Categories CRM

How Gamification is Useful in CRM?

How Gamification is Useful in CRM?

Introduction

Gamification is the process of using game elements and game design techniques in non-game contexts.

It has been applied to a variety of fields, including education and training, public health and wellness, marketing, business management, government policy-making and even crime prevention. Why? Because it works! Here’s how gamification can boost sales in your CRM or any other business:

Why use Gamification?

Gamification is a way to reward users for their actions, increase user engagement and motivate them to perform certain actions.

For example:

  • Reward customers who subscribe to your email newsletter with points that can be used to get discounts on other products or services.
  • Let’s say you’re running an event registration page where people are paying $50 per ticket. Instead of just giving them the option of paying through PayPal or credit card, you could use gamification techniques like leaderboards (where people compete against each other) and badges/points systems where they earn more points by signing up early or referring friends who sign up too!

How Does it Work?

Gamification is a strategy that helps you engage with your customers and potential customers. It can be used to help them achieve their goals or learn more about your products and services.

In CRM, gamification works by adding points, badges and leaderboards to the system so that users are encouraged to complete tasks like filling out forms or responding to emails in order for them to earn points. When they reach a certain number of points they’ll be rewarded with either virtual rewards (like badges) or real-world rewards (like discounts).

What does Gamification Offer Over Basic CRM Software?

Gamification is all about engaging customers, tracking them and getting feedback from them. Here are some of the ways that gamification helps you as a brand:

  • It makes your customer base feel like they’re part of something bigger than themselves. The more invested people are in what you’re doing, the more likely they are to stick around when things get tough–and let’s face it: things always get tough at some point!
  • It keeps track of who’s buying what and how often (so you can identify trends). This information is useful for planning future products or services, but it’s also helpful when deciding which current offerings should receive additional investment. For example: If sales numbers drop off dramatically after a certain product launches, then maybe there’s no point continuing production on another version unless we’re sure that consumers will buy into it again this time around–or it is an indicator that we should consider revamping our marketing strategy?

Gamification can Help Boost Sales in your Business

Gamification is a great way to boost sales in your business. By gamifying the customer experience, you can help improve your marketing, customer service and sales teams’ performance. There are many companies offering Salesforce CRM Integration Services that can help you with boosting your customer relationship.

Here’s how:

Gamification helps you target customers better. With gamification, it’s easier to segment customers based on their interests and behaviours so that they see more relevant content from you on social media platforms such as Facebook or Twitter–which means more engagement from those users as well! This brings us to the conclusion.

Conclusion

In conclusion, gamification is a great way to boost sales and improve customer loyalty. It’s also easy to implement. You don’t have to learn new software or hire an expensive consultant–you can start using gamification today with just a few clicks! If you need more insights on gamification, contact us. We’re a salesforce custom application development with a team of tech experts to guide you through the integration process.

Categories CRM

Benefits of CRM

Benefits of CRM

Introduction

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is the system that helps you manage all the information about your customers and prospects.

It’s important for most businesses, no matter their size or industry. But what are some of the benefits of using CRM? Read on to find out:

Organizations of All Sizes can Benefit from Using the Right CRM Solution

You may be wondering what the benefits of CRM are, or why it matters to your organization. CRM is an acronym for customer relationship management, which refers to the way that businesses manage their interactions with customers and prospects. It’s important because it helps companies develop stronger relationships with customers by making it easier for them to communicate effectively with each other.

CRMs can be used in a number of ways: some companies use them as part of their sales process; others use them as part of their marketing campaigns; still others use them both ways at once! For example, if you’re selling products online (like we do here at [Company Name]) then having access to information about who has purchased from you before will help guide future communication efforts like email campaigns or ads on social media platforms like Facebook Ads Manager.

Business Development

CRM is a great tool to help you improve your business development and customer interaction. With CRM, you can see who has been contacting you, what they’re interested in, how often they contact you and how much time it takes for them to respond. This data can help identify which customers are more likely to purchase from your brand or recommend it to others. In addition, a CRM system allows salespeople or marketing teams to collaborate on leads so that everyone is working together toward the same goal: closing deals with qualified prospects (or bringing back inactive ones). A Salesforce Integration Company in USA like ours will help you incorporate CRM to work toward improving your relationship with customers.

