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CDM Can Do More Than Manage Your Database
Customer Data Management (CDM) is rapidly becoming an indispensable business and marketing tool whose uses continue to increase on an almost daily basis. Not only is it a convenient way to keep track of your contacts and sales history – CDM can now do so much more.
Electronic databases are essential for keeping track of customer details but in the twenty-first century business place, far more is needed. Data needs to be analyzed and interpreted and must be readily available from anywhere that team members happen to be – anytime they want it. CDM is no longer just for large companies, small businesses also need the ability to access and analyze sales histories and customer data readily. CDM, used efficiently, can establish sales trends, enable targeted marketing campaigns, create mailing lists for e-newsletters and surveys, analyze feedback from customers, establish high-value customers and help businesses establish meaningful dialogues with leads and existing customers at every stage of the sales cycle. Cloud computing is a natural progression for businesses of all sizes looking for CDM solutions.
Social media is now a major business and marketing tool and companies should be able to integrate their CDM with Facebook, Twitter and LinkedIn to offer not only increased avenues for marketing but also further insights into their customers. Social networking sites are where customers, both existing and potential, gather but for businesses to successfully connect with them requires a revolutionary approach to CDM. Social networks are best used for generating dialogue and collaboration, not for direct sales approaches. If word of mouth is the best form of advertising, then social media provides this in spades. Customers will tweet about good – and bad – experiences they have had with various businesses and also use social networking sites to ask for recommendations. From a business’s point of view it’s all about making connections. It can also help by educating potential customers about your product or service, saving time when you actually start the sales cycle. Businesses can use social media sites to solicit feedback and to offer help and solutions. Additionally, viewing clients’ social profiles can help businesses direct their marketing approaches more efficiently. Forward-thinking companies are updating their customer data to include their social media accounts and are responding to customer concerns and queries on Twitter and Facebook. Interacting with your customers via social networking can be a great way to build and strengthen relationships.
An efficient CDM system will increase customer satisfaction, leading to increased customer retention and repeat business. InSite Systems lets you analyze and report survey results easily, transforming the way companies interact with their customers and share information. Its email campaign system allows companies to create and send e-newsletters and messages quickly and easily while its data collection services are fully compatible with all popular handheld mobile devices.
Janet Taylor writes for InSite Systems, a leader in surveys systems and a pioneer of customer feedback tool. For more information about our customer feedback system visit http://www.insitesystems.com
Customer Data Management Helps Business Focus
Customer Data Management (CDM) is a business strategy that can assist businesses, both large and small, in managing their accounts, leads and email marketing campaigns and assessing customer satisfaction and needs. Managing customer data efficiently results in greater customer satisfaction, less time spent on administrative tasks and more efficient marketing.
If companies are not currently using CDM then a paradigm shift in business and marketing strategy may be required. CDM shifts the focus from the product or service being sold to the requirements of the customer and this could result in a fundamental change in a business’s culture.
In a very simple example, a bed and breakfast establishment or small inn could be offering a full cooked breakfast every morning, TVs in rooms, and brochures on local tourist attractions. However, a close look at their customers’ analytics could reveal that their highest value customers are actually business travellers who, spending many hours on the road, actually prefer a lighter breakfast, possibly served earlier in the morning, before heading off to a meeting. These customers might also place more emphasis on free Wi-Fi and adequate, accessible power outlets in their room for charging electronic gadgets. This may seem like a no-brainer and is clearly a tad oversimplified. The point is that any business, regardless of size, will achieve greater success when it is able to recognize its customers’ needs and tailor its efforts towards meeting these, rather than continuing to offer the same products and search in vain for new customers to buy them.
An efficient CDM system can consolidate customer records, sales, leads and marketing strategies. New sales opportunities become easily identifiable, marketing strategies are more effective and business plans can evolve to accommodate the available data, allowing for more accurate forward planning. Additionally, a well-maintained CDM system can help businesses identify their high-value customers and understand their needs and preferences. This may mean re-evaluating a company’s product accordingly; to extend the example given above, if the bed and breakfast establishment continued to direct its marketing towards vacationing couples and focused on improving its hearty breakfast menus, it would clearly be wasting time and money.
