Why is CRM Software Crucial for SMEs to Boost their Business?

A Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system is a competent tool for businesses for customer management throughout their lifecycle. For Small and Medium enterprises (SMEs), CRM is a dilemma – to use or not to use. 

For large enterprises, it is a need, but SMEs are still figuring out if they need to adopt CRM. The slow penetration of CRM in SMEs can be attributed to a misconception about the product. The first misconception is that it is only for large companies, and the second is that it is an expensive tool for SMEs. These misconceptions and many more exist in the market. For these reasons, the CRM system is not used by SMEs. Today, we will discuss everything related to CRMs and how they boost business for SMEs.

Why is CRM Software Crucial for SMEs to Boost their Business?

What is CRM?

Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a tool or technology system that manages business relationships with their customers and with potential customers. The goal of CRM is to ensure that businesses improve relationships with customers. 

Once this is achieved, it helps increase the company’s revenue and the sales teams’ efficiency. Onboarding a new client has many steps, and if you don’t have a streamlined process in place and miss a process in between – it may not appear good later to get back to customers and tell them you missed something in between.

When you have a CRM system – it streamlines all the day-to-day processes within your company and allows you to implement a foolproof onboarding process for new clients. Also, it keeps customer satisfaction at its peak. Ensuring customers are happy has always been the top priority for organizations. It may make you believe that CRM has been for a long time. However, they are relatively new, and the best thing is CRMs are improving with every passing year.

Take a look at the below mentioned CRM industry trends for 2022:

  • The digital marketing software with the quickest growth rate is CRM.
  • By 2028, it is predicted that the CRM market would be worth $146 billion.
  • The value of the CRM market is anticipated to increase by 13% each year between 2022 and 2030.
  • Because their existing platform does not have the functionality they require, 66% of firms transfer to a new CRM.
  • CRM solutions are used by 91% of companies with 10 or more employees.
  • CRM solutions are used by 82% of businesses for process automation and sales reporting.

How does CRM work?

Before we discuss how CRM can help SMEs, it is crucial to understand how the tool works. To start with, it is essential to know that CRM can do many things. Therefore, once you plan to implement a CRM system within your company, you must find the features that would work best for your company and are specific to your sector (industry). Also, every company is different, when it comes to how it works with its customers. Therefore, you must consider that while selecting a CRM tool.

The first step is pretty generic – the CRM process starts by organizing customer information – such as their contact details, website, social media data, and everything else you can think of concerning your customer. 

The advantage of using CRM is that it can store more personal data. For example, how your client wants to communicate – via phone or email. If required, CRM can also work with applications such as virtual document signing or survey apps and make the whole process smooth and easy for your customers and your business.  

CRM tools can also generate insights that can help you understand your customer base comprehensively. Once you understand your customers better, you can better appeal to them and interact with them in your business transactions.

The latest CRM tools can even automate administrative tasks using artificial intelligence technology, which is a great feature to have for any company, including small and medium enterprises. An example of an administrative task that CRM can handle is data entry work. As an SME, if such tasks occupy your team for long hours, using CRM, employees can free up their time and focus on other crucial things that can help the business grow.

Why is CRM critical for SMEs?

As per the data available, only a small percentage of SMEs currently use CRM software. A recent study was conducted, and it was found that 34% of SMEs have no plan to use it in the future as well.

Most of these SMEs still rely on the old paper and pen method, and some have moved to MS Excel to track their customers. However, these methods impose some major issues which today’s businesses cannot afford:

  • It can lead to incorrect customer data
  • Tracking and follow-ups with customers can become difficult if the count is high
  • Marketing may sound too time-consuming as everything is manual

The beauty of using CRM is that they help SMEs in every area of business. The business areas in which CRM can help include:

  • Marketing: Every organization, including SMEs, needs to track their returns on marketing activities. CRM tools allow them to accurately measure the return on investment for each campaign. It eventually helps SMEs understand which activity should be continued.
  • Sales: SMEs need to understand the sales life cycle to improve sales. CRM ensures the processes in place maximize all new business opportunities.
  • Customer Service: CRM smooths the process for your company and leads to greater customer experience.
  • Finance: One integral part of any business is cash flow management. CRM gives visibility to financial transactions, which offers visibility on the accounting transactions.

CRM Software is crucial for SMEs to Boost their Business

Now that you have a fair understanding of CRM, we can move to the important part – how CRM software can help SMEs to boost their business. Small and medium businesses have smaller teams and hence there is a need to focus more on optimization from a digital source. CRM tools help SMEs stay organized, raise revenue, stay functional, and contrary to popular belief, help save money.

SMEs are more agile than large businesses and can move quicker in any process. Therefore, they can implement and get started with CRMs faster and actualize their benefits at a high level. 

Below are some ways CRM software can boost SMEs’ business:

Customer Relationship Management 

The core functionality of CRM is to act as a customer relationship management tool. CRM software is only as good as its customer retention and customer satisfaction. It gives SMEs the ability to enable a customer relationship and help move people along a sales pipeline that helps with the sales process and importantly, build a relationship.

Both marketing and sales teams are of utmost importance for the growth of any business. However, these teams need information and ideas at their fingertips for higher sales conversion (or success rate). The CRM helps your team with exactly that – all the required information is available at your fingertips.

Increase efficiency 

No one will argue that a computer works faster than an average human mind, and for this reason, you may want to have CRM software in your company. It allows you to automate certain tasks, and they can be done much faster. The available bandwidth from these tasks can be used to focus on something else. CRM can also provide you with information and insights with a few clicks – an employee may require an hour to access the same information without a CRM tool.

