Picking the right customer relationship management tool for your business needs is important in building a rapport with your current and future customers. A customer relationship management system, or CRM for short, is a valuable asset for any small business owner.
With so many options in the market as far as CRMs, it can be really difficult to select one that has all the tools and features you need to be able to communicate with your audience, manage customer accounts, and provide automation of business tasks.
In this article, we’ll go over the important tools you’ll need in the right CRM for your business to select which one is the best fit for you.
Communicating with Your Audience
The core of any great CRM is to help you develop a relationship with your ideal customer. This starts with lead generation. Most CRMs will have tools to start a funnel by creating a contact record and adding them to your audience or they will have steps to follow to integrate with systems that you already have in place to capture leads.
If you aren’t experienced in integrations or API setups, you may want to look at options that have easy lead capture tools all in one place or you can contact our team for assistance in setting them up.
Tools like Keap or MailChimp will allow you to separate your audience into a variety of segments. These segments can be set up however it best fits your business to put your customers in different funnels.
For example, many businesses will sort them depending on interest or lead sources. This allows you to really create and send the most relevant content. Within the CRM you can utilize tools like email broadcasts or text messaging to send out correspondence to your audience.
Whatever you send out you’ll want to make sure that it is something that will resonate with your audience because your CRM account will need to build credibility from a spam score perspective any negative feedback on your broadcasts can really affect email deliverability.
Manage Customer Accounts
CRMs allow you to track the customer journey, and see which emails and offers they have interacted with and which did not translate into a sale. You’re able to see broadcast open rates to get feedback on how certain content was received.
If you’re selling digital products, physical products, or services through your CRM it has the ability to track the total value of each customer over a lifetime.
Oftentimes your CRM will also have customer service capabilities to allow you to service your customers by quickly resolving their service tickets in the same system you manage their accounts.
Having your entire customer account managed under one system allows you to stay within a single login to save time and keep information organized.
Automate Tasks
The automation of tasks and communications with your audience is another huge time saver for the small business owner.
Find a CRM that has the capability to automate things like email campaigns for a slow drip of content, sharing digital resources that your audience wants at the tip of their fingers, and sending offers when they are in the right stage of their customer journey. You can also see all their actions and lifetime value over their lifecycle as a customer.
If your business runs subscription services you are also able to automate charges on their accounts and set email reminders for when subscriptions renew.
Need help selecting the right system for your business?
Our team has experience in selecting and setting up customer service management systems for small businesses. Give us a call today for a consultation.