations
Get a guaranteed stack of options to incorporate with other platforms, so you pick so you can have one focal database for the entirety of your customer data at your fingertips.
2020 trends for Customer Database Platform
Now the awaited news on what’s all been happening on the CDP front:
Vendors of applications are incentivised to add CDP capabilities to their systems because some clients want them. Individual CDPs are used for each system
The client will be advised by not to keep a singular CDP as their primary database as it adds value to their product and makes clients less likely to switch to another system.
Comprehensive accuracy of the ‘identity graph’ in finding matches between identifiers, beyond matches made using the customer’s own data
Additional information circulated by the vendor, both to refine the existing customer and prospect records and to inculcate new customers and prospects to the customer’s list.
Last words…
In spite of the recent developments, there’s still much work to be done in the Customer Database Platform. However, things are looking up as more and more people are getting interested in this technology.
We promise to keep you updated on this platform’s developments and as always if you hve any questions or need assistance with setting up a CDP for your business, we are just a message away.
Customers are tired of having random interactions with businesses. This leads them in a constant lookout for brands that understand their needs, concerns and challenges. They love to bring their business to companies that care.
Despite this fact, it is obvious that marketing automation isn’t going anywhere given the convenience and economical advantage. So the only logical conclusion is for businesses to figure out how to add that personalised touch to their automated marketing strategies.
In this article, we’re going to discuss a few things your business could implement to inculcate personalisation in all their marketing tactics. These will allow all your business to gain an edge in this competitive market.
1. Convert with a personalized homepage
Your homepage is the first point of contact with your target audience. Therefore it goes without saying that it is made as engagement-centric as possible. If a landing page interests a possible lead, they’re going to enter their details and there could be a couple of checkboxes for them to pick before submission. for instance, users can select which topics they’re curious about, share where they’re located, or disclose their gender.
New customers that visit your company’s website could be prompted to enter in their email for an opportunity to receive some complimentary newsletters, a reduction on your products, or something else useful to them.
Once a user has visited your website and you’ve got some data on them, you’ll start sending emails that are customized for them. The received email marketing messages or newsletters, the automated email system will keep track of whether email messages from your company are opened, and which links are clicked. This adds even more data to your marketing campaign to supply a customised experience
2. Get more data to enhance personalisation
Companies that get their brand message exactly right, and understand their customers’ wants and wishes, are the kinds of companies which will achieve the longer term. that’s why having data about your customers is so integral to understanding their habits.
Automating marketing campaigns for your business, like email campaigns, goes to enable you to proportion your email marketing efforts during a way you’ve never seen before. This leads to reaching a drastically larger audience and provides you with large amounts of valuable data about all of your different customer segments.
It is only by analysing customer data that your company can take things to the subsequent level in terms of sales, and it might be an enormous setback for any company to lose access to data that it takes an extended time to accumulate, segment and organise.
3. Leverage your segmented data
Once you’ve got someone’s email address and you’ve segmented it into the right list, now the work begins. Now you’ve got to make and curate content specifically for that segment. Offering an evidence email may be a good way to answer customer questions while still engaging them personally. you’ll also send email reminders for them to end fixing an account.
If someone signed up for a campaign supported interest. They could want content that interest only. during which case, you would possibly send a triggered email if they unsubscribe from your campaign. This enables you to recapture that subscriber, or, at the very least, understand why they left.
Triggered emails like this are particularly good for segmentation. Because they need a 152% higher open rate compared to non-segmented emails.
4. Few more things you can do to personalise marketing automation
Aside from a newsletter or company updates, another effective method to spice up user engagement on your website is to supply a freebie or a reduction on your product or services. This helps you improve your customer segmentation and creates valuable leads, and builds rapport among potential customers by offering them something for free of charge before they even make a sale.
While personalization is vital, there’s a careful line that has got to be drawn to avoid making assumptions about your customer and revealing what proportion data you’ve got on them. It’s also important to not make assumptions supported a demographic.
It is suggested to supply targeted offers and messages to people who check in on your website supported the info you’ve got, and wait until more is understood about the actual customer and their needs before sending an email that’s more personalised.
And Lastly…
An automated email campaign is incredibly effective at helping your business increase engagement and generates sales. New email addresses that have just signed abreast of your website will receive an automatic welcome email introducing your company, or that explains how your service works for beginners or provides a basic overview of what you’ll offer.
In case you wish to implement highly personalised marketing campaigns for your brand or have any question just drop us a line and our team will be delighted to help you out.
In today’s competitive market, customers expectations have reached a whole different level. They want to engage with a business multiple platforms and expect the interactions to be starting off where it was left the last time.
Customers are tired of having random interactions with businesses. This leads them in a constant lookout for brands that understand their needs, concerns and challenges. They love to bring their business to companies that care.
To ensure this, businesses use multiple tools to collect customer’s data so that the interactions are contextual and up to date. However, the most frequent challenge they face is due to multiple tools so the customer’s data fails to get consolidated.
One of the fairly upcoming solutions to these challenges is the customer database platform (CDP). In this article we’re going to be discussing this software and what it can do for your business.
What is the Customer Data Platform (CDP)?
A Customer Data Platform (CDP) is a product framework that helps present a centralised, diligent and refreshed perspective on an individual customer, in light of data from co-operations of numerous channels, platforms, and gadgets.
CDPs additionally let data stream to and fro between different customer data frameworks to execute communications and oversee customer engagement. The data it consolidates can be easily customised that enables businesses to implement any marketing strategy they want.
