lead management

How can marketing help with profits during an economic downturn? What must businesses do to get started? Read on to find out.

The current economic crisis is prompting businesses to change directions. Many are now focusing on qualifying and converting leads and delivering value to existing customers. What’s more, with the pandemic accelerating digital transformation, businesses are now more equipped to understand their customers better to achieve the aforementioned goals.

How can businesses use marketing to improve their profits, especially amid an economic crisis? What steps should businesses take to get better results? Check out our tips below.

Reexamine your lead scoring strategy

Your lead scoring strategy is what helps you qualify your leads and determine which potential customer is most likely to make a purchase. Lead scoring is a critical step in lead conversion strategy. 

Messing up with your lead scoring can impact your lead conversion results. This is why it’s important to reexamine your lead scoring strategy and check if it’s working well.

Some companies automate lead scoring so their sales and marketing teams can focus on more important tasks. By automating using a system, sales and marketing teams can automatically identify which of the incoming leads they need to focus on.

Focus on converting qualified leads

According to surveys, more than 25% of marketing qualified leads (MQLs) do not get a follow-up from sales. This is a wasted opportunity for driving sales. And in an economic downturn, every dollar counts.

To prevent this from happening, it’s important that, as previously mentioned, you can screen out the leads that are more likely to make a purchase, so you can focus on them and help them make a purchase as soon as possible.

You can generate qualified leads with content marketing, conduct follow-ups, connect with them through email marketing, or use positive customer testimonials and reviews to help speed up their purchase decision.

Work on your CTAs

Your CTAs are also crucial in your lead conversion strategy. CTAs may make or break your marketing campaign. If a CTA doesn’t match the customer’s needs or preferences, they may end up exiting from your website or from your other sales and marketing channels.

For example, having “Learn More” as a CTA may discourage customers that are looking to make an immediate purchase. “Buy Now” may not be effective if the customer needs more information about your product or service.

The point of CTAs is to convince users they need to take action immediately or you risk losing them, but this only works if the CTA matches the stage of the buyer in the buyer’s journey. 

Assess and evaluate your value chain

The final thing that you should remember is to add value for your customers. This can be done only when you understand how your value chain works and determine whether they’re giving value to the end users (your customers).

You can conduct a value chain analysis by doing the following:

• First, identify all your value chain activities. You can do this by having a list of each activity in your company that is essential in the creation of your company’s finished product.

• Second, calculate their costs. Costs such as rent, utilities, and manpower often play a role in value creation.  By identifying your value chain activities and their costs, you can see an overview of how your company is running and which parts are taking so much of your dough.

• Third, determine what your customers perceive as value. This is where it’s important to gather data and feedback from customers to help you understand them better. To get you started, gather data related to why and how your customers make purchase decisions. This helps you understand their intent and what they perceive as valuable.

• Fourth, compare with your competition. Understand the marketing effectiveness of your competitors. Compare how your competitors carry out tasks, what their business strategies are, and their revenue (or other performance) outcomes.

• Lastly, decide on a competitive advantage. After making your comparisons, you’ll already know which parts you are performing better compared to your competitors. It can be the cost, the perceived value of the brand, or the accessibility you provide to your customers.

Gather data from your customers now

Do you want to know how you can effortlessly gather data from your customers to understand them better? Book a FREE demo with our sales and marketing experts now to learn more.

Email metrics are important to assess whether your email campaigns are working to your advantage. Read on to find out more about email metrics and how you can improve your lead conversion with them.

Email marketing is one of the most used strategies nowadays. It helps businesses engage customers and keep the brand on top of mind. The problem is: many businesses don’t know what to look for to know if their emails are working.

That’s why in this article, we’ll list the most important email marketing KPIs you need to watch out for and how you can improve them.

1. Open Rate

The email open rate refers to how many people opened your email out of the total number of recipients. This metric is important in determining whether your subject line is catchy enough to capture the attention of your target audience or whether your brand is trusted by your target audience to open your email.

According to a study, the average email open rate for all industries is 21.33%, so if you score a better rate, that means your campaign performance is above average.

To improve your email open rates, we suggest A/B testing your subject lines, determining the best time to send emails according to your target audience, or conducting email segmentation for your customers.

2. Click Rate

Click rates refer to how many of your delivered emails resulted in a click. This metric is important in determining the number of recipients who clicked on at least one link in your email.

The average click rate globally is 1.27%, so if your result is lower than that, then you might want to try the following:

• Optimize your email content by making them more timely, relevant, and responsive to your target audience’s needs and interests. 
• Testing a more catchy and responsive headline.
• Segmenting your audience
• Changing your lead generation strategy to attract more qualified leads— those interested in engaging with your brand.
  

3. Conversion Rate

Conversion rate refers to the number of recipients who have completed the desired action in your email— clicking on a call-to-action (CTA) button, making a purchase, etc.

There are a number of ways to improve your conversion rate, which include improving your mailing list, making your email content more targeted, or designing a more appealing landing page, as mentioned above.

4. Email Open Time

Email open times refer to how long your audience is taking to open your emails. The shorter the time, the better. This metric allows you to understand if your audience is eager to interact with your email.

To improve your email open times, try determining the best times for a particular segment (ex: customers segmented based on location or job positions).

5. Email Read Time

Email read times refer to how much time your recipients are spending reading your email content. This is important in determining the relevance of your content to your target audience. The longer the time, the better. 