Integrating a successful CDM system with existing technology may arguably be more cost effective for larger businesses but CDM is important to small businesses also, allowing sales and marketing to be seamlessly integrated. Using the ‘cloud’ offers a virtual platform that all employees can readily access to get the customer data they need. Data can be centralized, ensuring that customers’ buying history and individual information are always kept up to date. Analytics help business owners and sales staff to understand customers’ preferences and tailor their efforts to meet their customers’ needs.
Efficient management of customer data involves integrating CDM with current technology and ensuring that all employees are comfortable using it. To this end, the ideal CDM system should be user friendly and easily navigated. It should also be accessible to any authorized employee from anywhere that employee happens to be.
Janet Taylor writes for InSite Systems, a leader in surveys systems and a pioneer of customer feedback tool. For more information about our customer feedback system visit http://www.insitesystems.com
Customer : Focused Business Strategies
“Build it and they will come” may work well for some specific enterprises but a better mantra for most businesses would be, “Find out what they need and build it.” After all, some of the most successful businesses have been established because someone spotted a gap in the market and was able to fill it. Listening, really listening, to your customers is one of the most effective strategies when it comes to devising a business plan.
A successful customer-focused strategy will place the customer firmly in the center of all business decisions. People like to feel special and appreciated so responding to customers in a way that makes them feel important and valued is one way to encourage customer retention. Offering repeat customers a reward for their loyalty is just one of many ways to achieve this. The reward does not have to be huge – a small discount or added value (a small giveaway included with their next order, for example) can work well. Following through after a successful sale and eliciting customer feedback is also a vital link in the customer retention chain.
Customers are looking to have their problems or needs fixed quickly and with as little hassle as possible. Successful marketing strategies ensure that the overriding message is how the company can help the customer to find a solution to their problems; the order process also needs to be simple and user friendly. Customers want quick response times. In this day and age, with many businesses offering 24/7 service, customers have been programmed to think that they can have a bright idea, or a perceived problem, at 4 a.m. and immediately get a response from a friendly customer service agent.
Customer feedback, both positive and negative, is invaluable to a business, yet a surprising number of companies fail to obtain this. Negative feedback does not have to be a bad thing, particularly if the customer’s complaint is dealt with sympathetically and rapidly. Customers who have a problem with an order, product or service but who receive a fast and friendly solution to their problem may be even more likely to return than those who had a satisfactory experience from the get-go.
Successful business strategies also require you to direct your marketing efforts where your potential customers are to be found. If your customer data is telling you that your highest value customers are career women with little time to shop then that is clearly the demographic you should be actively targeting. Identify not only your best customers but also your best selling product or service. Ask yourself what it is that makes this particular product so popular; consider this when you develop new products or increase your range of services.
Put yourself in your customer’s shoes; what is their first experience of your business? If your business is online, does your website offer quick, easy solutions to your customer’s problems? Is there a clear call to action? If your business is a physical store or office, what do customers see, smell or hear when they first walk through the door? Grocery stores have been using the smell of fresh-baked bread to lure customers for decades; a spa may have evocative scents and relaxing music playing; travel agents feature pictures of exotic holiday locations, etc. Office buildings must have a welcoming and comfortable reception area where clients can feel immediately at ease.
Many successful businesses, large and small, have created effective customer-focused business models using CDM (customer data management) software. Sending out customer surveys, analyzing feedback, organizing customer data and email marketing are just some of the advantages that an effective CDM system can provide for businesses.
Janet Taylor writes for InSite Systems, a leader in surveys systems and a pioneer of online survey software. For more information about our customer feedback software visit http://www.insitesystems.com
Increase Your Business Through Your Existing Customers First!
From almost every point of view, it makes better sense to focus your marketing strategy on retaining existing customers rather than on acquiring new ones. Repeat customers spend an average of 33% more than new customers – and you don’t need to spend anything like the time and money to get them! They also tend to give you more referrals. It is a no-brainer therefore that you should prioritize customer retention in your marketing strategy.
