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

Posted on October 10, 2022 by admin

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:

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

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
Breaks down silos – presents a unified view of the customer and deliver a uniform CX across channels
a wide variety of integrations that can unify data from disparate channels as seamlessly as possible. Every data channel should be connected
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:

Enabling elegant, painless interactions (66%)
Providing speedy service (66%)
Ensuring that customers feel understood (65%)
Making relevant information easy to find (63%)
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:

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?
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.

How email marketing can help in transforming your business

Posted on September 16, 2022 by admin

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

Posted on September 9, 2022 by admin

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

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

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

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!!

Useful Blogging Tools That Will Save You Time

Posted on August 19, 2022 by admin

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!!

Google’s key announcements in 2022 so far

Posted on August 10, 2022August 19, 2022 by admin

Google released quite a few updates and features in the year 2020 for over 1 billion users. Most of these updates are directed toward improving the user experience, security and privacy. In case you missed out on some of Google’s key announcements, here’s a quick summary for you.

Key highlights from Google in 2022

Android 13

Google wants to take the OEM customisation experience to the next level in Android 13. The users will be able to customise the looks of the UI with ready-made colour variants that can be applied throughout the OS and reflected in wallpapers and themes.

As for multilingual users, the Android 13 will give a variety of options to select different languages for different apps through phone settings.

Security and privacy update

With the transformation to remote work and using devices outside of security, office networks have become more vulnerable to cyber-attacks. To enable users to navigate online in a more secure manner Google is launching Account Safety Status for apps.

If an account is not fully secure, a yellow alert icon will appear on the profile pic and recommend actions that the users can take to secure the app.

Latest pixel devices

As many of us expected, Google has announced a new mid-range smartphone Pixel 6A. It will be using Google’s Tensor chip and have a 6.1-inch OLED screen with a blazing 60Hz refresh rate.

It also supports 5G and is equipped with dual cameras. Not only Google has also given a sneak into the design of Pixel 7 and Pixel 7 Pro smartphones.

Expanding search experience

Google has announced that it is growing the scope of what users can do with the latest multi-search feature launched to help users search with images. Users can now search by taking a picture or screenshot of local businesses, retailers, and other goods and adding “near me” while exploring.

Google is also putting together another feature called “scene exploration,” which will allow users to pan the camera in multi-search so that they can get more information on multiple objects in a scene.

We hope you found our summation of Google’s latest updates helpful and in case you have any questions, simply drop us a line and we’d love to help you out.

Cheers!!

How can you best use customers’ information for your business?

Posted on August 5, 2022August 5, 2022 by admin

The way your brand collects customer information determines how your marketing, sales and service teams interact with them. And this determines whether your business can make long-lasting relationships with or lose to your competitors.

This is why it is important how you collect, store and use the customer for your communication with your prospects and customers. The way you do that will help your brand deliver highly personalised interactions that can be scaled.

Now the question is, how to collect, store and make use of the information so that all your teams can make the best use of it? In case you’re wondering that same then keep reading we are going to be discussing just that.

Let’s get started, shall we!!

Customer Data for Marketing

Customer Data For Marketing

Marketing is always at the forefront when it comes to interacting with new audiences. Drawing attention to your brand, using strategies like forms and other lead gen tools to convert that audience to contacts, and nurturing them to become sales-ready leads.

1) Website Engagement

At the initial stages of a new lead’s engagement with your business, it’s important to make sure your website analytics is well built to help you understand how they are interacting and how you can streamline their user experience.

Let’s say you have an e-commerce business website, for example, you could utilise your website activity to recommend other likely products that each person might prefer via email or retargeting ads on social media.

2) Segmentation Inforrmation

The data that lets you compartment wise a contact’s info into groups and lists is one of the most useful types of customer information that you can collect early on. This can include data such as team size, industry, and individual roles.

Not only can this data gives rise to the most personalised messaging and marketing automation but it also helps you calculate the lead score.

3) Lead Scoring

Lead qualification data such as lead scoring is one of the most powerful ways for marketers to assist their sales colleagues. With automated lead scoring in place, points are given for positive interactions and behaviour and removed in the case of negative indicators.

It’s the quickest way to instantly analyse how likely is the prospect going to purchase your product, and ideally starts as soon as a visitor converts to a lead. Here are some examples of lead scoring metrics.