Automate Sales tasks 

If you are an SME with core operations around sales, CRM can help you boost your business significantly. It can automate crucial sales tasks such as lead follow-ups,  tracking sales appointments, and post-sales activities. You can track all the sales and marketing activities in one place. It also provides you with an alert when you are required to pay attention to a hot lead.

Integration with other software

CRM is not only about sales, but it can easily integrate with other business management solutions such as project management, data processing software, web services, and accounting. It gives you a more holistic and complete view as you can match your customer information with all other business processes. 

You can also do integration with email and social media, which makes it super easy for you to manage, prioritize and respond to customer email and social media notifications on a real-time basis. With this, you can convert more leads from email by turning your email into a conversion funnel. In short, it helps you better manage your email campaign.

Insights into sales performance 

To increase your sales, you need to understand where you are going wrong or can improve in the current process. CRM software analyzes your present sales performance and works as an opportunity management tool. CRM tools using technology like Artificial Intelligence can determine the scope of future revenue and scrutinize if the current sales process requires more focus. 

The insights can help you understand if your team needs further sales training to deliver better results. On top of all this, CRM software helps you diagnose potential service and support issues to make your business more proactive to customer problems.

Upselling opportunities 

Getting a new customer is a long and costly process. If you have an existing customer base, why not do most of it by upselling? A CRM can help you in this respect also and boost your business. Upselling is a technique where you can add additional services or products to the original purchase. 

Based on all the past interactions that a particular customer has had with the company and analyzing that information intelligently, a sales team can conclude what can be offered to the customer that he is more likely to buy. CRM helps you in this entire process.

Reports 

The CRM software can organize information into reports which lack human errors and biases. Sales reporting can be difficult when done manually. Analytics requires attention to detail which is a time-consuming process. With CRM, sales reports can be generated in no time and can be customized as per requirement. For example, a sales performance report tells you how well your sales team is doing in terms of closing target deal numbers and gives you an estimate of the actual and expected value of deals in the sales pipeline.

Team collaboration becomes easy 

CRM software keeps all the information centralized and helps your team members centrally track sales probabilities and pipelines. Users can easily access and edit the data shared with them about every customer touchpoint. You can better manage product supply by clearly analyzing the impact of marketing campaigns. Once you have CRM software in your company, it ensures every team member is on the same page – anyone can add notes, mark actions and act on problems.

Grievance Resolution 

As mentioned above, getting a new customer is not easy and also costly. Hence, you must do everything to ensure you don’t lose a customer. One of the main reasons you lose a customer is that there is an unresolved grievance that they have either due to bad quality products, poor service, later delivery, bad management, etc. Without a CRM system, it could be quite impossible for you to keep track of all the customers’ complaints. Since CRM generates a unique id for each customer, tracking everything related to them is easy.

Does your business need CRM?

You now know how CRM can help you boost your business. However, if you are still in doubt about whether it is useful for your business or not, let us try and help you. To get the answer to this question, you need to answer the below question for yourself:

  • Do you find it difficult to track customer-related documents?
  • Do you track leads from different sources in one place?
  • Do you miss giving enough priority to hot leads?
  • Do you feel you are unable to track campaign results effectively?
  • Are your customers from diverse backgrounds?

If the answer to the above problems is YES, then you need CRM software for your business, whether you are a small or medium business.

Conclusion

There are endless benefits that CRM software can bring to SMEs. If you want to expand your business or improve the existing process in your company, you need to consider investing in CRM soon. As mentioned at the start, CRM is a flexible tool and has a lot to offer – therefore customize the tools as per your requirement. If required, you can hire dedicated developer to develop a CRM for your business. 

5 Signs You Need to Hire a Digital Marketing Agency

Every business wishes to stay on top of their prospective customer’s thoughts whenever they are planning to make buying decisions. However, it’s easier said than done, today’s consumers are more interested in building a connection with brands than even their products or services.

Now if you’re a business owner, then you know digital marketing is the way to build customer relationships and attract traffic towards your business.

One of the crucial decisions as a business owner is deciding whether to set up an internal marketing team or hire a digital marketing agency. In case you’re having a similar question in your mind then you’re at the right place. In this article, we are going to be discussing why might be in need of a digital marketing agency.

Let’s get started, shall we!!

Signs indicating that your business needs a digital marketing agency

As a small business owner, you have enough things to worry about, such as overlooking resources and operations. There are times when you need to allow an expert marketer to grow your business.

1) You’re Not Sure Where Your Money has Gone

 

You’re Not Sure Where Your Money has Gone

 

Brand promotion online can consume a major chunk of your financial reserves. If not done carefully, pay-per-click advertising can use up all your bidding amount without giving any real results in return.

With years of experience, a digital marketing agency can execute your PPC campaigns, using targeted keywords and closely monitor the campaigns, so they can adapt accordingly.

Not only using the off-page and on-page SEO activities a digital mating agency can boost your brand’s presence organically in the long term.

2) You’re Doing the Right Things. But Getting the Wrong Results

 

You’re Doing the Right Things. But Getting the Wrong Results

 

We’re sure you’ve done your due research regarding digital marketing activities to grow your business. However, Those activities need to be planned and executed in the right order that varies from business to business.

The first step any professional digital marketer will do is analyse your brand’s end-to-end online infrastructure and prepare and custom plan as per your business requirements.

So that each activity applied has the maximum impact in improving your online presence and attracting relevant traffic towards your business.

3) You’re Doing Everything – By Yourself

 

You’re Doing Everything - By Yourself

 

You have N number of things to worry about while running your business this includes managing your staff, planning strategies, taking care of organisational logistics and more. This doesn’t leave much scope to effectively handle the burden of roles related to digital marketing.

