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ClickSend’s Tips to Improve Your SMS Marketing Campaigns

This is a guest post by ClickSend.

Given its fast engagement, high open and response rates, and effectiveness in reaching audience wherever they are, SMS campaigns are one of the most adopted mobile marketing tactics. SMS can be an incredibly valuable marketing tool if used correctly, but with just one wrong move, SMS messages can easily come across as spammy.

Don’t worry: the experts at ClickSend are here to help you delight your customers and get the most out of your SMS campaigns with these simple tips.

Before you start sending:

Set an objective

What do you want to achieve from an SMS campaign? It might seem boring, but you need to know your goals to measure how your campaign is working. Your objective might be to capture data, or to increase bookings or reservations. Set your goal, track it, and learn from it.

Know your database

Everyone on your database must have opted-in to receive your SMS marketing communications. Otherwise, your messages, campaign, and even account can be canceled. No one likes SMS spam, and messaging recipients who have not opted in will do more harm than good.

Keep messages clear and concise

Get to the point quickly. You have 160 characters to promote your offer and drive your desired action, and in today’s media saturated world, people have very short attention spans.

Pay attention to timing

Timing is everything, and that’s especially true for SMS marketing. Not only do people not want to get messages in the middle of the night, but they can’t take action if they’re asleep. Track when your users are most active on your mobile site or website to find the ideal times to send out SMS messages.

With these tips in mind, you’re ready to build your SMS marketing campaign. If you’re wondering where to get started or how to tell if your campaign will be effective, check out our list:

Five elements of a good SMS marketing message:

1. Give your message a personal touch by using the recipient’s first name, if you have it. Using ClickSend’s (First Name) placeholders will do this automatically. This also adds credibility to the message.

2. Identify yourself and/or the name of your company. Clearly stating who you are builds trust and recognition.

3. If promoting an offer, clearly present it and any conditions as succinctly as possible. Don’t use open-ended messages. Make it clear when the offer ends to avoid confusion, create urgency, and drive your desired action.

4. Include a clear call to action, whether it’s “Show This Text…” or “Click Here.” Show the recipient how to complete the action you want.

5. Always provide a clear way for the recipient to opt out of your marketing SMS messages. It’s the law in most countries and making it difficult for recipients to opt out only loses customer trust. For example,  include instructions in your SMS explaining how the receiver can opt out by texting ‘STOP’ to your short code (your shortened text number).

Engage customers and prospects through SMS campaigns or personalized one-on-one messages—try the ClickSend extension for Zoho CRM. This bi-directional text messaging extension allows users to send and receive SMS from Zoho CRM leads and contacts without logging in to the ClickSend platform.

Try ClickSend for Zoho CRM

Work smarter by adding new capabilities to Zoho CRM with business solutions from Zoho Marketplace. Explore Zoho Marketplace >

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Say hello to the new Office Suite logos

Your favorite Zoho office suite products—Writer, Sheet, Show, and Notebook—are getting new, refreshed logos. 

When we first launched Writer—Zoho’s first cloud app—we knew it was going to be an uphill climb to build a familiar, yet uncompromising office experience on the web. Now, more than a decade later, our word processing, spreadsheet, presentation, and note-taking apps stand among the best, with tens of thousands of documents created every day.

Starting today, we’re bringing new design updates to our office apps to create a refreshing, unified experience across the suite, and the first of these updates are new product logos.

//www.youtube.com/watch?v=ILWAToz4qE4

  Embracing Logolinism

If you use multiple Zoho apps, you’ve likely already noticed our new line-based logos on other apps. This is based on our new design language, Logolinism, which embraces simple, linear shapes to create easily recognizable product metaphors.

    The minimal, understated nature of the design—which we believe truly reflects the Zoho brand itself—also gives us more flexibility to adapt our logos across multiple platforms, media, and color palettes.

  Goodbye, Fill! =]

  These new changes are rolling out across the Writer, Sheet, Show, Notebook and WorkDrive web and mobile apps as we speak. We’ll be back with more design updates for the office suite, as well as complete insights into Logolinism and our process behind it, in the coming weeks.

We know design is a highly subjective experience, and since you’re seeing these changes with a fresh perspective, we at Zoho would love to know what you think. Post your thoughts about the new designs in the comments below!

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Enhance Your Productivity with the Zoho Forms-Automate.io Integration

Zoho Forms is one of the leading form software solutions for lead generation and data collection. Since launching in 2015, we’ve been pioneers in offline data collection, offering a feature-loaded mobile app and customizable and responsive web forms. Many businesses also use Zoho Forms to collect data internally to log their issues, raise requests, and more.

In most cases, the data collected through forms has to go to another app. Usually, the data transfer either happens manually or involves duplication with copy-paste. If not, it requires a bulk of coding expertise to automate the data flow between your apps.

To simplify integration with apps of your choice and automate business workflows, Zoho Forms is integrating with Automate.io.

Automate.io is a tool that lets you connect multiple apps and automate tasks between them, saving you a lot of time and effort in the process. It transfers data from Forms to various apps and solves critical business workflows.

How it works

Automate.io’s platform triggers an action in another app when someone submits a form response. You must create bots with your apps to set up workflows – one app is a trigger, and based on the trigger, automate.io will perform an action in another app. This integration can be two-step involving two apps or multi-step involving many apps.

For example, when your employees collect data from clients on your site, our offline mobile app would be an effective data collection tool. You won’t need to wait for them to return to your office and update the data in your CRM. When they are online, the data syncs to the Zoho cloud, and it triggers an action through automate.io. The collected data can be added to your Hubspot CRM, and tasks can be added to Todoist or appointments can be booked in Calendly through automate.io.

Configuring bots in automate.io is simple. To learn how, check out our step-by-step guide to integrating Zoho Forms and Automate.io here.

If you haven’t tried out automate.io for Zoho Forms yet, you can visit the link below to explore the app gallery.

While the possibilities of this integration platform are endless, we’ve listed a few examples that might help your team automate workflows across verticals efficiently:

  If your business runs on one or many of these applications and you need an efficient forms app that simplifies data collection, Zoho Forms should be your go-to choice. With the Automate.io integration, there are numerous business workflows that can be automated for you.

Try them out and also let us know in the comments which apps you use and the workflows you’d like to solve with Zoho Forms-Automate.io integration.

If you have any queries or suggestions for us, you can always reach us at [email protected].

Happy automating!

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#ZCampaignsChat Recap: The power of email marketing in the digital era 

We talk a lot about email marketing these days—crafting content, designing templates, choosing recipients, and, finally, sending out campaigns. Emails are sent by marketers to individuals who have the hopes of receiving content that interests them. Technology has a huge influence on email marketing, and that’s why marketers now need to be creative, critical, and action-oriented at the same time. With the entry of each tech disruption like Machine Learning, Artificial Intelligence, Deep Learning, and Predictive Reporting, email marketing sees new light, becoming more humanized and contextual.