Value of the market or industry
Identification as decision-maker
Adequate budget
Amount of time spent on your website

Customer Data for Sales

The sales create and boost the bridge for interested leads to convert them into happy customers, and nurture each prospect to the right product or service. Here is the customer information necessary for your salesperson.

1) Information About Decision-Makers

Your sales team gets a granular view of how each client’s company operates. One of the key components included in this is identifying and recording who is involved in the decision-making process.

This helps you to avoid the unpleasant scenario of them remembering you while you look anxiously at a blank record, or giving the deal to a colleague who has even lesser background information.

2) Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Estimation of a customer’s lifetime value is a really useful metric to forecast long-term and repetitive business.

You can calculate this by multiplying their purchase value by purchase frequency over your average customer lifespan. When you use the right Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) that has calculation properties, you can keep this up to date automatically for your active customers.

Lastly…

All this information can be efficiently tracked and stored in a CRM or CDP platform so that your marketing and sales teams can make the best use of and effectively convert your leads into your customers.

However, there are so many Customer Relationship Management (CRM) or Customer Data Platform (CDP) available in the market it’s difficult to choose the right one that is suitable for your business needs. In case you have any questions regarding CRM or CDP systems or need some assistance in setting up and their customisation, please feel free to contact us anytime and we’d love to help you out.

Cheers!!

What is Salesforce? And 3 Reasons Why it is the Best CRM

Posted on December 30, 2019December 30, 2019 by admin

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.

6 Ways Workflow Automation Will Improve Your Lead Nurturing ROI

Posted on April 24, 2018November 6, 2019 by admin

Staying competitive in today’s dynamic world is becoming increasingly challenging, especially for small to medium businesses. The number of possible lead nurturing touchpoints (where consumers can interact with the brand) has increased beyond imagination.

For instance,

consumers can call the helpline,
interact with automated chatbots,
contact business support teams,
Lead nurturing over social platforms, and
possibly fill up some inquiry or feedback forms

It is with this context, the idea of lead capturing and lead nurturing can be well understood. The process of engaging with the leads in a personalized (or targeted) way by providing highly relevant and contextual information at each touchpoint of the consumer buyer’s journey can be termed as lead nurturing. The intention is to provide enough value so that the lead can make a purchasing decision in the end possibly in favour of our business.

Marketers have to make sure they treat each prospect with due consideration irrespective of their source. To overcome the challenge of keeping a track of all leads and engaging with them in a personalized manner, organizations invest in CRM and marketing automation tools like Infusionsoft, HubSpot or others.

These Marketing Automation tools play an integral role in managing leads and enhancing the engagement abilities of the marketers with the leads.

What is the most effective lead nurturing method?

Now, let’s look into several automated lead nurturing strategies that can possibly boost your ROI.

1. The Art of Segmentation

The first step and more importantly the most effective lead nurturing strategy for maximizing ROI is to segment the prospect in a meaningful manner. Segmentation will help classify the prospect as per the personas which will determine the method through which the client needs to be pursued. Although it’s not always possible to segment in an automated manner, you can deploy some of the below lead nurturing techniques for automation:

In tools like Infusionsoft, you can TAG a prospect based on his website behaviour. For example, if the visitor has spent considerable time and action on a particular service page, it might indicate a preferred interest area
For web-forms, we can add an extra field to segment the visitor based on their interest.

Expected Outcome – A prospect list which is segmented based on their interests, behaviour or geographies.

2. Timely Follow-Ups

The second important step is to ensure the prospects are followed-up in a highly personalized and timely fashion. This is where marketing automation yields the best results for lead nurturing. The idea is to create an automated machine (as Ryan Deiss call it) so that you can focus on other value-added activities. The medium of follow-up can be any, email, SMS, or push notification. Some of the examples of timely automated follow-ups

A sequence of three nurture emails (Download – Gain-Logic-Fear template) to request the user to purchase your initial offer
Abandonment Cart Email Sequence say within three hours after the user abandoning the cart
Drip series on a successful sign-up to educate the user about your product

The best part about marketing automation tools is that you can structure your follow-ups based on IF-ELSE logic. If X happens, then send Y email/SMS, or if Z happens, then send T Email/SMS. Expected Outcome – A highly targeted lead nurturing email campaign set-up in your own marketing automation tool.

