What is a CRM exactly and what are the main points you need to know before you get one?
CRM System – What Does CRM mean?
Customer Relationship Management System! It’s really just a database, but so much more. It’s the dream marketing assistant for most growing small businesses, you can see in one system (called one single source of truth) all your customers and all the properties of those customers (field headings for me and you!) and all the interactions those customers have with you (either automated or manually recorded). Sounds amazing right!! Imagine the improvement in your customer relationships if you know the exact history of the touchpoints that customer has had with you!
Multiple Lists Problems?
Do you have multiple lists here, there, and everywhere?? This can be tricky to manage; as a business you likely created lists for different reasons over the years. Maybe you have them stored on Excel with data logged against each customer name? If this sounds familiar to you, if you need customer intel logged against each customer, then it sounds like you will benefit greatly from a CRM software.
Make The Leap & Clean Your Lists Up.
One giant leap for business owners! SO, there will be a bit of a transition period, let’s be reasonable, but any good CRM should make it easy enough for you. It will be so worth it!! It’s best to ensure the integrity of your lists first, by editing them as much as you can to make sure you are uploading great lists with good solid data. A little time consuming but it makes sense that you only upload what you want and need now rather than later!
Marketing to Multiple Lists With No CRM to Back You Up.
If you’re doing this at the moment, this means your business has no real-time recorded touchpoint actions, unless of course you fancy monitoring that on a spreadsheet too. As your lists grow in number then so does the juggling between lists without any real insight into commonalities that might exist between lists & contacts. How do you record who is interacting or engaging with your communications in one view? You can't, not easily anyway.
Become A Great Juggler Of Lists.
There are lots of free trials out there for CRMs, the ZYM CRM has a 14 day trial period, where you can upload all your lists and try it out for size. Once you see all your lists in one view, you won't ever look back! Juggling lists will become a thing of the past!
It’s A Visual Delight!
No more rows of information here to scroll through forever! Once you get your lists into the ZYM CRM, you will see a nice organised group of lists. Individual rows will be replaced with unique contact records per customer. Yes, the CRM will really carry the load for you with very little learning curve involved. Better contact management is a great win here for your business.
Lead The Way With Improved Lead Management
How are you managing your business leads at the moment? If you’re keeping it all in your head and it’s getting more difficult to manage, then a CRM is a fantastic start towards organisation & management of your leads. Using ZYM, you can manage the cold, warm & hot leads separately using the inbuilt leads scoring system in the CRM. Easy as a-b-c!
Centralise Customer Communications.
Add more power to your elbow and centralise all customer centred communications, with a CRM that allows you to email and market to your customers whilst also storing all their interactions on your emails & website pages. Why? Deeper intelligence improves customer relationships, if a customer isn't opening your emails anymore, maybe it’s time you reached out to them in person. We all know it’s cheaper & better to retain the customers that you have than get new ones and that is probably the biggest advantage a CRM can give you.
Manage Contacts With Ease.
Contact management has to be one of the major benefits of a CRM. When trying out a CRM, you should make sure that Contact records are easy to update and edit, so that they reflect the latest information you hold about that contact.
Increase Customer Satisfaction
It goes without saying, if you know more about your customer and have more up to date information about them, this should = increased customer satisfaction. A CRM will offer your business the increased chance of keeping the customers happier than ever! Definitely a win-win scenario for your customers and your business.
The Transition Period
It isn't as bad as it sounds I promise! As long as you are happy with the integrity of the data you are loading onto your new CRM, it will be plain sailing once you get your lists uploaded, sorted, segmented and ready for marketing purposes. The ZYM CRM (and any CRM) comes with help videos & 1-1 training if you need it, but I can tell you that it will be one of the best marketing choices you ever make, you will wish you’d done it sooner! Once you learn your new CRM, let's say it takes a few weeks to be 100% comfortable with it, then you can watch those customer relationships grow!
Take a free 14 day trial of Zym here.
Want to find out more about how Zym works? Click here to view the video tour.
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