Your leads opted in…now what?

Getting new leads only to watch them slip through your fingers is one of the most frustrating parts of marketing.

It’s one of the reasons sending follow-up emails and running retargeting ads are such essential strategies. Unfortunately, even then, most follow-up is just too cookie-cutter to actually capture attention and prompt purchases.

It can be challenging to figure out exactly which leads belong in which category, and it becomes even more complicated when you’re stuck with rigid lists because of limitations of your email marketing software.

Everyone struggles with getting ghosted by leads.

You’re not the only one losing hard-earned leads before closing the sale — it’s a problem for marketers everywhere.

In fact, a reported 79% of marketing leads don’t convert into customers. And of the qualified leads, half of them won’t feel ready to pull the trigger — possibly because they don’t have all the info they need to make a decision.

Leads also disappear because businesses don’t always know the best way to market to them.

Lots of sales opportunities go to waste when companies assume they know what their consumers want to see, or their marketing ‘strategy’ is throwing spaghetti at the wall and hoping something sticks. This simply wastes time on prospects who may never convert into customers.

Don’t lose leads — segment them.

That’s why it’s important to figure out what leads truly want so you can tell them exactly how your products fit their needs.

Online marketing expert Neil Patel put it best: “Nurturing leads is much more important than acquiring them.” If businesses don’t immediately address how their product offers value to potential customers, those leads will quickly move on.

So how do successful marketers find out what makes leads tick, keep their interest and get them to part with their money?

The short answer: targeted, personalized follow-up.

The strategy behind customer segmentation is simple: Leads spend more time on the things they’re interested in, and not every lead will be drawn to the same things. This means tailoring email follow-up to what does resonate with each customer segment.

For example, food bloggers might segment their email lists based on whether the person originally showed interest in their vegetarian recipes or their high-protein options.

So where do you begin? How do you know which of your products each lead is most interested in? Here’s a common strategy for finding out: The next time leads opt in to your list — whether to receive a free download, join your newsletter, or sign up for your webinar — keep the conversation going. On your “thank you” page after they submit their email address, while you still have their attention, ask them to tell you more about what they’re looking for or what challenges related to your product/services they’re trying to solve.

Based on their responses, you can automatically segment your leads and follow up with relevant, personalized emails that speak to each person’s specific needs.

Segment your way to more opens and conversions — because it works.

By segmenting your email list into different buckets based on your leads’ different wants and interests, you’ll have a greater chance of increasing your email opens, click rates and conversions.

Case and point: When wedding invitation company Paper Style swapped out their one-email-blast-for-everyone approach with a more polished customer segmentation strategy, the team saw a 244% increase in email open rate and a revenue per mailing increase of 330%.

Paper Style began personalizing their customer follow-up by asking site visitors if they were planning their own or a friend or relative’s wedding. By doing this, they were able to pinpoint two different audiences – brides and friends of the bride.

With this in mind, they placed leads in separate groups and sent them different sets of emails that focused on their needs, rather than sending all their leads the same exact messages.

Here’s another success story that hits closer to home: Before he started segmenting his email list, Automation XL Founder Luke Ward’s average open rate for his main lead nurture email campaign for new subscribers was 22%.

But when he began asking his web page visitors the question, “What is your biggest challenge right now?” and offering three options to choose from, he was able to segment his contacts based on the answers he collected from them.

He identified each lead’s biggest hurdle so he could follow up with targeted email content. In the end, his average email open rate grew to 43% — nearly double what it was before.

Here’s how you benefit from lead segmentation.

Using your thank you page to probe leads about their interests is an easy and effective way to automatically segment them into targeted interest groups and hyperfocus your email marketing. This allows you to:

• Send more targeted emails that your contacts will relate to and be more likely to open
• Quickly identify your leads’ biggest problems, challenges or interests
• Get higher email opens and click-through rates by sending leads tailored emails that offer immediate value
• Give leads and customers personalized experiences that show you are interested and want to address their needs so they’ll stay engaged with your business
• See which segments bring in the most sales so you can fine tune your business and marketing strategies

If you’re interested in using your thank you page to segment leads and follow up with targeted emails, check out this Thank You Page Conversion Booster system. It comes with everything you need to put this strategy in place.

The post Stop losing your hard-earned leads appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

If any of this sounds familiar, there’s also a good chance that your growth and sales are stagnating too.

Not an ideal scenario.

What you want is a software that works, does everything you need it to do, and is user friendly and affordable. Is that so much to ask?

No, it’s not too much to ask! In fact, you shouldn’t be asking for anything less.

Having one efficient software to run your business is what is needed in today’s world in order to effectively run a business online.

When you have multiple apps, your business suffers.

If you’re using a handful of apps to run your business, not only are you having to learn how to use all of them, but you’re also having to make them all work together and remember which data sets live where. And to ice the cake, when things break or you need further training, there are multiple support teams you have to contact.

What you really need is to have everything in one place. You need to be able to see the data from every aspect of your business and be able to use it to make optimal decisions.

The point is, when you are messing around with numerous software systems instead of working on the things that move your business forward and generate revenue, your business suffers.

With an all-in-one platform, your business is adaptable.

There’s no question that list-building and marketing are easier to do when all of your systems are tied together in one software and your efforts are streamlined. Having all marketing assets and data on the performance of those assets stored in one software platform is crucial if you want to be able to make decisions based on what is actually working with your audience.

When you can see how each of your marketing efforts is performing and make adjustments easily and quickly, you can test and iterate your techniques. The more agile you are, the better your ability will be to adapt your efforts to what’s working best to attract new leads and, most importantly, keep them.

The market is always shifting to and fro, and you need to be able to keep pace with accurate, comprehensive marketing data.

It’s hard to sell when your apps are holding you back.

If you miss a sale or a lead follow-up call simply because your software tools aren’t working together properly, over time this will hurt your business.

For example, let’s say that your leads opt in and their contact information is stored in one tool (your CRM), then you need to communicate with the leads from another tool (your email software) and, when you’re ready to close the transaction, you need yet another tool (your ecommerce suite). Throughout this process, there are numerous opportunities for a glitch in the system (not to mention a short circuit in your brain caused by frustration!).

Bottom line: the inconsistencies born from stringing numerous software applications together can lead to sluggish sales and stunted growth.

You need all the steps in this process to happen in one place.

With all of your data, all of your contacts, and all of your content in one place, you can run your business with confidence and clarity. You’re able to see the way all aspects are working together and, therefore, what you need to adjust in order to improve and optimize. This brings more sales and more growth.

Technology should make your life easier — not more complicated.

The cohesion that an all-in-one platform offers your business is a must-have in order to compete in today’s marketplace — and, more importantly, to make running your business less time consuming and more profitable.

Your software should make it all come together, saving you time and helping you make better business and marketing decisions. Your software should not be huge time suck that forces you to spend much of your time simply trying to figure out how to make things work together.

But it’s hard to find great options out there.

The real reason most businesses are suffering from multiple app syndrome is because single-point apps have dominated the market and become the darlings of Silicon Valley VCs.

The array of martech solutions that have been created are too numerous to count. There is an app for every aspect of running a business online, and Silicon Valley has been keen on funding the next great app — which may provide great investor ROI but is not ideal for the actual consumers of the apps. These consumers have been sold on the idea that all of the numerous apps will work together and talk to one another. Unfortunately this so often is not the case.

Looking at the martech landscape today, we have figured out everything that needs to be done, but we’ve also created a monster situation in which we are having to hack together multiple systems that were not originally designed to work together but which must work together somehow in order for your business to function.

This is where the effort to build an all-in-one software solution has come into play.

You need a software that gets it all done in one place with minimal effort and confusion.

What your software should be providing you is that ah-ha moment in which it all comes together and the larger vision is perceivable.

Your business is not simply an amalgamation of disjointed parts; your business is and should be a unified whole, and this is exactly what all-in-one software does for businesses: it brings the parts all together so that you can see the big picture.

Don’t just take our word for it.

Many people are getting by using a bunch of different software programs to run their business. But many who have made the switch to an all-in-one have seen a huge shift in their business and realized that life, and business, could be much easier with one powerful platform where all of the functionality their business needs lives in one centralized place.

Entrepreneurs are starting to use software that can streamline and simplify their businesses — and they’re finding that it can take them to the next level. Here are a few examples from business owners who went all-in-one and never looked back:

For the first 18 months of her business, Joan Randall, founder of Victorious You coaching, was “spinning around like a hamster in a wheel” and using numerous tools tied together in order to run her business, none of which talked to one another.

As an example, before using an all-in-one software, when someone filled out her form, it would notify her via email, then she would have to wait until she saw the email to add their information to her marketing automation software to get them into an email funnel. Once she began to scale, she realized that she had to stop wasting time going back and forth between systems. She needed everything in one place, and she found that in Ontraport. She only needed to set up her delivery process once. Joan has since streamlined her sales process entirely using Ontraport.

