Does your business need new leads every day? If yes, what strategies are you using to produce a steady stream of warm leads for your sales team or further actions? Traditionally, generating new leads was difficult for businesses, relied on trade shows, purchased mailing lists, and outbound marketing to conjure a list of prospects for your lead generation efforts. Now, everything happens in the blink of an eye as your lead gen moved from physical to digital means. Keep in mind, if you want your business to thrive, it is essential to have a strong presence on the web and effective strategies to derive lead/ sales from your digital efforts. Using CRM software aids this process by creating a coordinated effort to build and manage leads.
Lead generation is a process where you can gather information from your customers to aid in efforts to convert those leads into customers.
Today, marketers look for effective and efficient ways to magnify the strength of a website with the help of small business CRM software. According to Tech.co, the 6 benefits derived from CRM software are:
- Organizes information across multiple departments and individuals within the organization which leads to:
- Greater effectiveness across teams
- Enhanced customer service
- Automation of everyday tasks to improve efficiency and reduce gaps in communication with prospects
- Improved analytics and reporting to identify areas for improvement
- A better customer experience
- CRM software costs less than you think
If you aren’t familiar with the term, CRM, which stands for customer relationship management, is the art of strengthening the bond between customers and the company. Using CRM software reduces the friction involved in managing customer relationships while monitoring the performance of your strategies.
The idea of customer relationship management is important for every firm because the modern customer expects a company to value them, treat them as individuals, and keep their promise across multiple channels. A few years ago, a customer was only concerned with the quality of a company’s products, but now they want to magnify their bond with a firm, especially among Gen Z who want to buy from firms that espouse their values. In fact, a recent study showed 3 out of 4 customers prefer to buy from a firm that provides a superior customer experience, such as that available from CRM software. This is why many companies from across the globe joined the bandwagon to incorporate a CRM solution in their business.
Here are a few ways, a CRM software can improve your leads in terms of both quantity and quality:
Use social media
There’s no denying of the fact; social media is the biggest marketing tool for the vast majority of businesses. Using social media for your business is often the best and most coherent way to improve your leads and the majority of businesses maintain a presence on one or more social platforms. If you sift through any social platform such as Facebook, Instagram, Pinterest, Youtube, Snapchat, and Twitter, you frequently come across different companies channeling their products through these platforms using native advertising, as well as encouraging consumers to amplify their content through engagement.
By integrating your CRM software with social media it’s easier for you to track your leads based on likes, dislikes, interests, preferences, spending habits, and a lot more, providing insights into the best way to reach them. If you don’t know the buying behavior of your customer, your efforts won’t be as effective. Furthermore, the integration also helps you navigate through the moves of your competitors.
Integration of your CRM software with social media is a two-way street that allows consumers to interact with your business in the channel they prefer.
Customized emails
Keep in mind, lead nurturing is the most important step towards increasing revenue and generating more leads in most businesses. Creating customize emails that target segments within your contacts is key to successful lead nurturing. The basic ethos of developing strong customer relationship management is to provide a personal experience to the clients and customers of your business.
Utilizing CRM software improves the effectiveness of your nurturing process by storing templates designed for segments based on their behaviors, where they are in the decision-making process, and other factors such as those gleaned through integration with social media. Thus, a cart abandonment initiates a series of messages across multiple channels including email reminders and offers, remarketing on social and search, even pop-ups the next time the prospect visits your site all delivered in your desired sequence and elapse time, personalized to the individual with the product(s) left in their cart.
Use artificial intelligence
Artificial intelligence changed much of the way we experience the world today and opened up new avenues for marketing to customers. Industries needing to curate large sets of data must employ artificial intelligence to eradicate problems, identify efforts falling through the cracks, and predict customer interest and what motivates them to buy.
The main reason marketers embraced artificial intelligence is that it is the best way to convert new leads in a situation with a large database of customers and products. Artificial intelligence underpins YouTube’s and Netflix’s ability to predict the types of video you’ll like to keep you coming back to their platforms.
With artificial intelligence, marketers easily identify the right accounts with the right products to enhance the likelihood of converting the customer or prospect. With CRM, businesses can easily blend the two forces to magnify website leads. However, before you try CRM software with artificial intelligence, you must weigh the pros and cons of this tactic, involving both moral and ethical considerations as well as the technological challenge of combining these two marketing strategies.
Targeted customers
I know we say it a lot, but there’s no substitute for a deep knowledge of your target customer regardless of industry or marketing tactic. Understanding your existing customer base provides insights needed to identify look-alike audiences with similar characteristics who are most likely to become new customers. With help from CRM analytical tools, you can collect essential information from your prospective customers, such as their average income, gender, buying patterns, online conversations, and a lot more. Additionally, you can employ online surveys to gather crucial data from prospective clients as well as existing customers to make better predictions of likely buyers. Storing this information in your CRM database allows you to easily pullout likely buyers for any campaign you develop.
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Hausman and Associates, the publisher of MKT Maven, is a full-service marketing agency operating at the intersection of marketing and digital media. Check out our full range of services.