Recently, we chatted with some email geeks and industry experts on Twitter about how smart email marketing is getting. Here are excerpts from our #ZCampaignsChat in our second Expert Diaries episode:

  Q1. They say A/B testing also stands for “Always Be testing.” How do you think this method is evolving? #ZCampaignsChat

A/B testing is the most-sought-after tool for any email marketer. Subject lines, sender addresses, or content—experiments can be run for any attribute. But “smart” testing is when you not only know what you’re testing, but why and how to perform that test. Look what some of our experts say:

A1: The right martech makes A/B testing easier/faster, allows marketers to test nearly everything, and in real-time. Despite advances, A/B testing can still waste time and $$. AI+A/B helps marketers uncover hidden insights to A/B test for greatest impact. #ZCampaignsChat

— Tom Sather (@tom_sather) July 30, 2019

A1: Testing has to happen one piece at a time. You can't two elements of an email at the same time or you don't really know what has the greatest impact. Testing is, therefore, time consuming and clients avoid doing it (and miss huge opportunities by doing so) #ZCampaignsChat https://t.co/u3FrVgHdcy

— Val Geisler

(@lovevalgeisler) July 30, 2019

A1. “Always Be Testing” but “Always Have a Hypothesis”. Don’t test for the sake of testing. Have a testing plan in place. Even if it’s as simple as mapping out a few months' worth of subject line testing. #ZCampaignsChat (1/2) https://t.co/cEGPRb8Wse

— Jaina Mistry (@jainamistry) July 30, 2019

  Takeaway: A test without a plan is a lost route. First understand what attributes you’re testing and then reflect on why you to test them, which ultimately gives you answers for what metrics can optimize your emails. Some recent trends in Machine Learning are changing the way testing and experimentation is carried out, so leverage the power of these mechanisms as well. Don’t forget to test when you see what it yields!

  Q2. Email cadence has been receiving a lot of press lately. What’s your ideal email-sending pattern for starters? #ZCampaignsChat

Every brand wants to send out emails, but do their recipients really look forward to receiving them? The answer is…it depends! While you think you craft the best email campaigns, somewhere at the other end of the globe, your recipient might see you as a potential spammer and try unsubscribing from your brand. So how do you avoid sending too many emails while also not underperforming? Watch out what our experts discuss:

A2. Over 80% of UK marketers want rules to dictate cadence. This makes no sense if you are trying to have a conversation. #ZCampaignsChat

— Skip Fidura (@skipfidura) July 30, 2019

A2: Cadence is SO unique by brand! One thing you'll learn as you grow a new email programs is that *relevance* wins out over a set rule on # of emails, i.e. automated emails!

That said, starting monthly and adding from there is always an easy place to start.#ZCampaignsChat

— Jessica Best (@bestofjess) July 30, 2019

A2: No ideal email cadence for everyone and depends on biz, individual subscriber’s prefs and age of subscription. Use data to see how subscribers interact with emails over time both positively and negatively. New subs usually welcome more email at first. #ZCampaignsChat

— Tom Sather (@tom_sather) July 30, 2019

Totally! And once you set those expectations for your subscribers you have to stick to them. Don't suddenly change your monthly newsletter to a weekly without letting them know. Some of those subscribers may only want monthly emails from you. #ZCampaignsChat

— Jaina Mistry (@jainamistry) July 30, 2019

  Takeaway: There is no one rule for brands. Every brand needs to find its own email cadence, which might sometimes call for common sense and relevance over rules. Marketers can use the data they collect to determine what works for them, but, again, too much data can bog them down too, making them indecisive. This is where a balance between intuition and data comes in, so get realistic and aware about your engagement pattern with recipients—what conversations they like, how much content they can process, and how they reacted to your previous emails.

  Q3.What are some challenges you’ve faced in getting emails delivered, and how have you overcome them? #ZCampaignsChat

Getting your emails delivered to recipients’ inboxes can be the biggest challenge of all, considering the spam filters and umpteen domain reputation protocols. Beyond all this, brands still successfully manage to engage their contacts by sending emails that directly reach recipients’ mailboxes. Let’s hear from our experts as to how they handled unforeseen challenges while delivering their email campaigns:

(Some serious discussions can’t be restrained in 280 characters, you see! ;))

A3: How to answer this in 1 tweet??

First: you have to know if you have an inbox placement issue. Cue @returnpath or start by looking at your results by recipient email domain: if something's out of whack, you may have an issue!#ZCampaignsChat

— Jessica Best (@bestofjess) July 30, 2019

Good LORD. Do NOT switch ESPs if you're already having deliverability issues!

It's more often your fault as the marketer (content + how people got on your list) than it is your poor IP address

#ZCampaignsChat

— Jessica Best (@bestofjess) July 30, 2019

A3. Maybe I'm making this too simple but The best way to maintain good deliverability is to engage your readers. In other words, don't send crap. #ZCampaignsChat

— Skip Fidura (@skipfidura) July 30, 2019

A3. If you’re having deliverability issues, the most important thing is to not feel shame! It happens to every single email marketer at some point in their career. Use the resources around you to get to the issue and figure out the solution. #ZCampaignsChat (1/5) https://t.co/0E0OPG1nAn

— Jaina Mistry (@jainamistry) July 30, 2019

Takeaway: Don’t be embarrassed if your sender reputation is getting bad. Well, it does serve as an alert signal, but this is when you need to spend the time and analyze your domain reports and performance.

exactly. Don't run from your problems. They have a habit of following you! #ZCampaignsChat

— Tom Sather (@tom_sather) July 30, 2019

Don’t run away from problems; rather, take some simple yet effective measures like cleaning your mailing lists, adopting some list monitoring techniques, obtaining consent from people before sending emails, and studying your previous campaign metrics.

Q4. How are machine learning and AI shaping today’s email marketing strategy? #ZCampaignsChat

As stated earlier, machine learning and AI are transforming the way emails are created and delivered. While there are numerous advantages to these tools, the real question is whether marketers are really adept at handling them. Let’s look at what the experts think:

A4. The area I see it the most is making emails more relevant by dynamically inserting different content/products for different people #ZCampaignsChat

— Tim Watson (@tawatson) July 30, 2019

A4. … but don't be a magpie marketer and chase after the shiny new thing just because it has a sexy buzzword. #ZCampaignsChat

— Skip Fidura (@skipfidura) July 30, 2019

Takeaway: It’s undeniably true that machine learning and AI are changing the way email marketing is done, but one shouldn’t forget that as long as we don’t know what to achieve with them, they’re merely magic tools with no use. The future of marketing is highly shaped by the accurate decisions, strategies, and metrics that machine learning and AI put forward, so it’s time for email marketers to understand how best to leverage the power of these technological advancements.