Another business owner, Bob Newberry, founder of The Fitness Mindset reported the following: “The main reason we chose all-in-one software is because of the ability to scale the business and do everything in one system. The potential automation options are huge; it’s just a process now of testing what works and what doesn’t.”

Em Boden, of EmBoden.com said, “Having an all-in-one system from the start saves you so much time, money and headache … If you have Ontraport, you have everything you need.”

Now it’s your turn to ditch single-point tools.

With an all-in-one software, your business is more than the sum of its parts – it is an organized whole, allowing you to:

• Scale efficiently without the need to upgrade multiple softwares or, even worse, switch to new platforms altogether. Money and time spent on software and tech support is money and time not used to grow your business.
• Use automation to run your business processes and repetitive communication so that you have more time to do things that keep your business moving forward.
• Have only one software to learn and one support team to call when you need to troubleshoot.
• Capture, keep and convert more leads and turn them into repeat loyal customers. With an integrated view of the way your contacts are interacting with your content, you can nurture them towards sales by using personalized, relevant offers based on the data you collect and store.
• Make data-driven marketing decisions and customize your communication with your audience so you have the competitive edge that you need in today’s crowded marketplace.

Ditch the single-point tools in exchange for one integrated software that can do it all. Learn more about how all-in-one software platforms are changing the game for businesses today in our free download The Marketing Automation Buyer’s Guide.

The post Too Many Marketing Software Tools? Say No More. appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

So we gave it to them. We created a new visual CRM display called Card View that makes all of your customer data more accessible and easier to organize. You can now view your contacts based on their stage or status within your business and use a simple drag-and-drop action to manage their journeys.

With Card View you can:

• Visually see contacts organized by stages of any pipeline or process you want.
• Drag cards around to update the stage that a customer is in and prompt next steps.
• Create custom views to display your data in the ways you want it.
• Create quick visual cues to indicate priority.

While a visual CRM is commonly used to manage sales pipelines, Card View can be adapted to fit any process or funnel — opening a world of use case possibilities. Here are some of the creative ways our power users, Ontraport Experts, are using this CRM feature. 

Expert 1: Sam Wilcox, Founder of Tribecto Automations

@samueljwilcox

Sam Wilcox

Founder, Tribecto Automations

Use Case: Proposal Management

“Card View is great for management of many tasks other than the obvious sales pipeline. For one of my clients, we’ve implemented an easy-to-use management system for their Proposals team. We started by defining the stages of the proposal creation from start to finish and then made those stages the columns for our Card View.”

Their sales director loves this new visual CRM interface, as team members can easily get a quick glance of who’s responsible for each proposal, what service the proposal is for and what stage it is currently in.

Once the Proposals team moves the contact to the ‘complete and sent’ section, the proposal is automatically sent via email to the prospect, and a task is created for the Sales team to follow up in three days. It’s seamless.

I’ve recreated the same system in my account, and it has simplified a number of my processes in my own business.

Pro tip: Keep the prospect/customer engaged in the process by automating email updates for each key point in the process. This way, the prospect can really see the work that is going into the proposal, and they will value it much more.”

Expert 2: Neil Kristianson, Founder of Email Splat

@the_nak

Neil Kristianson

Email Splat

Use Case: Tracking Leads and Billing Stages

“We are using Card View to track prospects and customer projects in three different ways. First, we’ve created a Card View for a complete project journey from ‘unqualified lead’ all the way through to ‘completed project.’ The second view we use is only to track prospects from ‘inquiry’ to either ‘lost’ or ‘deposit paid.’ The third view is used to track our billing with stages for deposits, installments, final payments, monthly payments, etc.

All of these are set up so that people can move through the system automatically via their actions and/or task outcomes, or they can be moved through the automation manually using the cards.”

Expert 3: Sam Ovett, Digital Marketing Consultant

@SamOvett‏

Sam Ovett

Digital Marketing Consultant

Use Case:  A Better Way to Manage Referral Partner Programs

“When we get busy it’s easy for balls to get dropped. This can impact the way we manage our referral sales partners. Since we’ve been using Card View, keeping track of sales partners and helping them get more out of being a partner has become so much easier.

For example, when a partner first comes on board, it’s easy to see how much of our brand training they’ve completed and then, when they start marketing, it’s easy to get a quick view of how much they’ve sold and what level they have achieved.

This visual CRM display allows us to quickly know who needs a little help and guidance if they hit a plateau and makes it easy to know who to call up and congratulate when they are knocking it out of the park! This ultimately helps them produce more referrals leads that become sales—which is a win-win.”

Expert 4: Josh Ovett, CEO of Mobile Pocket Office

@joshovett

Josh Ovett

CEO, Mobile Pocket Office

Use Case: Sales Opportunity Management

“Card View takes the visual CRM function of Ontraport to the next level. List views make for  great databases but can be a frustrating experience when you want to look at a record and manage it. Card View changed that for us. It’s a visually intuitive way to manage sales opportunities that require a lot of human-to-human interaction.

Now we can confidently and easily kick-off the right automation based on what the prospect needs right after a conversation. We just drag and drop the card into the right pile and away it goes delivering follow-up better and more consistently than a dozen sales assistants! I never thought we’d say this, but we are falling in love with CRM again!”

The post Creative Use Cases for Ontraport’s Visual CRM appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Once you’ve done your research and settled on a CRM platform, your next step is to get all of your business and contact data inside of it. That means importing your contact list, setting up your first campaign, training your team and more. It’s not until you’ve successfully set up and customized your account that you’ll start to get the true value out of your new software.

Here are some implementation do’s and don’ts to help you get your new CRM account set up quickly and efficiently.

Importing contacts

Moving your contact list into your CRM should be one of your first set-up tasks. This usually entails preparing a CSV (comma separated value) file of all your existing contacts and then mass uploading that data into your CRM.

Don’t: import a disengaged list

If you’re moving your contact list over from a different system, we advise that you do some “list cleaning” prior to importing those contacts into your new CRM. List cleaning is going through your contacts and removing disengaged contacts, spam email addresses, dead email addresses or those who no longer want to receive email from you.

At Ontraport, our postmaster team randomly pulls newly imported contact lists for review. During the review process, if a list contains a large amount of spammy or dead email addresses, it could get flagged for potentially violating anti-spam laws.

Do: add a tag to all contact imports

You can import as many contacts as you’d like in whatever order you’d like, but keep in mind that groups are not automatically created when you import a new list of contacts. Tags are a way to help you label and easily find specific contacts again. You can create groups of contacts based on the tag that you attach to them when they are imported into your CRM. Make tagging your contacts a habit — this will help immensely when you’re segmenting your contacts into targeted groups.

Organizing your data

One of the most intriguing features of all-in-one CRM platforms is that they are completely customizable so you can show your business data exactly the way you want to view it.

Don’t: have sloppy naming conventions

As you build out your CRM account, you will be amazed at how much data and information you can collect. However, that data can get lost or become overwhelming if you don’t properly organize it through standardized and shared naming conventions. Naming conventions are the practice of diligently naming all your assets according to standards you set so that your team can easily find exactly what they need. This extends to all the data and assets within your CRM from emails to landing pages to tags.

Do: organize your contact records

A contact record houses all the information and behavioral data that you have for each individual contact. In Ontraport, a contact record is broken into multiple tabs, and each tab houses your default and custom data fields. You can think of tabs as separate pages of information, similar to the concept of browser tabs. You can customize these tabs into subsections of data fields that show exactly what you want to see.

Be sure to move and organize your contact records in a way that makes sense for your business and workflow. Need to quickly see which sales rep is assigned to each contact? You can easily organize a sales tab to show that exact data. Going even further, get rid of the fields that you don’t use. While you can’t delete default fields in most CRMs, you can move them all to a designated tab so that they aren’t cluttering your contact records.

In Ontraport, you can also choose how you want to view groups of your contacts: in a traditional list format or in a compact Card View format. In Card View, each contact’s information is displayed like a business card, showing only what you want to see at a glance, and the cards are sorted into columns to represent stages within any process.

Creating your segments

Properly dividing up your contacts into specific segments based on their interests, behaviors, demographics (or whatever criteria you choose) allows you to personalize your interactions with them to produce better results.

Don’t: randomly send out mass emails

Haphazardly sending your contacts emails is a surefire way to annoy your list with emails that don’t necessarily relate to them or their interests.

Segmenting your contacts into targeted groups based on their interests, behaviors, demographics and more is key. In Ontraport, you can segment your list in almost any way you can think of using groups. Groups are dynamic collections of your contacts that automatically update when new contacts meet the criteria of that group. For more strategies on how to segment your contacts, check out this guide.

Do: create individual campaigns

One of the most common actions that new Ontraport users want to take is to send emails to their list. But rather than sending one-off broadcast emails to the segmented groups that you’ve created, you can build a campaign to send and monitor all future correspondence to that group.