Key Features of CDP
1) Integrations
It’s crucial while exploring which CDP is best for your group and your organization to look at what incorporations each CDP gives. You need to guarantee your whole showcasing stack will have the option to incorporate with the CDP you pick so you can have one focal database for the entirety of your customer data.
2) Reporting and customized dashboards
CDPs can accompany strong revealing usefulness just as tweaked dashboards. Most CDPs offer some sort of essential announcing capacities, however, some additionally incorporate increasingly refined reports and the capacity to auto-generate reports. Its advanced dashboards will permit you to choose what data is generally essential to you and your business.
3) Cross-channel automation
While this may seem like an advertising computerization highlight, and it is, CDPs improve this ability by fusing unsiloed data. Customary promoting computerization programming can execute cross-channel mechanization, however, they can’t utilize data from a solitary customer profile that is automatically rolling in from numerous sources.
CDP Benefits
Data privacy is becoming crucial for companies
With the emergence of the GDPR, the CCPA, and other data security laws, ensuring your customer data is critical. Infringement to any data security laws can prompt monstrous fines, lost buyer trust, and a sharp drop in stock worth.
Unified data source
When you have a centralised database at your fingertips, customer communication becomes highly personalised. It also provides keen insights for your marketing campaign.
Real-time coordination
You can monitor team activities from the dashboard and easily make sure that each & every member is on the same page with the organisational directives.
Conclusion:
CDP’s implementation into your business might seem complicated at first but it has huge benefits. These customer database platforms come in a variety of models so it is important for you to choose the right on for your business.
In case you need more information on CDP with regards to your business, please feel free to contact us. We’ll be happy to help you out
Should a sales process be dynamic or well-defined?
There are two trains of thoughts regarding this, while some sales professionals strongly believe that every sale requires a different approach. The other side advocates in favour of an elaborate sales process.
From our experience in sales & marketing for numerous partners and of course ourselves as well. We’ve come to the conclusion that every business must have both of these aspects in order to maintain a competitive edge in the market.
While being readily adaptable to change, your sales teams need to follow a sales process to align themselves with the larger organisational goals. Businesses with a robust sales process experience a 28% higher revenue growth than their counterparts, as it ensures their leads don’t fall out of the funnel or go cold before any action is taken on them.
If your business doesn’t have a sales process or you wish to strengthen the one you have in your company.
Then please have a look at the below-mentioned sales process practices.
1) Leak-Proof your Sales funnel
Yes, your business is getting leads, conversions and sales, and you might be thinking that everything is hunky-dory, but sadly that might not be enough. What you need to ask your self is whether you’re getting the maximum output from your sales process?
If the answer is no and you see that although you’re receiving enough leads and conversions, the number of successful sales is not up to the mark. This means there are leaks in your funnels and your leads are falling out of it. In this case, you need to get on top of things and start working on ensuring that your sales pipeline is leak-proof and streamlined.
To do that you need to determine the stage in your sales process through which your leads are falling out of and then start fixing the cracks.
For instance, if you have high conversions but the final sales are low that means there might be a challenge with lead prospecting which requires a revisit to the buyer’s persona. So that the right prospects are targeted by the sales team.
In the case of high customer churn, there might be an issue with customer support, leading to customer dissatisfaction. You need to double-down on customer support ASAP.
2) Unclog your sales bottlenecks
Having a sales bottleneck is annoying mainly due to the fact that it can be easily identified and hence easy to avoid. When your sales pipeline has a bottleneck, your leads do not move past a certain stage. The sales process gets clogged and leads lay dormant with no movement.
Once you identify the stage with the bottleneck, you can determine the best way to unclog the pipeline.
Your business might have a lot of leads entering the sales funnel, but become redundant if they don’t get qualified. Not all leads that you reach out to would be willing to purchase your product or services right away. The best way is to set up a lead nurturing campaigns that nurture these leads over time so. That when they’re ready, they will bring their business to you.
In some cases, your sales reps may also forget to touch-base with a warm lead, making them go cold. This is unacceptable because that lead might have been your ideal customer. Reduce the load from your sales teams by automating your email communication with a CRM tool. This will ensure that all your emails are always delivered at the right time.
3. Keep updating your sales process
As your business expands it is bound to be dealing with different industries and territories. With this transformation, your sales process will have to adapt accordingly. The Growth requirement for a small business is very different from an enterprise company. And your sales process plays a crucial role in that.
One of the biggest change would by the variance of the sales cycle which depend on the industry you are selling to. To deal with this can, you might have to radically change your sales process starting with creating new buyer’s persons as per the new industries.
You need to constantly analyse the results of the selling efforts in the new territories. Some of the key element to analyse would be the conversion rates from cold email prospecting. Cold emails might od the tricks in some regions, however, in some cases, you might have to tweak your approach. An alternative, to reach out to your prospects is by applying Account-Based Selling (ABS) methodology.
Account-Based Selling is a highly personalized technique for targeting high-value companies. In this sales process, the sales team will reach out to multiple decision-makers within an enterprise.
Although the number of emails sent out using the ABS method will be less. But this lack of quantity is compensated with quality. Each & Every touchpoint that your sales reps perform will be highly personalized, with the aim of establishing a relationship with the prospects.
4. Measure the KPIs of the new sales process
Once you’ve reconfigured your sales process. You need to make sure that all the changes are implemented throughout the team and everyone understands the process flow.