  Q5. Automated emails with humanized content is the new norm in email marketing. Your thoughts? #ZCampaignsChat

Automation is always welcomed by email marketers, and, true to its nature, it does save a lot of time. But sending emails in bulk needn’t mean the message should also be written for the “mass” audience. Automation certainly ensures the emails are delivered on point to the right people, however, designing tailored emails is still in a marketer’s hands. Here’s what our experts say about designing personalized emails:

A5. I have been saying for years that all we are trying to achieve is having human conversations at scale. #ZCampaignsChat

— Skip Fidura (@skipfidura) July 30, 2019

A5. Every email, whether automated or not, needs to have the human touch. Email is a 1:1 communication. Without a sense of authenticity or humanity in your email, you may as well be a robot. #ZCampaignsChat https://t.co/eWItsuiMOO pic.twitter.com/KOKb0P2uq3

— Jaina Mistry (@jainamistry) July 30, 2019

A5: The holy grail of email marketing is a fully personalized, automated and humanized content. Surely another area that AI and machine learning will help marketers achieve? But don’t be creepy. #ZCampaignsChat

— Tom Sather (@tom_sather) July 30, 2019

A5: Ha, I'm chuckling a bit here: What is "humanized" content?? Be actually human, please.

Automation is one of my favorite #emailmarketer tricks for getting emails to someone on their timeline, but content and messaging should all still be, well… human.#ZCampaignsChat https://t.co/9dok54Tjub

— Jessica Best (@bestofjess) July 30, 2019

Takeaway: Emails need to be contextual and conversational. You can automate and mechanize the process of email creation, but in the end, they’re delivered to humans who would prefer to read content that relates to them. If you fail to bring in a human-to-human feel, the whole idea of delivering emails would fail. It’s time to send humanized emails, dear marketers!

  Q6. Unsubscribes aren’t always harmful to your brand. What do you think? #ZCampaignsChat

Marketers are frequently frustrated with the opt-outs that increase with every email they send. But rarely do marketers take the time to understand what made people quit receiving the email in the first place. And only a chunk of them feel positive about the whole “unsubscribe” show. Want to know why?

A6: Bring on the unsubs! They're cleaning up your list (good for deliverability), telling you they aren't a good fit for you (good for product-market fit), and saving you money on your per-profile costs with your ESP! #ZCampaignsChat https://t.co/AC3Ncwy7kd

— Val Geisler

(@lovevalgeisler) July 30, 2019

Allowing subscribers to easily unsubscribe isn’t just about deliverability, it’s about how your brand is viewed by your subscribers. If you hide your unsubscribe, you could be seen as deceptive and untrustworthy. Is that really how you want to be seen? #ZCampaignsChat (2/2)

— Jaina Mistry (@jainamistry) July 30, 2019

A6. Unsubscribes are to be embraced. Whilst we'd rather not have them, they are ultimately a very good thing. Break ups happen and finishing a relationship on a good note, not sour one, is always best #ZCampaignsChat

— Tim Watson (@tawatson) July 30, 2019

Takeaway: Unsubscribes aren’t always harmful. Sometimes it gives you a way to clean your mailing lists and keep only the contacts relevant to your brand. Unsubscribes also help you reflect on your campaigns’ performances and take actions that will improve engagement.

  Q7. Which performance metric best determines an email’s success for you? #ZCampaignsChat

Creating and sending email campaigns has got a step beyond—reviewing. An email’s success is determined by many different criteria that differ across brands and their intent to engage. That said, here’s our experts’ outlook on which performance metric could be looked at:

A7. The best performance metric is the one that tied to your goal or CTA, like revenue per email, or downloads, etc. Metrics like Opens should be tracked but are better in troubleshooting why a campaign didn’t meet objectives. #ZCampaignsChat

— Tom Sather (@tom_sather) July 30, 2019

It takes looking at opens, clicks, conversions, unsubscribes, spam complaints, etc, to give you a full picture of the success of your campaign. #ZCampaignsChat (2/2)

— Jaina Mistry (@jainamistry) July 30, 2019

A7. So as close to the sales as I can get and still have current enough information to make changes mid-campaign. #ZCampaignsChat (2/2)

— Skip Fidura (@skipfidura) July 30, 2019

Takeaway: Plan well before you send out your campaigns—this will help you decide which metrics are essential for your brand so that you can effectively track them. Moreover, studying performance metrics is important to revising your email marketing strategy, so looking at a campaign’s opens, clicks, bounces, unsubscribes, and spam complaints helps you get a complete picture.

  We hope this episode of #ZCampaignsChat helps you understand the importance and power of email marketing in the digital age. Got some interesting perspectives to share? Drop in your comments and let’s discuss email marketing!

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Introducing Custom Branding and more in Office Integrator

We’re adding white labeling options to Zoho Office Integrator aimed at making our document, spreadsheet, and presentation editors a true part of your application.

Zoho Office Integrator helps businesses add document creation muscles to their custom applications by giving them powerful, easy-to-integrate document editors and APIs.

Businesses like e-Agree.com use Office Integrator to streamline and automate the user experience of their contract management services, and we couldn’t be happier. Office Integrator enables creators like you to access fully-featured, customizable document editors easily—without having to build them from scratch.

Today, we’re happy to introduce some exciting updates aimed at giving you even better control of how the editors look and behave in your application. Here’s everything new and improved:

Custom branding

Add your custom brand logos to the editors. Remove any instances of the default Zoho logo across the document, spreadsheet, and presentation editors, and replace them with yours—we’re sure they’ll look great!

Here’s how it works

  Custom domains

While the default API requests and editor URLs are pointed to .zoho.com, you can now customize them to be directed to your own custom domains, like .zylker.com for example.

Custom domain mapping in Office Integrator is implemented using the CNAME method. All you have to do is verify and match your registered domain with the custom code we generate for you, and we can complete the process in 5-7 days.

Here’s a complete on using custom domains in Office Integrator

  Customizing the editor experience

Polishing the overall experience? Pick and choose what you want your users to see and how. You now get the control to keep or hide Download, Print buttons as well as the entire top-band of our editors—making sure they sit well within your application and the experience it provides.

To get to the UI customization options, go to the White labeling tab and choose the “User Interface” menu.

We’re also opening up internationalization options for all three editors, so that they match the UI-language of your application.

Here’s a deep-dive

That’s all for now. Let us know if you have any questions by posting in the comments section below or by dropping us an email at [email protected]

Availability: Customers on the Commercial plans can get hold of everything we announced today through the new White Labeling Add-on.

What’s stopping you? Get started with building your next big dream, right away!

  Happy building!

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Zoho Projects: A glimpse of our year so far. 