3. Automating the Consumer Journey

Lucid Chart - Consumer Journey lead nurturing

Consumer journey refers to step-by-step activities (or touchpoints) a consumer goes through in the entire lifetime with the brand. Through automation, you can stay ahead of the curve and literally chart out the funnel (or steps) through which you want the consumers to move, before or after their purchase. For example,

Customer is driven to a landing page from a Facebook Ad -> Prompted to download the e-book -> the ones who have downloaded are requested to attend a webinar -> Ones who have attended a webinar are nurtured to undergo a free trial of your product -> Nurture to purchase paid version of software ->nurture the lead to purchase any top-ups (upsell) for the product -> Request feedback, and if feedback is positive, request to refer friends, provide reviews and ratings.

Having a well – constructed representation of the consumer journey (also known as a funnel) which is specific to your business is helpful in optimizing your marketing strategy.

4. Lead Scoring

The next strategy is to assign scores based on user behaviour and engagement. The idea is to devise a meaningful point-based system (or lead scoring) that can be useful for prioritizing the follow-up with your prospects. You should think through your own lead scoring formula and then implement in preferred marketing automation tool. An activity indicating a higher level of interest in your products or services should get more points. Also note, it is also important to keep analyzing the formula and not be afraid of refining it as you go.

This procedure is effective in prioritizing the leads that need to be targeted first. For instance, if the lead is marked as cold, then they would need more engagement with your lead nurturing team. On the other hand, if the lead is marked as hot then they are ready to close the deal and should be approached by the sales team immediately. Expected Outcome – Your prospects are assigned leads cores which in turn will help you segment them as Hot, Warm or Cold.

5. Loyalty through delight

It is an indomitable fact that the most powerful form of marketing is from the word of mouth. And this only comes through loyal customers who have been extremely satisfied with your product or services. With the help of CRM, businesses can collect personalized information of their client and use that to create personalized WOW lead nurturing sequence for their customers.

Now, who doesn’t love personalized experiences designed just for them? Off course this goes without saying that delighted customers turn into a loyal customer and customer loyalty goes a long way into increasing the ROI for your business

6. Analysis and Optimization

Any marketer knows that analysis plays an integral role in the framework of any marketing strategy’s success. Analytical marketing automation tools help marketers quantify the success and failure of their marketing techniques.

As you all know that there is no certainty of success while implementing a marketing strategy. However, with continuous analysis of any marketing strategy, marketers can determine the parts of the strategy which are succeeding or failing.

Once the above-mentioned points are ascertained then strategy needs to be optimized accordingly, thus increasing the probability of its success.

To sum things up it has been made extremely clear how crucial a role marketing automation tools play in the success of a business. From automating client communication to optimizing your marketing funnel, Marketers need to embrace lead nurturing for their business wholly and solely.

Automation in the healthcare industry – Massive Benefits

Posted on November 29, 2017November 6, 2019 by admin

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.

3 MUSTS to grow your Business

Posted on July 4, 2016November 6, 2019 by admin

Are you interested in entrepreneurship? Are you interested in starting up an entire digital kingdom of your own? Are you enthralled by the prospects of planning, processing and developing an entire market for yourself?

Well, then what is stopping you? Well, it looks like there are some snags that might be disrupting your rise to glory. Your business might be waiting to bloom, but due to the lack of some crucial elements, you might be missing out on a spectacle worth living for! You know what I am talking about. The moment when you realize that your business has broken beyond the bonds of its origin and is free to grow, develop and proliferate on its own.

Oh, wait.

But, where do you start all this? Let’s take an example just to give you an indication of the cardinal laws that govern the digital wilderness.

The 3 Cardinals of Online Business to Grow

#1 Design & Development

The first step that you have to take as far as climbing up the mountain of a task that digital empire building is, involves the planting of a seed of identity in a virtual space that your online business or website will call home. Developing an identity for your business is as important as developing a personality is for a child who matures from infancy to adulthood.

The foundation of your identity is your website- which ultimately becomes your model to develop your app, digital advertisement, etc. There are 2 parts to this:

WEB DESIGN:

Designing is basically made up of everything that the viewer comes in contact with as soon as they land on your website. This includes the overall look and feel of your website. The design of your site gives an apt indication of what elements your business is defined by as well as the inherent conceptualization of business model. We have only started to understand how revealing a design can truly be as far as sending out messages about your business as well as your intentions is concerned. Design is similar to the clothes that you wear, in that they reveal a lot about your personality as well as your mindset.