Generally, customers become repeat customers because they have a relationship with you, so it is up to each business to foster that relationship and endeavor to ensure that customers do not just disappear after one successful transaction. Like any relationship, the business/customer relationship needs to be nurtured; customers want to feel that they are special and that you care about them. To this end, customer data management is vital. As a business owner or marketing specialist you can foster relationships with your company’s customers by reaching out through regular newsletters, keeping your customers aware of new promotions or developments in your business and showing your appreciation with added value – giveaways or referral fees, for example.
Getting feedback from your customers is another vital part of your marketing strategy. Word of mouth is generally agreed to be the most effective type of advertising so it is worth ensuring that your customers’ experience has been positive. After making a sale or providing a service, follow up with the customer and obtain feedback. If there is anything negative, do whatever is reasonable to correct it.
Obviously, new clients are important and having good relationships with current clients can help a business generate new leads also. Maintaining and managing data on your existing customers also allows you to establish the demographic you should be targeting when it comes to attracting new ones.
Don’t be afraid to stand out from the crowd or ‘go the extra mile’. People have a tendency to take good service for granted and often only comment when something goes wrong or does not come up to expectations. The company that goes that little bit further, however, can sometimes engender a positive feeling in its clients – and that will get that particular company remembered.
Of course, customer data management can be a huge headache; it is likely to be well worth companies’ while to invest in software that will do this for them. An efficient customer data management system, such as that provided by InSite Systems, will offer solutions to all a business’s customer data management needs: mobile data collection that is compatible with smartphones and other handheld devices, a user-friendly messaging solution that allows companies to send e-newsletters and bulletins and a system that allows for the creation and distribution of high-caliber online surveys.
Janet Taylor writes for InSite Systems, a leader in surveys systems and a pioneer of online survey software. For more information about our customer feedback software visit http://www.insitesystems.com
How to Implement a Successful Customer Data Management System
Managing one’s customer data, and using it to direct the main focus to a ‘customer first’ approach, is still a relatively innovative concept for some businesses yet the success of the business and its marketing strategy depends on easy accessibility to essential customer data.
The business benefits of customer data management (CDM) are manifold: understanding trends and customer buying habits, thus allowing you to anticipate needs; the ability to readily identify high-value customers and more efficient, targeted marketing, to name a few. However, implementing a successful system for managing customer data is complex. Information must be collected in a central database, analyzed to give meaningful results and stored in such a way that it is quickly and easily accessible to any team member who wishes to utilize it.
Many businesses, not surprisingly, make the decision to outsource their customer data management. Many service providers are able to provide businesses with Software-as-a-Service (SaaS) or cloud-based CDM solutions. The system can be implemented rapidly and saves the necessity for having on-site IT support thus making it highly cost-effective. Cloud-based solutions also eliminate the need to store vast amounts of data and concerns about security can be laid to rest. Your CDM provider should be able to customize the system to the needs of any particular business or industry.
InSite is an industry leader in customer feedback solutions and data management systems for businesses that are looking for an integrated approach to collecting and sharing information. The system can be fully customized and is completely scalable, ensuring that your CDM system can grow as your business grows. An efficient CDM system should enable businesses to streamline their operations; customer data can be made available to any team member as necessary, even if they are working remotely, and information can be accessed from anywhere with an Internet connection.
Customized applications can improve sales, marketing, customer support and management. Having a well-informed staff where everyone can offer quality customer service tends to make a good impression. An efficient CDM system can help a business both retain existing customers and attract new ones.
Not all employees will readily embrace a customer-focused approach to sales. For the successful implementation of a CDM system, all key players need to be on board with the concept, which may represent a paradigm shift for some. Every team member should receive training and be able to access technical support readily if needed.
Privacy and security may also be concerns. Customers can be extremely nervous about allowing businesses access to their personal information, and rightly so. A successful CDM system will ensure privacy. Additionally, every business needs to be assured that their data is secure from both physical threats: fire, flood or theft, for example, and electronic threats. In choosing a CDM supplier, these questions must be asked and satisfactorily answered.
Customer data management is not a new fad; it is a vital way for businesses to develop meaningful, and profitable relationships with their customers. Managing large amounts of data and analyzing and utilizing it effectively to increase sales requires a reliable and trustworthy CDM system.