In a digital marketing agency, there are multiple teams responsible for managing various activities such as SEO, design & content, development, Process automation etc. All these work in sync to achieve the desired results.

4) You Don’t Have 1, 3, 6 & 12 Month Plans in Place

 

You Don’t Have 1, 3, 6 & 12 Month Plans in Place

 

This can only have when your business has the right reporting parameters in place. The metrics will help you get a crystal clear image of your organisation’s current status and plan your next moves accordingly.

One of the key responsibilities of digital marketing is designing and implementing a robust reporting infrastructure for your business. Using tools Power BI and Google data studio, the metrics are reported to help you make real-time decisions and plan ahead.

5) Your website is not providing you with the results you need

 

Your website is not providing you with the results you need

 

Having a beautiful website is one thing but to meet your organisational objectives it has to rank in the online search results. Now, this is not an easy feat as there is a lot of competition online.

By implementing off-page and on-page SEO activities along with relevant content, the digital marketing agency can empower your website to rank higher in search engine results.

Summing it up

 

Hiring an external digital marketing agency has many benefits but you should also keep in mind that it takes some time for digital marketing activities to take effect. In case you have any questions or need to hire a professional digital marketer then please contact us and we’ll get in touch with you in no time.

Cheers!!

CRM Vs CDP: Differences, Similarities, Applications & Use Cases

You probably know about CRM (Customer Relationship Management) tools quite well. After all, it originated as a concept in the 80s, and as a product in the 90s. You may know some things about CDPs – even though you’d be surprised to know that they’ve been around for more than a decade.

And while you might think that CDP is just one of the (multiple) acronyms in your life, there are a few firms who’ve no doubts about CDPs whatsoever. Among them is the world’s No.1 CRM, Salesforce, which is developing its own CDP – earlier Customer 360 Audiences, now simply Salesforce CDP – by leaps and bounds.

Then, there are the good folks at Adobe and Oracle, who are on the bandwagon too.

Why?

In this article, we’ll answer that. As well as give you a detailed analysis of their differences, similarities, and areas of overlap. After reading through, you’ll know which tasks they’re best suited to, and which one (or two!) will help you increase conversions and drive ROI. Plus, we’ve got some illustrative use cases to explain it all perfectly.

So read on! And yes, it’s a long read. So get comfortable. Or,  skip to the TLDR part at the end of each section. And get your hands on the pdf version for future reference.

Here’s what we’ll cover:

  1. How Customer Experience is Driving the Unstoppable Growth of CDPs & CRMs
  • What is Customer Experience (CX)
  • Why is CX the Gamechanger Today?
  • CX from a ‘Personal’ Perspective 

How Customer Experience is Driving the Unstoppable Growth of CDPs & CRMs

What is Customer Experience (CX)

Customer experience is defined as how a customer feels about your brand across the sum total of interactions with you. It’s about how welcome, cared for and catered to they feel with your product, your people, as well as all your digital interfaces & touchpoints.

Why CX is a Gamechanger Today?

According to a Gartner survey, 75% of companies can prove that higher customer satisfaction increase revenues. This growth is driven by higher retention rates or a greater lifetime value. As Raj Gautam, CEO, QL Tech, says, ‘Simply creating a better product is not enough. You need to constantly deliver more value to your customers.’

Delivering value means providing the right content to your audience for their stage in the buyer’s cycle. Give them timely assistance right where and when they need it. Keep your ear to the ground, and get the right feedback to continuously improve your product. Keep up with their changing behaviour and buying habits. And make them feel that they’re well cared for in general.

Giving CX that ‘Personal’ Touch 

In short, game-changing CX is all about providing that personal touch. Every interaction, message, ad, and solution that you deliver must seem like it was made just for them. And the rewards of doing so are immense.  

86% of shoppers will pay extra for an extra nice CX. And a more personalised experience has triggered 49% to make impulse purchases. Understanding your customer better and delivering just the right trigger will pay rich dividends.

 

CDP –  What it Does, and How

  1.  collect, understand and act on data to influence customer decisions whenever the customer is ready to act. Some customers may be looking for real-time interactions, and some may want to take things slow. Based on data
  2. Breaks down silos – presents a unified view of the customer and deliver a uniform CX across channels
  3. a wide variety of integrations that can unify data from disparate channels as seamlessly as possible. Every data channel should be connected
  4. The CDP should be data source-neutral unifies all customer touchpoints and makes data useful to every team and every technology within the enterprise. Rich customer data within the supply chain, call centres and other places outside the shopping cart should be utilised.

 

CRM Vs CDP Vs DMP

CRM is an operational system for sales and customer service agents; it has detailed data but isn’t designed to let other systems work with that data.

DMP holds summarized data used primarily to support ad campaigns. 

In short: big data and data warehouse overlap with CDP while CRM and DMP are pretty distinct and you’ll probably need both.

 

CRM Vs CDP in Detail

Rating CRMs and CDPs on the Most Critical Components of CX:

  1. Enabling elegant, painless interactions (66%)
  2. Providing speedy service (66%)
  3. Ensuring that customers feel understood (65%)
  4. Making relevant information easy to find (63%)
  5. Being consistent and connected across channels (63%)

 

Applications/Advantages of CRMs

Applications/Advantages of CDPs

True CDP can align with data compliance goals In the wake of the European Union’s General Data Protection Regulation and the California Consumer Privacy Act

The best CDPs bring all customer data and preferences into a central repository, meaning opt-in/opt-outs are easy to manage, customer data is easy to eliminate completely and locating all of a customer’s data is a fast process — all critical elements to complying with modern privacy regulations.