Improving this may require some time and effort (trial and error). But you can start by experimenting with email structures and content types, and by integrating personalization.

6. Email Marketing ROI

Email marketing ROI refers to how much your business is getting from the resources it spent on email marketing like ad spending, manpower, etc. This metric is important to determine whether you should continue with email marketing as a marketing strategy in general.

To improve your email marketing ROI, you need to improve your other email marketing metrics as well. You can also use tools that allow you to implement smart automation. 

This means that the tools will handle the email marketing for you such as sending emails based on schedule or when certain conditions are triggered (e.g. a new subscriber).

This reduces the resources necessary to run email campaigns (i.e. you don’t need to hire additional manpower to perform email marketing tasks), which leads to better email marketing ROI.

Better email marketing with Saphyte

Want to learn more about tools to improve your email marketing performance? Talk to our experts now. Book a FREE demo here.

Content marketing is a way for businesses to attract leads, convert them, and keep them engaged. Read on to find out why it’s important to do it in 2022.

Articles, e-books, videos, and any information you get from a brand— whether entertaining or educational— can be called content and it’s designed to make you aware of the brand and keep you engaged.

Some forms of content remind you that the brand is there on the market. Other forms of content motivate you to make an on-the-spot purchase.

So what is content marketing and why is it important in 2022?

What is Content Marketing?

Content marketing is a marketing strategy that involves the use of articles, videos, and other forms of content to attract, engage, and convert leads into customers, and retain them.

This approach helps the brand do the following:

Promote brand awareness and top-of-mind awareness

Establish credibility in the market

Encourage purchases to drive sales

Motivate leads to make their first purchases

Businesses often use search engine optimization (SEO), social media, and email marketing to forward their content to their target audience.

Talk to us to know more about content marketing and what tools to use here.

Why Is It Important?

The following are reasons why content marketing is an important strategy that businesses should use in 2022:

Content marketing works. According to 42% of B2B marketers, content marketing works and they’re effective in producing results.

They bring in necessary traffic. According to content marketing leaders, they experienced a 7.8x higher year-over-year growth in unique site traffic when content marketing is done right.

They help you get more leads. Businesses with blogs report getting 67% more leads than other companies.

Content determines buyers’ next steps. According to a report, 47% of buyers view three to five pieces of content first before engaging with a brand’s sales rep.

Content helps build loyalty, nurture audiences, and drive sales. According to a report, 78% of successful organizations use content marketing to build loyalty, nurture leads and audiences (64%), and generate sales and revenue (57%).

Content marketing can help you establish and nurture your relationships with your prospective and existing customers. When the recipient of your content thinks of your company as credible, trustworthy, and responsive to their needs and interests, they’re more likely to choose you among your competitors when it’s time to buy.

How Content Marketing Works

Every buyer has a different set of needs and expectations at every stage of the buying process. Knowing the right content to send helps you nudge them to move forward to the next stages.

For example, a buyer at an awareness stage may need to know more about how your brand’s products and services can address their pain points, challenges, and questions. A buyer at a consideration stage may need to know more about the specific features or functions of your products and services and how they differ from what’s available on the market. A buyer at the closing stage may need to know how choosing you can benefit them in the long run.

Sending them the right content at the right time is crucial in closing these deals. Some tools are built and designed to help businesses automate this process.

Here’s an example of how you can engage your leads and customers through email with ease:

How to Get Started

To make content marketing easier, here are things to take note of:

Know your audience. The first step to making a content marketing strategy is to know who you want to reach and how to reach and engage them effectively. This requires you to determine their needs, preferences, and interests, among others, so you’d know what type of content to send them.

Get a team. Hire professional writers and editors to make your content for you. Remember, a small error in content, typography, or grammar can make you lose your credibility and discourage prospective customers.

Determine your distribution strategy. Know where your target audience is hanging around, when they’ll be most active, where they’re more likely to click on your content, and what type of content works best for them.

Use tools. To make the entire content marketing process easier, use tools and technologies designed for it. Some can help you distribute your content automatically with just a few clicks.

Automate your content marketing now

Want to know more about content marketing and how you can automate it? Talk to us and click here to get started.

To achieve business goals, marketers need to develop a content marketing strategy that is designed for their organization’s needs, as well as their audiences’. Read on to find out how to start making yours.

Many businesses plan to write some blogs, post on social media and send bulk emails to their target audience. But many also don’t know where to begin.

It’s understandable. According to a report, 74% of companies observed that content marketing increased their lead generation results. Those with a content strategy also achieved 27.1% higher win rates and 18.1% higher quota attainment. That’s why, in 2022, 90% of marketers continue investing in the channels they focus on using a content marketing plan.

In this post, we’ll talk about what content strategy is, why it’s important, and how you can develop your own content strategy that is designed for your unique business needs and your target audience. So let’s get started.

Learn more about what content marketing is and why it’s important in 2022 here.[1] 

What is a Content Marketing Strategy?

A content marketing strategy is a plan of action or policy that uses content (blogs, articles, videos, among others) designed to help organizations achieve their business goals.

Most business organizations use the content for the following:

To increase brand awareness in the market

To attract and generate more leads

To engage leads, nurture them, and convert them into customers

To remind customers of the brand and make a repeat purchase

To retain customers and reduce customer churn

A successful content marketing strategy will help businesses achieve their targets and goals, like those mentioned above.