CRM systems also provide other benefits such as better communication between departments within an organization; improved relationships between companies and their customers; improved sales performance due largely because more accurate information about each customer’s needs allows businesses make better decisions about what products/services should be offered next time around rather than just guessing blindly based on past history alone (which often leads nowhere).

Sales and Marketing Cohesion

The first of the two major benefits of CRM is sales and marketing cohesion. Sales and Marketing need to be working together, not just because it’s good for business (it is), but because they have different goals. Sales want more leads, while Marketing wants more qualified leads. They also have different metrics: salespeople track closed deals and revenue generated from each lead; marketers track how many people downloaded a white paper or watched a video on YouTube.

CRM software can help both sides by bringing all this data together in one place so that everyone understands what both departments are doing at any given time–and why those things matter for reaching company goals overall. With this information at hand, organizations can make better decisions about where they should invest their time or money next year when setting up their marketing campaigns; they’ll know which products will generate the most interest among potential customers; they’ll be able to forecast demand accurately enough so no one gets stuck with excess inventory at year end (which happens often enough anyway).

Lead Management and Tracking

You can use a CRM to manage and track your leads. Lead management is the process of converting leads into customers, opportunities, sales and revenue. As a business owner or marketer you have most likely been tasked with increasing revenue but in order to do this effectively you need to be able to track your leads from start to finish.

Lead management involves:

  • Creating an automated workflow that allows you (or your team) to respond quickly and efficiently when someone fills out an online form or calls in with questions about products/services they’re interested in purchasing
  • Automating tasks so that they happen without any human intervention – saving time while freeing up workers’ brains for higher-value activities

Improved Customer Experience

Customer experience is the most important aspect of CRM, and it’s what can help you turn your customers into raving fans.

Here are some ways that Salesforce can improve customer experience, along with the features that enable these improvements:

  1. Personalization: Salesforce’s CRM tools allow businesses to collect and analyze customer data, which can be used to create personalized experiences. For example, businesses can use Salesforce to segment customers based on their interests, purchase history, or other data points, and then send targeted marketing messages or product recommendations.
  2. Omnichannel Support: Salesforce’s Service Cloud enables businesses to provide support to customers through a variety of channels, including email, phone, chat, social media, and self-service portals. This ensures that customers can get the help they need, in the way that’s most convenient for them.
  3. Automation: Salesforce’s automation tools can help businesses streamline customer interactions and reduce response times. For example, businesses can use Salesforce to automate responses to common customer inquiries or to route customer requests to the appropriate department or agent.
  4. Collaboration: Salesforce’s Chatter feature allows teams to collaborate on customer issues in real-time, which can help resolve issues more quickly and improve the overall customer experience.
  5. Feedback: Salesforce’s CRM tools can also be used to gather feedback from customers, which can help businesses improve their products, services, and overall customer experience.

The Benefits of CRM Include:

  • Improved customer retention rates
  • Higher conversion rates for new leads or sales opportunities

Improved Resource Allocation

With CRM, you can track the resources that have been allocated to each client and project. This means that if a team member needs more time or money to complete the project, then it’s easy for them to request this from their manager.

It also helps with resource allocation by providing information about who can work on what project at any given time. For example, if your company has two developers available but four projects they need to complete within three days’ time (and one of those projects is urgent), then CRM will allow you as a manager/director/executive etc., know who should be working on which project without having an argument with them about who gets what job first!

  • Increased productivity and efficiency
  • Reduced expenses
  • Enhanced customer service, resulting in an improved customer experience

Conclusion

CRM is a powerful tool that can help you better manage your customers, leads, and sales. It’s also useful for tracking resource allocation and improving productivity. By using CRM, you’ll be able to get more done in less time while keeping everyone on the same page at all times. If you want to make the most of Salesforce Integration Services, we’re only a call away!