CDP buyers should look for organizations that already prioritize data privacy best practices

AI-driven personalization is the wave of the future. Right now, the building blocks of this are being laid by CDPs that can collect and normalize data in real time. In the future, this means chatbots that can have tailored conversations with customers, but also soak up their behaviour through the buyer journey and make decisions based on that data in the future.

machine learning-enabled CDPs powering real-time, tailored decisions, marketers will also approach testing in a whole new way. Through automation, marketers will be able to more quickly and strategically test the next steps and communication methods and gather smarter data around the results. 

 

Top CDPs

It has been interpreted in different ways by different vendors and even users. So, choosing a CDP software is never about the ‘best CDP’ in the literal sense of the word but it’s about the ‘the best CDP solution for you.’

AM I READY FOR A CDP?

Your Martech stack was built organically over time, without a clear PoA, maybe even before CDPs existed.

Victim of cloud vendors who’ve overpromised and underdelivered.

In house, the IT department has delayed or built inefficient, poorly integrated software systems.

Your data is in silos, and different tools are unable to access all of your customer data.

You have constant sources of data that will not dry up

You have all the data definitions/business rules required to make sense of the data

You need to make decisions in real-time.. You handle large volumes of data, your customer’s value personlaised one-on-one communication,  

 

You’re having trouble building a consistent, relevant, cohesive and personalized ‘multi-touchpoint customer experience’

You are unable to track and measure conversion effectively across the complex marketing mix

You are finding it hard to manage dynamic customer databases- from data privacy and unsubscribes to moving conversions from the prospect to the customer workflow in real time

Omer Artun, CEO and Founder of AgilOne adds: you are probably ready for a CDP if:

You have a significant number of customers who frequently interact with your brand across channels (the greater the number of customers, interactions, and transactions, the more value a CDP will provide)

Your company gets a lot of value from 1:1 interactions (e.g., increased LTV, response rate, ROAS, etc.)

There are multiple customer profiles across multiple systems, but you could benefit from a master customer record

You need a single customer view in real-time, so all operating systems can have access to real-time customer data across different interaction points, devices, and applications

Beyond the pure customer insights, the right CDP can offer, marketers must also realize that a CDP solution can help future-proof their operations and keep pace with the evolution of technology like AI for years to come.

% of companies that are going to be competing solely on customer experience.. Gartner!

CX -> marketing + sales + service

Not good to outsource CX initiatives

 

The success of digital transformation will not be measured by how much companies invest in innovative technologies, but by how well they use those technologies to elevate and maintain the customer experience. 

In the experience economy, transactions that used to occur face-to-face are being rapidly replaced by digitally-enabled interactions, person-to-machine engagements or, even, machine-to-machine experiences across a diverse and dynamic spectrum of digital gateways or digitally-aided, in-person situations.  

Customers knowingly or inadvertently give you their data – the behavioural, financial, relationship, location, and personal identity information that gets exchanged – knowingly or not – in return for an ever-improving, loyalty-building customer experience. 

 

capture and analyze interaction data in real-time

brands face the problem of stitching together fragmented data from interactions that stretch across email, web, mobile apps, call centres, chatbots, in-store transactions and more. To meet customer expectations for contextually appropriate responses, companies need unified, actionable data for which legacy technologies like data warehouses, data lakes, and customer relationship management systems (CRMs) are just not up to the task. 

In the ever-expanding digital ecosystem, customers engage across multiple channels at any time of day or night from virtually any location or device and expect a brand to respond with an immediate personalized response.      

delivers the most current intel about a unique customer from – structured and unstructured; real-time and historical; anonymous and identifiable – data that is collected from multiple sources. 

 

A CDP is an evolution of something all modern marketers (should be) familiar with – a marketing database. In this case, a CDP is a marketing database, purpose-built for the API-driven world and ‘pick and mix’ marketing technology stacks in mind, while also allowing for the integration of offline sources and legacy database and infrastructure”. This gives you some idea of who could use a CDP

 

WHAT BASICS NEED TO BE IN PLACE BEFORE INVESTING IN A CDP?

We identified the symptoms, diagnosed the problem and prescribed a good strong CDP as the possible cure. But –  have you checked for allergic reactions?

It appears that true, data-driven personalization across all touchpoints and throughout the customer’s journey would be difficult- if not impossible – without a CDP.  So, if that is your goal, and you have clarity on exactly where you are stuck with using your customer data more effectively, you should be ready for a serious investment decision. But it’s not all about what you don’t have. You also need to think about what you do have in place today for a CDP to deliver tomorrow.

 

Consider these:

  1. A plan: document your journey and plan: what are the realistic expectations and outcomes along with milestones for the CDP investment? Who are the people accountable and who are the decision-makers?  What will your KPIs and metrics be? What will you prioritize in case there is too much data?
  2. Data: you need some amount of ongoing customer data from multiple sources with a reasonable level or capability for integration to be in place before CDP can work to move you forward. In essence, you should be at least at the bottom of the pyramid in the Graphic above. Even if it’s unconnected, siloed and inaccessible, you still need the inflow of high-quality data from multiple sources.
  3. Data skills: you don’t need the tech chops of a data warehousing expert but some analytic and application experience is required within the marketing team to manage and own the CDP project, right from the evaluation and requirement mapping stage to regular use post-deployment, and of course the turbulent deployment stage in the middle. Get the right people on the team before moving to the next stage.
  4. Management and user buy-in: it’s unlikely you will get a budget without management buy-in, but don’t forget adoption- will the users- the people that make up your marketing team – be able to accept this level of integration, transparency and measurability?
  5. Marketing Automation: you need a fairly mature marketing automation solution or stack in place for optimal CDP outcomes. Having connected and real-time data in place won’t be much good if you don’t have a robust outbound/ inbound marketing automation system in place to use the data and execute personalized campaigns.
  6. Integration capability: for CDP to deliver, data needs to flow. Ensure you have checked with internal experts on the integration capabilities of existing solutions and what it would take to get the data flowing both ways, as well as plug in the analytics solution.
  7. Compliance: with GDPR and other data protection data privacy laws in effect or due to come into effect soon, a unified customer view will go a long way in ensuring compliance. It is useful to understand the compliance requirements for your industry and geography and figure out whether and how a CDP Course Changes Build Customer Loyalty

 

According to Gartner, a course-changing digital experience leads customers to shift their perspective or approach and begin to take confident steps toward their goal. A positive course change can impact brand preference by 37% and behavioural advocacy by 54%.