The year is halfway over, and we’ve been hard at work improving your experience with Projects. Say hello to an upgraded Zoho Projects that comes with new and enhanced features to give you a productivity boost. Read on to learn more!

Lay it all out – Multiple layouts for projects

Zoho Projects is introducing multiple layouts for your different needs. Let’s use the example of a musician in a record company. It would make sense for the business to follow a standard layout for managing all its administration activities. However, the musician would need the tool more for keeping track of their bookings and the logistics of their tours. The fields for managing administration don’t really apply to their work. A layout that’s tailored to address event planning work would help more. After all, software that you use to manage work shouldn’t make you work harder. That’s why we introduced our multi-layout functionality, to facilitate layouts that record details which are more relevant to your work. We’ve also added a few other custom fields to our existing list. You can now add URL, phone, and email fields to your projects.

Control access – Task field permissions

Introducing enhanced Roles and Permissions—you now have field-level permissions to go deep and break down your tasks at the field level. You can now set your system so your employees can only view and modify tasks that they’re assigned to or tagged in. With our new field-level permissions, you can require that only some profiles—like a manager or admin—can assign tasks to others, while the other profiles can only assign tasks to themselves. The user profiles can be given view or edit permissions for each field in your tasks. You can also make sure that particular fields are hidden, or can’t be edited. For example, if you don’t want your employees to change the task dates, it can be done. If there’s a particular custom field like “Externally committed end date” that you want only your managers to be aware of, you can do that, too.

Work easy – Subtasks in Kanban view 

Easily manage all of your tasks by simply moving them across a board. Our Kanban view has now been enhanced to introduce subtasks. Even with carefully laid out plans, there are always factors that can cause changes to a project in real-time. For a construction project, getting permits for land may have originally been a subtask, but unforeseen legal problems can make it complicated. Now this can become a task on its own that requires you to do a whole set of activities to solve it. In Zoho Projects, you can now simply drag and drop to reorder subtasks or make them into parent tasks in Kanban view.

Be alert – Threshold and budget reach alerts 

Keep your project spending in check. It’s easy to get caught up in your work and spend more than what was planned. There’s also always a chance of unexpected expenses. With Zoho Projects, you can set up a threshold for your budget and get notified with email alerts when you hit it. There’s also an option for getting alerts when you reach your planned project budget.

Balance for better – Resource allocation

Use resource allocation to efficiently balance the workload among your employees. When creating and assigning tasks, it’s possible to see which users are under-utilized, over-utilized, or unavailable on specified dates. You can also select an owner to see if they’re available at that particular period, and how full their plate is. This saves you the time it would take to go to the resource utilization chart to check everyone’s workload after all the tasks have been assigned.

That’s not all! We have several exciting updates in the works for you. Stay tuned to find out what’s up!

Until then, we wish you many happy projects!

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Introducing Zia in Writer: The smart writing assistant trained to help you write better.

Writer now has a smart assistant to identify grammatical errors and also come up with real-time style and readability suggestions to help improve your writing.

Meet your new personal proofreader. Zia, Zoho’s AI-powered intelligent assistant, can help you identify embarrassing grammatical and style errors early-on, before you share your writing with the rest of the world.

Zia is smart enough to understand the context of your piece, and capable enough to give it the polish it deserves. And the best part? She does it all while working quietly in the background–in real time. Let’s take a closer look.

1. The grammar checker that combines rules with context

We’ve seen grammar checkers before. But Zia is a little different. She doesn’t stop with the basics. She combines them with advanced machine learning techniques to provide contextual feedback about each sentence.

From frequently confused words to punctuation and preposition errors, Zia is trained to identify most common grammatical errors and suggest corrections. Watch for the green underlines she makes in your documents.

Real-time grammar and style suggestions in Writer

  2. Readability scores and insights 

Zia knows the Flesch-Kincaid index so that she can score your piece for complexity. Open her mini-report card and she shows you how readable your piece is, and what age groups will be able to read it.

The Ease of Reading card also lists ways to improve your overall score:

A. Run-on Sentences are primary indicators of writing that isn’t structured well, and avoiding them will make your writing more readable and clear.

B. Average Sentence Length indicates how long you structure your sentences to be. Sentences that are too long can confuse your readers, preventing you from conveying the concept clearly.

C. The Polysyllabic Words section lets you know if you’re using complicated language in your piece. Words with more than 3 syllables are generally harder to read. Zia identifies these words and lists simpler alternatives you can use.

  3. Style suggestions to give your writing its final polish

Zia lets you know if you’re overusing adverbs and passive sentences. She warns you if you’re starting to sound cliched. She nitpicks so that others don’t have to. 

Here are some highlights of the Writing Quality card:

A. Wordy Phrases: These are the orange underlines that appear on your documents. Wordiness is about using more words than necessary to make your point. Zia comes up with ways to shorten some of your phrases and avoid redundancy in writing.

 B. Cliché Scanner: Lets you know if words or phrases you had written have already been overused and thereby lost their effectiveness.

 C. Passive Sentences: Zia identifies sentences in your piece that are in passive voice. Avoid passive voive—especially in formal writing—as it can make your sentences appear less direct.

You’re probably wondering how much all these new updates are going to cost you. Our monthly plans start at $0. All the new grammar, readability and style tools will be available completely free for all our users, forever.

That’s all for now. Let us know what you think about the new updates and how they help you write better. Drop us a comment below or mail us at [email protected].

Happy writing!

This announcement is part of the #FutureOffice series that talks about the latest updates to the Zoho Office Suite. Read the complete announcement here.

The post Introducing Zia in Writer: The smart writing assistant trained to help you write better. appeared first on Zoho Blog.

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The Three Questions to Ask Yourself Before Investing In a CRM System

The below is a guest blog by Gene Marks, a CPA, author, columnist, and owner of The Marks Group. Gene writes every day on small business for the Washington Post; twice a week for Forbes and weekly for Inc, & Entrepreneur.

When considering a customer relationship management (CRM) system for one’s business, most people devote their time to evaluating an application’s features, cost, customizability, scalability, and how quickly it can be implemented. It’s all good and important stuff. But it’s not as important as something else: a look in the mirror.

CRM is not for everyone. For sure, a good CRM system, if implemented the right way, can benefit any business of any size and in any industry. But sometimes a company just doesn’t have the culture for CRM. This is not a fault of the company. In fact, I’ve come across many great, profitable and growing organizations that – for reasons I’ll dive into below – are just not able to succeed with a CRM system. Is this your company? To find out, you should ask yourself these three questions. If the answers aren’t positive you might want to consider whether or not a CRM system is right for you.

One: Do you have the right resources?

In the end, your CRM system is just a database. But it’s a database – if used the right way – that will be accessed by most, if not all, of your employees and it will help them significantly improve productivity, profits, and sales. Like any asset, it will require an investment and, like any investment, it will require resources – both time and money.

