- Contest Factory
- April 12, 2022
There are so many systems and technologies available to businesses today that it’s often difficult to find your focus in the right places. You may find yourself pouring over technology reviews for hours and deciding on your tech stack and how to implement without considering significant value propositions. A real tech stack that meets your specific organization’s needs is fairly customized, and do not be concerned with mixing and matching technologies to get exactly what your business needs. Using APIs between your most provocative software will provide you with solutions that will crush your competition – those that do win. Take the time to thoroughly understand what you are trying to accomplish – align goals with tactics and maximize each vendor to deliver the best custom solution available.
There are several categories in your CRM that you want to ensure are connected as end-to-end solutions so you may leverage the synergies in technology to avoid monthly fees while maximizing base software product function. You will most definitely want to hire a professional for this as you will save more money in the long run by customizing a 1x developer fee in APIs overusing plugins and apps that have monthly fees. Consider spending 10K once versus 3 different $99 monthly fees over the next five years; $17,820 later you start to recognize economies of scale.
Your primary use of your CRM is data collection and tracking. Each native CRM has many functions, and this is where it gets tricky; buy the base model out-of-box and see what the API options are. Often times you will find the base product is limited, yet you can customize and that’s the savings versus buying the “pro” version or next level up. The basics beyond email collection will be touchpoint recording – ensure every touchpoint is recorded and that you unify records so that multiple email addresses map to the same single person. This enables lead scoring so that more touchpoints are higher on a sales funnel or salesperson’s lead list.
Plenty of CRMs have the base functionality of drip campaigns that continually remind users of who you are on a basic cadence – cannot emphasize how powerful this is. Build your campaigns and then learn how to make them dynamic as you learn. Set up a welcome campaign where you test subject lines in the sequence in one place and test content in another to learn what works best and employ the winner of each of these. You don’t want to test two variables at the same sequence level as you will not know what impacted the win and will falsely implement two items as opposed to the successful single strategy. You may also employ A/B landing page testing once you feel solid on your messaging and content testing in the blast
Once you have the basics settled, you will want to map in additional variables that not only inform you but trigger actions to engage and further your client or prospect down the funnel. This includes having triggers set on very specific pages on your website and cursers that get through X% of the page get an inset form to enter their details to continue reading the article; now you have captured an engaged reader on your website – this is gold. What next? Add them to an email sequence that you test for conversion.
Additional capabilities would include chatbot initiation based on CRM data that personalizes the experience and asks how to help you with detailed info on the product or services the browser has engaged with; including FAQs, product specifications, client reviews, product/service demos, and access to a product/service expert. Remember that increasing engagement ultimately leads to an increase in conversion; so getting folks to engage with artificial intelligence at the cost of a 1X fee will pay off in spades. Simply do the math using a break even calculator, it’s much more favorable than you may think.
Again thinking of engagement, be sure to provide plenty of data points where you provide options to your website visitor, email contact or phone contact. Provide content (still KING) that is attractive, informative, and novel/clever – remembering your brand has a personality and you need to appeal with the proper copy to your audience. This may also include knowing their referral source and weaving it into their landing page experience. Familiarity also helps to move your prospect further down the funnel. At each point, collect more data, documenting the engagement and potentially providing opportunity for a more personalized experience.
Be sure to capture email click data – you start with the basics knowing very little unless you have bridged software to capture search term data with records and conversion, which is the nirvana of eCommerce. Appending click data will give you enough information to segment your data further and provide an even further personalized experience. Imagine someone clicks on a female clothing ad so you know to send a female clothing experience at each touchpoint. However, if this person comes in anonymous, you send the general catalog and track each click as an ‘interest’ for the customer record and customize marketing as you move forward. Also, remember that most CRMs enable dynamic content and drips so that each new email in the sequence further personalize the next email by logging the clicked-on content.
Once you know your customers well, you can even prompt with complementary product suggestions based on previous purchases; we can do simple add-ons or statistical ones. Suggest same style and different color. When you get deeper into your optimizations you can start correlating product purchases to the same basket items or follow-up purchases to make on-site or email suggestions.
These CRM tips should get you thinking about your customers, your products and/or services and how to engage and collect data to further your conversion. The more folks you add to the funnel with these one-time automated rules (do not forget to optimize) will start churning sales faster than you may think. Be sure to set tests on both sides, inbound and outbound to find your best conversion path. With this guide, you are well on your way to increasing conversion, average order value, and most likely retention.