Why is it important?

A content marketing strategy is important because it ensures that the content that you’re sending out is doing work. Remember, it’s not free to produce content. It requires time, energy, and company resources to write articles or publish videos. That’s why a strategy is important to make sure that they work.

It’s also important to note that your competition is sending out content too. Your strategy should take this into account because the first content the customer receives may lead that customer to ignore all other options and make their first purchase.

7 Essential Parts of a Content Marketing Strategy

What should your content marketing strategy be made of? Here are seven essential elements to take note of:

Your target audience

Their needs and preference

Your competitive edge (USP)

Your content format

The channels to focus on

Your team

The evaluation

1.   Your target audience

The most important element of your content marketing strategy is understanding your target audience. Who are they? How do they behave? Getting the right idea about your target customers lets you decide what to do in the next steps so you can get your message across effectively.

2.   Their needs and preference

Of course, each customer has a need that they have to address. Understanding each customer’s needs and preferences lets you provide an offer that is relevant and responsive to their unique situation.

3.   Your competitive edge

You need to know how to market your unique selling proposition (USP). What makes you different from the rest? Why should the customer choose you among the competition? Knowing your competitive edge allows you to drive your message home— telling the customer to ignore all other options and just focus on your brand.

4.   Your content format

Not all customers respond positively to blogs and articles, some prefer the video format. Choosing the right content format for the right customer is critical to getting them to consume your content.

5.   The channels to focus on

This is extremely important especially when you market on social media. Understanding which platforms your target customers is likely to use lets you optimize your content performance, especially when you choose to run paid ads.

6.   Your team

The success of your content marketing strategy depends on the team executing it. Choosing the right people to implement tasks and run workflows is an important part of the strategy.

7.   The evaluation

Last but not least, evaluating your performance lets you spot what needs to be corrected in your strategy and what needs to be retained. Use the right tools and metrics. Learn from industry peers and be ready to adapt.

5 Steps to Develop a Content Strategy

Now that you know what elements to focus on when developing your content strategy, it’s time to make one! Let’s dive in.

Set a goal

Know more about your customers

Choose your tools

Determine your content

Explore and experiment

1.   Set a goal

Goals are what would determine what your plan is going to look like and how it’s going to be implemented.

There are many goals to choose from. When planning their content marketing strategy, many businesses aim to:

Generate more leads

Establish brand awareness

Drive sales

Retain more customers

2.   Know more about your customers

Clearly defining your content’s target audience also allows you to be more specific about your content marketing strategy.

It lets you produce more relevant and valuable content that they’ll want to consume and which will, later on, push them to become customers.

Customer profiling helps you know more about your customers:

3.   Choose your tools

It’s going to be hard to run a content marketing strategy, especially if it’s your first time. Choosing the right tool makes the job easy and also helps you become more efficient in your tasks.

Tools like Saphyte’s Drip Marketing lets you send emails automatically on schedule to your target customers.

4.   Determine your content

There are several content formats to choose from and your content will largely depend on your target audience. Among them are:

Blogs.

Videos

Podcasts

Infographics

Emails

Case Studies

Ebooks

Lead magnets

5.   Explore and experiment

The success of many content marketing strategies today can be attributed to their willingness to explore and experiment. Evaluate what’s working and what isn’t. Try something new and see how far it goes. The sky’s the limit.

Want to know more about content marketing tools?

See how Saphyte’s tools can reinvent the way you engage with your leads and customers. Talk to us and get started here.

Relationship marketing plays a crucial role in increasing customer lifetime value, the amount of value a customer contributes to your business from their first purchase towards their last. Read on to find out the things you should know about relationship marketing and why you should consider this approach.

Focusing on building valuable and lasting relationships with customers improves retention. And customer retention is becoming more important these days, especially when businesses aspire to grow.

Multiple studies found that improving customer retention by at least 5% helps in increasing revenue by 25% to 95%. It’s also more cost-effective. Engaging existing customers for retention has been shown to be at least 6-7x cheaper than acquiring new ones.

What do these numbers mean? All of these mean that in order for companies to increase their sales, cut their expenses, and grow their profits, they should find ways to build customer loyalty and reduce customer churn. And one proven way to do this is through relationship marketing.

What is Relationship Marketing

Relationship marketing is the process of building long-term personal, individualized connections with customers. It focuses on providing value and relevance through content, product, and services for a continuing, lasting relationship.

Companies that implement relationship marketing seek to get to know a customer better to improve their experiences with the company. They do not stop after a deal is closed.

In fact, they continue to reach out to the said customer by sending relevant content, personalized offers, and discounts to encourage repeat purchases and consequently increase the chances of customer retention.

The way relationship marketing works is often illustrated with customers going through a lifecycle process. They start by discovering the brand and end up becoming advocates of that brand.

Learn more about relationship marketing here: ​​What is Relationship Marketing and Why is it Important?[1] 

Examples of Relationship Marketing

The following are examples of how relationship marketing works:

1.   IKEA

IKEA is one of the few companies that focus on relationship marketing as a primary means of growth. It is considered the world’s largest home furnishing retailer and has more than 400 stores worldwide.

The company is famous for using demographic, psychographic & geographic segmentation to provide personalized experiences to customers and offering value at every stage of the buyer’s journey. It gives importance to customer retention, establishing loyalty, and building long-term relationships with its customers.