A campaign consolidates all of your marketing automation into an easy-to-use graphical format called a campaign map. From the map, you can send emails, view their open rates, set goals for your contacts and more. This also provides an historical record of all of the emails that you’ve sent to a specific group at a glance.

Onboarding your team

One of the first obstacles you might run into is getting your team onboard and encouraging adoption of the new system across your business.

Don’t: delegate the task of learning your CRM

When migrating your business over to a new CRM, it’s important to stay in the loop. Even if you know your team members or virtual assistant will be running the day-to-day tasks in your CRM, make a point to understand your powerful new software yourself. Set aside time specifically for training on your new CRM platform, for both yourself and your team, so that you can ensure everyone on your team is using your new CRM the same way.

Do: regulate your users and permissions

In most CRMs, you have the capability to customize the level of access given to each member of your team. You might have sensitive data that you don’t want everyone you work with to have access to. You can use a combination of users, permissions and roles to keep certain information secure and to further streamline your team’s individual jobs.

In Ontraport, there are administrators and users, and they all have their own unique login. Each new account starts with one administrator who has permission to do everything in the system. From there, you can create roles which designate a user’s access to certain parts of the system. You would add your team members as users under specific roles. You might have roles for each category of user such as sales rep, manager or customer service rep — all with varying permissions to view different data in your account.

Customizing your CRM

While your CRM can be ready to use “out of the box,” it’s important that you customize your system to work for your entire team and business as a whole.

Don’t: get stuck in information silos

An information silo is the way organizational knowledge tends to be stored within separate departments, making it difficult for that information to be spread between teams. An all-in-one CRM is designed to break down these information silos by making customer and business data available to everyone on your team, regardless of department.

That being said, it’s easy for different teams to get intimately familiar with one feature of your CRM platform and completely ignore other features. Take this opportunity to cross-train your team on how each department fits into the overall customer journey and how you can use your new CRM as a collaborative tool.

Do: create custom fields

Depending on your business model, there are many different highly specific bits and pieces of information that you’ll need to keep track of for your clients. For example, if you’re a real estate agent, you likely want to track the dates that your client’s property entered escrow and the transaction closing date. If you repair air conditioning units, you probably want to know what the make and model of your client’s AC unit is. If you are a wedding coordinator, you need to know the wedding venue and dates. Custom fields make it possible to store all of these types of information and more.

There are different types of custom fields you’ll have to work with, such as numeric fields, checkboxes, dropdowns, text fields and so on. Some fields, like text fields or checkbox fields, require no further setup. Other fields, such as dropdowns or list selection, require you to specify a list of possible inputs. This gives you the capability to collect and store the exact type of data that is most important to your business.

The post Getting Started With Your CRM appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Because companies are responsible for sorting through all kinds of customer communication on a daily basis — online chat conversations, demo calls, social media and emails — it can be a challenge to know how to leverage customers’ information. This is because the data is spread out among different business software tools, not organized in a way that connects each data point to an individual contact, or it is so hard to use that employees cannot find the data they need at the moment they need it.

The solution is to have an individual, top-to-bottom view of all leads and customers where all the data about them lives in one place. That’s exactly what an all-in-one CRM like Ontraport does for you. This type of unified approach to customer data management is called a “single customer view.” It’s defined as “an aggregated, consistent and holistic representation of the data known by an organization about its customers.” Having a single customer view makes it far easier to treat each lead and customer who crosses your path as an individual with unique wants, needs and concerns.

An all-in-one system takes the single customer view a step further by not only providing the data you need about customers all in one place, but also equipping you with the tools to act on that data. With your CRM combined with responsive automation capabilities and built-in landing pages, email, tracking, payment processing and more, you can provide a uniquely personalized and positive experience for each of your contacts at each stage of the customer lifecycle.

Putting your data into action through the customer lifecycle

From the day your new prospect learns of your brand to when he or she becomes a repeat buyer who raves about your products, your all-in-one CRM is the holder of all the data and interactions you have with that person.

Here are just some ways you can use that data to provide excellent experiences for each individual to keep them flowing through your customer lifecycle:

Attract right-match leads

The Attract stage of the customer lifecycle is all about drawing in the people who will be most likely to buy your product. Rather than taking stabs in the dark about who is in your target audience and what resonates with them, you can use data available in your CRM about your existing customers to create highly segmented follow-up campaigns.

Using CLV to target the right customers

When you know the common demographic traits, interests and online behaviors of your customers who buy the most of your products and refer their friends most often, your marketing team can more easily find more customers like them to improve your results overall.

One way to determine how well you’re doing as a business is by identifying your Customer Lifetime Value, or CLV. This tells you how much each of your customers is spending on your business and what your predicted net profit may be thanks to their purchases. Knowing your customers’ CLVs means you can spend more time, energy, and money on those who will most contribute to your bottom line and help grow your brand.

An all-in-one CRM like Ontraport gives you the ability to easily calculate your CLV, thanks to all the necessary data being in one place. With CLV data, you can build highly targeted audiences based on the traits of those with high CLVs or even create Facebook “lookalike” audiences using existing customers in a certain segment.

Similarly, you can use CLV to understand which marketing initiatives were responsible for generating people with higher CLVs and choose to focus your marketing budget on those assets. Using this data, you’ll see higher-quality leads coming in faster and at a lower cost than you otherwise would.

Segmenting your leads for better nurturing

Once you’ve attracted leads to your business and garnered their contact information, you can organize them into appropriate segments so you can stay in touch in relevant ways.

In an all-in-one CRM, your landing pages and forms, where you collect customer data such as their biggest pain point or interest, are synced directly with each person’s contact record in your CRM. That means the information entered into a form field can automatically trigger the appropriate follow-up nurturing sequence. For example, contacts who select an interest in wedding catering would be placed on a campaign about your wedding services, while those interested in corporate event catering would be placed on a campaign about those services.

All this happens seamlessly when your landing page and form data are in the same place as your contact data and when all that is in the same place as your follow-up systems, such as email and SMS.

By placing customers into the campaign that best fits their interests, the likelihood of keeping them engaged and driving a sale significantly increases.

Personalizing your marketing for stronger connections

With CRM data, you can take narrowly targeted marketing efforts one step further to actually personalize the experience of each one of your leads.

This could simply involve greeting each customer by name on your emails, landing pages, direct mail pieces and text messages without manual input, or it could go steps further to provide individualized experiences with your marketing content.

For example, with some landing page builders, you can set specific blocks on your landing pages to only show to contacts whose data matches specific criteria you set. You could choose to show a promotion for your wedding catering upsell package or testimonials from brides only to those who’ve previously visited your sales page about wedding catering.

This type of highly individualized marketing is often what sets a business apart from its competitors, and it’s only possible when the data inside your CRM works directly with your landing pages and tracking systems.

Optimizing your marketing quickly for better results

When a system houses all the assets and automation related to your marketing campaigns, it also houses all the data related to your marketing campaigns, which means the data will be accurate and aligned because it’s all coming from the same source.

Using UTM tracking links and other tracking scripts in your campaigns, you can ensure all the information you need about which links each contact clicks on is automatically tabulated in their contact record. You can then view lead source data as a whole for each campaign to quickly gauge which of your marketing assets are leading to the best results so you can put more of your budget toward them.

Without all of the data available within an all-in-one CRM, there’s no way to truly understand the status of your marketing campaigns.

Convert leads into customers

This stage is about actually making sales. All the initial setup you did in the Attract stage to put each contact within the right segment and remain responsive to their signals of interest works to build their confidence in your brand and prompt a purchase.

If you have a live sales team that interacts with leads via phone, video or chat, an all-in-one CRM is an absolute must-have for keeping their conversations flowing and keeping contacts moving along your funnel toward a sale (this is where Ontraport’s new visual contact management feature comes into play).

Building better rapport through relevant sales conversations

By simply pulling up leads’ contact records, your sales team can see a complete picture of every past interaction the leads have had with your brand, such as the landing pages they visited, emails they opened and any free or entry-level products they purchased. This kind of information gives the rep a good understanding of the leads’ interests and knowledge level with your brand, making it easier to build rapport and have more valuable sales conversations.

In addition to records of leads’ past interactions, the contact record shows any notes collected from previous sales conversations for the new sales rep to reference. This is especially useful when you’re not speaking to a new lead; it could be a former customer who is considering coming back or a lead who’s been in your funnel for ages and has already spoken to someone else on your team. Knowing this information equips the rep to meet leads where they are and speak to them differently than they would a recently qualified lead.

Prioritizing the hottest leads and biggest opportunities

Team members can use visual contact management systems as their go-to for their day-to-day task prioritization.

Organizing each contact according to their stage in your funnel can give team members an immediate understanding of which contacts to focus on. This means they’re spending less time digging through records or lead score lists and less time contacting leads who aren’t yet ready to buy. Instead they’ll find their greatest opportunities for sales at a glance and have control over their progress toward sales quotas. They’ll be in touch with the right leads at the right time and with the right message, thanks to the data available to them in your contact records.