The seed of identity of your website is sown through the process of logo design, where the intentions behind your business ideals are expressed artistically. The next phases of designing include aspects such as designing of the virtual space that your business calls home, which is embedded in the process known as website design.

WEB DEVELOPMENT:

Development basically takes care of all the background that that goes into making your site that is controlling how every icon, widget, tool works on your site. For this you need programmers who specialize in programming languages such as C++, HTML, Java, PHP. Being at the helm of an online business may involve the need to use special tools and plugins on your site, such as payment processors and API (Application Programming Interfaces).

The integration of plugins and templates is an especially significant point of consideration if you are nurturing your website on a CMS platform like Joomla or WordPress. CMS stands for Content Management System, a platform that enables users to create digital content equipped with low-level details and user-friendly interfaces. We can use this for controlling formatting, history editing, updating versions, managing search bars, integrating plugins, and more. This process of development changes and fluctuates on the basis of the CMS platform on which you are building your website, which means that Joomla development might differ heavily from WordPress development or Magento development.

Development of entire websites and digital empires can be done through the use of frameworks as well. These frameworks provide much greater freedom and flexibility as far as development is concerned, owing to the fact that they are made up of fixed patterns of methods and classes of code. The process of using frameworks for the development of a website includes the practice of Laravel development, Smarty development, Drupal development, Zen Cart development and Zend development.

#2 Marketing

Let’s face it, your business or website needs to have numerous channels through which it can express itself and reach out to people. A website or business without a dedicated target audience or consumer base is good as a tree without roots. The only way the website or business can grow is if it receives the nectar that all majestic digital creatures crave on the online medium, traffic!

Know your message- This is the foremost thing you need to be clear about. What are you really advertising? What is it that you are putting out to your consumers? Always remember, what you are producing isn’t always the same as what you are advertising. The lack of proper communication can ultimately be the end of your business or website. Without a voice and an intention, your website will be left out in the vast market of the digital space, with no one to notice it or to acknowledge its presence.
Know your audience– The motive or intention behind your website or product determines your target audience. A matte lipstick brand will target women in their 20s-30s, while a domestic drill will target husbands. Therefore, once you get the statistics of the specific target population to which your product/service appeals the most. You can initiate the process of increasing connectivity and strengthening the bonds within and without the business.
Know your medium– In order to truly allow your business to grow beyond the bounds which it was created within during the inception phase. You need to understand how your customers interact and grow with the content/product/service that you offer them. This is of special significance as far as choosing a platform or medium of advertising is concerned. By using different mediums of advertising, you can start paying attention to the various aspects that your audience pays attention to. The medium you use defines the criteria that audiences employ to consume your product or service. Hence, by understanding the behaviour of your audience on different mediums, you can play around with the various tactics and techniques by tailoring them according to the differences that are evident among different mediums.

The techniques, in this case, include aspects such as digital marketing, content marketing and social media marketing.

#3 Automation

Automation is another word for response, and is a distinct process which involves both users and producers on the same platform. To be more specific, it is a process that often blurs the lines between plain digital marketing. And more advanced software-based techniques of monitoring and analysis. Marketing Automation refers to the use of various software-based tools. Which can be used to convert repetitive processes into fully automated processes within the body of the business or the website. This is similar to converting certain processes involved in the development and marketing realm of the businesses into functions which occur involuntarily. Imagine this to be similar to shaping involuntary functions of a living organism, such as breathing, pumping of the heart as well as aspects such as digestion.

How can you make use of this?

Marketing automation is the ultimate tool for any aspect of online business development. Often defined by optimum assembly-line software, marketing automation lets you effectively handle your consumer base. Right from targeting the right audience to market integration. This helps you to be constantly connected with your consumers. Through offer-announcing SMSs, appraising emails and active polls, social campaigns and market funnelling techniques. Without the need to worry about maintenance and management.

Marketing automation

by making use of tools like Infusionsoft can cause immense returns for your business. This is possible due to the fact that it creates the opportunity for business owners to automate processes such as market funnel management, API integration, sales cart automation, and more. There are several other tools and practices for ensuring that you gain mastery over the process of automated marketing.

So, there you go mate- you have successfully summed up the stepping stones of online business development. Although reading material isn’t all that goes into building your empire, it is better to know the depth of the water before you cross the river, isn’t it?

Do let us know your queries, insights and opinions on these aspects that we have explored.