Keep an eye on the key metrics to determine what changes are working best and what did not. Set quantifiable goals that will help achieve your sales targets.
Determination of a broken sales process and optimisation is quite tedious. You have a lot on your plate, with all the metrics that need to be tracked and deals to be closed. To take care of all these tasks your business must have an effective CRM in place.
Yes, the initial setup might seem complex but the long term benefits are immense!! In case you need more information on Freshsales CRMs or you need help in getting the most out of your CRM please feel free to contact us and we’ll get back to you in no time.
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.
Ecommerce giants such as Amazon and Alibaba have transformed the way we shop today. Not only that, but they have also provided extraordinary opportunities for small businesses to sell their products through their platforms as well.
However, these privileges come with the cost of their own. To avail their infrastructure and client base, small businesses have to shell out a sizeable chunk of revenue from sales on the platform as commission. Furthermore, this arrangement does not give much space for branding and marketing of their own.
Now the question is how can you overcome these challenges? Either you can continue utilising the big guns portal to selling your product or you can try to build your client base with the help of Ecommerce shop builder.
If you wish to explore option no. 2 then you are at a great place, as today we are going to be discussing Zoho commerce plus one of the leading eCommerce operating systems.
Let’s talk about some of its key features and how Zoho Commerce Plus can help you out in your eCommerce venture.
Personalised Branded Store
Zoho Commerce Plus is an addition to Zoho One, the operating system, It is a fully integrated, end-to-end platform for the eCommerce industry.
From marketing to sales to promoting customer loyalty. It is a fully scalable platform to run your eCommerce business like well-oiled machinery.
You can build your professional online store without the need for writing a single code line. Personalise your branded customer experience using the drag-and-drop store builder, which also comes equipped with a variety of customizable templates.
Timely Order Management
Delivery and order management is the lifeline of and eCommerce business. A customer just wants their orders to get delivered as soon as possible. Which is why it is utmost important to deliver the right order within the stipulated time limit.
Zoho Commerce Plus ensures that you are always equipped with the information needed to optimize order fulfilment. Zoho boasts about its unified interface for every individual order made across every channel, throughout numerous warehouses as well as shipping carriers.
Data from any third-party systems can be imported into the platform’s Analytics and analyzed to empower you with provided blended insights.
Multichannel Marketing
Marketing to customers is all about communication, only by understanding the thought process and actions can you find all the ways and medium at every step of their buyer’s journey.
Now different customers choose different paths to interact with your brand, which is why eCommerce Plus enables you to construct customized customers journeys to communicate based on their stage in the buying process.
The more the better, with Zohos Omni-channel customer communication platform you can enable context-aware dialogue with prospects and customers.
Since customer information is flowing across multiple communication channels such as emails, chat, social media, etc. Your marketing, sales, and support representatives have a singular view and context of each customer which empowers them in delivering a consistent, cohesive experience.
In-Depth Analytics
Zoho commerce plus has one of the most comprehensive analytics platforms in the market. It offers multiple inbuilt dashboards and reports for businesses. These reports and dashboards cover e-commerce, operations, etc. that offer a multitude of insights.
Most of these invaluable insights are regarding the visitor’s behaviour on your eCommerce store, which also includes heat maps, scroll maps, and conversion of products sold on the eCommerce store. This helps you optimise your eCommerce platform for better customer experience.
Conclusion
Zoho commerce plus provides a multitude of easy website building tools that you would need to create a sustainable brand, along with a robust back-end infrastructure that can help with content management as well as security.
The system leverages upon Zoho’s customer experience on analytics, and intelligence software providing businesses with an interconnected, first-of-its-kind eCommerce platform.
However, all the above points discussed are only the tip of the iceberg which is Zoho. If you need more info about Zoho commerce plus capabilities or wish to apply it in your business please feel free to contact us forZoho implementation or drop us a line in the comment section and our experts will reach out to you in no time.
The role of the project manager is crucial to the success of a project in every industry. Why wouldn’t it be? After all, a project manager is the person responsible for the intended initiation, planning, design, execution, monitoring, controlling and closure of a project.
But that’s not all, along with all these known-to-all project management responsibilities, a project manager also has many other important aspects to look into. For example: making people gel in so that they can work together without conflicts, track each individual’s work, ensure optimum motivation within the team at all times, keeping teams and clients on the same page, just to name a few.
Sounds quite difficult, right? Well, it is, which is why it is important that they have the right kind of tools and strategies in place to make their work easy and effective. Fortunately, there are a wide array of software applications out there to aid the specific requirements of project managers (and their team as well). However, considering the number of project management software and team management apps available out there, it is a task in itself to make the right choice.
Don’t worry! Below, we’ve compiled a list of project management tools that every project manager should consider using today to facilitate effective project and team management.
Let’s begin
Best Online Project Management Tools For Project Managers
ProofHub is a project management and collaboration platform that brings people in one place to discuss plans, create to-do lists, lay down Gantt chart, calendar milestones, track progress/time meet daily deadlines, and celebrate success. This tool comes with scalable features well-integrated, reasonably priced, and comes with scalable features that make it an ideal alternative to Basecamp, Asana, Trello and many other leading PM solutions.
Key features:
Chat and discussions
Task management
Workflows & Boards
Events & milestones
Gantt charts
Custom reports
Custom Roles
Files and notes
Recurrent tasks
Online proofing and approval
Announcements
Mentions
Time tracking
White labelling
Multiple languages
Advanced search
Mobile and tablet compatibility
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
ProofHub Essential – $50/month or $45/month (billed annually) (Discounts on subscriptions for non-profits)
ProofHub Ultimate Control – $99/month or $89/month (billed annually)
Zoho Projects is a project management software designed to help you plan and collaborate on projects in a less complicated manner. The software also allows you to streamline your project workflows with automation, customization, as well as integration.