Following up consistently

All sales reps know that it takes numerous follow-up attempts and several connection times to appropriately nurture a lead into a sale. If they fail to follow up due to lack of organization, they could lose a sale.

Using visual contact management workflows combined with automated tasks and prompts can keep this from happening. Team members can easily manually set reminders to follow up after a certain period of time based on their interactions with someone, or use automated reminders built into their funnels. Team members can be assured that there will be no dropped leads and that each contact is receiving exactly the right follow-up at exactly the right time.

Creating smoother handoffs between marketing, sales and customer service

Because of the rapport that they work to build with each new customer, your sales team often ends up being the de facto customer advocate when an issue or opportunity arises. With a CRM, you can ensure that the smoothest possible handoffs occur between marketing and sales or sales and customer service because all the notes and information about each customer’s background is stored in his or her contact record.

With an all-in-one CRM, you can also automate this transition so that, once leads are qualified, they pass seamlessly into the sales funnel from the marketing team or into your new customer welcome funnel immediately after their first purchase.

Fulfill promises to customers

Although an all-in-one CRM offers many benefits that make it easier to attract new leads and customers, it doesn’t stop there. You can also gain an edge when it comes to serving customers, retaining them for longer and developing more profitable relationships.

Providing customers with above-and-beyond service

By gaining access to all the available information about each customer, your team can learn more about the individuals they’re interacting with to ensure they’re correctly serving their needs.

Your team can personalize the support they provide to emphasize the priorities that the customer has already expressed to the sales or marketing teams, and they can learn more about each customer’s unique situation so they can provide customer service that goes above and beyond. For example, say that during a conversation with your team, a customer revealed that he or she had recently experienced a big personal victory thanks to your life coaching service. If your sales rep or customer service agent noted this in his or her contact record, the next time the customer contacts your team, the team member could congratulate him or her on the achievement.

Customer support team members can also use an all-in-one CRM’s trove of data to more easily solve problems. For example, Ontraport’s contact records show every step a contact has taken in a campaign — every link clicked, email received, purchase made and more. If a customer calls saying he didn’t receive the download he signed up for, wasn’t charged correctly for an item or has any other common complaint, team members can easily view the history and automation log to see where the problem may have occurred and more quickly find a resolution.

Using CLV to tailor service

Sometimes it’s important to make exceptions to the rules for a high-value customer, but it can be difficult to make that call. With an all-in-one CRM, your team can easily see the total lifetime value of the customers they’re dealing with to better understand the value of their relationship for the company so that they can justify making an exception for only the most high-value customers.

For example, say a client had spent $10,000 with your business over the past year and was frustrated with a recent $5 surcharge. Although this is your policy, you may want to make an exception in order to keep this particular customer’s business. This is just one example of how a CRM can empower members of your team to make good decisions that preserve your most valuable relationships.

Overall, when your team members begin to rely on your CRM for information to make the customer experience better, they will see a higher satisfaction rate on customer support issues and end up dealing with fewer complaints.

Delight customers with unexpected offers

The Delight stage is where you turn your new customers into repeat buyers by offering upsells and cross-sells to keep them engaged. This is often where customers truly understand the value of your brand and become loyal to you.

Offering the right upsell at the right time

The segmentation you did earlier in the funnel serves to simplify which upsell and cross-sell products to offer to customers in the Delight stage. For example, if a customer bought your wedding catering dinner package, you might upsell them on a dessert table; if a customer bought your corporate event catering package, you might upsell them on a professionally printed menu for the tables.

All of these offers are ingrained in your automated campaign from the beginning and can be set to fire at a time you choose — whether it’s when a contact reaches a certain stage of your onboarding funnel or after a pre-selected period of time since the person’s first purchase.

With your automated campaigns working directly with your CRM data, you can be sure you’re offering the right Delight stage product at the right time to each individual. You’ll get more sales from each customer on your list thanks to the segmented outreach you’ve given to them all along.

Providing a smoother repeat purchase experience

You likely have extensive data about customers who’ve reached this stage of your funnel. You can see which of your segmented campaigns they’ve experienced, and you have basic info such as their address and payment information that can be used to pre-fill forms the next time they’re in the process of making a purchase on your site. This makes the buying experience much smoother for repeat customers, which ups the possibility of them completing a purchase and continuing to come back.

You can also use the data available about customers at this stage to continue using conditional blocks in your landing pages to show only certain landing page blocks to certain customers. For example, if you have a membership site, you can show a block offering the next level of membership to the visitor, which can be triggered based on the membership level that’s stored in their contact record. Even without a membership site, the landing pages and CRM can work in tandem to detect the length of time someone has been a customer or the types of products that customer has previously purchased and trigger a landing page block based on that information.

Seamlessly sharing feedback with the product development team

An all-in-one CRM makes it easy to break down “information silos” that prevent data from being shared freely between different parts of your company. In addition to the information inside the contact records supporting the marketing, sales and customer service teams, it can also serve to benefit the product development team.

Knowing the ways customers are using the products and services, including the challenges they may be having with them, is crucial insight the product team can use when making decisions about new products they’re creating, improvements to the product or new versions and upgrades, and which add-ons or upsell packages to create. Having this feedback based on CLV data can further support the team in determining the right changes to keep their best customers happy.

Gain referrals from repeat buyers

At this stage, you’ve got repeat customers who are sold on your brand; now your goal is to encourage them to tell their friends about it. Referred customers are much less costly to acquire than new ones and much more likely to stick around for the long-term, so they’re extremely valuable to your business.

Increasing brand loyalty and referrals

Improving the quality of your conversations with customers throughout the lifecycle, including during any customer service conversations post-purchase, can have a big impact on customers’ willingness to spread the word about your company. Most customers expect to have unpleasant interactions when submitting an issue for customer service, so if you’re able to turn that expectation upside down by using the information in your CRM to your advantage, customers will want to stick with your brand long-term and refer new customers to you.

Identifying, nurturing and empowering your brand advocates

You can use data about your existing customers to figure out which of them are most likely to refer your business. With your CLV data and other insights into customers who refer you to others, you can identify patterns in your most valuable referrers. You can use that information to spot more potential referrers, nurture them into more loyal brand advocates, and give them the tools and incentives they need to share your business with their friends.

The full customer lifecycle

With so many specific benefits for each part of the customer lifecycle, it’s clear that maximizing the use of your CRM can change the landscape of your entire business. Fundamentally, using your CRM to its fullest puts the customer at the heart of your entire strategy. This leads to four large-scale effects:

1. More Satisfied Customers: With more personalized service, relevant sales messages and fewer complaints, you’ll enjoy better relationships with your customers and a better brand perception as your reputation spreads via word of mouth.
2. More Sales: Because of higher-quality interactions with your team across the board, it will be much easier to turn leads into new customers as you handle their objections and treat them as individuals. This will also help achieve more repeat business and better retention.
3. More Referrals: As you earn more trust from your customers and continually impress them with personalized service, they’ll be more willing to share your business with their friends.
4. More Insight: Since you’ll be measuring and collecting data on all the interactions between your team and your customers, you’ll gain priceless insight into your team’s performance, your customers’ habits and preferences and your best sources of new leads.

By using your CRM data to its full potential throughout the customer lifecycle, you’ll turn an ocean of data into a relationship-building tool that can only lead to expansion.

The post Why Businesses Need an Integrated CRM Software appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

According to Experian, the biggest challenge currently facing marketers is gaining insights for personalization accurately, quickly, and efficiently. CRM software manages and analyzes customer interactions throughout their journey with your company. By compiling a mass of information about customers, CRMs allow businesses to enhance their marketing, sales and customer support to create a personalized customer experience for each individual.

For example, when your customer support rep is able to bring up topics from previous communications in conversation, customers will feel a closer relationship with you — they’ll understand that you have their concerns in mind. It’s a win-win situation; because you made them feel special, they’ll be more likely to become loyal, repeat buyers and spread the word about your business for you.

We reached out to industry leaders to find out how they use CRM to create connections and a personalized customer experience. Check out their advice and apply it to your business to improve your customer relationships and sales potential:

Track all customer interactions and store their information in one place.

“When attempting to communicate effectively with clients and, in turn, build a great digital experience for them, remember that consistency creates loyalty. It’s critical that a company’s CRM tracks all customer interactions and integrates these channels together as one. By this, I mean email, phone, social media, live chat, and any other communication channel. If these aren’t integrated, the customer will likely have a poor digital experience.

For example, if a customer is communicating with a live chat representative today but is forced to repeat all the information they provided via email the day before, this damages the digital experience. It’s a waste of time, and customers will notice. Streamline customer communication with a versatile CRM, and you will build a successful digital experience.”

– Dan Roberge, President, Maintenance Care

Integrate your CRM with all your other marketing tools and assets.

“We integrated every stage of our sales process and user journeys with our system setup, so when an event is triggered, the contact is automatically pushed from one stage to another, and useful information is added to his or her contact record. This way our records are always up to date.