To “deliver a clear, consistent, and compelling message about the organization and its product,” IKEA uses a combination of experimental marketing, customer engagement and content marketing, and digital marketing and social media engagement, among others.

2.   Starbucks

Starbucks didn’t just rise to the top because of good coffee. The company has been known to provide excellent customer experiences that make it easy for them to be the topic of conversation.

Starbucks starts with providing customers with comfort and peace at their stores— a different feeling that customers don’t commonly get elsewhere. A personalized product option is then offered to every customer— whether they want 2 pumps of syrup, soy milk to replace dairy milk, a scoop of java chips, or anything else added to their drink.

Starbucks communicates with its customers via text, email, and direct mail. There, they provide content to customers and also open accessibility for purchase. Starbucks also allows customers to turn their mobile phones into electronic rewards cards to redeem free drinks, a birthday gift, or a free sample menu item.

3.   Amazon

Amazon’s success story rests primarily on its ability to provide a customer-centric experience to its over 300 million customers.

The company built its own Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software to collect customer data, such as location, searched items, and previous purchases, to instantly modify and personalize users’ on-site experience.

Amazon uses email to connect with customers and keep them purchasing. They also have the ​​Prime customer loyalty program where customers get free and fast shipping, free cloud storage, and free streaming services, among others, by paying extra for membership.

6 Things You Should Know About Relationship Marketing

When talking about relationship marketing, here are six things that you should know about:

1.   Personalization is key

Personalization is the process of crafting an experience or message to match a recipient’s needs, interests, and other factors, based on the data the company has gathered.

For example, if the customer has searched for hair products in the past few minutes, it’s likely that the customer needs a hair product or is interested in buying one. Having this data allows companies to offer relevant product recommendations which increase the chances of the said customer making a purchase.

Personalization is key to a relationship marketing’s success. Companies need to be able to offer relevant and valuable information for customers to continue to interact with them. When a brand’s product and services do not match the customer’s needs, interests, or preferences, it’s likely for a churn to occur.

2.   Repeat customers are more likely to spend more

A study found that repeat customers spend three times more per transaction compared to non-repeat customers. They’re also easier to sell to, which means that in relationship marketing, retaining customers is more important than anything else.

When repeat customers become advocates of your brand, they’re not just there to make repeat purchases. They’re also there to influence others to make a purchase, spreading good word-of-mouth marketing to promote your brand and increase your sales revenue.

3.   Technology is an advantage

Improving customer relationships through personalization would be impossible without technology. Technologies like CRM software allow companies to seamlessly collect and sort customer data for instant use.

CRMs help inform sales and marketing teams what a customer needs, what they’re likely to purchase, and what to do to encourage them to make a purchase. With CRM tools and features, companies can also automate tasks involving personalization such as email marketing, catalog offering, and customer profiling, among others.

4.   Everybody loves incentives

To keep customers engaged, companies need to keep sending content that helps customers maximize the use of their purchased products or encourage them to browse for other products for enhanced use and experience.

But nothing engages customers more than incentives. Incentives can take the form of discounts and freebies.

Many companies incentivize their customers through a loyalty program, where customers gain points with every purchase. These points can be exchanged for free items and products.

Each purchase allows the company to gain more details about the customer— their needs, preferences, and other information that can be used to provide a more personalized experience to the said customer.

5.   Customer feedback and insights are game-changers

Building a good relationship is a two-way street. Companies guestimating what customers need wouldn’t suffice. Customers also have to contribute and inform companies what they think, feel, and experience when using their products and services.

To encourage customers to provide real feedback, companies have to find ways to reward honesty, make providing feedback accessible and convenient, and be transparent about how the feedback would benefit the customer.

6.   Provide a multi-channel experience for every type of customer

For companies to truly capture every type of customer’s interest, they need to be sensitive about their marketing channels— how the customers found out about them and how these customers interact with them.

This way, the company can map the whole experience of the customer and look for ways to improve this experience. A different journey may then be provided for a customer that used online marketing channels compared to traditional marketing channels.

Because customers nowadays use more than one marketing channel, companies have to provide a consistent multi-channel experience (omnichannel marketing) to all customers.

Customers expect a consistent, quality experience throughout and that’s why the brand’s identity and values should be unified and consistent as well across these channels.

Upgrade Your Relationship Marketing

Improve the way you build relationships with customers. Get in touch with Saphyte’s support team now to know more about relationship marketing and the tools you can use to connect with customers.

Companies that value customer experience gain 4-8% higher revenue than their competitors in their industries. They are found to be 60% more profitable than companies that don’t focus on customers. Find out what customer relationship is all about and how it transformed the way companies deal with their customers.

When companies talk about customer relationships, they usually refer to the marketing strategies a company implements to encourage customers to stay for the long haul. Customer relationship strategies aim to build loyalty and they typically require determining what customers uniquely need and want first before anything else.

However, right now, companies face roadblocks in identifying these needs and preferences. The global pandemic caused a shift in consumer preferences and changes in consumer behavior, which means that the consumer data that companies have gathered in the previous years may be rendered irrelevant.

Without the right data about your target customers, it would be hard to offer the right solutions. This puts a strain on the customer relationship. Some customers may avoid coming in contact with the business again after the business failed to address their needs and preferences.

How Customer Relationship Works

All customers start from a point where they had zero knowledge about the brand. Along the way, they come into contact with the brand via advertisements, word-of-mouth communication, or other promotional activity of the business.

