What is a CRM?
If you’ve been in business a while, chances are you know what a CRM is, and you know you need one! For the newbies, here’s a quick overview. A CRM is defined as Customer Relationship Management. It’s a collection of tools and applications that help manage your relationship with your customers. This is important for small businesses, because every lead matters. Therefore, being caught up on each lead, and being able to understand their stage in the customer life cycle, will greatly help improve the function of your business. Your customers are priority, and CRM makes your connection with them stronger. Making them happy is what counts.
CRM and Small Business
Don’t be afraid by these terms if you don’t know them! Business owners have always kept track of their clients. Back in the day your CRM would have been a huge notepad! You would make your sales calls, or go knocking door to door, or spend money on marketing, and then you would track everything through the magic notepad. Then the notepad turned into an excel spreadsheet. And as cloud technology was born, the excel spreadsheet grew up and we shifted into the CRM.
Cloud technology has allowed for a major boom in CRM, meaning that is as accessible and learnable as ever. If you are old school, don’t be scared by it. They are simple to use, and will far outpace your notepad or spreadsheet.
CRM’s have increased small business ROI by an average of 5%, and 6 out of 10 small businesses are using their CRM for email marketing. Most businesses report a growth in the customer base. As well, lead costs have gone down around 23% on average for businesses, with a 300% boost in conversion rates. Need I go on? It’s truly remarkable what CRM can do for your business.
In 2008, only 12% of businesses used cloud-based CRM – This figure has now increased to 87%!
Here are 5 ways CRM’s improve your small business:
- Make a stronger connection – CRM’s allow for you to follow up on customers at different points of interaction with them. For example, they expressed interest in joining your newsletter. Hey that’s a lead! But, where is the conversion to being a customer? CRM’s can manage your relationship with that customer. Send them personalized emails, based on what you think will get the best chance of conversion
- Efficiency – Keeping track of all your leads in ONE place. That’s right, one place for you to understand where they are at in the customer life cycle. This makes you more efficient, spending less time organizing and scrolling through your excel spreadsheet or notepad. As well, most CRM’s allow the creation of landing pages meaning that ALL of your digital marketing is now within one platform. How much time will save you? DAYS!
- Customer Understanding – Why do some of your customers react differently to your marketing activities? How come someone looks at your emails, but doesn’t follow through on your call-to-action? Sounds messy doesn’t it? Well CRM fixes all of this. You’ll understand who is reacting to your activities, and who isn’t. This allows to understand your customer better.
- Lead Automation – You can now automate your following up. Yes, you heard me, no more phone calls or writing out emails. You can create automation in your CRM. For example, someone signs up for your webinar, but doesn’t buy your product or service. Maybe they’re unsure, or thinking of going with someone else. Well now you can email them automatically, a day, or week after following up with them. Maybe something has changed, and they are now ready for the sale!
- Ease of Use – When I got started in business CRM’s were pricey, and hard to use. The interface was not very user friendly. The good news is they’ve come a long way in the last 5 years. You have more options, and better features right at your fingertips. And, companies have realized our need for simplicity, and training! It’s never been easier to use a CRM in your small business.
Different tools offered by CRM platforms
- Contact Management – As described above, CRM’s allow you to manage your leads. See if they’re cold or hot leads, and categorize them. All in one place!
- Email Marketing – A great CRM will allow you to send email campaigns. For example, managing your newsletters, and other email activities, can be done through the CRM
- Landing Pages – Is WordPress to difficult to navigate? While you can create landing pages on WordPress, you want those landing pages plugged into your CRM. This will allow you to manage all of those leads from your website.
- Marketing Automation- If you have the right CRM, it will tell you who to follow up with and when. Based on client behaviors you can trigger things like thank you notes, specific email campaigns, or even sales offers. You can truly create a relevant experience for your clients.
- Lead Generation – A great CRM should allow you to create forms on your website, and emails that will allow for users to opt-in. This allows for everything to be in ONE place! Don’t you love CRMs already?