With a little finesse, you can target potential customers with personalized messages and email templates customized for each stage of their journey or resolve issues much quicker when a support ticket comes through.”

– Nicholas Hopper, CEO, Crozdesk

Tailor your follow-up to customer preferences and behaviors.

“To create a unique customer journey, small businesses should tailor the experience to the preferences the customer exhibits … If Jane reads your blog and then buys something, send her blog articles via email with subtle product references in it. If you notice that many people place an order for a refill of the same product they bought last month, you can offer them an exclusive subscription. If some customers only buy from a certain product category, such as cardigan sweaters, you shouldn’t be trying to sell bodycon dresses to them … If you notice that Ben visits your site a lot and browses around but buys rarely, maybe he’s a hesitant shopper and needs a little push. For him, you can have a special email series with content on your product quality, story, methods, and values to persuade him it’s worth it. Take what they like and give them more of it to show that you respect their preference. ”

– Dimira Teneva, Word Pixie, Metrilo

Segment your customers based on their interests.

“Let’s say you own a smoothie company that specializes in making DIY smoothie kits. A potential customer is searching on Google for which smoothies are healthiest and most convenient to make. The customer finds your article about smoothies and clicks through to your site. The customer has read the article and found it useful and then continues to browse other articles or your website. The customer then decides to sign up for your email newsletter through a sign-up form. At this point, you’ve captured that customer’s data and sent it back to your CRM system to be stored.

You can now use this data to learn more about what interests your customer through the type of newsletter he or she signed up to receive and the type of content he or she viewed on your website. This data can be leveraged to send personalized emails with related blog posts and related offers that you think the customer might be interested in.”

– Andrew Kozman, CEO, Mercury Digital

Follow up in a timely, personal manner.

“Customers like to feel highly valued and important. To stay at the forefront of their mind, you can use CRM software to set reminders for yourself to follow up quickly with customers that either just made a purchase from you or had a question about your product/service. The faster you follow up, the better chance that your customer will be likely to buy from you, rather than from a competitor.”

– Tracy Julien, VP of Marketing, GuidedChoice

Discover what their biggest pain point is.

“One of the first things we do to one of our client’s CRM is add a drop-down field for “biggest problem” if it doesn’t already exist. We fill this field with two to five customer pain points that our client solves with its products or services. Then, we make sure the client’s lead generation processes are set up to capture this information as early as possible.

Once you know your customers’ biggest problem, you can customize their experiences to ensure that they get the most value possible from you. This information can help you shorten sales cycles and delight current customers. It helps your marketing team deliver the best educational content, helps your sales team offer the most relevant products and services, and helps your customer service team know what your customer cares most about.”

– Tyler Sprunk, CMO, Simple Strat

Final thoughts

Customers don’t like to all be treated the same. We live in a world oversaturated with mass marketing messages that we’ve trained our brains to tune out. What stands out now is when people feel personally addressed and when someone makes them feel important. Don’t let your customers tune you out; create a personalized customer experience instead.

The post Create a Personalized Customer Experience With CRM appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Maintaining strong relationships with your customers is essential for sustaining a successful business. In order to understand and form relationships with your clients, however, you’ll need to keep organized.

For example, a property management company needs to store information about each of its buildings, landlords and tenants. A veterinarian might need to treat multiple pets belonging to one person, and a contractor might do kitchen and bath remodels for multiple clients and need to keep track of project information for each.

Custom objects would allow all these businesses to organize and manage their information in relational ways. They are a type of record in a CRM, similar to a contact record, that can be connected to multiple other records.

In the case of the contractor, he or she can create a custom object for each remodel project, allowing him to correspond the remodel with that homeowner’s record. If he’s remodeling both the kitchen and bathroom inside the same home, he’d have two records tied to the homeowner’s record. The remodel project records could include information such as the estimated cost, material selections and timeline, while the homeowner’s record would include their name, address and other relevant data.

This kind of linking allows businesses to better keep track of information and ensure they’re accurately serving their customers. The veterinarian wouldn’t want to accidentally send an email to the pet instead of the human, just as a property manager wouldn’t want to send tenants in their New York building information about a renovation taking place in their Chicago building.

Ontraport clients use custom objects in many creative ways to manage these types of complex relationships. Here we profile just a few successful examples: An early-development learning center that manages their courses, students and parents; a motherhood education company that organizes many events in numerous cities; and we’ll even share how the Ontraport team uses custom objects to streamline its expert certification process.

Shichida Australia

To say the students of Shichida Australia get an early start is an understatement — babies as young as five months old attend these weekly classes accompanied by their parents.

Invented in Japan more than 50 years ago by Professor Makoto Shichida, the Shichida education program uses learning methods such as music, lyrics and cue cards to build kids’ memories and stimulate their brain development.

Owner Shiao-Ling Lim opened her first location in Australia in 2008 to bring the philosophy overseas so babies outside of Asia could benefit from it. Today, Shichida Australia has five early learning centers, more than 2,000 students and 50 employees.

Using Custom Objects

With so many students — and their parents — to keep track of across a variety of courses and multiple locations, the Shichida team knew they needed more than a basic one-to-one CRM setup.

They started using Ontraport in 2016 and worked with Ontraport Expert Andrew Wadsworth to create a custom objects system to organize and manage each of these players and automate their interactions.

“We understood that in order to scale, we needed tools to help us automate,” said Shiao-Ling.

They created three object types: Students, Parents and Inquiries (representing interest in courses). Using one-to-many relationships, they tied these together in various ways. For example, one parent may have multiple children, each of whom attends several courses.

The creation of object records occurs automatically when leads enter their information in a form on Shichida’s home page. Just as the values entered into any form field automatically get entered into a contact record inside of Ontraport, so do they with object records.

The form requests the parent’s name and child’s name, and it includes a space for leads to enter their inquiry, among other form fields. The data entered into each of those fields syncs with their relative Parent, Student and Inquiry object records. If records don’t yet exist, submitting the form creates a new record.

The ability to organize all of this information seamlessly and automatically has allowed Shiao-Ling to regain her time; she says she’s “freed to focus on strategies and guiding the team.” Since the beginning of her journey with Ontraport, and since implementing these custom objects two years ago, Shichida Australia has doubled in size.

Motherhood Matters

When you’re expecting, there’s a lot to expect — and baby books and blogs can only cover so much. After experiencing the surprises that come with being a new mother, Monica Infante was inspired to launch Motherhood Matters, a one-stop shop for new parents and their babies.

Motherhood Matters produces conference-style events for new and soon-to-be parents as well as for parents of kids ages 2-5. What began as a small event in Rochester, New York quickly blossomed into a multi-city movement to both educate and empower parents.

As word spread and Infante continued to expand events to several locations within the New York, Pennsylvania and Ohio metro areas, she realized her manual workflow was weighing her business down. “Running leaner became imperative,” she said.

After spending several years working with separate tools for each type of task within the business, Monica transitioned to Ontraport in 2017 to bring everything into one centralized system.

“We needed the ability to see, search, and report on information which, to that point, had been siloed in a variety of disparate solutions,” she said, adding that they also “needed as much automation as we could get.”

Using Custom Objects

Monica and her team use custom objects in Ontraport to manage their seven events, the attendees and the contracts related to the exhibitors and speakers at each event.

Specifically, they organize this information with three vital custom objects:

• Events objects hold the particulars for each event location and date.
• Agreements objects store information on exhibitors and speakers for each event.
• Items objects include any product or literature that needs to be inventoried, such as an exhibitor’s giveaways or a speaker’s presentation slides.

The object records cross each others’ paths and interplay in numerous ways to enable Motherhood Matters to efficiently and automatically manage all the moving pieces involved in event planning. There are also numerous campaigns under each object to automate the relevant follow-up communication and tasks.

“Our decision tree and conditional logic are incredibly complex, with each outcome resulting in a totally new path,” Monica said. “I don’t have to keep that in my head anymore. Instead of moving people around, I tick a box and the system does everything it’s supposed to.”

For example, some of the most helpful campaigns for Monica and the team have been those designed to remind vendors about specific elements she needed prior to the event. Vendors are added to one or more appropriate campaigns when they pay for an exhibitor package, depending on which options they select at checkout. These campaigns look for data fields in the Agreements object to be updated. If the fields remain blank, the exhibitor receives a series of emails reminding them to submit their information, allowing Monica to fulfill her obligations.

“No other tool allowed us to effectively automate what we do from a customer service standpoint,” Monica said. “Ontraport’s flexibility allows us to keep the personalized touches in our relationship nurturing process in place.”

Monica worked with Ontraport Expert Neil Kristianson to build these custom objects and related campaigns. She said using the automation and CRM functionality of Ontraport has significantly minimized the amount of time her team spends on tasks, allowing them to focus on actually running and promoting their events.

