Best Internet Marketing Series: Contact Management

Best Internet Marketing Series: Contact Management

When it comes to business, every single customer is important. Which is why we often concentrate on capturing more and more of them. Most of the people and businesses out there focus on creating a great website and attracting more and more customers through advertising. What they fail to consider is, the importance of retaining those customers as well.

We have already discussed the importance of having some sort of organizational scheme for all your leads, customers and prospects. Unless you have a place to store all the information, and also retrieve it easily, your leads won’t do you much good. As businesses grow, they need something more substantial for that purpose; a more powerful and robust organizational tool. Hence, a CRM (Customer Relations Manager) is a necessity for most businesses.

 

Now, about CRMs….

What are CRMs?

CRMs are basically databases that store all your information in an efficient system that facilitates easy addition and retrieval. They will also provide you with reports from various aspects regarding your customers, like their personal information (age group, gender etc), business information (professions and occupations) and demographic, as well as other statistics.

CRMs also allow you to add notes, tasks, and many other details that will help you lead your prospects through sales and customers through relations.

Advantages

Easy Data Entry

A CRM should automate the data entry process so that you have to do minimal manual work. CRMs can, and should be linked to your webforms so that they easily capture your prospects’ information when they take some action on your website

Detailed information

Businesses need to keep track of their prospects’ and customers’ details from various aspects. Depending on your business, you might want to track down details such as age, location, occupation, time spent on your website etc. The more details you know, the more specific marketing strategy you can develop, which will target a specific demographic of people.

A CRM should maintain all this data. But for collecting information, you will need to interact with your visitors through webforms, surveys, polls, holding contests, having conversations, etc.

Targeted Marketing

Once you have all the necessary information collected, you can move on to targeted marketing. With the information at hand, you can ascertain which product is picking interest from what type of prospects, and then make your moves accordingly. This is where a good CRM comes into the equation.

Use the information to send out emails, invitations, direct mails, or whatever else they might be interested in. You can set up certain auto-responder sequences for a certain target group.

Pin-pointing actions

CRMs are all about precision. With a good CRM, you will know what interests your prospects and what information they’ve already received. You can then work on sending different message to different groups. Pin-pointing your marketing will return much greater returns from your efforts, because the internet is all about delivering the right content to the right reader.

The right CRM?

Well, there are many CRM solutions out there. You will have to purchase most of the services offered by them. But we think it’ll be worth it. One can’t say which is the best CRM out there. They are all good. It falls on you to decide which one to go for, depending upon package plans and services offered. The leading CRMs are provided by Oracle,Sales Force, Sales Nexus etc.

Internet marketing can be difficult, especially for beginners. So we advise you take all this one step at a time. If you don’t understand what I have written about, feel free to ask in the comments section below. There is one more post to come in this series. So see you soon in that post. Have a nice weekend :)