As a technologist, rarely is any one technology BETTER than other – per se.
I think it’s really about what is best for YOU and what you want to do.
Well here’s how I see the world of “CRM” – customer relationship management software.
You probably already know what email marketing is all about.
Mail Chimp, Campainger, Constant Contact, Vertical Response and others are email marketing solutions. These are awesome solutions when you want more of a transactional relationship and to “touch base” using a static email newsletter. All small businesses need these solutions.
A customer database is also important.
So many business owners use Excel to store their customer records or nothing. Others use a database like Filemaker Pro, Microsoft Access, Quickbase or other solutions that let you store basic records. Of course contact management tools like Act, or Outlook Contact Manager are used as well.
When you want to go beyond just email marketing and a static customer database, CRM is the next step!
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) – such as Infusionsoft (and others like Salesforce, ZOHO, SugarCRM, BatchBook, etc) work to categorize your information (clients, prospective clients, etc) into a central database so you can better keep track of who’s who and more easily share this information with a team. You can know who bought what, where they are in your sales funnel and other information your CRM system can often tell you.
Infusionsoft goes a step further than many small business CRM systems and provides an ALL IN ONE solution which includes email marketing, landing pages, web forms, analytics, sales and opportunities and more. Infusionsoft’s differentiator is the marketing campaigns you can build.
These campaigns are “personalized automation” so that you can automatically reach out to your customers to get them to buy more or refer business to you. Or the campaigns can help you reach out to your prospective customers to NURTURE them until they are ready to buy.
With Infusionsoft’s automation links, recipients of your communication (especially email) can craft their OWN story of what further information they want to receive from you – depending on what they select. Hence, Infusionsoft is automated, but personalized!
Think Infusionsoft’s CRM is for you? Ready to take your business to the next level?
It’s pretty amazing. Instead of spending time trying to SELL – you let Infusionsoft do that and you spend more time with customers, or just closing deals or with your family 🙂
Think this is something that might be for you or for a client?
See an Infusionsoft demo here.