“Ontraport has fueled our growth in so many ways … its comprehensiveness magnifies our capacity to add additional events,” Monica said. “By centralizing the management of so many aspects of the business in one place, Ontraport empowers us to operate as leanly as possible.”

Ontraport Experts

At Ontraport, we use custom objects to manage our Ontraport Experts program. These experts are critical resources for our users across the world, and to become certified, they must take a five-day advanced software course and pass an exam. To remain certified, experts are required to pass exams every year to show they’re staying on top of the system’s features.

Managing all of the factors involved with these courses, exams and renewals became time-consuming, and the data we needed to manage the program quickly outgrew our method of organizing which relied solely on fields and tags within each expert’s contact record.

“There were a lot of moving parts,” Ontraport PR Manager Stephanie Cuevas said. “Which course are they attending — the one in California or Australia? Is this a renewal or new certification? Have they paid for the renewal? Were the tests graded? Did they pass?”

One of the biggest challenges was ensuring fields for renewal dates, payments and test scores didn’t overwrite themselves each renewal period. It became messy trying to figure out which original certification class each expert was in and when they had last renewed. The manual grading of the exams was also taking an employee 15-20 hours a quarter.

“We needed a way to streamline this process in an organized fashion, and custom objects was the answer,” Stephanie said.

Using Custom Objects

We created a custom object to house the certification tests, and those objects (tests) are related to the contact record for the expert who took the test. This allows multiple tests to be related to one expert, as experts take a new test every year to maintain their certification status.

The test is simply a form so, when it’s filled out, the related fields update inside the test object record. Tests from every year are held in separate tabs so answers aren’t overwritten; this also accommodates for the annual changes in test questions.

An automated campaign relates the test objects and the experts’ contact records: Once a test is submitted, the test is automatically scored using “if answer A = A, add 1 point” logic, and a task is sent to a team member to manually review the practical portion. From there, the grade goes into the test object record and spurs an automated follow-up series depending on whether the expert passed or failed.

For example, experts who pass receive emails congratulating them, informing them of their benefits and prompting them to log in to the Certified Experts portal for resources. Meanwhile, the renewal date in their contact record is updated to the following year, and that date becomes the reference source for an automated series of renewal reminders when that period comes around.

“Using custom objects for our certification exams really allowed us to maintain clean contact records while still using only one system to automate all of our courses and grading,” Stephanie said, adding that the time spent grading exams was reduced by over 50%.

This concept can be applied to any business that requires renewals, such as a membership product that involves completing a course or updating their information every year in order to maintain membership status.

“Gone are the days of Google forms, missing information, overwritten fields and tedious grading,” Stephanie said. “Now I only have one task sent to me, and Ontraport takes on the rest.”

The post Keep It Together With Custom Objects appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Understanding your customer data contributes to overall savings on business costs and the creation of competitive advantages. In order to use this data to your advantage, you’ll need to adopt smart habits, such as keeping your contacts organized and cleaning your data on a regular basis.

Having accurate customer data on hand can do a lot of good for your business, while messy data can wreak havoc.

ZoomInfo notes that poor quality data negatively affects prospect and customer relationships, employee morale, and it wastes sales reps’ time. Inaccurate or unreliable data hinders smart decision-making and can diminish a business’s competitive edge in the market.

Here’s a list of the five most common customer data “don’ts” that your business can turn into “do’s”:

1. Data silos

Don’t: Store customer data in numerous siloed contact records

Keeping an overview of each individual customer has always been tricky, but the emergence of countless digital channels has made it an even more daunting task. When your data is stored in too many places, it becomes difficult to keep track of it all. This inevitably results in lost information. In fact, research suggests that 54% of marketers view fragmented or siloed data as their biggest barrier to leveraging customer data.

Do: Converge all of your data sources into one holistic customer profile

When it comes to data sources, communication is key. Each source should converge with the others so that your sales, marketing and customer service teams can get a 360 degree view of contacts in one place at any given time. The result: a smooth and seamless customer journey for both prospects and loyal customers.

How do you work towards this single view of the customer? The answer is not always as simple as using a CRM. Though CRM software is a vital part of creating your customer profile, if your software of choice isn’t an all-in-one platform, you will still need back-end data sources. These might include email marketing, marketing automation and customer care platforms. By syncing these apps together, you’ll create one, actionable database.

2. Slow integrations

Don’t: Waste time trying to patch systems together

A common mistake business owners make is starting with one or two inexpensive single-point solutions and slowly racking up additional software tools over time. While this may work well at first, as more tools get added to the list, it becomes more difficult to integrate the data. As a result, businesses end up either working with slow, hacked-together integrations or with tools that don’t communicate with each other at all.

Do: Use a CDI hub to integrate customer data

While the simplest solution would be to get every part of your business into a single all-in-one CRM platform, that’s not always an option. To integrate each software solution effectively, companies are turning to CDI (Customer Data Integration) hubs for an easy fix. The advantage of a CDI hub is that they allow companies to automatically integrate customer data into one central database. Before the data is sent to the hub’s central storage, the quality and the accuracy of the data are verified.

It’s important to note that these web-based CDI implementations can also be quite lengthy and pricey. The easiest way to maintain an acceptable budget is to devise a solid data management strategy. You’ll find that optimizing your customer data will allow you to spend more time focusing on your bottom line.

3. Depreciating tech

Don’t: Use outdated technologies or try to stretch a tool’s functionalities

There are two problematic tech practices in many organizations right now: The first is that companies are using outdated technology because they’ve made the investment in the not-so-distant past. The second is that companies start using their existing tech for purposes that are way beyond the actual scope of the product. Stretching your software’s functionalities may seem like a great hack at first, but you will end up missing out on crucial functionalities needed to get a single view of your customers.

Do: Invest in the technology your business needs to fulfill all your goals

The best way to maintain a realistic budget is to create a data management plan and get a clear overview of your technical needs. This will help you optimize your customer data which will, in turn, help streamline your business practices.

Get rid of redundant software and invest in new, data-solidifying technology. The key is to find a sustainable way to link your existing systems holistically and to invest in the right technology for your business.

4. Structured and unstructured data

Don’t: Leave a mess of structured and unstructured customer data in your contact record

When your customers and leads fill out web forms and interact with your brand, the information enters your system in two formats: structured and unstructured data. While structured data arrives already organized, unstructured data is a little more difficult to manage and analyze because it consists of human-generated or machine-generated data like text files, video files, social media content, satellite imagery, PDFs, and sensor data.

Without a method for keeping your long-form unstructured data integrated, you’ll be stuck looking at an incomplete picture of your contacts.

Do: Integrate structured and unstructured data neatly

This doesn’t mean that you have to spend countless hours manually editing each of your contacts to your liking. There are ways to automate much of this process and prevent many of the errors and inconsistencies from happening in the first place.

For example, you can use text tagging, which Search Business Analytics says is “the process of manually or automatically adding tags or annotations to various components of unstructured data as one step in the process of preparing such data for analysis.”

5. Polluted data

Don’t: Let murky data live in your customer database

As you accrue more and more data, you’ll see an increase in information that is slightly murky or downright useless. Data is no good if it cannot be turned into actionable insights. Often, you start gathering the wrong or inconsequential data because of one of three reasons:

1. You don’t know exactly what you want to measure.
2. Various stakeholders have various interests, and it is too complicated to keep track of all of the KPIs.
3. You are not using the right filters and end up counting a lot of useless data, leading to a distorted view of reality.

Do: Clean up your customer data at least once a quarter

Polluted data will seep into every analytical aspect of your business, so it is in your best interest to sort it out as quickly as possible. Clearly document what you want to measure, consider which elements could be distorting your analytics, set up the appropriate filters to sort out the problem, and enjoy your brand new, clean database. Make sure to rinse and repeat every quarter for the best results.

An arms race for the customer

If you operate in a saturated market, you’re competing against many different companies that are selling similar products. How do you stand out? By offering a superior customer experience — a feat that can only be achieved with a clean database and a holistic view of the customer.

“Your ability to understand and respond to what’s happening in your business is mission-critical,” Ontraport CEO Landon Ray says. “Without clear data at your fingertips and the ability to act on that data quickly, you’re at a serious disadvantage.”

Want to get ahead of the curve? Revisit the customer data roadblocks you may be facing and focus on what your customers are really thinking and how you can meet their needs — even in an incredibly competitive consumer market.

The post The Do’s and Don’ts for Handling Customer Data appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

The stat they all used? Customer lifetime value , or CLV, which is a measure of how much your customers contribute to your bottom line over time.

Knowing which customer segments have higher CLVs allows you to better target leads who are like them, meaning you’re focusing your time and money on the people who will maximize your ROI, and you can feel comfortable with your cost per acquisition. Later in the customer lifecycle, knowing this information allows you to tailor the experience to meet the likes and interests of your best customers, increasing retention and referral rates.

Your CLV data can and should inform your entire CRM strategy. This one stat can be the impetus behind improving customer relationships throughout the customer lifecycle and accelerating your growth.