“When customers do something different with confidence after a digital experience, that creates a lasting brand impression and inspires customers to share their memorable experience with others,” said Ms LaRocca-Cerrone.

 

Self-Reflective Learning Drives Course Changes

Customers’ self-reflective learning during a digital experience has 2x the impact on driving customers’ course changes, compared to user experience functionalities. This is because customers change course when they feel empowered and ready to do something different, not because of a slick or intuitive user interface. “To trigger these valuable customer course changes, CMOs must invest in building a new class of digital experiences that slows customers down at key junctures and rewards their self-reflection,” added Ms LaRocca-Cerrone.  

Google Core Algorithm Update of September 2022

The official Google list of algorithm updates will take around 2 weeks to release. And this update is generally being positively welcomed by the online community. While the algorithm is constantly going through changes, however, a core algorithm update tends to be more noticeable.

So let’s dive deeper and find out what the update is all about.

Google core algorithm update

There will be modifications to many parts of the Google algorithm however it’s presumed it will be affecting search results across most languages. The impact of helpful content might become more prominent during a core algorithm update.

With that being said, the helpful content has been an important part of the core algorithm core and is being consistently running so that a new website can be affected by that algorithm component known as the Helpful Content Update (HCU).

As for how to respond to this change The best approach now is to be vigilant of any changes in the search console but don’t react. Search results may bounce around for the next few weeks. Let the search results settle down before trying to make making a definite decision.

We will keep you updated on how the update shapes up, till then stay tuned!!

How email marketing can help in transforming your business

While some might think that email marketing is not as effective as it used to be, that is not the case. It is about how you implement it for your business. True, the age of outbound and impersonal emails is over, but email marketing with context can make a huge impact.

People check their inbox several times a day and when they see an email that catches their eye, they open it. And that will give your brand a chance to engage with them. When you market your product or service through contextual emails the probability of conversion increase exponentially.

In this article, we are going to be discussing how email marketing can benefit your brand, so without further adieu, let’s get started.

 

Benefits of Email marketing

1. Easy to Analyse and optimise

Every email that is sent, gives metrics and reports that show open rates, click-through rates, bounce rates, and conversion rates.  These metrics are crucial in understanding which email marketing strategies are working and what needs improvement.

Growth through adaptability is the key to every business’s success.

2. Highly Contextual

Email marketing lists can be easily segmented based on demographics, interests, past behaviour, etc which empowers your business to create personalised messaging that users are looking for. 

This is an effective marketing strategy that helps your marketing message resonate strongly with your audience.

3. Low Cost & Good ROI

Compared to other marketing channels like pay-per-click, email marketing costs very little. With the right email marketing tool such as a CRM or CDP, you can fully automate all your email marketing campaigns. 

However, its advised that you take help from an experienced digital marketer in the begging while setting up your CRM or CDP platforms.

4. Helps in building Relationships, Loyalty & Trust

Customers nowadays are always on the lookout for brands they can relate to. Email marketing is great for building one-on-one relationships with prospects and customers.  

By creating well-written and engaging newsletters and emails, that are in context with the interactions that people have had with your brand, the chances of conversion or repetitive business increase greatly.

Summary

Email marketing is still an incredibly viable strategy to reach out to your audience, but you need to ensure your emails are personalised and not spammy. 

In case you have any questions or need help with your email marketing campaigns than simply drop us are line and we will try our best to help you out.

Cheers!!

How Blogging helps in empowering your digital marketing strategies

A well-written blog can make a powerful impact in boosting all your business’s digital marketing strategies. When we say “Well-written” it’s not just using attractive language (although that is also important).

A good blog should be able to explain and elaborate on the main topic as efficiently as possible for the readers. For instance, when you write a blog about your products or services then your blog should be informative enough for the visitors to understand what your brand is all about.

If done the right way your blog can play a key role in converting your visitors into valuable customers. In this article, we will discuss the number of ways blogging plays a key role in your digital marketing strategies.

 

Why blogging is essential for your brand

People just don’t want to purchase products or services from your business, they wish to form a connection to which they can relate. In this regard, blogging can help your business to a great extent.

 

Empowering SEO and SERP

Empowering SEO and SERP

 

Blogs greatly boost your SEO activities both off-page and on-page. Producing trending and relevant content is a sure shot of coming on top of the competition on the search engine results page. 

The Google search engine is a big fan of updated content, new content on your website can help to improve SERP rankings. Using specific keywords about your product or service also helps to boost your search keywords. 

You can add some engaging new topics from your team members by getting them to share their experiences at events or write about the latest trends in your brand’s market.

 

Adding value that helps build relationships

Adding value that helps build relationships

 

As we mentioned above, customers wish to build a relationship with businesses and that is what you should focus on.  Blogs provide an excellent medium to enhance that connection between your brand and the customers. Consumers like to be informed of the updates and appreciate that you are educating them. 