Sure, you’ll have to subscribe to the software. But the software cost will be just a small part of your overall investment. To get your system off the ground, running smoothly, and then growing with your company, you will need people to be involved. You may need to hire external partners, consultants, developers, integrators, and specialists in the application. You will definitely need your employees to spend time on the system. You’ll want to assign user and database administrators. You’ll need some IT support. You’ll want to organize training.

All of these activities take time, and time is money. This is time that your people will be spending that will be taken away from their normal jobs. It may require overtime. It will definitely result in questions, frustrations, challenges, and pushback from some – it’s all normal human behavior. Regardless, it will require resources and you’ve got to make sure they’re available. Two: Is there a clear way to evaluate your return on investment?

If you’re going to spend $1,000 or $1 million on a CRM system, you’re choosing to do so in lieu of investing in another asset. Is this a good investment? Would your money be better spent on a piece of equipment, or some inventory, or hiring a new customer service representative? Or maybe just sitting in the bank collecting interest? To justify whether you need a CRM system initially, and whether or not the system is generating a satisfactory return on investment in the future, you need a clear-cut way of evaluating your ROI.

It’s not as hard as you might think. You’re in business to profit, so a CRM system – like any investment – should be helping you generate more profit. There are really just two ways to generate more profit: increase your sales and/or decrease your expenses. It’s just math.

Think about sales. How many opportunities have you lost in the past couple of years because you didn’t follow-up on a task or something fell through the cracks? How many dollars are you overlooking because your people aren’t asking the right questions of your existing customers? How many customers did you lose because you didn’t keep a close relationship with them?

Now think about expenses. Will a CRM system help you improve productivity? Answer calls faster? Respond to problems quicker? Get more things done with less people? Can you quantify this?

Before getting started with this system, create these profitability metrics and then closely measure during and after the implementation. If you find yourself unable to do this, then you might want to reconsider your investment – because this is how you’ll satisfy yourself that your investment is worth it.

Three: Are you resolute?

A CRM system can be a tremendous benefit to your company, but it can also take a tremendous amount of work. While it’s just a database, it can be a powerful database. However, for it to be useful and productive the data needs to be accurate and complete. If the data isn’t good, your system is a waste.

So how to make sure you have a great database? People need to be trained. Internal controls over the data need to be established. Specific rules and processes need to be created – and then enforced. Everyone will need to modify what they’re doing, throw away those spreadsheets, stop making notes on the back of an envelope, enter information after calls and appointments, and really spend time in this system that they were previously not spending their time in. All of this takes effort and it requires change. People generally don’t like change, particularly when they don’t see the big picture or how the change is helping them.

So that’s your job. Once you’ve decided to go down this path you – as a leader – must be resolute. You cannot look back. You will be positive. You will not give in to the few (and there will be a few) who complain or want to go back to the old way of doing things. You will hear people out and make adjustments and ensure that problems are fixed. But you will commit to making your system a success.

Conclusion

The reality in 2018 is that there are many great CRM systems that will, if implemented the right way, contribute much to a company’s profitability and value. But there’s no such thing as the perfect system. So your job is to choose what you think will be best for your company and then make sure – by providing the right resources, having clear metrics to evaluate its return on investment, and then steeling yourself to get the job done over the long term – that the system ultimately meets and exceeds everyone’s expectations. When I hear of companies that failed with a CRM system, it’s usually because they never asked these questions before they got started. Now you know!

We’d like to invite you to continue the discussion and learn more about making the right CRM choice for your business. Join us for a webinar on April 26th, “3 tips for choosing the right CRM for your business.” Register for free.

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Zoho Mail Presents: Reader View, Email Status Indicator, and More

Have the comfort of reading emails on your own terms, view the statuses of your emails at a glance, call your colleagues from the mailbox, and drag-and-drop your emails as attachments. Make emailing simpler with Zoho Mail’s fresh set of features!

Without further ado, we present you the fourth installment in our Roundup of features blog posts.

Reader view:

Everyone has a preference when it comes to reading: the brightness at a certain level, the font size a little bigger, a particular font style and so on. The most important thing is that the words are legible and appealing enough to catch and retain the reader’s attention.

So why should it be different for emails? When emails that contain important information come in different fonts, sizes, and styles, it can disrupt your focus.

We can’t have that, so Zoho Mail came up with the Reader View. A little book icon in the top-right corner of every open email that will give you the perfect way to read the email on your terms.

Just like your e-reader, Zoho Mail lets you adjust the font size, line spacing, and font family to your liking. There’s even an estimated ‘time to read’ metric in the header of your emails. You can also switch between Night and Day modes while reading, in case you’re in bed, on a red eye flight, or just like to take it easy on the eyes. If you’re in an email conversation thread, you can just click the Next button to view subsequent emails.

Printing your emails is easy from the Reader view, just click and send to the printer without the clutter of headers and wild html styling. Have a neat and crisp physical copy of your emails.

Email status indicator:

The first thing you look at when you log into your mail account is your mail listing. As you scroll down checking one email after the other, there are bound to be instances where you do a double-take – wondering if you’ve replied to that one from your boss or if you’ve forwarded the email your colleague asked for.

With Zoho Mail’s Email status indicator, you don’t have to open an email to see if you’ve replied to it or not. Now your mail listing sports dedicated icons that display the status of your emails.

Besides indicating the Read/Unread statuses of the email, these icons placed before the sender’s name (In case of Classic view, it is visible when you hover over an email) will show whether the email has been:

Audio and video call support in Contact cards:

Some things are better explained over calls, where there is less room for miscommunication. The next time you want more clarification on the email your colleague sent you, give them a call straight from your mailbox.

That’s right, Zoho Mail now supports audio and video calls, in addition to its integrated chat option by Zoho Cliq.

Clicking on an email address displays the chat, as well as audio and video call options on the contact card. Select the most convenient option and start a conversation instantly.

Add emails as EML attachments:

When most of your business emails feature the phrase, “Please find attached,” it needn’t necessarily be media files that are attached, it can also be emails. It is not unusual for people to attach emails for reference when replying to an existing email thread or composing a new one.

In Zoho Mail, you don’t have to download each email in order to attach them while composing an email. A simple drag and drop does the trick.

  Once you click Compose Mail, just click and drag the email(s) you wish to add as EML attachments from your mailbox, then drop them into the compose tab.

You can also select multiple emails in your mailbox and use the ‘Forward multiple emails’ option to attach those emails as EML attachments and start composing a new mail all at once.

While we are coming up with more feature updates to make your email experience even better, please feel free to comment and tell us what’s your favorite feature in Zoho Mail

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Add custom fields to your ecommerce product page 

Does your ecommerce business sell products that involve displaying additional information or receiving product-related information from customers? Zoho Commerce’s new feature, Custom Fields, could be what you need.