Calculating CLV requires comprehensive data

Despite the critical importance of this number to a business’s revenue growth, many businesses simply aren’t using it effectively. According to research by Criteo, of the 92% of organizations that are trying to measure CLV, an overwhelming majority, 66%, believe that their organization could be doing this better.

The reason? Disjointed data. Calculating CLV is difficult, if not impossible, if your customer data is spread out across multiple systems, such as your payment processor, your CRM-only tool, and your referral tracking system. The malalignment between how each system stores and measures information makes it extremely challenging to reconcile the data in a way that enables companies to draw accurate conclusions.

Without the ability to measure this crucial metric, many businesses also find it difficult to improve CLV, which consequently has a negative effect on their entire business growth strategy.
With an all-in-one CRM such as Ontraport that houses all of your customer data in one place, you can always confidently get an accurate view of your CLV. You can also easily see in real-time how CLV is affected by changes to your marketing campaigns, customer service processes, sales systems or any other factor in your business as you test new things.

How to calculate CLV

With Ontraport, you not only have access to all the data you need to calculate your CLV, but you also can generate a lifetime value report that does the math for you within your campaigns, with one click.

Before we delve into how you can use that report, it’s important to understand all the factors that go into the formula. This will also be useful if you’re still using other single-point tools and don’t yet have all your data inside one platform.

Step 1: Divide your customers into relevant segments

You can calculate CLV as an aggregate number for all of your customers, which will provide some interesting insights you can use to improve your business. But calculating it that way won’t help you identify who in the group are your best buyers. To do that, you’ll need to divide all your existing customers into segments based on relevant differences, then calculate the CLV of each segment one by one to see which group is the most valuable so you can focus your efforts on them.

How do you identify your buyer segments in a way that will allow you to compare them? You can divide your segments using the following types of information about your existing customers:

1. Demographic information

You can divide your segments according to demographic factors such as age, gender, or physical location to look for relevant differences.

Although there might be significant differences based on only one factor (for example, perhaps customers between the age of 30-40 have a 50% higher CLV than any other group, regardless of gender or physical location), the best way to narrow your focus is to combine a number of factors to develop a picture of your ideal buyer based on many different data points. For example, you might discover that a customer segment with the highest overall CLV is a 30-40 year old male who lives within 50 miles of Los Angeles.

2. Buying habits

In addition to demographic information that you have about your existing customers, you also have access to lots of behavioral data that you can use to identify profitable customer segments. For example, you can use the customer information in your database to learn about each customer’s purchasing frequency, purchase amounts and preferred product types.

Although your instinct may be to search for customers who have high order values or frequency, it’s important to look at the whole picture. A customer with a high frequency and a low order value might not be as valuable as someone with a lower frequency but a much higher order value. You are looking for the golden combination of factors, so you’d be wise to calculate the full CLV of several different customer segments with distinct buying habits and pair these insights with demographic information.

3. Referrer information

If you’re running a partner or affiliate program, or if you’re tracking referral information for new customers (i.e., by asking them, “How did you hear about us?”), you can investigate differences in CLV between customers who came from different referral sources.

Since referred customers tend to spend more and stick around longer, this is definitely worth looking into. You may just find that customers referred by one or two particular sources have a significantly higher CLV, and this will allow you to focus on your relationship with that referrer to encourage him or her to keep it up, while also identifying and encouraging similar customers to become referrers as well.

4. Lead source

In the same way that you calculate the CLV for all customers who share the same referrer, you can calculate the CLV for all customers with the same lead source. Lead sources might include Facebook ads, a Google search or an event that you attended. Basically, a lead source is the channel where your relationship with a customer or lead first began.

By comparing the CLV for different lead sources, you can more easily track which parts of your marketing are really working, and you can get clear about the exact ROI of each marketing channel.

Step 2: Calculating your CLV variables

Use the information below to find the variables you’ll need to calculate each segment’s CLV.

1. Average order value

The first number you need is found by taking the total value of sales made to a single segment and dividing it by the total number of orders placed by that segment. This will give you the average order value for a unique segment. It is important to note that one customer could buy several times in a period and each of those purchases would be considered an order when calculating average order value.

Use this formula to calculate your average order value:

Total Sales for Last Year ÷ Total Orders for Last Year = Average Order Value
$________________ ÷ ________________ = $________________

2. Average number of repeat sales

The next number you need to identify is the average number of repeat sales, determined over a set period of time — whatever makes sense for you (but it must be the same time period you used to calculate average order value). This number is simply the total number of cumulative orders made by all customers divided by the total number of unique customers. This determines how often the average customer purchases from your business in a set period of time.

Total Orders ÷ Total Individual Customers = Average Number of Repeat Sales
________________ ÷ ________________ = ________________

3. Customer retention rate

The average customer lifetime is the length of time that someone remains a customer. In order to calculate your customer retention rate, you need to know the number of customers at the end of the period, the number of new customers attracted during that period, and the number of customers at the start of the period. The equation looks like this:

[(# of Customers at the End of the Retention Period – # of Customers Attracted During the Retention Period) ÷ # of Customers at the Start of the Retention Period] X 100 = Customer Retention Rate
[( ________________ – ________________ ) ÷ ________________ ] x 100 = ________________%

4. Customer lifetime

The customer lifetime is the average length of time customers across a particular segment will continue doing business with you. In order to calculate the customer lifetime for a particular segment, you need to know the customer retention rate for each segment. Once you have that, subtract the value of the customer retention rate from one. Then, divide one by that number to get your customer lifetime value.

1 ÷ (1 – Customer Retention Rate) = Customer Lifetime
1 ÷ (1 – ________________ ) = ________________

Step 3: Putting it all together

Once you have calculated all four of these figures for a segment, it’s time to put it all together to quantify that segment’s lifetime value. Here’s how you’ll do it:

A. Average Order Value

x

B. Average Number of Repeat Sales

x

C. Customer Lifetime

=

Total Average Customer Lifetime Value

(A)________________ x (B)________________ x (C)________________ = $________________

That final number represents the lifetime value of one segment. By comparing this number among multiple segments, you can understand which of your customers are truly the most valuable.

Once you have this number, there are a few additional items you’ll want to factor in per customer.

1. Referral profit per customer

When customers refer new customers to you, their CLV increases. To calculate referral profit per customer, first determine how many referrals you earn per customer served. Say that out of every five customers within your CLV segment, one of them refers a new customer who buys product X for $100. Your referral rate is 20%, so that means that, on average, each new customer brings in a referral profit of $20.

Referrals Earned ÷ Customers Served = Referral Rate
________________ ÷ ________________ = ________________
Referral Rate x Cost of Product = Referral Profit per Customer
________________ x $________________ = ________________

If your affiliate program includes payments to referrers, you’ll need to subtract the affiliate costs you pay from the referral profit per customer. To do this, multiply the cost of your product by your commission rate and referral rate.

As an example, say that you pay 10% commissions to anyone who refers someone to buy product X for $100. Your total referral cost is $10 per customer (since it takes you five customers to earn one referral), your referral cost is $2 per customer.

Cost of product X Commission Rate X Referral Rate
$________________ x ________________ x ________________
= Referral Cost per Customer
= $________________

Once you know referral profits and costs on a per-customer basis, use these numbers to adjust your final CLV:

Total Average CLV + Referral Profit per Customer – Referral Cost per Customer = Adjusted CLV

$________________ + $_______________ – $________________ = $________________

2. Acquisition cost per customer

Since some customers cost more to attract than others, it’s important to know how their acquisition cost stacks up with their CLV. In fact, once you figure out the acquisition cost per channel, you can adjust your overall CLV equation to reflect it.

To do this, you need to figure out how much it costs you to attract one customer on a specific channel. Starting with your total spend on that channel during a set timeframe, divide by the total number of new customers brought in via that channel during that timeframe to find your cost per conversion.

Total Spend ÷ New Customers = Cost per Conversion
_______________ ÷ _______________ = _______________

Your cost per conversion tells you how much it costs you to attract a new customer, so subtract this cost from your CLV to figure out how much each customer is worth to you after the cost of advertising.

3. Hard costs per customer

In addition to what it costs to attract a new customer, you must also factor in the cost of serving that customer for a true calculation of their lifetime value. This is especially important if it costs more to service some customers than others, so identifying customer segments that use up more of your time and resources can allow your business to become more profitable.

Your hard costs calculation will differ depending on your business model, but there are two main types of costs: fixed and variable. Fixed costs remain the same no matter how many customers you serve. This might include costs such as your office rent, internet bill, insurance, etc. It’s not necessary to count fixed costs in your CLV calculation because they don’t change depending on how many or what type of customers you have.

Variable costs are what you want to pay attention to when it comes to CLV. Variable costs change depending on your business’s volume. They increase if you serve more customers and decrease if you serve fewer. A good example of a variable cost might be packaging for a physical product or perhaps labor costs for your customer service team’s wages.