Categories CRM

Importance of UX in CRM application

Salesforce.com is the leader in CRM market and most of the implementations are carried using Agile/Scrum methodology. Today I would like to discuss the role of UX and its importance (or the lack of it).

What is UX?

UX stands for User Experience (well you must already know that if you are here). It is is the process of enhancing user satisfaction with a product by improving the usability, accessibility, and pleasure provided in the interaction with the product.[wikipedia] Let’s try to break down this definition:

  • Any Application should be easy to use. Do we need training to use Google or Iphone?
  • Features should be easily accessible.
  • Application should appeal to the users.
  • User Assistance and Help should be easily accessible.

The Absence of UX in CRM Implementation

My usual experience with any large implementation of CRM application (especially Salesforce.com) has been void of any UX consideration. Sure, there are UI design sessions but there are sporadic and there’s no single theme/idea that tie up the whole UI.

My observations have been:

  • Gap in information: The flow of the requirements is Business User -> Business Analyst -> Technical Team. With each handover of requirements, some information is lost and the mismatch in the expectation starts creeping in.
  • Absence of UX: In a 20 week project, I would believe that 4 weeks should be spent on UX and prototyping, however in reality it is not so.
  • Complex UI: The end result is a customized solution with complex and hard to navigate UI.
  • Unnecessary Data/Processes: Users end up having data that they don’t need but they believe they want. In one instance a client had data spread in 30 objects and then there was a complaint of Large Data Volume issues!

Proposed Approaches

I have found that the action items listed below are very productive in resolving the issues above:

  • Effective Communication: This lies in the lap of Scrum Master/Project Manager. How to prevent the discussions from veering off from the story being discussed. If you sit back and listen in on any story grooming sessions, sometimes you might feel that a new religion might be devised when in reality all they need is just a text box.
  • Curtailing the roles: This too should be managed by Scrum Master/Project Manager. It’s quite common to experience that Business Analyst meet with users and get some requirement and they translate that into a solution and provide that as a requirement to the development team.
  • Providing the “Business” need: This is the responsibility of Business Analysts. When the business analysts become experienced with any system, they implicitly start providing solutions as business requirements. Hence this practice must be curtailed by business analyst through self-discipline and solutions architect by asking questions which reveal underlying real business requirements.
  • Adhering solution to Best Practices and requirements negotiation: This is an extremely important responsibility and it lies with the Solution/Technical Architect. It requires courage and guts, to prevent the requirements from being groomed which are incompatible with the system and finesse to negotiate with the users.
  • Defining Nomenclature: This is a collective responsibility of all the parties involved in the project. This requires self-discipline to use the same terms across the users/teams. It is quite common to see different set of people in the same project use different terms to describe the same thing. e.g. Sales would call Prospects which the development team would refer as Leads. I have experienced numerous times that this has resulted in requirements being interpreted incorrectly and resulting in wrong solutions and loss of money and time.

In the end, the successful outcome of CRM implementation depends on the collective responsibilities of all the parties involved, self-discipline, effective communication and it is a collaborative effort.

Categories CRM

Introduction to Marketing Automation

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing is a process that cannot be done by just sitting in one place. We need to attend meetings, send out a bunch of e-mails, set up some blogs which cannot be done in one day because it’s stressful, tiring until a solution was introduced which not only takes a little bit of weight of our shoulders but also makes our marketing process task-free, and this solution is Marketing Automation.

To be precise, Marketing Automation is a software that automatically does your tedious marketing tasks. It is designed to make your tasks as top priority and executes it in a more efficient and streamlined. Introducing Marketing Automation doesn’t make you jobless or less useful in the field instead it helps you be more effective and reach your goal faster. It will not jeopardise the contents that you are producing. The final goal with marketing is to produce more revenue for the company that you are working for and in order accomplish this we need customers. We need to drive traffic to our website, convert traffic into leads and close those leads into customers. Marketing Automation solutions makes the conversion and the closure stage of this process which in turn makes it easier for you.

