CRM Software for Small Business

CRM Software is no longer optional. It’s imperative. Regardless of size, almost every business needs a CRM system to help manage sales, marketing and customer service operations.

Today’s most popular CRM systems are costly, which is why many small businesses are wary of investing in CRM. However, there are plenty of CRM systems in the market targeted specifically at small business owners, offering them the right mix of features and functionality.

Many CRM solutions are now offered in a web-based, software-as-a-service model.

Buying CRM software is not about selecting the first solution you examine. It is about defining your business strategy and putting it into action. The solution you select must be in alignment with what you want to achieve.

A CRM system can be your software product that assists you in managing your list of customers in such a way as to benefit the relationship between the business and those customers.

CRM helps you to analyse the customer behaviour so that you can plan accordingly. The solution also helps in showing the profitability. If you have achieved good profit through customers, very well good. But, if those customers are wandering without showing any interest, you need to understand and tackle them to make it profitable.

With varierty of ways, CRM software definitely increases the overall business process and increase profits. You can also keep your customers happy by having all the relevant information at your fingertips.

CRM solution helps to attain a more unified and 360-degree view of customers and prospects, to collaborate and deliver more consistent service levels and ultimately improve financial and business performance. Without real time access to a centralized and accurate CRM solution, the chances of climbing the successful ladder and improving the profits is little. The true value of CRM extends to not only capturing customer data and behaviour but also the easy accessibility. CRM has the ability to track and report every information in real time offering huge benefits.

Direct Marketing – Strategy for business promotions!

What is Direct Marketing?

Direct Marketing is a form a advertising that allows business to communicate straight with the customer by the means of phone, email, mobile messaging, brochure distribution, promotional letters etc. Direct marketingmethod is used by all sizes of business from startups to multinational companies. Direct Marketing is an attractive method as the results can be measured directly.

Direct Marketing Channels:

1. Email marketing: Sending marketing messages through emails is the most widely used strategy for marketing. It is relatively inexpensive and much easier to execute.

2. Mobile: Mobile marketing includes SMS, MMS, Mobile Banner Ads etc. This enables the business to engage with prospective leads in an interactive manner through mobile devices, smart phones or tablets.

3. Online Tools: With the expansion of technology and ideas, use of online tools and application has been rapidly increasing. Social media sites being the most popular these days along with banners and google ads etc.

4. Telemarketing: The most common and the oldest method of marketing is telemarketing where marketers contact customers through phone for lead generation.

There are various other ways how marketing is done. Some of the techniques could be time consuming or expensive but may offer more benefits.

Marketing is one of the main process in the business life cycle. It requires a lot of attention, strategy and analyses. Making time for marketing and concentrating on how to improve and make use of better marketing techniques is very much essential. Marketing is a mixture of sales, advertising, public relations and publicity.

Would you like to know more about Marketing Management? Read this article on Marketing Management Software.

SMS configuration with CRM

CRM can be configured with SMS integration to work with inbound SMS responses from customer or sales agents.

Maple CRM provides flexible SMS integration solutions and ensures that SMS communications can effortlessly keep running and it can provide continuous and consistent SMS delivery.

SMS marketing is considered to be one of the few marketing techniques that is used to reach the targeted customers at anytime and anywhere.

Consider a sample SMS configuration to know how it could help in a typical business flow. Company A is into telemarketing where it deals with generating leads and scheduling meetings for the sales executives.

With a well placed CRM, you have the records of all your contacts, leads and customers. You can easily monitor whats happening with a lead, which sales agent is working on it and how interested the customer is in your product/service.

But many a times it so happens that the meeting which is scheduled with the Sales Agent often gets postponed or cancelled and it goes uninformed to the sales agents resulting in loss of time and confusion.

So what if you have a system that could confirm both customer and sales agents time schedule and cancel if none responds. So if they receive SMS notification regarding the meeting and if they respond back to the SMS, then only the meeting time is confirmed. This process could happen few hours before the actual time scheduled. This can avoid Sales Agents to travel till the client’s place unnecessarily. This also saves up the time of your sales agent.

Such SMS integration can happen with SMS templates which could be even more easier when things are all automated and responses are sent automatically based on the time duration.

Read more on CRM with SMS integration.