This is where brand awareness starts. When the brand messaging piques their interest, they may seek more knowledge about the brand. And after weighing options, or when a need arises, they may proceed to select the brand’s product and services out from the competition.

They will then use the product. Here, an experience will be formed. If it’s a good experience, the customer may consider buying the product again in the future. In fact, they may even act as brand ambassadors, actively promoting the product and the brand to other people.

If it’s a bad experience, the customer may no longer choose the product in the future and may even discourage others from buying the product.

Customer relationship then aims to keep the customer moving from the first stage (awareness) to the last stage (advocacy). It seeks to keep customers loyal to the brand (and promote the brand to their social circles) by identifying the customer’s specific needs, offering the right solutions, and consistently offering a positive experience throughout their journey.

How Customer Relationship Transformed Marketing

Many marketers began to prioritize customer relationships after seeing successful companies implement a customer-centric model.

According to a report, 45.9% of business professionals would consider customer experience as their #1 priority for the next 5 years.

And this is because many customers now would prefer experience over anything else. In fact, according to research, 86% of customers claim that they are willing to pay more for a great customer experience.

It’s not stopping anytime. At the end of 2020, a study expects customer experience to overtake price and product as the key brand differentiator.

How to Integrate Customer Relationship in Marketing

To emphasize the concept of customer relationship when engaging customers, take note of the following:

1.      Prioritize gaining customer trust

You can never build loyalty without gaining customers’ trust first. That’s why, in all things you do, always ensure that you will be able to gain the customer’s trust at the end of the day.

To do this, your products and services must be reliable. They must create a positive experience for your customers. They should be able to fix a problem or provide a solution to a challenge.

2.      Understand customer’s intent

Understanding why your customers became your customers is essential in running a customer relationship marketing strategy. It helps you predict intent and anticipate the needs of your customers before they even say it.

Here, you can create a roadmap that leads to a smooth journey for the customer, leading to customer satisfaction and loyalty. Integrating technology may be necessary to speed up processes and increase service accuracy and reliability.

3.      Identify opportunities through customer data

Throughout the journey of the customer, sales opportunities may arise for the business. Identifying these opportunities will not just increase revenue but may also enhance the experience for the customer.

Sending personalized offers or promotions, for example, is a way to enhance the customer experience and exceed their expectations. Gathering customer data through tools and technology is an effective way to personalize offers.

Customer Profiling with Saphyte Forms – YouTube

4.      Management must agree

To enhance the customer experience, the management must first agree that this is top priority. Drafting customer-centric company policies are, therefore, necessary to ensure that employees collectively follow protocols that aim to give customers a positive experience.

These policies must also align with company goals, mission, and vision. To build genuine relationships with customers, those at the top of the organization must lead in doing so.

Transform Your Marketing

Learn more about how to use tools and technology to gather customer data and provide a personalized experience. Get in touch with our experts here at Saphyte. Click here to get started.

Meta Description: SaaS businesses and CRM software solutions are the new Tyler Durden & The Narrator from fight club. Don’t you agree?

Social Copy: Move and give way to the new Tyler Durden & The Narrator (you know, Fight Club) in the business arena. Meet CRM and SaaS. Learn about this iconic duo making rounds about in the business world today and why CRM leads as a SaaS enabler here.

SaaS is becoming a more popular choice for businesses of all sectors and sizes. Study shows that about 80% of final users in the US alone prefer using SaaS applications. While this is excellent news for SaaS businesses, this means a constant battle to stay on top of the increasing demand and compete.

The Challenge

In today’s modern world, companies are constantly laden with drastically decreased lead conversion rates if the transaction business fails to respond to their query within 5 minutes, and availability has become a hot commodity around customer experience. Putting customers in queue will give them a leeway of choosing your competitors, further diminishing all your business’s efforts in attracting new customers and running effective marketing campaigns.

With this impending challenge looming over the businesses, buzzwords such as CRM and SaaS are often seen, and for great reason too. Both CRM and SaaS software are readily available in the market to help businesses align their sales and marketing needs and even their productivity needs. With their popularity, it’s doesn’t come as a shock that vendors are now combining these two powerhouses.

CRM Leads as a SaaS Enabler, Why and How?

With the constant demand for on-the-go services, choosing SaaS-based services over on-premise software is prevalent among businesses of all sectors. These demands, coupled with the advent of cloud computing and the mobile revolution, CRM software has jumped into the cloud computing world. CRM SaaS deployments of CRM are expected to reach their full potential soon (like very soon).

As SaaS will continue to commandeer the cloud model vessel of the future, businesses will also begin to shift their time and energy to their organization’s core goals instead of investing in obsolete IT solutions. In this case, modern-day CRM systems remain the most capable technology to enable and strengthen SaaS companies. Here are three reasons why.

CRM Software Automate Repetitive Tasks

SaaS employees spend hours and hours on day end on daunting repetitive tasks that prevent them from focusing on what matters most – the customer. There are plenty of events that can happen in an 8-hour shift, yes, but if SaaS employees spend much time doing manual tasks, all efforts are in vain.

A cloud-based CRM solution can help employees and organizations automate such tasks. For instance, you can use it to send the contacts on your email list a series of emails at pre-set conditions and track emails to check if they are read or ignored. Or, you can use CRM to assign tasks or pipelines to your sales team.