Today every marketer relies on emails to do marketing and generate results. In order to make prospects and customers purchase they send email after email to their entire list hoping that the email might resonate with some of their prospects and customers and makes them buy. But marketers are just wasting their valuable time and money to people who are not interested for worse all it does is annoy them and that’s an ineffective way of doing marketing. But if we use the Marketing Automation Program, it will help to feed your prospects through the entire buying process delivering highly-targeted, personalized messages that address their specific barriers to purchase.

As shown below, following tasks can be automated by Marketing Automation solutions:

  • The marketer sends an email asking to download his/her latest e-book to a certain list of targeted contacts.
  • Later he/she sends a thank you note to all the contacts that downloaded the offer.
  • After some days are passed the marketer sends a follow up email offering a case study relating to that topic.
  • Finally, when someone downloads that case study, the marketer’s sales team will get the notification so they can follow up with them.

Now imagine yourself in your customer’s position. Wouldn’t you rather receive information about the products /services from the company like the emails above, instead of the emails that you know that being sent to thousands of other people? So the emails like above feels personalized and makes the company trustworthy and ultimately more likely to buy. It’s really hard to sell and close contracts with customers. By introducing new revenue many companies forget about their customers. It’s easy to sell to a customer who has already bought some products from your company. You can also provide contents to people who are looking for. Keep those customers engaged by giving them segmented content and convince them to keep purchasing.

That’s Marketing Automation in a nutshell. It has the ability to target your contacts and sends them content based on their likes and dislikes. You are feeding them information that is necessary for them and not useless information that will just end up in spam. You are making it less stressful for yourself and the buyer as well as increasing revenues for the company. Marketing Automation is not only about selling, it’s also about nurturing your prospects.

CloudFountain Inc. team has successfully implemented solutions integrating Marketing Automation solutions like Pardot, Marketo with CRM applications like Salesforce.com. We are glad to say that we have been successful in demonstrating tangible and measurable results by providing these solutions.

We have provided solutions and solved problems such as:

  • Implement Marketo/Pardot
  • Integrate with Salesforce.com
  • Reduce duplicate data
  • Create a Closed-loop marketing process to provide measurable results for marketing efforts
  • Provided Digital Marketing + Marketing Automation + CRM solution

As always, your feedback is invaluable. If you need any help with Marketing Automation solutions, integrating with CRM applications, issues with duplicate data in the Marketing Automation tools and/or CRM applications, we will be glad to help with our past experience helping our clients solve such problems.

Categories CRM

A GUIDE TO MARKETING AUTOMATION

What is Marketing Automation:

Marketing automation is a process where a software platform helps you to automate your marketing and sales engagement to generate more leads and take better measures for marketing success. It automates and measures marketing tasks and workflows so that companies can increase operational efficiency more effectively and grow revenue faster. It replaces old manual and repetitive marketing processes through gearing more efficiency and effective progress.

Why use Marketing Automation:

  • Builds trust with your audience: Trust is one of the very important reasons why a customer chooses any company to buy any product or have any services.An automated marketing campaign that is pre-programmed into the system can help build trust in your product or service much quicker than the traditional routes.
  • Build interest in your product or service: Constant marketing and awareness are very important for developing a brand into a known and successful venture. The issue comes where companies are not being able to reach and scale every lead and follow-up. Automation of your marketing helps to get higher level of consistency and it is achieved along with an increase in the conversion rate which must be implemented properly.
  • Helps after service customer retention and generate more leads: Customer Retention has been proved to be much cheaper than acquiring new customers and hence should be very important for every company. Post sale or providing service, it is very important to conduct a customer review. 88% customers trust online reviews as much as a personal recommendation. When the service or the product has been delivered, it’s the perfect time to be asking for a review and introduce the customer to your referral scheme. Marketing automation also helps here with several customer management and referral services to enhance more and more lead generation.

Role of Marketing Automation and how can it help you:

Marketing Automation helps you in:

  • Generate more lead
  • Prioritize leads
  • Nurture those leads to a sales-ready state
  • Management of all digital marketing campaigns
  • Generate report on lead efficiency rates.