Key features:
Time logging
Project budgeting
Expense tracking
Resource utilization
Kanban board
Forums and discussions
Global/Project dashboards
Custom widgets, views, and fields
Custom permissions
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
Standard – $25 per month ($20 per month if billed annually)
Express – $50 per month ($40 per month if billed annually)
Premium – $100 per month ($85 per month if billed annually)
Enterprise – $150 per month ($125 per month if billed annually)
Trello is a project management and collaboration system that utilizes the concept of boards (which represent projects) and cards (which represent tasks). It simplifies project management and collaboration by organizing all your project-critical details in one place.
Key features:
Instant overview on front and back of cards
Drag and drop functionality
In-line editing
Easy uploading of files and attachments
Data filtering
Archiving of card records
Deadline reminders
Email notifications
Activity log
Assign tasks
Information retrieval and back-up
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
Business Class – $9.99 per user/month (billed annually)
Enterprise – $20.83 or less per user/month (billed annually)
Wrike is one place for all of your work. It’s a project management solution that comes packed with team collaboration and business management features to eliminate your everyday hassles at work.
Key features:
Task management
Gantt chart
Document collaboration
Discussions in tasks
Task prioritization
Customized reports
Recurrent tasks
Workload management
Time-tracking
Google Docs, Dropbox, Box integrations
Email integration
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
Professional Plan – $9.80/user/month(billed annually)
Business Plan – $24.80/user/month (billed annually)
Wrike for Marketers – $34.60/user/month (billed annually)
Clarizen is an enterprise-grade solution that addresses every challenge a team might face while collaborating or managing work. It empowers teams to achieve better efficiency across the entire project management lifecycle by streamlining work and automating processes.
Teams can use Workzone to keep projects organized by tasks/subtasks, gain clarity over responsibilities, and connect together to quickly identify when a task is due or needs immediate attention.
Backlog is a project management tool exclusively designed for marketing and software development teams. The aim of this solution is to boost collaboration, coordination, and communication between team members so that they can be more productive with their project/tasks.
Jira is a project management software with a simple, intuitive interface that enables effective collaboration within teams and allows them to manage every aspect of project management in one place.
Key features:
Customizable workflows
Unlimited custom fields
Seamless source/issue integration
Advanced search and filtering
Advanced reporting
Customizable dashboards
Advanced security
Mobile interface
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
Cloud Up to 10 users – $10 monthly flat fee
Cloud 11 – 100 users – $7 per user/month
Self-hosted Server – $10 one-time payment for 10 users
Self-hosted Data Center – $12,000 per year for 500 users
Hive is a cloud-hosted project management platform that caters to the specific needs of your team. It offers a multitude of features that let you create, assign, track, and complete tasks in one place.
ProfWorkflow is a project management system that helps you collaborate seamlessly and have better project visibility. The software works for freelancers and all small, medium, and large enterprises.
Key features:
Templates for reports and forms
Dashboards and status summaries
Easy-to-use scheduling
Messaging tool
Branding & configuration
Permission-based access
File sharing
Time tracker
Notifications & alerts
Gantt style timeline
Free basic training and support
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
Solo – $10 per month, ideal for freelancers
Professional – $20 per month per user
Advanced – $30 per month per user, perfect for enterprise
Flock is a robust collaboration and management application that simplifies the process of working together. It manifests a central hub for modern teams to work together to achieve the desired goals.
Key features:
Productivity tools
Multiple Integrations
Communication management
Search functionality
Video and audio calls
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
Pro Plan – $6/user/ month or $4.5/user/month billed annually
Podio is a work management platform that keeps everything closely tracked and organized. This is an ideal tool for team collaboration, task management, information sharing, project scheduling, and automated workflows.
ClickUp is a hybrid project management platform with all the features you need to streamline your processes and work efficiently. The platform works seamlessly for many industries, including sales, marketing, design, and development.
Key features:
Project management
Task management
Multiple assignees
Threaded Comments
Custom Statuses
Agile Board View
Progress Percentage
Custom Notifications
Mentions
Drag and drop reordering
Smart Search
Gantt Chart
Calendar
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
Business – $9/user/month or $5/user/month (annual billing)
Airtable is a management solution equipped with exceptional organization and collaboration functionalities. It works like a typical spreadsheet and allows you to organize all your project related information into a centralized system.
Paymo is a project management tool that helps your team achieve their goals through measured steps. It keeps everyone on the same page and helps them stay organized, productive throughout the project management process.
Key features:
Project management
Task management
Team management
Resource management
Financial management
Time tracking
Timesheet reporting
Mobile apps
Adaptable dashboard
Personalization
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
Small Office Plan – $11.95/user/mo (billed monthly) or $9.56/user/mo (billed annually)
Business Plan – $18.95/user/mo (billed monthly) or $15.16/user/mo (billed annually)
Microsoft Project is a work management solution we all have used or heard at some point. It enables individuals, teams, and enterprises to get started, manage a project, and deliver it successfully with the intended value.
LiquidPlanner is a collaboration and project management software for the new generation. It offers specific features to match the project needs of all small and large teams.