Janet Taylor writes for InSite Systems, a leader in surveys systems and a pioneer of customer feedback software. For more information about our online survey tool visit http://www.insitesystems.com
Utilizing the full potential of your web site as a marketing tool
Has your website been overhauled recently or is it still the original site you launched some years ago? Businesses that have been achieving some success over a period of time may be guilty of taking their website for granted. No doubt their marketing strategy includes email marketing, social media, networking, etc. but it is the company website that provides potential customers with their first taste of its business. A website that has not been updated for some time may not be giving the most desirable first impression.
Revisit your existing site with fresh eyes:
Make sure you are utilizing your site’s full potential as a marketing tool. A useful tip is to approach your website as if you were a potential customer coming across it as a result of a Google search. How easy is it to navigate? Does it give you the information you want quickly? Is there a clear call to action on the landing page? Do you get a favorable impression of the company and its key personnel or is the website seemingly anonymous? Most importantly, does it offer solutions to your problems?
Ensure your website is focused on the customer:
A successful website is customer focused; it suggests to visitors that it has the answers to all their problems. A site that boasts of the company’s many achievements and awards or lists all the amazing services offered in tedious detail does not necessarily appeal to the customer who has come searching for help. Now is the time to utilize all that customer data you have been religiously gathering; establish who your preferred, high-value customers are and target this demographic on your website. Use the feedback you have obtained from your customers to identify their greatest needs and be sure that your home page addresses these.
Imagine you are looking for a reliable plumbing service. You click on a site that explains the many services offered, the state-of-the-art equipment that the plumber has and how many years they have been in business. However, it is does not relate to your particular, possibly urgent, needs. Frustrated, you move to the next site. This page focuses on how the plumbing company can solve your particular problem. Which company do you imagine gets the most customers?
Effective customer data management software can help you with organizing and analyzing your customer data so that focusing on your desired demographic and its specific needs is simple. Personalize your site and include a clear call to action:
It is often said that we do business with a person, not a company. Your personality needs to shine through on your website. Let’s return to our hypothetical customer’s search for a plumber. At the first site, despite the detailed history of the company’s achievements and its amazing equipment, there is no indication of the ‘face’ behind the business. Also, it is difficult to see how to proceed with contacting the plumber, obtaining advice or getting an estimate. Again our customer moves to the second site. This site has a photograph of a smiling, helpful-looking plumber, perhaps with a short bio or quote. There is a clear ‘click here for an estimate’ or ‘contact us’ button – right on the landing page. Clearly we have a winner!
Include a blog on your site:
If your site does not already have a blog, consider starting one and try to update it frequently; new content on your site will improve your search engine rankings.
A blog also provides businesses with a perfect marketing tool; its focus should not be to sell but to inform and educate. This establishes the writer as an expert in their field and allows readers to feel that they are helpful and trustworthy. Our hypothetical plumber, for example, could review water-saving showerheads or offer ‘first-aid’ solutions for dealing with a blocked sink.
Janet Taylor writes for InSite Systems, a leader in surveys systems and a pioneer of customer feedback software. For more information about our customer feedback solutions visit http://www.insitesystems.com
Effective Customer Data Management Helps Achieve Your Goals
There is something about the start of a new year that makes private individuals and businesses alike turn to thoughts of goal setting. Clearly, in both our business and our personal lives, having clearly defined goals is essential – if we don’t know where we want to go, then how will we know when we have arrived? More importantly perhaps, how will we know we are not just wandering round in circles, aimlessly, achieving little?
Ideally our goals should be S.M.A.R.T. goals: Specific, Measurable, Attainable, Relevant and Timely. For example, let us assume we want to increase sales by 5% in a six-month period. This would appear to satisfy most of the S.M.A.R.T. criteria. It is specific, we have stated a precise increase in sales; it is measurable, clearly we will know – in six months’ time – whether or not we have succeeded; it is likely to be attainable, 5% does not sound unrealistic; and it is timely, our objective has a specific time-frame during which we intend to achieve it. Four out of five then, so far so good; but what about relevance? Business goals must be relevant not just to the business owner but also to his/her employees. A Harvard Business School study, conducted in 2001 by Robert Kaplan and David Norton, found that only 7% of employees fully understood their company’s goals or their role in helping to achieve them. That leaves us with 93% of employees falling into the ‘wandering aimlessly’ category!