Think about what is important to your prospect or customer, how your product or service will benefit them and write on that. The better you are able to resolve your customer, the more chances there are for them to remain loyal to your business.

By focusing on features and answers instead of benefits, and by shifting by blogging to respond to your customers’ wants and needs you are adding and building value for your business.

 

Boosting Brand Awareness

Boosting Brand Awareness

 

Brand awareness is a crucial element of digital marketing, blog posting will allow your business to showcase the personal side of your business to your potential prospects and existing customers. 

The best branding campaigns are comprised of fantastic storytelling and what other way to directly provide that epic story than blogging? A comprehensive yet entertaining blog is an excellent way to reinforce your brand’s image on the market. 

Posting hot content on your website shows your up-to-date knowledge about your product or service. Now there is constant arrival of new content formats and features, but your blog remains the core of an effective digital marketing strategy.

 

Lastly…

Blogging will always remain a very powerful key component when it comes to executing a successful digital marketing strategy, Building trust with your customer by providing them with helpful content is crucial and important in growing your business. 

In case you have any questions or you need our help your jump-starting your blogging journey, then please feel free to book a 30 minutes free session with us and we would be happy to assist you in any way we can.

Cheers!!

How to Use Customer Analytics to Grow Your Business?

No business in the world can undermine the value of customer analytics. It not only helps businesses to make informed decisions, but it can help them build their entire customer lifecycle for their brand.

Now some might be wondering what customer analytics is. Well, it’s the collection, processing and analysis of customer information to gain insights into customer behaviour. As for why you need customer analytics? Well, this goes without saying, there more you know about your customers, the better your business can prepare itself to attract, convert and develop a long-lasting relationship with them.

Businesses use various tools to gather customer business analytics effectively. In this article, we are going to discuss all the steps involved and why customer analytics is necessary for your bottom line.

 

How can you collect and store customer analytics data?

The way your business collects and stores customer information makes an immense impact as it paces the way towards how can use the data as effectively as possible.

Data collection

The first step is figuring out ways to collect data for this your marketing teams can use Google Analytics to collect customer information such as the behaviour of visitors to your business website.

There are other tools like HubSpot, Mailchimp, and Optimizely that work just as well as Google Analytics.

Data sorting

The data that you have collected is mostly unstructured, you need a way to sort it and direct it for further analysis. A customer data platform (CDP) can be very helpful in doing this, will help you do this. CDP directs your data to the place where it needs to be. 

CDPs connect multiple tools and ensure the data collected is standardised. Properly sorted data is much easier to sort and analyse.

Data storage

Now that you have your customer data all sorted your CDP needs to send the data for storage in a data warehouse where it’s unified. Redshift is one of the most popular data warehouses among users, but there are plenty of others like BigQuery and Postgres.

Once you have selected the data warehouse that you’re going to use to store your data, now’s the time to start that process of customer analytics. 

Data analysis

Lastly, you’ll need some way to analyze your data with business intelligence tools like Mode Analytics, Looker, or Tableau. But there one thing that you should note is that these tools are that they require specific knowledge of SQL. 

In case you are not proficient in SQL, you can also consider having a look at a tool like Chartio.

Need for customer analytics for your business

Customer analytics will help every department within your company, especially when it comes to building highly personalised, timely marketing campaigns.

Customer journey analytics can also help your sales team understand your customers’ behaviour to help them reduce your sales cycle. Your development team can use customer analytics to build a better product as per customers’ preferences.

Similarly, the marketing teams can use customer analytics to streamline your marketing funnel more so that your audiences convert more effectively.

Summary

Today’s well-known brands have an immense understanding of their customer analytics. If you want to take your business to the next level by creating a more personalised experience for your customers, you need to take the time to build a customer analytics infrastructure.

If you have any questions or need help setting up your customer analytics pipeline, please feel free to book a 30 minutes free session with us, and we will try our best to help you out.

Cheers!!

Useful Blogging Tools That Will Save You Time

In today’s cut-throat digital world writing a decent blog is just not enough. You need to do the research, find the right keywords and market it so that it helps you grow your audience and reach out to your customers.

By the time you’re done with all these activities, it’s time for the next blog and the cycle begins again. This rarely leaves you time to do anything else, in fact, most bloggers have to cut some time from their blog prog promotions.

What if we tell you that certain tools can drastically reduce your blogging time? Sounds interesting? Well, it certainly is and we are going to be discussing these blogging tools in this article. So without further adieu let’s get started!

Awesome Blogging tools for all your needs

Todoist

The Todoist tool takes your to-do lists to a new level by allowing you to create multiple tasks so that you could make a list of blog posts, schedule, and collaborate with others.

With the ability to personalise your views that fit with your style it simplifies workflow by connecting your emails, calendars, and files. Not only this Todist can integrate with multiple other apps, including Dropbox and Alexa.

As of now, Todoist has around 187k Google reviews with a 4.7 rating.

Evernote

When it comes to capturing anything from text, photos or audio notes, Evernote is the finest. With this digital workspace, you can save drafts of your blog posts in the app and then publish them when you’re ready.

Another function that Evernote specialises in is clipping images and screenshots while you surfing the net. Evernote’s a powerful search feature and keyword tags easily find what you need to capture and sync your notes with other devices if you want.

Flipboard

The Flipboard app can be used to collate all kinds of content like news, blogs, videos, photos, social media posts, etc. As of now, there are stories from nearly 30,000 topics on Flipboard.

You can then turn the unified content into personalised stories to share with social media followers or used for your blog. It has an easy-to-use interface that is highly customisable by topic interest, making it great for niche blog promotion.