Aha! is a comprehensive road mapping and project management software. It implements a framework that allows teams and project managers to connect and facilitate easier, faster achievement of business goals.
Key features:
Business model generator
360 tracker
Idea management
Visual reports and detailed charts
Notebook
Product notes
Third-party integrations
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
Premium – $59/user/month (billed yearly) or $74/user/month (billed monthly)
Enterprise – $99/user/month (billed yearly) or $124/user/month (billed monthly)
The last tool in our list is ProjectManager. It’s an end-to-end project management solution that takes project management and collaboration to a whole new level.
Key features:
Real-time dashboards
Gantt charts
Task management
Timesheets
Resource management
Chats & discussions
Online file storage
Project templates
Advanced reports
Pricing:
Free Trial – Available
Personal – $15 per user/month
Team – $20/user/month
Business – $25/user/month
Enterprise – by quote
If you have a tool in mind that would make a perfect addition to our list of top project management tools for project managers, let us know in the comments below!
Before you even start reading this article, you must ask yourself this question.
How Customer-Centric Are You?
We ask you this since you are trying to explore the true power of Infusionsoft for your business. And this clearly shows that you wish to manage customer relationships with your brand in the best way possible, which is what Infusionsoft is all about.
One of the biggest problems any business owner faces is trying to maintain better customer relations and increase conversion rates, but failing to understand the consumer base from their perspective.
You might have even tried to enhance your lead generation processes, but have not been able to achieve the desired sales targets. Well, it is the right time to leap into the future of customer relationship management.
It’s true that Infusionsoft might not be the latest tech when it comes to CRM and there a many articles that have covered this topic, Furthermore, a lot of businesses are already using Infusionsoft as their core CRM to manage their customers.
Having said that it’s been observed that even though businesses are already using the CRM, they are failing to utilize its full potential which in turn affects their marketing capabilities. In this article, we are going to cover various functionalities of Infusionsoft that are going to streamline your customer management and skyrocket the digital marketing efforts for your brand.
So let’s get started, shall we!!
Note to Self: Do Not Forget to Strategize
As mentioned above, one of the major issues that businesses face is that even though they have a CRM in place for customer management, they are not able to truly connect with the customer or prospects where it matters the most.
Before exploring various Infusionsoft functionalities you need to map out the entire customer’s life cycle with regards to your product or services.
These are the steps that you should follow which designing your CRM strategy:
Start by creating by a buyer persona if you don’t have one already. It is basically a virtual representation of your ideal buyer who would purchase your product or services.
Now keep your buyer persona in mind and design a flowchart entailing all the steps through which your ideal buyer or prospect engages with your business. Try to be as thorough as possible and start from capturing all the lead entry points, to brand engagement, to how the purchase will be made, all the way to the WOW factors your brand uses to delight the customers after purchase. We recommend you use a flowchart making tool such as Lucidchart for designing the buyer’s journey.
Now that you have created the buyer’s journey for all your established personas, the next step would be to apply tags on each and every step of the journey. We will be discussing the tagging logic more going further but for now you should know that these tags can derive useful information based on the actions taken by them on your site.
Lastly, choose the medium which is best suited to communicate with the users and apply it through the Infusionsoft CRM
Advanced Tagging Logic
All businesses keep a track of their prospects and customers in their database for various purposes such as managing logistics, remarketing or even to improve their product or service.
Implementation of Tags simply you track the common aspects of your prospects and customers and segment the contacts into very specific lists so that targeted marketing messages can be sent. But the challenge lies in figuring out the aspects that are worth tracking.
With the help of tagging logic we can not only find out what action the users have taken on the site but also deduce who they are as per the demographic profile, what is the user’s area of interest in your business, with the help of this data, we can map out the entire buyer’s journey within the Infusionsoft.
By using tagging logic you can create personalized marketing campaigns to meet the requirements of your business or brand and personalize your communications which are by far the best way to nurture your existing and potential clientele.
The Power of API Integration
Infusionsoft can help out your business by utilizing the immense degree of API customization through which you can connect your in-house software and technologies with the CRM. With this synchronization you can bridge the database of your in-house Application and Infusionsoft then you can transfer the most up to date customer back and forth between the API & CRM.
If you are still confused let’s discuss an example shall we:
Cliniko is one of the most widely used medical assistant software used doctors around the world. It assists medical practitioners with a variety of daily tasks such as keeping track of patient’s medical history, scheduling the appointments etc.
By bridging Infusionsoft and Cliniko doctors can get new appointments, patients with Infusionsoft email marketing campaigns so that you can increase the revenue for their practice. This synchronization allows businesses to launch automated email campaigns based on patient’s behaviour, appointment time, buying habits, invoice requirement and so much more.
With Infusionsoft API integration, you can manage and control your entire sales cycle with the help of standardized REST APIs and share contacts, email lists, leads, companies, inventory and other details across all of the cloud services you use for your business.
The Better The Reporting The Better Business Efficiency
This is an undeniable fact, the more thorough and streamlined your business reporting analytics are the more efficiently you will be able to modify and adapt your business strategy as per the changing analytics. Hence steering your brand towards success.
However, Most of the online reporting and analytics tools lack flexibility. Analyzing and tailoring of those static data tend to consume a good amount of productive time. Well, this won’t be the case anymore if you can implement with the Infusionsoft marketing automation to create your own reporting parameters as well as for analytics and reporting tools, that can be completely customized to suit the specific requirements that your business or brand might have.