CRM software enables SaaS companies to help their marketing and sales teams spend time more efficiently. Automating repetitive, low-impact, yet high-effort tasks, the software frees up time so employees can use it to invest in scaling their business.

CRM Systems Manage and Secure Data More Efficiently

To understand the SaaS model better, think of it as a bank. The bank’s business model protects the privacy of the individual customer while providing reliable and secure services on a massive scale. Customers can use or avail of the bank’s offerings and services without worrying about other people accessing their personal information without consent. That’s why a CRM system is a great combo partner for SaaS companies because of its similarity when it comes to the business model.

We all know that collecting data for your current and incoming clients are free. However, it needs to be appropriately organized to use gathered information fully. A good CRM solution offers a prime repository from which all employees can easily access and communicate with their customers in real-time. All company interactions with customers and prospects are securely recorded and stored for future reference. Employees’ can use CRM tools to determine when the last contact with a customer was, provide call memos, and plan activities – of course, to assist businesses in making better decisions.

Real estate companies or any other business are always looking for suitable solutions to streamline their business process. Modern businesses acknowledge that streamlining their business processes is an integral component of success. 

However, streamlining your business process is not easy as it sounds, especially for real estate agents. In a general sense, real estate agents spend a significant amount of time doing admin work – scheduling meetings, setting up reminders, sending emails, leads follow-up, and other menial tasks that can take out precious time out of their day. Instead of closing deals and growing your real estate business’s bottom line, they’re still typing the day away. 

Finding the balance between a good amount of admin work without sacrificing sales performance is like walking on a tight rope untrained. But is a CRM essential for your business? Yes and yes. Here are why adding a CRM is best for your real estate brokerage. 

The Numbers Don’t Lie

A study by Boston Logic and Hubspot states a high correlation between CRM usage and agent productivity, and there is data to prove the degree of impact a CRM software can make. The results of this study are astounding, and here are some of them. 

At 72.5 percent, nearly 3 out of every four agents polled in the survey already have a CRM system in place. 

At an equivalent rate, 69.4 percent of brokerages surveyed currently supply CRM software for their agents’ disposal.

Nearly 1 in 3 brokerages are uncertain which CRM system is suitable for them, and another 13 percent didn’t know where to start.

Overall, 96.2 percent of brokerages and 94.6 percent of agents surveyed said that a CRM system helped them increase their productivity to some degree.

Surprisingly, 21 percent of real estate brokerages said they did not need a CRM system due to costs, implementation, and difficulty adapting to the CRM. 

Why Real Estate Businesses should be Paying Attention to CRM Now

The success of real estate businesses hinges on relationships, and with the competition getting tighter in the real estate sector, brokerages need to adapt to advance business tools like CRM systems. More than productivity and efficiency reasons, CRMs also streamline transactions in the real estate sector. Here are some of the transactions a CRM like Saphyte can streamline for your real estate business.

Visibility of Prospects in the Sales Funnel

Your sales team is packed with tasks all day long, and reality dictates that there’s no other way around it. As long as the marketing department delivers leads, your sales team will contact them to establish products or services that fit your customers before getting through the actual nurturing and closing process. 

With a CRM, you can help your sales team streamline their process by giving them visibility on your prospects through your sales funnel. Thus, making it easier for your sales representative to see where your prospect is in the sales process. Furthermore, a CRM sales funnel makes it easier for your team to spot the warmest leads or those who need more nurturing. 

CRM Streamlines Email, Invoicing, and Quotes

Most CRM software comes with an email, invoicing, and quotes, which can be advantageous for your sales department. These features allow your real estate sales representatives to send and respond to emails and quote queries without switching software from time to time. 

Also, having your email client and quoting and invoicing in one place minimizes the risk of errors caused by manual data entry. Having all your data needs in a single repository creates a more dynamic, responsive, and responsible team, adding more value to your brand. 

Marketing-to-Sales Handoff Process

The handoff process from marketing to sales is tricky and fragile. During this process, most leads fall through the cracks for several reasons like miscommunication, being too busy to do a follow-up call, or your sales team being too swamped with too many leads. Leads falling out of the sales funnel during the handoff process is an ordinary circumstance but can be avoided with the help of a CRM. 

A CRM can fix this problem by addressing the underlying issues such as missed notifications, and no sales funnel visibility, and lead tracking. A CRM can automatically alert your sales team if new leads are on the sales funnel and your sales team. In return, your sales team can see where the leads are through the funnel. When your team has early notifications and access to a visible sales funnel, no leads will fall out of the cracks, and your sales team can work on more opportunities to close a sale. 

CRM Automates Admin Tasks on your Sales Processes

Your sales and marketing team has too much on their plate. Besides making calls, they also spend their entire shift sending out product catalogs, brochures, and real estate pricing guides which is repetitive and time-consuming. The emails your sales team may look like the same, but they still take time from copy-pasting the text, changing names, attaching documents, and finally sending it to the client. 

With a CRM like Saphyte, some tools automate your workflows, send follow-up emails, chatbots, and more. Your team can go to other prospects or tend to more critical tasks while maintaining the experience quality service to nurture and support the customer’s experience throughout the sales process.

Sales and Productivity Reports

Creating sales reports is not an easy task, but with quality CRMs, you can quickly generate reports with a few clicks and sets. Since the nature of a CRM is to collect data constantly, it’ll be easier for the whole team to gather and combine data on your clients. 