What are Custom Fields?

Custom fields are product fields that can display or receive different types of information, including numbers, text, currencies, email IDs, check boxes, drop-down boxes, multi-select options, and auto-generating numbers.

You can use these fields to either display or receive data. You could use them to receive product-related info like a message to be printed on your product, or additional notes for product customizations. You can also include a check box to agree to terms and conditions, or a drop-down for an option to be selected.

To display data, you can include order-related info like a date or a text to be displayed to your customers.

How to implement custom fields in your online store

You can include custom fields in your online store by creating them from the Settings page. All custom fields are added to your products using a default layout.

What are layouts?

Layouts are groups of custom fields that you can add to your products. You can create your layouts in the Custom Fields section.

The default layout contains all the custom fields you’ve created for your products, but you can choose one containing only the custom fields that you want.

Conclusion

Use the custom fields feature on your online store whenever you need additional information for your products. Learn more about implementing custom fields here: https://help.zohocommerce.com/product-custom-fields#create_custom_fields

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Introducing Cliq’s new logo!

If you’ve been using other Zoho apps, and know many of Zoho’s product logos are undergoing a design refresh, you probably saw this coming: Cliq has officially joined the Logolinism club!

We’re excited to reveal we’ve updated Cliq’s beloved chat bubble logo to this sleek, minimalistic new version:

But first, why change it?

The purpose of a logo is to reflect your brand’s purpose and to create a unique identity among the public. That being said, a logo should also reflect brand aesthetics while also staying simple and unique.

 Following the guidelines of Logolinism—Zoho’s new minimalistic logo style characterized by simple line art, bright colors, and simplified forms—we began to remodel our existing logo to match Zoho’s fresh new look.

 The story behind our logo:

When the idea of the new logo came into discussion, it didn’t really take us too long to decide on what direction to proceed. Our logo—a simple, clean design—was created to communicate very simple ideas:

The outlines match the outside curves, or brackets, formed by the letters “C” and “Q” in our product name, “CLIQ”.

The three dots in the center signify communication, collaboration, and productivity—Cliq’s purpose and our motto.

And of course, the overall representation of a message or chat bubble highlights Cliq’s capabilities as a messaging platform.

We carefully deliberated over the variety of designs our dedicated designers came up with, and in the end, we are pleased to present a new and improved logo that carries the essence of what we want to convey.

Our new logo embraces the minimalist style of using clean, brightly colored line art to form a simplified image in place of highly detailed or realistic icons. While this style follows the current trend of minimalism, it’s also easy to understand and recognize.

The best part of this new Logolinism style is that it works for everything! We’re pleased to join other Zoho products in this ongoing design refresh, making Cliq easily identifiable as part of the Zoho family. 

P.S. If you’d like to update to or use the new logo, we’re sharing our assets right here for you to use!

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5 ways small businesses can build customer trust using email marketing

Every business holds on to values such as honesty, loyalty, and respect, but one value that stands as the key to success for any business is gaining and retaining customer trust.

The digital revolution is screaming for business transparency and customer trust with the rapid expansion of online reviews, community forums, and more. This clearly signals that businesses should make special efforts to establish a good brand image and embrace customer trust.

DID YOU KNOW?

85% of consumers trust online reviews as much as personal recommendations

Trust takes time and consistent effort to sprout. Customers trust businesses that’ve been around a while because time has allowed those companies to establish their brand, grow their customer base, and recruit experienced employees.

Take the case of two businesses, Business A which has had a long term presence, and Business B, which is very new in the market.

So, how can this new small business quickly build enough trust to compete? They must use a smarter approach to winning customer trust.

Marketing to the rescue!

Well, the good news is the thorns on the roads of trust-building for small businesses can be removed using consistent communication and a smart marketing strategy.

DID YOU KNOW?

84% of marketers believe that building trust will be the primary focus for marketing efforts in the future.

The best marketing solution for small businesses is one that is easy-to-use, is budget-friendly, and provides a flexible platform for a consistent flow of communication.

All of this can be easily served on a single plate by using an email marketing tool, which also provides a great ROI.

DID YOU KNOW?

In 2018, the number of global e-mail users amounted to 3.8 billion and is set to grow to 4.4 billion users in 2023.

Five bricks of email marketing to build trust

There are numerous ways to use email marketing to build and retain customer trust. To get started, we’ll focus on five methods.

Ask before you shake hands

In the age of GDPR and other privacy requirements and consumer protections, it’s important to have your lead or customer’s consent before engaging them with communications or promotions. One easy way to gain their consent is by using sign-up forms.

Before this step, ensure you have a website that stands as the face of your business in the digital world. It should have engaging content with a CTA (call-to-action) at the end that will convert casual readers into potential customers.

If your site content feeds the need of the users, they’ll begin to show interest in your business and will get in touch with you voluntarily. This is the ideal situation. Readers who reach out to you on their own are the ones who have begun to trust you, but their trust at this stage is still very fragile.

Embedding a sign-up form on your website can invite readers to engage with you in a hassle-free way. Many email marketing tools offer numerous sign-up form templates from which you can choose.

Nurture and build

After your readers have reached out to you, the next step to build up their trust is to nurture them with well-planned and consistent email follow-ups. The amount of effort, planning, and care you present through consistent email nurturing will show that your business is serious and eager to serve them. This will strengthen the fragile trust and help convert them into a customer. However, the drawback for small businesses is the lack of time and resources to craft and send nurturing emails.

Fortunately, your email marketing tool should offer various automation workflow series that can easily help you automate these routine engagements within a short period of time.

Be human

While nurturing your contacts with regular emails, avoid sending them out in bulk to your entire contact list. Your contacts are living, breathing humans with unique interests of their own, so it’s natural for them to trust the business that best understands their unique needs and serves them accordingly. This sort of personalization is a key element to increasing conversions.

To do this, use analytics to understand the behavior of your contacts, segment your contact list based on their interests, and use personalization tags to send out uniquely tailored content. 

Feedback matters

After consistently sending out tailor-made content to those contacts who’ve reached out on their own, it’s now time to learn what they think about your business. This will tell your customers that you value their opinions about your offering.

The best time to request feedback is usually after customers have used your product or service at least once, by using your email marketing tool to collect valuable feedback.

Retain and grow

Now you have sowed the seed of trust and the plant has grown and produced sweet fruits. So what next? Will you just abandon them and forget about them forever? Well, obviously no, you will continue to take good care of them in order to retain that trust.

A great way to do this is by giving them exclusive promotions every now and then. Offer festival gifts, special coupons, and giveaways that ensure your customers understand their presence matters for your business. 

Customer trust is a must-have insurance policy for small businesses, so start building it and watch your business grow within a short period.

Best wishes!