Who should use Marketing Automation:

Marketing automation is for the companies with a large number of leads and follow-ups often tend to mess up with the database or gets misleading which in turn compromises marketing goals. Hence, marketing automation helps to control and manage a big amount of marketing workflow for these companies.

It is even very important for the people with small companies having a few leads and follow-ups. Marketing automation helps them nurturing and generating more leads and follow-ups for them in a very cost-efficient manner in a very efficient and effective manner. Hence, no matter if it’s a large or a small scale company, marketing automation is for all, and if implemented correctly can be a very powerful tool.

Benefits of Marketing Automation:

  1. Lead Nurturing: Set-up customized, automated engagement tracks that free up time to focus on important leads, preventing early-stage leads from slipping through.
  2. Easy Data Collection: Easily collection of important data prospect information using forms and custom landing pages.
  3. Cost Efficient: Automating repetitive tasks will help improve productivity and efficiency in an effective manner without engaging and hiring more and more people to manually work upon it.
  4. Enhances Communication and Collaboration: All the communication and collaboration is automated and hence companies no need to rely on employees for constant follow-ups.
  5. Lead analytics: No longer chasing down dead ends. Automated analytics shows leads having interest in you, and follow up with only those generated better customer turn-ups.
  6. Overall Analytics: Gives you overall analytics that generates reports including how well marketing automation campaigns are working, and where leads are coming from.

Challenges of Marketing Automation:

Ref: https: //www.i-scoop.eu/marketing-automation-fails-role-vendors-content/

Important statistics of Marketing Automation:

Ref: https://www.marketo.com/marketing-automation/

95% of companies reported some benefit from marketing automation. They found that companies can expect to achieve an increase in marketing staff productivity between 1.5 and 6.9% and increase sales productivity by an average of 4%.

Important Steps to perform while doing Marketing Automation:

  1. Create targeted content that directly addresses your customers’ demands. That content should be extremely high-quality, entertaining, engaging, & shareable.
  2. As you build out marketing automation strategy, you will learn more about your leads. Use this information to empower your company to re-invest that data into refining your marketing strategy. Use marketing automation software to streamline this process.
  3. Update regularly to market trends for your marketing and analytics software to communicate effectively with each other. This integration will help ensure that your brand is delivering the right marketing messages to the right audiences at the right time.
  4. Build qualified and targeted traffic to be successful in their marketing. We want to attract audiences who will ultimately become happy, long-term customers (who will refer other customers).
  5. Once you have visitors on your portal, the next step is to convert them as customers. Start collecting information about them. Once you start building an organic customer content, you can start reaching out to your customers and prospects in a better way so that you can re-engage them through your content.
  6. Make sure to maintain relationships with customers for various long-time benefits.

Closed-Loop Marketing

What is Closed-Loop Marketing?

As per Hubspot, Closed-Loop Marketing is a process by which Sales reports back the status on the leads generated and provided by Marketing.

In the scenario of Marketing Automation + CRM(Salesforce.com) environment, a solution should be provided which is based on integrating both the systems and applying Analytics and Reporting on top of it to provide a feedback to Marketing department about the leads they provided to Sales in the CRM. In the absence of a Closed Loop Marketing solution, Marketing department never receives the feedback on the leads they provided to Sales and thereby cannot improve their processes or the quality of leads.

Integrating Marketing Automation with CRM for Closed-Loop Marketing:

Important Checkouts:

  • Marketing automation should be—first and foremost—driven by value.
  • Care about your customers. Send them marketing messages that generate interest.
  • Always be looking for opportunities to listen to feedback.
  • Stop promotional blasts, and focus on ways to pull audiences close to your brand. Marketing automation means targeting the right users with the right message at the right time in their buying journeys, hence avoid spamming.
  • Monitor and analyze feedbacks on regular basis with an objective eye.
  • When executed well, marketing automation can help build strong prospect customer relationships. Depending on your company’s marketing model, a single lead can be worth upward other million leads.

CloudFountain Inc. is CRM consulting firm with expertise in providing CRM+Marketing Automation solutions for SMB clients. We would be extremely glad to receive feedback from you.

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