JUST A FEW FINAL WORDS…
There you go, folks! We hope you got quite a few insight on what Infusionsoft CRM can you for your business however as you might have guessed by now that implementing the above-mentioned element with respect to your business is a difficult task.
It is highly recommended you hire an Infusionsoft consultant with expertise on the CRM, such as QL Tech who is a certified Infusionsoft partner and can help you Automate and scale your repetitive marketing tasks. Our Marketing Automation services especially focused on planning, execution, automation, and measurement of digital campaigns including entire setup and implementation of the user journey within the CRM.
In case you have any questions or doubts, please feel free to contact us or book a free consultation online.
Each and every single product and service needs smart marketing tactic to survive and grow. Dentistry is no exception here. Are you a dentist who is struggling to grow your practice and boost your referrals? Do you want to build trust in your practice? Do you want to help out the patient pool with your treatment recommendations? Do you want to reconnect with the patients who haven’t yet started with your treatments? Have you heard anything about dental marketing automation? Then, this is for you!
A brief about Dental marketing automation
This is the modern era; gone are the traditional practice days when dentists used to sit in their clinic and treat the patients who accidentally visit them. Max to the max, advertisements were carried out via customary channels like newspapers, televisions or local magazines. Now everything is available online, including the presence of dental clinics. For any query, any doubt, be it a toothache or cleaning of teeth – first of all, a user will run a Google search. And, based on the search results, s/he will dig further.
Dentistry has adopted digital marketing practices to quite a significant extent. Here, the marketing of a dental practice is done to educate existing and prospective patients about their services. The digital marketing services are quite common in dentistry. However, apart from website development, SEO and PPC, have you also considered dental marketing automation services? How can they benefit you?
Benefits of dental marketing automation
The right digital marketing strategies will help you get the patients. But, if you want brand awareness, effectiveness in driving the right patients to the practice and securing a positive ROI, you definitely need dental marketing automation services.
Take a look at the straightforward benefits of dental marketing automation:
1. Convert your website traffic
However good, content-rich and aesthetic your website is – it is not enough to grow your dental practice. Through SEO and PPC, you would be able to drive relevant traffic to your website. But then what next? Is it enough for you? No, driving relevant traffic to your website is just one step towards great ROI on your dental marketing efforts. You, now, need to convert this traffic into your actual customers (here, service consumers i.e. patients).
First of all, you need to analyse who all are coming to your website, what all pages and content they are looking for. What kind of information they access or download from your website. You also need to check whether they are booking any appointments.
All these activities become super easy when you have marketing automation in place. Marketing automation platforms, inThe healthcare sector, open avenues for you to drive your potential patients to take real action.
2. Customised and more targeted responses
You have enough visitors visiting your website. And, based on your analysis, you have also figured out that they are hot leads. It means they can effortlessly be converted into your real patients. But, the real challenge falls now. The only truth you know at this point of time is everyone needs a dentist. How will you tackle each one of them? This is because not everyone would like to avail the same treatment from your dental practice.
For instance, some might want basic treatments like teeth cleaning or teeth whitening. Whereas, some might need advanced treatments like dental implants or dentures.Based on the data and analytics,
you can segment your leads in the following manner: Segment A: People who need a dentist now for teeth whitening Segment B: People who need a dentist now for dentures and dental implants Segment C: People who might need to see a dentist in the future but not now Segment D: People who are not at all thinking about visiting a dentist
If you fail to attract the hot leads with the right content, your game is over! You need to address their requirements differently. For instance, if your lead is a senior adult looking for dental implants, your message should be appropriate to him/her. And, if your lead is a young girl looking for cosmetic dentistry, your message should be customised and different from the former. How can you use this segmentation to grow your dental practice? Dental marketing automation services are inevitable here. These services help you segment your leads based on their needs and deliver them relevant, right and more targeted messages.
3. No burden on small team size
Unless you have a grand corporate dental setup, you need a helping hand to avoid burdens of your small team size. A single person cannot handle everything, starting right from explaining treatment requirements and procedures, booking appointments to sending them after-treatment patient care advises. Neither can you afford a big team to handle tasks individually.
To avoid this hosted and bustle and make processes more streamlined, you need to have marketing automation in place.
Recommended CRM – InfusionSoft services in your dental practice marketing
By now, you are aware that dental marketing automation services are must for the growth of your dental practice. And, there are many marketing automation tools and CRM available in the market. The immediate question falls here is which one is the best for you and why.
We recommend none other than Infusionsoft services for your dental practice. Take a quick look at the benefits of employing Infusionsoft services as a dental marketing automation tool to promote your dental practice.
1. AUTOMATION OF SCHEDULING
You can integrate AppointmentCore with Infusionsoft and enable patients to set up their consultation. You can create various time slots depending on your availability and buffer time between two back to back appointments. Your prospects (patients) can select a time slot and practitioner (if any) and book an appointment online. That’s how you can easily create an appointment in InfusionSoft. Hence, when someone schedules with you using AppointmentCore, the appointment will be automatically created in Infusionsoft for you. Using this appointment information, you can create automated processes that will help optimize and grow your dentistry practice.
Important note: Each Infusionsoft user can track their tasks and appointments through Infusionsoft.
2. Send appointment reminders
Once the appointment is booked and entered into the system, the real game starts. Infusionsoft will send appointment reminders to the person who has booked a consultation. It will also send a copy of the same email or text to the staff members so that they are also updated. Just take care that the length of your reminder message is as crisp and clear as possible.