- Shopping Cart – Instead of having to integrate your shopping cart, your CRM, and your website, you can have your shopping cart reside inside of your CRM. It makes it just a little easier. When someone purchases a product, it can trigger a fulfillment sequence. Nothing falls through the cracks.
- Affiliate center – Want other people promoting your products and services? Affiliate marketing is a great way to systematize your referral system. The affiliate center makes it simple and easy for your clients to send new leads your way.
What’s more is that CRM’s can increase your customer base, sales, ROI, and customer service. From ONE place! Are you ready to chow down on our favorite CRMs?
CRM’s
To rate each CRM, we will grade it on four different metrics:
- Price – we will look at the monthly and yearly cost, to see if it makes sense for small business owners
- User-friendliness – Examining how easy it is to go from a notepad or excel sheet, to using it’s features
- Product Features – We will look at what the best features each platform has
- Overall – We will look at the whole package and grade it based on the categories mentioned above
- Hubspot
Price: B+
You can start using Hubspot for free. Yes, for free. It’s a pretty sweet incentive. It’s probably the best intro to CRM that you can get. The free version of Hubspot allows for:
- Customer Management
- Lead Flows
- Contact and Company Insights
The packages get more features with the paid versions. For $50 a month, you will get the features above and as well:
- Removal of Hubspot branding
- Custom Form Fields (for lead generation)
However the more powerful features that one would desire comes at the $200/month cost.
These features include:
- Email Campaigns
- Social Media Management
- Landing Pages
- Call-to-Action
User-friendliness: A+
Hubspot is probably one of the most user friendly CRM platforms out there. Everything is very easy to navigate. Using the dashboard, you can find your different needs. There’s a contacts tab, within there you can easily manage contacts and your communications with them. You can also see your landing pages and forms in the content tab. The email builder is sleek, and easy to use. Followed by the landing page builder, being very well laid out and easy for a novice to understand. That might be too much functionality for your small business at one time. However, overall, Hubspot is pretty user-friendly!
Product Features: A+
Hubspot has it all if you have the money to spend monthly. It can be basic as, managing your lists in a fantastic user experience. To create emails, you just go to the email tab and you will see your email campaigns. Followed by building you sales funnel by helping you build landing pages. You can also track holistically your sales funnel. And even more, it will check your website’s SEO for how it’s ranking, and what opportunities you can take. The last feature which we want to mention, is the connection to social media. You can manage conversations and mentions across all of your social media channels through Hubspot, but it will come at a price!
Cost: C
True it starts out free. But as soon as your list size starts to grow, the cost increases pretty rapidly. For example at 10,000 contacts you would be paying $1250 per month for the marketing hub and another $400 for the sales hub. Compared to some other platforms, it’s a bit pricey. But we can’t argue with the “you get what you pay” adage. They have built a very user friendly and intuitive platform.
Overall: B+
Try out Hubspot for free here. It’s a fantastic CRM to start off with. The basic packages will allow for you to gain an understanding for CRM. You can start importing your contacts, and managing from their. However, probably the best feature that Hubspot is its flexibility between SEO, email, website, and social media management. If you can pay for the professional version, it will be well worth it!
- Infusionsoft
This is our favorite CRM, and the one that we use at Amy Walker Consulting. It’s one of the industry heavy hitters, because it’s packed full of features. The customer support is out of this world, and a really great resource for beginners. An easy introduction to CRM!
Price: A-
While there is no ‘free-CRM’ version of Infusionsoft, its features are more affordable than Hubspot. Infusionsoft’s starting price is $79 a month. That doesn’t include all of the features Infusionsoft has to offer, but it does give you full marketing automation. Infusionsoft also grows with you and as your list size increases, you will notice the price of the services stay cost effective. For example, using all of Infusionsoft’s features with a list size of 10,000 your cost would be more like $300 a month. That’s a great price for a full service CRM software.