Quick Recap

A CRM’s design is to organize and store all of your sales team’s customer information and data in one easy-to-access location. Adding to providing exceptional visibility, CRMs help simplify your sales process by automating repetitive admin tasks that take time out of your sales team’s day of selling. 

The goal of a CRM is to enable your sales team with all the tools they need to close sales better and efficiently. Streamlining your day-to-day transactions with a CRM is easy; finding the one that works with you can be daunting. With your real estate CRM needs, you have Saphyte as your partner. 

Saphyte is a cutting-edge, cloud-based, centralized CRM platform that is not only scalable and flexible but can also adapt to the unique needs of its users as they grow. Built with features and tools that mitigate business risks and errors, lower costs, support sales and marketing operations through automation and innovative tools, and boost employee productivity. 

With Saphyte, you can take a holistic approach to your real estate business without the hassle and possible future-proof your business. Ready to talk about endless possibilities? Book a call with us and our real estate CRM experts will be right on with you. 

Companies of all sectors and industries rely heavily on data for their operations. Data plays an imperative role for companies and leaders to gain informed decision-making, respond to change, and establish strategic goals. Data plays a more significant role in lead generation campaigns. In 2020 alone, 4.8% of enterprises have invested more than $50 million in Big Data and AI initiatives for their company.

If you think it’s too much money just for a piece of information, then you do not see the whole picture. Data plays a critical part in a business’ sales process, particularly the lead generation aspect. The data you’ve gathered turns into reports, and those reports, in turn, allow you to understand your customers adequately.

How Data Benefits your Business

Data goes beyond information. Potential customers’ phone numbers, email, and postal addresses are among the data sets most in demand in a growing international business. So how does this set of information benefits your business? 

Data Makes Campaigns Efficient

The lack of data with their leads renders leads useless. Leads without qualified data are essentially unusable, given the amount of customization you have to pour dedicate in every lead generation campaign. It’ll be easier to create segments and customized pitches for your leads to follow with comprehensive quality data. It’ll be easier for sales and marketing teams to make personalized pitches and outreaches, thus giving them more leverage to upsell and create sales. 

Data Allows Sales Teams to Understand the Customer

Prospects or leads don’t like talking with salespeople who don’t know nor understand their needs, which will eventually lead to frustrations on both sides – customers getting annoyed that salespeople are pitching the wrong solutions and the sales team losing their leads.

Sales teams can avoid these issues if they have established data because they already have a basis to work with. They can better understand their leads’ needs, tailor their products and services to their customers, and create compelling messaging that resonates well with their prospects.

Data Gives Sales Teams Talking Points

When sales teams understand their customers better, the more talking points they gain. Salespeople can ask questions, more concrete answers to inquiries, and have more topics they can talk about. When customers feel that sales teams are well-equipped with information, it leads to more profound and meaningful interactions and eventually leads to better conversion rates. 

Manual Data Entry: A Bane or Boon to Businesses

Not all data is created equal, and the amount of data you need to run successful sales campaigns doesn’t matter. Always remember that a hundred quality leads data are better than a thousand unrefined leads. 

Traditionally, data is “gathered” through manual data entry and performed by data entry operators (people). Manual data entry requires entering specific and predetermined data such as prospect’s name, business type, money amount, etc. 

Operators can obtain information from various sources, including paper bills, invoices, orders, receipts, etc., into a target program. Depending on the type of business, the target program could be handwritten record books, spreadsheets, computer databases, etc.

Manual data entry might be a good option for small-scale businesses (1-10 employees) because of its cheap staffing. However, manual entry can restrict expansion and inhibit progress due to these reasons.

Cost penalty. Imagine you’re going to a world-class, luxurious hotel, but has a cheaper price tag. Seems like a bargain, right? But the hotel never made mention or made you aware of the hidden fees and costs. You’re having all the fun, but the moment you check out, you realize that you’ve been completely ripped off. The same analogy applies to manual data entry. You’re spending on hiring staff and spend more on correcting data errors. Manual data errors are costly. Study shows that incorrect data costs businesses at least 30 percent or more of their revenue. It is a penny-wise foolish move to spend more on manual data entry, thinking it can save your business costing. 

High Error Rate. Surely the error rate for manual data entry is not that bad. Well, data says raw Data entry not followed by verification steps shows an error rate as high as 4%. That’s two errors for every five entries made. Another study indicates that data entry operators make 10.23 errors when processing data. These data errors may seem like minor collateral damages, but they eventually create discrepancies in your desired output. The higher the error rate, the higher the damage and cost it’ll bring for you and your business.  

Slow Turnaround Time. Manual data entry is time-consuming, and businesses can’t afford to waste too much time. Turnaround time can result in delays, extra expenditure, and even more errors – three aspects of which companies can’t afford to risk investing. 

Findings: Manual data entry is a bane to every business’s existence. 

Remedy: Automate your data entry efforts today, and save plenty tomorrow.

How Automation Helps you Avoid Losing Leads

Manual data entry error is the main culprit as to why your number of leads is dwindling. The consequences of non-automation are forgetting to follow up with your prospects or calling leads based on the order they appear on your system. You can avoid these pitfalls by implementing a sales automation strategy for your business. 

Automation can help you not only simplify your sales processes from approvals, notes recording, lead scoring, call logging, customer onboarding, or any other manual and repetitive tasks in your sales process. There are plenty of tools available in the market. One of the many is Saphyte CRM. 