Sometimes variable costs increase proportionally for each additional unit sold (as in the packaging example, assuming all packaging costs the same per unit regardless of quantity purchased). However, some variable costs are not proportionally linked to units of product sold. For example, your customer service costs: Some customers will require less assistance than others. What you are looking for is any relevant difference in cost between segments, so to find this number you’ll need to know the total cost of serving all customers within your segment (over the same fixed time period you used for all your other CLV calculations) and the total number of customers served. Then, divide using this formula:

Total Cost of Customers in Segment ÷ Total # of Customers in Segment = Cost Per Customer

Then, subtract this number from your CLV to find the final adjusted CLV taking cost per customer into consideration.

When you calculate this number for your various segments, you might be surprised to discover that one customer segment requires far more of your time and resources. After factoring that into the CLV calculation, you might even find that the segment you believed to be the most valuable in terms of revenue is actually less valuable in terms of profit, since they are far more expensive to serve.

Lifetime value reports in your CRM software

While all of the calculations above are important for understanding every factor involved in CLV, with some CRM platforms such as Ontraport, you can quickly have your CLV calculated for you within any of your campaigns.

Lifetime value report within a campaign

In Ontraport, the lifetime value report — available from the dropdown while viewing a campaign map in Performance Mode — shows the total and average amount spent by the contacts who hit any element on the map. This includes money that they’ve spent on any product throughout their entire relationship with your brand since they entered your database.

This report is very useful for tracking changes in lifetime value throughout campaigns. You can tell which elements have an effect on your lifetime value by seeing how lifetime value changes as contacts move through your funnels.

With the tracking capabilities in platforms such as Ontraport, you can also take this data steps further to compare how the lifetime value changes for different segments of your audience. For example, you can filter your report by lead source to compare the lifetime value of leads from Facebook to leads from LinkedIn. Understanding lifetime value on a channel-by-channel basis is incredibly valuable when making decisions about which channels to increase your spending on and which channels to cut back on.

Creating a lifetime value reporting map

Because most businesses use multiple campaign maps rather than one map for their entire business, you can create “reporting maps” that serve solely to capture data from each of your maps in one place.

These maps will be comprised of trigger, goal or wait elements only — no actions — and are designed to provide a top-down picture of your data.

In its simplest form, a reporting map might have just the triggers from your other maps and an “end” element after each one. You’ll set the trigger settings to “Any Contact in Account” for “Who can activate this trigger?” Any contact who activates the trigger will add to that trigger’s stats on that campaign and be part of the number of contacts displayed on the end element. Clicking the number on the end element creates a group of the contacts who are there. In the case of CLV, running the lifetime value report on this map would tell you the CLV of contacts based on which trigger they came into your campaigns from and the total CLV from all of them.

This is just one example of a reporting map that will aggregate information across campaigns; you can tailor a reporting map based on the way your campaigns are set up or based on which information is most important to you.

Using CLV to inform your strategy

It’s common for businesses that have only just calculated their CLV to find that a segment that they have been neglecting is actually worth more to their company than other segments in the long run. By paying attention to the specific customer segments that are most likely to have a high value, businesses that segment their customer base and determine the unique CLV of each segment can dramatically increase the bottom line of their company over time.

Here are a few simple ways that you can use your CLV calculation to grow your business faster:

1. Save money on marketing

Knowing your CLV gives you a reliable frame of reference to know how much to invest in marketing. For example, if you know that on average a new customer is worth $100 to your business over the long term, it’s probably a safe bet to spend $20 acquiring that person. However, a $20 cost per acquisition does not make sense if your average CLV is only $15.

You can also divide this up according to marketing channels. For example, if it costs you $20 to acquire a customer on Facebook, but Facebook customers end up spending $200 on average, that’s a great sign. You would know with certainty that scaling your Facebook ad investment was the right decision.

2. Tailor your business to focus on your most valuable buyers

Once you know exactly how much each customer segment is worth to your business, you can make changes to your business that improve the customer experience specifically for those people.

For example, let’s say that you are a business coach who has found that, although you’ve coached restaurant owners, hair salon owners, and many other types of business owners, your most valuable customer segment is a gym or fitness studio owner. You can shift your brand and even your product to primarily benefit gym and fitness studio owners. Instead of having a membership site about general small business growth, you could use most of the content you already have but focus on gym and fitness studio growth. You’d attract more people who are similar to your most valuable customers and retain them for longer.

You can also use CLV to more confidently determine the right product and customer journey improvements to make. For example, say that your CLV calculations revealed that Segment A is worth three times as much to your business as Segment B. Segment A would benefit in a major way from an improvement to your customer service processes, whereas Segment B would benefit more from a change to your product’s core functionality. You only have the money to do one or the other, so which one do you choose? CLV makes the decision obvious.

3. Reduce costs

When you know which customer segments have a lower CLV (especially because of a high service cost or high acquisition cost), you can cut back or eliminate any marketing efforts or product/service options targeted toward them. You will stop taking on low-value, high-effort customers and save unnecessary costs.

Of course, you should never intentionally withhold service from anyone, even customers who have a net negative CLV (if they happen to buy from you anyway). Provide a top-notch experience no matter what, because if their experience is negative they can do damage to your brand by leaving negative reviews or warning people to stay away. Even if a customer is not in your most valuable segment, there is still a chance that they could refer their friend who is.

4. Earn more referrals

Since customers with high CLV are more likely to become referrers, by narrowing in on your highest CLV group, you will be able to multiply your growth because the people they refer are also likely to have a high CLV. Your growth will only accelerate as long as you continue to provide excellent service to that group.

The post Why CLV Matters appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.

Crafting and executing a great marketing campaign takes a large investment of time and resources, and it’s crucial for this investment to pay off. It’s frustrating to keep investing in a marketing strategy that doesn’t produce reliable results.

Marketing strategies may take weeks or months to bring in a substantial volume of leads and, even then, you still might see missed potential or unachieved goals within your business. You’re learning that turning to questionable marketing tactics and quick-fix strategies is a speedy but ineffective way to close the gap, and it doesn’t guarantee a reliable stream of leads.

When you do get leads into your funnel, you might be noticing that many of them are either uninterested, the wrong demographic, not ready to buy, or just not qualified in general. To bring in the desired ROI, you need to redirect your time, money and effort.

You’re not the only business struggling to attract your customers’ attention.

Let’s face it, today’s marketing landscape is extremely competitive. This gives customers the ability and right to be very selective when it comes to their attention and wallets. Marketers have to offer their leads and customers exactly what they want to see, or else prospects won’t pay attention. In fact, according to The 2017 State of Personalization Report by Segment, 71% of customers on average are frustrated by impersonal experiences with businesses. However, just because you haven’t yet found the leads you’re looking for, doesn’t mean that the marketing channels you’re using are worthless. It just takes a bit of research and strategy to pull the right customers in.

Getting the leads you want doesn’t have to be an impossible task.

Hyper-targeting your marketing outreach to match exactly what your audience is looking for is the most effective way to produce high-quality leads who reliably convert into customers. By segmenting your marketing collateral to cater to varying audiences, you can skyrocket your email open and conversion rates and boost your overall ROI. According to Segmenting Your Customer Base, “Dividing your prospects and contacts into specific segments based on their interests, behaviors, demographics, stage in the buying cycle and more allows you to personalize your outreach to them, leading to better response rates.”

Why does hyper-targeting your marketing messages yield such impressive results?

Leads have different interests, pain points and desires, and they want to see personalized marketing that fits their exact needs. Generic marketing just doesn’t work anymore because it seems sales-driven and disingenuous.

Take Automation XL founder Luke Ward for example. Like many small business owners, he was using a one-size-fits-all marketing strategy and was getting dismal results. However, after implementing a process that segmented his subscribers and leads based on the behavioral and implicit information he gathered using a powerful CRM software like Ontraport, he was able to provide each contact with highly targeted content. As a result, his average open rate doubled to reach 43% and his average click-through rate jumped to over 20%, which is not only extremely impressive but also imperative to close more sales.

Segmenting your customer base will transform your marketing efforts and will help you:

• Boost your return on the marketing investments you’re already making so that you can maximize efficient use of your time and money.
• Bring in high-quality leads who are interested in what your business has to offer so you don’t waste time chasing down prospects who are a poor fit.
• Market smarter by showing your leads information that they want to see precisely when they want it.
• Gather valuable data about your customers’ behavior and interests so you can create effective and targeted marketing collateral for them.
• Identify your ideal customers and buyer personas so that you can craft messages to match your most important customer demographics.  
• Grab new prospects’ attention quickly and hold onto it so you can bring in more high-quality leads than ever before.

To learn more about how you can hyper-target your messaging to boost your conversion rates and connect with your audience on a personal level, check out our free guide, Segmenting Your Customer Base.

The post Send Marketing Messages That Give Your Leads What They’re Searching For appeared first on The Ontraport Blog.