Your CRM and Marketing Automation Platform, The Core Of Your Business

So, you are thinking of getting a CRM and a Marketing Automation Platform and something that sends out your emails. Well, there are thousands of apps out there for these functions. How to choose something that works for you? Why is it important to choose wisely? Let’s start at the beginning.

What is CRM?

CRM is, in short, stands for Customer Relationship Management. CRM is an extremely important database of your contacts. It can hold any sorts of data about your contacts from the basics like name, email, address to things like what kind of products or services they showed interest in, what and when did they purchase, where they got engaged with your content (yes, you can even track that on your website, blog posts or landing pages), when is their birthday, anniversary, any notes after a call. Your options are unlimited (in most cases, because some software providers give you a limit of how many custom fields you can add.)

What Can Be A CRM?

Funnily enough, even an Excel sheet can be your CRM until you outgrow it. Even for some, a notebook can do the work until they have just a couple of clients. So, not only the fancy big apps are your options in the beginning for holding your customer information. Now you probably wonder how you can leverage a CRM without Marketing Automation or Email Autoresponders. The best CRM apps are already built together into one single platform where you can automate your tasks, processes, and send out automated emails based on the data your platform holds in its CRM section.

Why Is It Important To Choose Wisely When It Comes To Your CRM And Marketing Automation Platform?

When you have a big database with several automation and integrations, changing to another app can be pretty painful. A new app by itself can cause some resistance to the users. But switching between platforms, you have to be very careful about data loss, or if the new app has all the capabilities that your previous app did, or you have to work around some of the different types of limits. Just to mention some of the challenges you can think of.

How To Choose The Right App For Your Business?

Suppose you are not a gigantic enterprise that wants to develop their own app or customize it with a team of developers. In that case, I suggest finding an app that is already built and partially customizable to your needs. Your best bet will be something that’s already established, has frequent updates, and has appropriately working customer service. The new, shiny, cheap apps are red lights. Be careful with them. Check the owner. Is it only a landing page to sell the app, or does it have a real website? Who are the owners? Do they have reviews? When you get to the app, is it a goal-driven app, or you can just drag and drop things randomly, and things happen? Goal-oriented CRM and Marketing Automation Platform are crucial for your success. You have to start every automation at the end. What is your goal with this automation? Do you want new subscribers? Do you want to sell a particular product? Do you want to get a review? Do you want to deliver something?

How Does It Integrate With Other Apps?

Having an API integration is a good thing to have but still requires custom code development. That’s why it’s good to check on Zapier if you can integrate your app with other apps.

The Bad And The Ugly Of The Marketing Automation World

It requires work and strategic thinking. You have to plan ahead what processes you want to automate and what steps you want to guide your customers through. Onboarding, nurturing, satisfaction survey, engagement, launch, referral campaigns.

How To Avoid A Mess In Your CRM?

Set up your strategy. What are the things you want to build? Set up a naming convention for your tags.
For example:

Clicked – Garfield series;
Abandoned – Garfield Series;
Purchased – Garfield Series.

Identify which ones will start the automation. There are more complex campaigns as well, and depending on the app, you sometimes have to set up tags to stop automation.

How to leverage your CRM and Marketing Automation Platform?

This system will be the core of your business. When you want to monetize social media, generate leads, follow up with customers and nurture them, it will help you automate all these processes.

Onboarding

When someone purchases your product or service, you need to set up a seamless onboarding for them. This might include a single or double opt-in, delivery of their order, appointment scheduling, reminders about the appointment, and a follow up after the call is made.

Nurturing

When someone shows interest in what you do but don’t buy from you, it doesn’t mean you lost a potential customer. It means that you just got a new potential customer, but you have to build up the trust, keep the conversation going, and reach out to them when they are ready to buy.

Reach Out To Your Hot Leads

When someone opts-in (provides their email address) to your content, you have a chance to keep a closer eye on their level of engagement. The best CRMs give you this feature as well. You can set up on what basis you measure your Leads Score. You can give or take scores from your leads based on their actions like visiting a particular pricing page, unsubscribing from a list, clicking a link in an email. By doing this, you can even send out an automatic email or set up a task to one of your team members to reach out to the most engaged contacts on your list. This way, you can make more sales of the right product to the right people on your list at the right time.

Ask For Feedback And Referrals

After someone becomes your client, you can ask them about their experience. You can do many things with these answers. If they are negative, you can set up a task to personally reach out to them to solve the issue they experienced. If they are positive, you can thank them and send them directly to referral automation, where you can ask them to invite their friends or business partner to use your services. Alternatively, you can integrate your CRM with a reviewing app, so it will collect and show their reviews on their page.

Send A Gift

You can set up fulfillment automation when the time comes, for example, customer anniversary, birthday, or any particular day. You can set up automation to a fulfillment company to deliver a special present to your contact. You can use fulfillment with book orders or any physical product to trigger an automation that reminds the team member or the service provider to deliver the products.

Card Expiry, Declined

When a card expires, you can set up an automation to avoid declined payments due to the expiry. The automation can send out emails to your customer to update their payment details before the expiry day. This will save a ton of headaches for you and your financial team on subscription payments.

When a payment is declined, you can integrate the payment processor (for example, Stripe) with your CRM and Marketing Automation Platform and send out emails or even text messages to help your customer get back to the payment process.

By now, you have an idea about how unlimited options you have to leverage your CRM and Marketing Automation app. The only limit is your imagination.

You can grow your list, nurture them, sell them more, ask them for referrals, grow your business, and save you time on sales and other internal processes.

A good CRM, Marketing Automation, and Email Autoresponder App will help you send the right message to the right person at the right time, and when it’s set up correctly, it will become the core and the heart of your business.