The problem of how to ensure that our employees’ efforts are fully aligned with the company’s goals also begs the question of what strategies we should employ to achieve these goals. While a 5% increase in sales may be realistic, we still need a clearly defined, effective strategy to achieve this. Will we be trying to sell more to our existing customers, trying to find new customers or a combination of these two? Marketing to existing customers requires a different approach to marketing that is directed toward a wider field of potential customers that we have only limited knowledge of.
Clearly all that customer data we have been collecting avidly for years can now be put to good use. First we must establish who our high-value customers are and how we could increase our sales to this group. Next, we need to discover which specific groups of people we should be targeting if we intend to increase our customer base. Effective customer data management will provide us with a clear picture of our high-value customers. Knowledge of these customers and their past buying habits and demographic is essential, whether we wish to increase sales to these customers or to identify potential customers who fit the same demographic. Assuming we collected relevant data and asked the appropriate questions on our surveys, then we do have the information we need; we just need to be able to analyze it and we are well on the way to achieving our goal. Eureka!
At this point, we should have a game plan in place, a plan that we can communicate to our employees and to which end our marketing and customer service efforts should now be directed. Employees should be able to see how their efforts directly relate to the company’s goals. As a result, they are likely to be more engaged and to experience greater job satisfaction, leading to a lower staff turnover. Performance reviews and compensation can even be directly linked to the achievement of goals.
InSite Systems’ customer data management (CDM) solutions can help any business clearly identify its high-value customers and give it the information it needs to direct marketing efforts towards these customers, potential or existing. With cloud computing, InSite’s CDM solutions also allow clients to quickly access real-time data analysis anytime, anywhere.
Janet Taylor writes for InSite Systems, a leader in surveys systems and a pioneer of customer feedback software. For more information about our customer feedback solutions visit http://www.insitesystems.com
Enhance Your Email Marketing Campaign with e-Newsletters
At the time of writing we are approaching the end of the year, the Christmas and New Year holiday period when businesses may take a short break and reassess their policies and campaigns for the coming year. Email marketing is likely to be a major focus of any company’s marketing strategy and the end of a month, quarter or year are popular times for sending out e-newsletters.
A regular e-newsletter can be an effective way to develop customer relations at virtually no cost other than the writer’s time. Results from an e-newsletter may not be immediate but over time, provided you publish regularly, they can produce excellent returns, making this one of the most cost-effective components in your marketing strategy. An e-newsletter can help establish you as a leader in your industry or field of expertise. Think of your newsletter as if it were an informational brochure to hand out to clients or prospective clients; the aim should be to inform, educate and possibly entertain, rather than to sell. A stockbroker might provide investment tips, a restaurant could suggest wine pairings, etc. Let your passion for what you do, or create, show through – people will be more inclined to relate to you and remember you.
E-newsletters and bulletins can be used to notify clients about new and updated products, special promotions or exciting new developments in your field. They should generally have a single focus and not be overlong – 250-350 words is an effective length to aim for. Make every effort to ensure that the intended recipients are happy to receive your email marketing missives; it is a good idea to have customers validate their email address to ensure they have ‘opted in’ to receiving your company’s messages.
When writing e-newsletters, as with any kind of email marketing, it is important to bear in mind that your intended readers may receive hundreds of emails a day, so persuading them to even bother opening your particular communication means having a really snappy headline and attention-catching preview pane. It is also worth remembering that reading online produces eyestrain much faster than reading print; it is tiring and therefore it is important to make e-newsletters as easy and comfortable to read as possible. Readers can move away from the text with a mouse click – and often will. Including pictures and graphics and breaking up blocks of text with white space to ease eyestrain will help maintain your readers’ interest.
For larger companies, managing an email marketing campaign, with possibly thousands of customers or potential customers, can be time-consuming and may seem like a massive undertaking. Even smaller businesses may need help organizing their email marketing and distribution of e-newsletters to clients.
InSite can help you with all aspects of your email marketing campaign. Their award-winning email marketing software is convenient to use and provides a cost-effective way to manage your marketing campaigns and stay connected with your customers. InSite’s ‘Messages’ software allows you to set up lists of contacts, to design and send your e-newsletters, keep track of responses and access real-time feedback anytime, anywhere. You will be able to send hundreds of e-newsletters or bulletins in seconds. The software is mobile compatible and can be utilized on any handheld device, ensuring your customers receive your bulletins wherever they may be.
