Many people know that after implementing a CRM and email marketing, the problem is rarely solved there. These products, while great, require flexibility and willingness to incorporate them into your business processes. After learning several lessons ourselves and helping thousands of small businesses marry CRM and email marketing together, I want to share three solid tips that you need to apply right now in your business.
Collecting, Using and Managing Accurate Data
CRM software is a great solution to store data. Almost scary, due to the amount of data it can hold indefinitely, it needs to be managed and that includes using current, useful data and purging old data. A necessary evil of successful CRM is the more data you have, the better it is.
It’s a good idea to allow your contacts to update their profile and give them the power to remove themselves from certain campaigns if it no longer applies. Even better, have your CRM do it for you after a period of time or inactivity.
Contacts with no activity in a long time (say a couple years) are asking to be removed. Not many things can hurts email reputation more than sending emails to abandoned email addresses, which ISPs use as honeypots to score less than reputable senders. Same with wasting postage for direct mail for old addresses or phone calls to wrong numbers. (It related to my going green post I wrote last week about being efficient in your small business.)
End-to-End Customer Experience
In the words of my first hiring manager here, it should be the goal of a customer-oriented business to establish an “end-to-end customer experience.” That is, put in the processes, follow-up sequences, people and talent in front of the customers so it’s a rockin’ customer experience. If you don’t have a process to handle when a customer is not happy; or even a policy to shed guiding light for their concerns, it’s a good idea to consider establishing one.
Likewise, being accessible at every moment possible is a good idea. Offer your phone number, Web, email address and other useful contact information in all your communications is a great way to fulfill on this obligation to make an end to end customer experience.
One System to Simplify
There are countless numbers of point solutions out there. Trust me, they are awesome. However, when building a scalable business, a lot more success is achieved when all the data talks with all the other components in the business and functions as one autonomous system. When you choose to use one CRM that delivers all the data you need to make decisions from current and relevant historical data.
I’ve seen many customers struggle as they try to master each system individually. It’s not that it’s impossible to make Infusionsoft work and behave with several systems, because it is — it’s that each system has their own defined purpose and extending them beyond their barrier is the challenge.
The benefit of one system versus many is the simplification and the ability to minimize chaos when it happens, not if.
No matter what you solutions you use, you should always measure it and hold them to your goals in your business. The goals of your business are to grow, right? Why not use one system that does it all under one roof. That’s not saying that ConstantContact, Salesforce or ACT! aren’t good at what they do, it’s just that doing it all in one system is much better.
[Photo by sam.kronick on Flickr]
Posted In: CRM