Agorapulse

Agorapulse is an all-in-one digital marketing platform that is used for monitoring, managing, and analysing your social media marketing campaigns. It helps you analyse the impact of your marketing strategies so you can decide on what’s working and what’s not.

You can schedule social media posts in advance so that you don’t miss any opportunities to engage with your followers. Agorapulse specialises in performance tracking to identify your best-performing content and the implementation of analytics to understand which content is getting the best response.

These blogging tools will help you in simplifying most of your blogging activities and help you save time. We will keep updating you when we come across other tools that you can use. Till then keep reading our blogs and drop us a line in case you have any questions.

Cheers!!

Automation in the healthcare industry – Massive Benefits

Weeks back, we shed light on the growing importance of digital marketing in healthcare industry. No matter whether you run a corporate day surgery or a clinic, digital marketing and automation are becoming must-have elements for practitioners and medical service providers.

Let’s understand the need for automation in the healthcare industry

If you are from the healthcare industry, probably you would have started taking help of automation.  And, if you are little hesitant about why you need automation in the healthcare industry, read through this article. There are numerous benefits of using automation in the healthcare industry.

A small exercise: Which scenario intrigues you more?

Scenario A:

John runs a dental clinic. He has employed 4 full-time nurse navigators. On average, they spend their 12 hours a week in attending phone calls, booking appointments, and maintaining excels of patient data.

Further, both in-house and outdoor patients are highly dependent on nurses for their treatments and related care. Obviously, nurse navigators have dual responsibilities of taking patient care and maintaining data. And hence, John can get very little quantified feedback data from their reporting. Since there is not much of actionable data to analyse, there are no corrective systems in place.

In spite of sufficient staff, John is not professionally satisfied. The reasons were quite a few. Nurse navigators are spending more than required time on repetitive and monotonous tasks.  Also, he is unable to provide a personalised touch to his regular patients who lose their track during on-going treatments.

Scenario B:

John is advised to take help of automation to ease his pain. After employing business process automation in his dental clinic, he could lessen his fixed salary costs. Now, he has employed 3 full time and 1 part-time nurse navigators.

Further, when his patients go off track in taking their care from home, through self-service tools, he provides them with automated alerts. These alerts help them bring back on track.

The systems which he employed are user-friendly and provide him with immense ease in knowing real-time patient data.  With the help of actionable feedback, he is able to gauge what concerns can be addressed that results in an overall increase in his ROI.

What is your take on these two scenarios? For sure, you will like to have an environment similar to Scenario B for your clinic/practice. The reason behind the differences in the environment is nothing else but “automation.”

It is the right time for you to realise the need of automation and get ready to tackle with new processes. Take a quick glance at some of the most prominent benefits of automation in the healthcare industry.

Benefits of automation in the healthcare industry

Increase in labour efficiency

Whether you run a day surgery or a small clinic, you need to carry out lots of stuff on a daily basis. A large chunk of routine activities is monotonous. Moreover, activities like processing insurance payments, transferring lab reports to the appropriate clinician, scheduling patients’ appointments, and compiling medical records and charts are routine admin tasks.

If you apply automation for these tasks, imagine how easy it would be for you. In addition, the entire labour work can be done in a few clicks and in much better-synchronised manner.

There is a common fear among practitioners and day surgery owners. They fear that implementing automation might hurt employments. But, this is not the case. Reduction in labour costs does not directly imply lay-offs in mass. In fact, medical centres, clinics, and day surgeries will still require people to get trained on how to automate monotonous tasks that result in efficiency and higher productivity.

Reduction in waste

Automation can efficiently boost the connection between nurses and patients. Nurses don’t need to spend their much of time in admin activities. Hence, nurses can better invest this saved time inpatient care.

On the other hand, usage of various papers, worksheets, registers, and others result in immense workload leading to a lot of waste. Automation can save all this is quite an effectual manner. A Texas hospital study found that greater automation in the areas of medical records, order entry, and decision support appeared to result in a reduction in deaths, complications and cost.

Increased certainty of results

Automation not only eases your admin activities, but it also helps patients to remain on track throughout their treatment tenure. With the help of automation in the healthcare industry, you can send your patients regular reminders of their next due treatment of consultation. You can also send them health tips, precautionary measures, or any other dos and don’ts related to their ongoing treatments.

On the other hand, since patients follow a standardised care path as directed by your automation services, most likely they will stay on track. Even if they get deviated, there are high chances of them coming back to track due to regular reminders. And hence, treatment outcomes will be quite close to your predictions.

Insights based on data rather than presumptions

Automation in the healthcare industry can make your lives much easier since you can get data-driven insights. Through properly integrated systems, you can get real-time data and continuous feedback. These two elements play a major role in performance enhancement and process optimisation.

Click to read more on: What is Marketing Automation?

Closing thoughts

The above listed expected benefits are just a glimpse of the overall picture. Once you get started with automation in the healthcare industry, you will be able to enjoy the beauty of automation services.

5 Ways to Use Social Media Automation in your Marketing Strategy

Automation – keeping things simple, and making them faster

We are now in 2017, and the era of Social Media automation is truly upon us. Today, we witness a number of scheduling tools for various automation tasks. Such tasks include automation of e-mail responses, automation in industries, automation in banking services – in a nutshell, and many others. A pretty big chunk of the average person’s day is dependent on automation and automated processes. Automation, in itself, is an invaluable tool to boost productivity.

Social media – Killer Shark or a Marketing Runway?

