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Find & Compare CRM Software
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Customer relationship management (CRM) software is a technology used by businesses to store customer data and manage the interactions between your company and your clients, as well as potential customers.
It helps to support sales management with one simple goal: to improve customer relationships by producing more engaging and personal content to boost sales.
When talking about CRM, people can also mean it as a strategy or a process whereby the company sets its values and philosophies around building meaningful relationships with customers.
However, sales & CRM software does this for you, automating the process and analysing all interactions between each customer and the business.
Check out our review of the best CRM software for small business.
CRM systems record all communications, be that emails, telephone calls, website and social media visits, and all other measurable interactions that individuals have with your business.
These people may be existing customers of yours or potential customers.
On top of this, CRM systems also look at business factors, such as news published by the business, new products released, or any other company activity.
With these two sets of data combined, CRM systems can see when customer interactions coincide with specific business activity, allowing you to gain an insight into what this individual likes.
As a business, you can then use this insight to make information that this individual is likely to engage with visible to them, building a more intimate experience for your customers and better chances of them connecting with your brand.
To help create great customer relationships, CRM platforms have several key features allowing for seamless integration of customer data to produce effective responses.
Here are some of the features that you can expect to see when using CRM software.
This is a communication tool that integrates with your website to create a chatbot.
Customers visiting your website will then be able to conveniently contact your business using the live chat feature, ensuring great customer service and freeing time for you to spend on other areas of the business.
This allows you to effortlessly link all your social media accounts such as Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and others your website blog so that new blog content is automatically broadcasted across all your channels.
You can also receive information on the best times to post content based on user response, plus the option to schedule content ahead of time for easy social media management.
This makes forming beautiful new personalised email campaigns straightforward yet quick and allows you to optimise your emails.
You can also track when your emails are opened and who by, sending automatic follow-up emails if needed. This puts time back into your day while still effectively boosting customer engagement.
This allows you to use customer data to find new potential clients and create personas to target these people with effective marketing campaigns.
You can also manage leads on one platform, by making calls, sending emails, and assigning tasks through the central CRM system.
By tracking the customer lifecycle you can establish effective content to target customers to improve your business marketing strategy.
You can also look at your website metrics such as the time spent on each page or how much traffic it receives.
This can inform you as to where there are gaps in your content to improve the website and your conversion rates.
Several free CRM systems offer features such as free business templates, blog ideas, and marketing plans, as well as building up a persona of your customers.
If you are a small business or freelancer with only a small customer database to manage, the free CRM tools and features mentioned will be hugely effective in bettering your business.
However, larger companies are better off paying for more extensive CRM systems to gain access to marketing strategy software and lead generation tools.
Whether you can benefit from a free version or need to pay for a more comprehensive CRM platform depends on the nature of your business and the size of your clientele.
CRM helps to generate more intimate and personal relationships with your customers, both existing and future. By improving customer experience, your business will benefit.
In terms of existing customers, producing meaningful content can help you retain their business and ensure they stay loyal to your brand.
It also keeps everything, that being previous purchase history, the status of existing orders, and any complaints, in one central location.
For potential customers, using CRM software can help encourage them to purchase from your business as they believe your views resonate with theirs.
There are three main types of sales & CRM software: operational, analytical, and collaborative. You must choose the right one for your business needs to make the most out of the technology.
Operational CRM software is focused on streamlining individual customer interactions to improve contact and convert people to customers.
It does this by ranking each individual to determine which are warm leads, and you can then target these individuals with personalised content.
Businesses also use operational sales & CRM software to automate both sales and marketing.
Analytical CRM software uses customer data to help you make better business decisions to improve the way you serve customers.
It does this by storing all data for all your customers in one central location and uses this to find trends and patterns to create a generic profile of your average consumer.
Sales and marketing teams can then target specific consumer profiles with specific campaigns to check the response and create a great business strategy.
Collaborative CRM software makes customer information easily accessible across multiple teams, such as internal departments, stakeholders, distributors, and vendors.
Therefore, these systems focus on customer service to retain existing customers, rather than chasing new leads.
By keeping all areas of the business aligned, customer relationships and satisfaction are improved.
Deciding which sales & CRM software is best for your business depends on your business’s personal goals and requirements.
Check out our guide to the 10 best CRM for small business.
Ideal for businesses that need help organising customer information and wish to save time on sales and marketing.
Ideal for businesses that need to better understand their customer profiles and create effective and personalised campaigns to improve the business’ sale strategies.
Ideal for businesses that need to improve communication between departments, improve customer service, and retain more existing customers.
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