Janet Taylor writes for InSite Systems, a leader in surveys systems and a pioneer of online survey software. For more information about our online survey tool visit http://www.insitesystems.com
The Benefits of Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of today’s more efficient and accessible ways of advertising. In terms of global reach, it remains the most cost-effective marketing strategy at your disposal. Some companies have phased out their more traditional marketing approaches such as Yellow pages, billboards, and cold calls in order to experience an ‘instant gratification’ effect from their marketing efforts. Even the smallest of businesses have turned to email marketing to help boost sales and revenue.
Email Marketing is Not Spam!
First off, when I refer to email marketing, I am not referring to spam. A proper email-marketing campaign is targeted to people who want to hear about your products or services; typically, customers, prospective customers, or members, if you work in an association. Email marketing is part of a marketing and communications function and should only be executed if you have the permission of your contacts of subscribers.
If you do not have a properly developed list of contacts of people who have agreed to hear from you, and you go down the route of blasting out unsolicited emails, well, you’ve effectively let the world know that you don’t want any friends. If however you want to learn more about the right way to execute email marketing campaigns, then read on.
Getting Started
A good starting point is to get hold of an email software application that has the capability to distribute mass emails to a specified contact list, store demographic data, and track results of your campaigns. I’m partial to InSite Messages because it does everything you’d expect an email campaign system to do plus, it generates instant reports on pertinent information such as send rates or link-through rates and ties all your campaign data back into contact information and message history.
InSite Messages was a heaven-sent application whenever I had to begin a marketing campaign for survey participation. We also used it to help bring in registrants for our spring and fall conventions, product releases, publication sales and weekly newsletters to our members. The only thing to remember about blast emails is to be mindful about sending meaningful information and not inundating your customers’ inbox with emails containing unnecessary information.
Some Benefits
• Won’t clog up your email server.
• Cost-effective and sometimes even FREE. • Outbound emails can be scheduled and sent automatically.
• Comes with templates for professional look and feel.
• Automated contact lists and subscription links.
• Manage content or insert feeds as content.
• Easy to read, up-to-the-minute reports.
Beyond the Basics
Beyond basic email marketing communications, many news services are now using email campaign management software to send news and bulletins to subscribers. A good email campaign management system will allow you to insert RSS feeds directly into the page that will be emailed to subscription lists. All you have to do is indicate what feeds you want included on your page. You can then schedule when the message or bulletin will be sent, and the feeds will be emailed on a single page to your subscribers.
Of course this works well if you have a list of subscribers. If you are using a tool like InSite Messages, you can manage contacts and subscribers and assign contacts to any number of lists. Once your contacts are in the system, you can easily set up unsubscribe links in the body of your messages. If a contact no longer wants to receive emails from you, they can simply click the unsubscribe button and the email campaign software will drop them from future mailings.
Below, I have outlined a quick summary of a few ways businesses and organizations are using email campaign software to communicate and market to their stakeholders.
Customer Newsletters & Bulletins: Enewsletters and bulletins are a great way to connect with customers on new programs, products, services and to communicate other important information about your organization.
Employee Newsletters & Bulletins: Internal communications is an important and often overlooked function. Email blasts to employees on new programs, initiatives, products and services can be a very effective way to communicate what is going on in your organization.
Email Marketing Campaigns: Email marketing campaigns are a great way to market new programs, products, services and communicate other important information to your customers.
News Services and Announcements: Email event notifications and announcements are also important to communicate to your customers and prospects.
Press & Media Releases: Public Relations companies have really picked up on email campaign software to streamline the design and distribution of professional press releases. With a click of a button media contacts can be notified immediately.
Whichever direction you decide to take your email marketing, you are sure to keep your customers in the loop and up-to-date on what is going on in your organization. And at the very least it proves you are alive and well and flowing with the ever-changing tides of technology.
Janet Taylor writes for InSite Systems, a leader in surveys systems and a pioneer of online survey software. For more information about our online survey tool visit http://www.insitesystems.com