Saphyte is a UAE homegrown business operating out of Dubai. Currently, Saphyte is helping hundreds of local companies in and out of Dubai to drive digital transformation through local support, zero implementation fees, competitive subscription models, and an advanced SaaS CRM ecosystem technology. 

Here are some of the benefits you can gain with a sales automation platform, like Saphyte’s customer relationship management (CRM) software, you can achieve. 

Identify Potential Customers. With a CRM like Saphyte, it’s easier for sales teams to view and track the best quality leads, leading to much more successful conversions. This way, sales teams are only monitoring and talking to the most important leads.

Lead Information. With Saphyte’s features and functions, your sales and marketing teams can learn more about the prospects and which industry they’re in. Data like this helps your team understand your prospects’ needs and requirements and the best ways to engage with them.

Easy Reporting. Using a CRM like Saphyte can help you stay informed with the use of internal emails and reports. You can kiss spending hours to keep the rest of the team on the loop goodbye, as the reporting happens automatically.

Create Invoices and Quotes. Saphyte helps your team create detailed and straightforward invoices and quotes in a matter of minutes. 

Marketing and Sales Tools. Saphyte is packed with features and functions that you can use to make your sales and marketing teams work easier, straightforward, efficient, and effective. 

Make Data Work for you by Partnering with a Sales Automation Tool that Works with you

Feeling like this is your chance to take your e-commerce CRM integration to the next level? Book a demo with us today, or start your free trial now! Reach for a new possibility and unlock your e-commerce business’s potential with Saphyte today!

Lead generation is a continuous and never-ending effort. No matter how much work and effort one puts into it, you’ll always be on the hunt for more leads next month. If you feel like you’re all alone, we’re telling you, you’re not alone. 

At least 53% of B2B marketers spend more than half of their yearly budget to make their lead generations effective. When companies understand that leads are the lifeblood of their business, placing a polished lead process is the next best thing that they can do. 

A high-conversion lead generation process means businesses are confident that their marketing will bring them a certain number of high-quality leads each month. Hence, giving them peace of mind to try out new initiatives, make data-driven decisions, and spend their budget on the most critical places.

So, will your business need a lead generation process? Yes, of course. Having a strategy for working your leads from brand awareness to closing a sale should be an integral part of your business. Lead generation processes help your sales team make sales and help your marketing business identify content and campaign opportunities. 

Are you for Manual or Automated?

As we all know, lead generation begins with understanding the customer journey, and the rest will go from there. However, there’s a specific challenge to the modern lead generation process nowadays: manual lead generation. 

Pushing through manual lead generation is a troublesome infrastructure because manual effort costs both time and financial resources. Also, manual lead generation is a complete waste of time for both your sales and marketing teams. Your sales teams are preoccupied with calls, and your marketing teams are occupied with the next opportunity. Both teams have no time to deal with manual customer research. 

Further, manual lead generation takes enormous research and can also adversely affect your business’s sales. That is why most companies prefer automated lead generation. We all know that time is equated with money. Time does not come for free, and businesses don’t have the luxury to waste even more time. Automated lead generation not only brings definite speed for your lead generation process but also accuracy.

How to Polish up your Leads Process with Automation

With the discussion above, automation wins the race by a large margin. Of course, your business will always have its unique lead generation strategy. The next big step you can take is to improve your process with the help of a leads automation tool. Saphyte got you covered when it comes to tools to make your lead generation better, accurate, and faster. Here are some tools we have on our sleeves. 

Lead Capture with Saphyte Sync

Most of the people your business wants to talk to are on LinkedIn. Manual data entry can cost you more time and more errors. With Sync, you can capture LinkedIn contacts with auto-populated information such as their name, company, email address, country, and other details. 

What’s even better? All your captured contacts automatically sync to your own Saphyte CRM, and it’s a free web extension tool for all Saphyte users. Nifty, eh? 

Show Creativity with Less Effort

Creativity takes a lot of time and effort, and for marketers, these two factors are hard to balance. Saphyte balances these two forces by bringing in marketing tools to help you create better opportunities. With email marketing, servers, and landing page templates ready for you to use. You can also use our low code/no-code solutions for our landing pages. You can show creativity with less effort. 

Marketing on Autopilot

Saphyte has plenty of automation tools that you can use to your marketing advantage. You can also run your marketing campaigns on autopilot with drip email marketing. 

Drip email marketing helps you automate the emails sent to your customers at a particular time or specific event and keep it over time. You can send out marketing emails based on varied trigger events such as when leads submit a form, open their emails, click, etc. Users can schedule the flow of your marketing email campaign by setting the specific count, time, days, or hours before sending an email to their leads.

Users can also track and monitor all the contacts on the waiting list of their drip marketing campaign. Not only that, users can measure the success of their drip email campaigns and go beyond metrics like open rates and clicks and focus more on your email list value, the subscribers’ activity, and the engagement rate. You never have to worry about manually sending emails ever again!

Plenty of Tools too Long to List on this Blog

Saphyte has plenty of tools up on its sleeves that this blog can’t merely cover. From Marketing, Sales, Teams, Connect, and Integrations – Saphyte has you covered. 

Taking the next big step but don’t know where to start? Ask our digital ecosystem experts by booking a demo today! We’re ready to help you accelerate and achieve the best for your business.