Ask anyone born post the ’90s where the real dynamism is. A great majority of them will tell you it is social media. However, over two-thirds of marketing executives cringe at the very mention of social media. This is because of the overload of social media. Its intrinsic ease of access is, strangely enough, killing marketing. However, on the other hand, it is also enabling a rebirth for marketing, in the form of social media marketing.

marketing-runway-for-social-media-marketing

Let us move towards what exactly social media marketing is. Today we see many small businesses, libraries, and stores purely run based on their social media presence. Moreover, nowadays, we see companies use various channels of social networking to create a self-sustained marketing model for themselves. The more the employees post on social media, the more potential gains the business stands to receive.

The use of social media is not quite universal—but it is getting close. 70% of the U.S. population now has at least one social networking profile, while more than half use two or more social networks. According to CMO survey, the number of global social media users is projected to grow from 2.1 billion in 2015 to 2.5 billion by 2018.

The following pie describes the impact of Social Media Marketing on businesses

social media marketing comparison graph

A dose of insight:

Social media marketing now plays almost as large a role in purchasing decisions as does TV, and 57% of consumers say they’re influenced to think more highly of business after seeing positive comments or praise online.“

Still, some fascinating contradictions remain. Even though businesses today use social media for marketing and those efforts are expected to increase, many marketers and top executives alike find the business value difficult to quantify through this process. Today, as social media is speeding along at a lightning pace, marketing executives are huffing and puffing along in its wake. Now, it is time for marketers to catch up.

That is where the brainchild of the two – social media marketing and marketing automation – comes in. Say hello to ‘social media automation’!

When the worlds of social media and marketing automation hit into one, a union of convenience and connectivity is achieved. A broad bandwidth of experts in this domain does seem to concur with this fact. According to a recent study by Marketo91% of the most successful users agree that marketing automation is “very important” to the overall success of their marketing efforts across channels.

Five rules for social media automation

Today, a major amount of our time is mostly spent staring at screens. It seems that this trend is here to stay for long. The devices and their screens are getting more and more sophisticated as well. Keeping that in mind, here is the nitty-gritty of social media automation.

1)Post When Your Audience is up and surfing

The chances of getting higher traffic to your posts are obviously higher when your audience is online. Each business (and social network) is unique. The only way to know the best time to post is to dig into analytics. Once you are well versed with the knowledge of perfect posting times, it becomes easier for you to make data-driven decisions. Rather than throwing posts out hoping for an outcome, better you predict it. Based on our research, we highly recommend a tool called True Social Metrics if you need to understand when and how your audience is spending their time on the web.

bes time to post on social media marketing

Once you know your best time to post, you can then use a tool like Post Planner or Sprout Social – both are excellent social media management tools. Usage of these tools can help you plan or schedule your posts at specific intervals.

When content is added to a unique plan, it is then scheduled based on the pre-determined times. It can also help you sort out the best posting times depending on the type of content you are creating. No huffing, no puffing anymore! Just let your system do all the hard work, while you get some downtime!

The buffer is another important social media tool used to optimize social updates. which conveniently helps in scheduling posts on various other social media platforms such as Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus, LinkedIn, and others. It also helps in spreading scheduled posts out to publish throughout the day and engagement time.

There you go, an easy way to save a whole lot of time and effort! What are you waiting for, then?

2)Automate to drive it home: Evergreen Content

Your evergreen content is your bread and butter. This aspect of your website never gets old. In simple words, evergreen content is material that is considered fresh and exciting to your readers. It adds value to your audiences, no matter when it is posted. A tool we found to be very nifty when it comes to posting evergreen content is Tailwind. Pin your freshly churned content – be it a blog, a page, an article or a quote. Let it keep showing up on your social media pages.

3) Set up automation meetings between your heroes: multiple social networks

Perhaps another fundamental feature of automation in general, extending even to social media automation is inter-connectivity. As a marketer, you can set up a linked list of operations based on triggers. By combining one social media network with another, you can achieve greater returns and attention to your posts or websites. With a tool like IFTTT (If This Then That) you can share your Instagram post over Twitter for a wider band of users to see.

4) Set up notifications -to keep you up to speed!

Do you know that annoying pop-up which keeps appearing on your smartphone? Well, a similar feature can be implemented here as well! Except, who has the time to interact, respond, and stay engaged all the time? Timing is essence here. To stay up to speed, you need to initiate automated notifications. One such useful tool we came across is Twitonomy. Twitonomy helps you manage your mentions over Twitter, but more than that – you can see your most influential, engaged, and active users (provided you shell out the bucks for a paid version). The beauty is in its ease of use. Find a mention, click on the tweet, respond, follow, or even add to a list. Within a matter of seconds, you can interact with your audience and stay in the conversation.

Set up notifications -to keep you up to speed!

This graph depicts that an average of 68% of social media fan posts is ignored. Here is where you can get ahead of the rest. Just by being responsive and responsible, all without your own precious time being wasted!

TweetDeck is a successful and totally free desktop web app. It is the best fit for those who need to manage varied accounts, follow specific hashtags, respond to lots of distinct users, and see precisely what’s being tweeted in real-time.

On the other hand, Followerwonk is used to explore and grow your social network. It does deep digging into Twitter analytics and let you know who are your followers? Where are they located? When do they tweet? Which tweet gets more fame?

5) Don’t let it do all your work!

It is easy to get carried away these days, isn’t it? Well, automation is a time-saver, perhaps a lifesaver for so many of you marketers! However, having a portion of your work automated doesn’t mean you kick back and grab a breather. Indeed,  social media management tools are surely here to stay, but only because they free up your schedule from monotonous work. Use this time wisely to interact with your customers, to spread your content, and to build relationships!

Finally, since you do spend most of your time on social media anyway, why not utilize that to improve your productivity – as funny as that sounds? That is why, for growing businesses, developing a social presence through automation is perhaps a leap of faith they can afford.

Remember, It is never too late to start!