3. Request feedback and reviews
It’s tough for any business to request feedback and reviews. Infusionsoft services ease your pain with almost zero effort. You can build a lead nurturing campaign wherein add a stage that shoots an email for feedback and reviews once the patient avails treatment or visits your clinic. You can redirect them either to your Facebook page or Google page. Remember, word-to-mouth is the best strategy for any practitioner. And these social proofs act as word-of-mouth in dental digital marketing.
4. SEND CONTENT-ORIENTED FOLLOW UP SEQUENTIAL EMAILS
At times, for any dental practitioner, it is challenging to control the drop-out ratio. For instance, your patient visits you to ask for an opinion about teeth whitening treatments. You recommended zoom teeth whitening based on his/her dental health and hygiene. However, if the patient does not schedule to start, you can send follow up email reminders to start with the treatment, how it is beneficial, and what all can go wrong if the treatment is not done on a timely basis.
This all can be easily managed by updating your patient data in the practice management system. Infusionsoft can monitor overall appointments, treatment stage of the patient and detect the patients who are still idle and haven’t started with any treatments.
5. Ask for referrals: referrals are an essential part of building your dental practice. It can be earned by delivering services that patients are thrilled about. Further, you need to send reminders and offer incentives for those treatments. By making sure this happens every time for every patient, the number of referrals can only increase in your practice.
6. RECONNECT WITH PATIENTS
Along with growth, survival is also important. Similarly, along with treating new patients reconnecting with the old patients is equally important. Infusionsoft services help you out in reaching your old patients who haven’t turned up for a while. You can send them health tips, newsletters, or even festival greetings. Not necessarily they have to get treated from you all the time. But good relationships are a must. They can help you get the referrals and contribute indirectly to the growth of your dental practice. Not to forget – it also helps in upselling and cross-selling.
Closing thoughts..!
Hope you enjoyed reading this blog. Given that Infusionsoft has so much potential to transform online businesses, there’s a lot of benefit to putting your money on the line as an incentive to make it work. If you still have some confusions in your mind or would like to learn more about how you can grow your dental practice using lifecycle marketing and dental marketing automation services, connect with us.
Are you ready to earn better ROI, more and better patients in your clinic? Get started now and schedule your first and FREE Practice Discovery Session. This session will help on both the ends to find out how best we can provide value to your practice and how best you can overcome your hurdles . This FREE session can be carried out over the phone or face to face depending on your preference and location. The session is completely private and confidential.
According to HubSpot, “Marketing automation refers to the software that exists with the goal of automating marketing actions.”
Many marketing departments perform various repetitive and monotonous tasks. These tasks include, but are not limited to emails, social media, and other website actions. The marketing automation tools make these everyday jobs easier. In nonprofessional terms, marketing automation is all about optimisation. The scope of marketing automation is beyond simply automating the marketing department’s repetitive tasks. In addition, it optimises the time of your staff. It can even hint on which customers your sales team concentrates their endeavours.
Digital marketing automation has its bloodline in email marketing. However, it is way beyond email marketing. Marketing automation aids marketers to restructure various actions like generating, scoring, and nurturing leads, managing link selling, cross-selling and up-selling, customer lifecycle marketing, and others. The efficient implementation of marketing automation technology can effectively increase operational efficiency. The technology helps to grow revenue quicker by cutting your sales cycle, recovering your lead aptitude, and saving you time to focus on other important areas. However, unfortunately, these paybacks can be availed at a giant cost.
1. Infusionsoft
Clate Mask and his brother Eric Martineau, Scott jointly established Infusionsoft in 2001 at Mesa, Arizona. It caters to more than 25,000 customers. Infusionsoft is one of the most successful marketing automation tools for small businesses that already have a strong customer base and a turnover above $100,000.
Infusionsoft, a leading sales and marketing software, supports small business in getting structured, building sales, and saving time. Its user interface is very well designed. Very few marketing automation tools offer order forms, payment processing, execution, and inventory tracking directly inside the tool. Infusionsoft is one of those automation tools. In addition, it allows worldwide tracking, which makes it easy to keep a track of a contact’s behaviour across multiple marketing channels. Besides, a lot of bloggers use this software for email marketing and creating marketing campaigns & funnels.
Infusionsoft expedites the creation and execution of a sales and marketing strategy. It centralizes customer interactions, attracts new leads, meets sales quicker, and automates recurring tasks like a follow-up, contact management, billing, and payment—all from one place.
Infusionsoft charge a unique mandatory launch fee of $1999.
2. ActiveCampaign
Again, this automation tool is the best-fit solution for small businesses having the strength of less than 100. This tool is very reasonable compared to others. You would be amazed to know that it costs a maximum $150 per month. ActiveCampaign provides services like unlimited email sending, CRM and sales automation, onboarding, and unrestricted access to social data.
Though it is very affordable, the automation features that ActiveCampaign provides are robust. The features include sales team notification, cart and form abandonment, visual workflow editor, and web traffic analysis. The interface of this software is so straightforward that anyone can operate it with ease. The reason why ActiveCampaign should be preferred by small businesses is pretty obvious. The platform makes lead generation and warm lead nurturing effortless by excellent CRM and mailing solutions.
3. Hubspot
In 2006, HubSpot was founded by Brian Halligan and Dharmesh Shah at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT). It was launched in December 2007. Since ages, HubSpot is one of the pioneers in automated digital marketing. It is an inbound marketing software company that helps businesses in modifying their marketing from outbound lead generation to inbound lead generation. It does it by allowing them to “get noticed” by more potential customers in the usual course of the way they shop and learn.