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Introducing Writer’s new merge fields: add QR Codes and more

We’re making it easier than ever to add dynamic elements like QR codes, bar codes, and watermarks to your documents in bulk.

Denso Wave Inc. first came up with the concept of QR codes when searching for an easier and faster way to complete manual tasks, like tallying purchases at a cash register. A quick scan of one of these square-sized grids (or of similar bar codes) gives you access to any stored information like websites, product details, or locations, or lets you complete financial transactions easily.

The team behind Writer is happy to announce that you can now add QR codes and other special fields to your Writer documents. With this update, you can create custom documents with dynamic fields in bulk from a single platform.

Writer now offers four new special fields to streamline your bulk document process:

QR Codes

QR codes provide a direct link to the online world, offering countless possibilities to positively engage your users. With Writer, you can now generate unique QR codes without having to code or go through multiple complicated steps. Adding a QR code to a document is as easy as it gets. Once inserted, you can either give it a fixed value or use a dynamic field as its value—based on which custom QR codes will be automatically generated.

For example, imagine you’re hosting an event and want to send personalized badges to all your invitees. Map the QR code field to the column in your data source which lists the badge URLs. On merge, Writer will convert these badge URLs into QR codes and send it out with each invitation.

Bar codes

Nearly every product available for purchase today, from milk cartons to airline boarding passes, are marked with bar codes containing information for easy access and checkout. This dynamic component is also usually generated in bulk as printable labels or part of custom documents.

Similar to adding QR codes in Writer, you can now generate and add custom bar codes to bulk documents on merge. For instance, if you need to prepare invoices for 200 items sold, you can easily create and merge 200 unique bar codes to the respective invoices all at once.

Image and list fields

If you have multiple items in the same field, Writer makes it easy to present the items in a clean and legible list. For example, say you have your candidate’s skills separated by commas in your data source. With the Merge as List option, Writer will merge the array of skills into an easy-to-read list. Similarly, if you want to merge multiple images into one field, Writer will merge the images into a list as well.

Dynamic watermarks

We use these semi-transparent images or text to either protect our work or brand them. This update makes it easier for professionals handling a large number of documents everyday to watermark their documents all at once instead of editing each document manually.

Easily auto-generate your watermark fields in Writer based on a field in your data source. Say you want to send personalized documents to different companies using the respective company’s name as the document watermark. By using merge fields from your data source as the value for your watermark, each custom document generated on merge will have the respective company’s name as the watermark.

That’s not all! Click here to get the list of all the field types we’ve rolled out this month.

Let us know what you think about these new updates and how they help you handle everyday tasks. Drop us a comment below or write to us at [email protected].

Happy writing!

Make Zoho do more for you: You can now use Writer, along with Sheet and Show, as part of our cloud office suite and other collaboration tools by signing up for Zoho Workplace or Zoho One.

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Zoho Mail Offline: Uninterrupted emailing even when unplugged 

Despite the rising popularity of messaging apps, email has retained its throne as the primary mode of official communication. Checking emails has become synonymous with working, and work is no longer limited to the office. Inevitably, we are always on the prowl for the “Wi-fi Zone” signboard when we’re in public.

Most times you’ll successfully find a connection but what if you’re miles above the ground in a plane and the Wi-fi gods decide to abandon you? Do you let your work come to a halt? Not anymore.

No matter where you are—home, office, train, or flight—lack of Internet will no longer get in the way of your emailing.

Zoho Mail Offline!

You can now read and respond to your emails even when your Internet connection fails you. All you have to do is enable Zoho Mail Offline Mode in just a few quick steps.

To get started, turn on Offline Mode in your Zoho Mail settings. Pick the emails you want to store offline to begin syncing. You can choose to save emails of the past 7, 14 or 30 days, while configuring Offline Mode. These emails will then be automatically synced to your browser storage to be made available to you when you go offline.

Besides being able to read emails, you can even reply to these emails. The replies are stored in the Outbox and delivered once your connection is back. You can also compose emails and save them as drafts or templates.

Offline Mode is a small step towards providing you with the best of Zoho Mail, even when you’re disconnected. Try it out and give us your feedback, while we come up with more Offline features.

Get the complete Zoho advantage: you can now use Zoho Mail along with the broad suite of products that Zoho offers by signing up for Zoho Workplace or Zoho One.

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Why an email opt-out isn’t always bad for your brand

We’ve all been there. It’s hard to say goodbye to the subscribers you lose from time to time. Your efforts to bring in contacts and nurture them are commendable, but if you feel a pang every time a contact unsubscribes from your emails, you need to read this—unsubscribes do more good for your brand than you think.

What happens when someone unsubscribes?

When a contact no longer wants to receive your emails, their only source of separation is the unsubscribe button or the link you provide in your emails. And as soon as someone unsubscribes, they stop communicating with you.

Why would someone unsubscribe?

A large mailing list doesn’t ensure everyone is interested in your brand or your emails will fetch the highest open rates. Most often than not, even your biggest mailing lists suffer unsubscribe attacks. There are many reasons for contacts to unsubscribe from you: 

Their areas of interest have changed over time

They don’t want to hear updates from you

They prefer a competitor’s offers

They aren’t sure what they subscribed to

They feel like you’re spamming them

And while all you’re obliged to do is accept their decision to opt out, it can actually be good for your brand in the long run. There are some rather surprising truths that should make you look at unsubscribes differently. 

Promotes responsible marketing

The best part about email marketing is its ability to go well with the email marketing regulations that bind it. With all the stringent security around customer data collection and processing, unsubscribes help you not only comply with the laws but also respect a recipient’s decision to end their line of communication.

This ultimately guides you to permission-based marketing—the act of being transparent about your email marketing motives, helping recipients find value in your engagement, and then confidently adding them to your address books.

Improves list hygiene 

Don’t sweat the diminishing numbers—instead, check how healthy your mailing list is, upon every email-opt-out flush. Sometimes, people unsubscribe for good, and these may be the ones who don’t acknowledge your brand and the offerings. Also, with spam complaints from uninterested parties, and bounces from incorrect email addresses, it’s better to get these entries off your list—and then watch your bounce and spam rates plummet.

Measure your email marketing success by counting the genuine contacts, not the congested inboxes and indifferent recipients.  

Unearths valuable information

With every unsubscribe, you can learn more about your contacts’ preferences. Make sure to collect feedback or their reason for opting out, as you can always work on those your contacts state as your weak points.

The information you collect before people leave can help you know your contacts’ issues, and prevent future miscommunication and irrelevant engagement on your brand’s end. Take a look at how to easily get this done using Zoho Campaigns.

Bonus: A good prevention technique is to constantly help your audience to revisit their email interests. Allow them to choose what they want to receive with Zoho Campaigns’ subscription preferences options. 