User-friendliness – A-
The pro and con of Infusionsoft are the same. It can do SOOO MUCH! It’s a very robust program, and while it is very learnable, it will take you some time to learn, understand and utilize all of the features. Fortunately Infusionsoft gets top marks in customer service and training. Everything is categorized beautifully into three categories: CRM, Marketing, and E-Commerce. This allows for you to navigate around quite quickly. In the email campaigns under marketing, you can see which contacts responded to your emails and which haven’t. Also you can see which leads are cold and which ones are hot. Not to mention the insane amount of resources available to you. They have an ‘Infusionsoft’ University, and as well a fantastic customer service. Where they will walk you through the steps to do whatever you need to do.
Product Features – A+
So many little goodies on Infusionsoft! One of my favorite features is the CRM, contact management. You can apply tags to different contacts, sort them into different segments. This is incredibly useful for building your sales funnel. You want to be contacting people with the right messaging, based on the lead score that you give them. As well, Infusionsoft, has a great landing page builder. Using templates, or building your own, it will allow for you build highly converting landing pages, without too much of a hassle!
Overall – A
It’s our favorite software for a reason, it’s simple enough to manage our business leads, through email campaigns, landing pages, etc. While it doesn’t have the SEO or social media features, like Hubspot, it’s more affordable and reliable for small business. Check out Infusionsoft here
- Mailchimp
Have you already heard of Mailchimp? It’s probably one of the crowd favorites. It began as a powerful emailing tool for different organizations. It’s strong point is creating beautiful emails and understanding the analytics behind your email campaigns. Not to mention, that you can now build facebook ad campaigns and landing pages on it as well. If you love emailing, this might be for you!
Price – A+
Mailchimp is pretty affordable. They have a ‘Forever-Free’ version that is zero cost. The limitations is your email list. Past 2,000 contacts, you will have to pay monthly. But for starting off, this price is great.
User-friendliness – A
The first time I opened up Mailchimp, it all made sense to me. I saw where I can create emails, and manage my templates. Building out emails is easier than ever, Mailchimp is the industry standard for email marketing. You can choose a template, or make one from scratch. However, it’s super easy. You build by blocks, filling them with content. The great feature is that naturally, through Mailchimp, your emails will look great. The only draw back, is that building landing pages and ad campaigns is slightly more difficult, and you can tell the platform isn’t optimized for these purposes. But you can still use it form online forms and such.
Product features – C
Mail Chimp is kind of a one trick pony. As I have mentioned, emails are Mailchimp’s quid pro. It’s the best thing that Mailchimp does. You can manage contacts as well, and sort them into segments. Marketing automation is also really cool, and easy to do. In addition, you can create landing pages, and facebook ad campaigns from the same function as email creation, but it is not as intuitive as the email builder. Mail Chimp does not have an affiliate center, the ability to run your social media, tools for running your sales system, or many of the other features we love. Hence, the rating from us.
Overall – B
If you’re focused on email campaigns, Mailchimp is a great place to start. It makes marketing automation quite easy, you can build nice emails, and is user friendly. However, as a full CRM system it’s lacking. Landing page creation is kind of tricky and not intuitive like Hubspot or Infusionsoft. The same goes for Facebook Ad Campaigns, which is great, but doesn’t improve over Facebook Ads Manager. Therefore, Mailchimp gets a B+ for its price and user friendliness. Learn more about Mailchimp here.
What’s the right CRM for you?
When choosing the right CRM for your small business, evaluate the features, price, and user friendliness. These three elements will which CRM to go for. For example, you just started your home business and have 50 leads. Sign up for Mailchimp, and begin managing them and interacting with them through beautiful emails. Or maybe your business is already going and you have 100’s of leads. Then probably Infusionsoft might be for you, build out your sales funnels (landing pages, email campaigns, etc)
Hopefully this has made sense to you. If you want to learn more about what will power your small business to the next level, sign up for our newsletter here.