They “get” content marketing.
It provides a full suite of integrated marketing tools that comprise blogging, content management, search engine optimization, social media publishing and monitoring, email marketing, and more. HubSpot is a complete platform for developing marketing effectiveness and marketing competence.
Hubspot does have monthly packages of $200. However, their offerings cost $800/month package for marketing automation and CRM integration that includes only 1,000 contacts. The further cost grows based on the user’s contract requirements.
4. Marketo
Marketo, founded in 2006, launched its first product “Lead Management.” In 2012, Marketo acquired “Crowd Factory.” This acquisition resulted in the benefits of social media marketing capabilities. Finally, the company went public in 2013.
Marketo is easy and influential marketing software that suits an organization having the strength of 100+. It helps marketing and sales professionals drive revenue and develop marketing engagement. Most of the users usually compare this software with Pardot owing to their similar functionality.
Marketo overpowers Pardot in terms of implementation, usability, and design of their platform. Marketo provides the foremost cloud-based marketing software platform for companies of all sizes to develop and maintain engaging customer relationships. It has an outstanding integration with Salesforce. These two tools work effortlessly together through their syncing takes a considerable amount of time.
The packages of Marketo include three standard pricing tiers, at $895, $1,795, and $3,175 per month. Under each tier, various new features are available which may come at hefty prices of an additional $900 – $1,400 per month.
5. Ontraport
Ontraport is again very good for SMBs, the affordability factor is just as important as a feature. It allows accessing the full suite, along with a money-back guarantee only at $600/month. The topmost features of Ontraport include but not limited to two way SMS automation, Landing page A/B testing, ROI tracking, custom reporting dashboard, video hosting, API access for third-party development, task management automation, and lead scoring and routing.
Ontraport holds a wide range of inspiring shopping cart features. These features comprise automatic credit card payment collections and the ability to add cross-sells, upsells, and cart rejection orders.
Ontraport allows storing 25K contacts, managing 100K contacts, and sending 100K emails per month.
Pardot belongs to Salesforce. It was jointly founded by Adam Blitzer and David Cummings in 2007. In 2012, Exact Target acquired it for a reported $95 million. Later, Salesforce acquired Exact Target in 2013.
It is a full-featured and user-friendly marketing automation tool. It helps pipelines to pick up the pace and drive sales through social marketing, sales intelligence, email marketing, lead generation, lead management, and more. Other prominent features include segmentation wizard, ROI reporting, email marketing with complete branded templates, real-time sales alerts and CRM integration. It maximizes the efficiency of the sales and marketing teams and ultimately increases revenue.
The standard package provided by Pardot comes at a cost of $1000 per month. The other packages related to advanced analytics, A/B testing, dynamic content costs around $2000 per month. The ultimate package related to API access and custom user roles is of $3000 approx per month.
7. GetResponse
GetResponse Marketing Automation facilitates you to devise flexible processes that sustain your unique business style. Also, can transform your marketing database into a lead scoring activist. It is highly efficient in optimizing the sales funnel. The top features of GetResponse include but not limited to drag and drop visual workflow editor, post-purchase communication, loyalty and reward programs, tracking online activities of subscribers, cutting-edge customer scoring, and others. This platform is very simple to operate; you need to have a full-time CRM manager. Its monthly payment plans are sectioned by list size which starts at $15 per month for unlimited messages to up to 1,000 subscribers.
MailChimp provides enterprise-level automation tools without any hurdles. Its prominent features include but not limited to trigger emails when customers abandon shopping carts, conversion of interested subscribers into customers, re-engaging with existing customers, integration of web services with apps, and others.
There are three pricing plans offers of Mailchimp: Forever Free, Monthly, and Pay As You Go. They also have an alternative designed to fit users’ needs.
9. AWeber
AWeber is an ideal autoresponder platform for small businesses, bloggers, and entrepreneurs. This marketing automation tool is a comfortable process to automate your emails. Its new drag and drop editor is capable to support your email automation requirements. Its prominent features include lead segmentation, web activity tracking, creating invoices, split testing, generating sales reports, and others. AWeber enables you to assemble your list with their opt-in forms. It sends out automated emails to your subscribers. If you want to get started with email marketing, AWeber is the perfect key.
10. Zoho CRM
Zoho Campaigns is an email marketing automation product that helps you create, send, track, and share your email campaigns. Its free services include 12000 emails/month, 2000 subscribers, pre-designed templates, real-time visitor tracking, template library, A/B testing, social sharing, merge tags, sign-up forms, and many more.
Zoho CRM provides a complete view of your sales cycle and pipeline. Zoho. Thereby it enables you to spot trends, marking opportunities, and further, lock more deals. Zoho’s shaped customer relationship management and marketing effectiveness procedures help you build your company into a customer-centric business. Its campaigns are integrated with internal services like Zoho Survey, Zoho CRM, Zoho Forms, Zoho Docs & Zoho Sites, Zoho Creator, and other services like LinkedIn, Shopify, SurveyMonkey, Facebook, Twitter, Eventbrite, Google Analytics, WordPress, Google Apps, and others.
Its service packages are in affordable ranges. $12/user/month package provides services of sales forecasting, reports, and dashboards. A professional package worth $20/user/month provides services of Email integration and social CRM. An enterprise package worth $35/user/month provides services of territory management and custom modules. Further, its CRM Plus package worth $50/user/month provides services of email marketing, help desk, and customer surveys.