Saves on energy and costs 

Setting up an email, workflow, or even a segmented mailing list is a tedious job, and needs to be done right for a smooth email marketing process. Unsubscribes simplify your job, helping you channel your energy and time into things that need more attention. You no longer have to expend energy and then watch it go into the drain—eventually, since only interested contacts remain in your list, you’ll have a highly-targeted reach with healthy open rates.

Refocuses your brand strategy

Maybe sending four campaigns per week didn’t work; the audience segment you targeted was too generic; workflows weren’t dynamic enough—these are some things to reflect on after every opt-out. Once you identify what didn’t work for your brand, or what has gone wrong, you can rebuild your campaign strategy and rework your email-sending patterns.

So, let go of the thought that email unsubscribes are always harmful for your brand. They hurt your short-term performance, but they’re stepping stones to efficient email marketing techniques and better communication with your audience. Use some of the best practices suggested here to keep track of your unsubscribes—and stayed tuned for more myths to be debunked by the Zoho Campaigns team!

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CRMs Aren’t Just for Salespeople: 7 Reasons Marketers Need CRMs

Consider, for a moment, how your business uses its Customer Relationship Management (CRM) system. At many businesses that have CRMs, they are often used by salespeople to track interactions with leads—moving leads through the sales process, closing deals, and assigning monetary value to leads that become sales.  

There’s a line between marketing and sales, and most CRMs are used on the sales side.

Salespeople use CRMs to make smarter decisions that can help turn leads into customers. But before leads become customers, they’re simply conversions: people who filled out a form, sent a chat, or made a phone call to your business.

Marketers understand conversions. They track, manage, and report on conversions to see if their efforts are working. However, important data can get lost between a conversion and the final sale—data that’s worth tracking. Companies that use data in their marketing decisions see 15-20 percent more ROI than those that don’t. This is why marketers should care about connecting with their data.

In this post, we’ll explain seven reasons why marketers should have access to CRMs, and how marketers can recapture the missing data between acquiring a lead and making a sale.

1. Finding the common thread between marketing and sales

Let’s take a step back. How do you currently track your marketing success? Maybe you use a simple tool like Google Analytics, or perhaps something more powerful. Whichever it is, you’re using it to see which marketing sources drive leads.

Leads are the common thread that connects marketing to sales. On the marketing side, conversions become leads. On the sales side, qualified leads become customers.

It’s notable that over 75 percent of B2B marketers don’t have revenue or industry information about leads in their database. Since both marketing and sales teams care about leads, both teams can benefit from access to lead information, such as:

Where leads came from

What they want

How they got in touch

Who they are

What their budget is

How much they’re worth in revenue

Marketing tracking software allows you to connect marketing sources to lead. The CRM allows you to connect leads to sales. If you can connect all these pieces of data, you can track the entire customer journey.

 2. Overcoming the Google Analytics problem

There are problems with using a simple tool like Google Analytics to see how many conversions came from each marketing channel. Google Analytics can tell you how many people filled out a form after seeing your PPC ad, or how many people called you after clicking a Facebook ad. That’s useful information, but it’s incomplete.

Google Analytics doesn’t tell you what happened next. Did the conversion result in a qualified lead? What was the lead value? Did the lead turn into a customer, and how much was that customer worth?

Once the marketing department generates a lead and delivers it to the sales department, it’s generally accepted that the marketing department has done its job. However, marketers can benefit greatly from following those leads further.

Leads are fuel for sales, and sales are the ultimate indicator of success. That’s why you have to go deeper than Google Analytics.

3. You’ll understand the value of leads over other metrics

Marketers should care about leads just as much as salespeople do, because leads are the best metric to track when measuring marketing effectiveness. If your marketing is working, you should be driving leads.

While you might understand the significance of marketing statistics (impressions, CTR, clicks, conversion rate), the people in your boardroom or in your client meetings care about leads. They understand that leads—more than any other metric—are fuel for sales.

4. You’ll be able to calculate ROI down to the cent

Let’s say you spent $4,500 on various marketing channels last month. How do you know if it worked? How do you know if you should increase spend more next month, spend less, or shift spend to different marketing channels?  

You’d start by finding out how many conversions each marketing channel generated, but without access to a CRM, you don’t know if those conversions led to quality leads. You don’t know if your marketing is driving sales. As a result, you don’t have any way to calculate the exact ROI of your marketing efforts.

Now, what if you knew that your Facebook Ads resulted in 200 qualified leads and $5,000 in actual sales? Or, that your Google PPC ads generated 300 leads, but only 50 of them were qualified? That’s valuable, actionable information and it can be found in a CRM.

The marketing journey doesn’t end with the conversion. It ends at the sale, and marketers should follow the journey all the way to the end.

 5. You’ll discover which marketing channels drive the best leads

You can’t just track how many leads come in; you have to account for lead quality and lead value. This information will tell you which marketing channels drive the best leads, and are worth investing in.

Marketers that don’t have access to a CRM can’t track lead quality or lead value. They can track leads back to the marketing source, but that’s it.

By integrating CRM data with marketing software data, you can follow the lead all the way through to the sale and with the marketing info still attached. This gives you the ability to produce reports that show which marketing sources drive leads that convert to high-value sales.

6. You’ll be able to answer all your marketing questions 

Once you have access to all the details about every lead, you can start to answer more detailed marketing questions such as:

What marketing inspires our best customers to reach out?

Are Facebook Ads driving the kind of leads that turn into sales?

When a customer fills out a form, is that usually a good lead?

Are customers getting in touch to inquire about sales or to receive support?

These are the kinds of questions that help create an effective, long-term marketing strategy that doesn’t need to be re-worked every few months.

 7. You’ll save time

Business owners often barely have enough time to create and execute marketing campaigns, let alone to go back and measure data from each campaign to see what worked and what didn’t. Marketers need these insights so they can invest in the campaigns that deliver ROI and abandon campaigns that don’t. That’s where CRM data comes into play.

The better you understand which marketing channels work, the less time you have to spend creating new marketing campaigns and re-working campaigns that aren’t producing results.

With the right integrations, CRM data can instantly show you which campaigns are working. Tools like Google Analytics might show you which marketing sources drive leads, but these tools miss a lot of info, too. The tracking stops when the lead gets to the sales team, when in fact it should continue on through the final sale.

When you’re measuring your marketing effectiveness, ask yourself if you have all of the relevant information. Most importantly, ask if you can track every lead from initial marketing source to final sale.

The more information you have about which marketing channels work, the more streamlined your marketing strategy will be. That means marketing costs go down and leads go up as you zero in on your most effective channels. Plus, combining the CRM data with your marketing tracking data gives you the ability to answer detailed questions about your marketing efforts. In a boardroom or a client meeting, that ability is invaluable.

Author:

Mac Mischke is a writer and content marketer at WhatConverts. You can reach him at [email protected]

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