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Tools to Grow Your Business from Anywhere and Everywhere

Jun 16, 2020

“Growth is never by mere chance; it is the result of forces working together”. James Cash Penney, Founder of J.C. Penney Stores.

Almost every single business owner out there wants to grow their business. While some like Mr. Penney achieve phenomenal success, some not so much. So, if you too are wondering how to grow your business rapidly, merely planning about it is not enough. You need to put together tools to grow your business and make those tools work in sync (like forces working together). In today’s world when your audience expects real-time personalized communications, putting in place some critical tools to grow your business is the key to success.

So, let’s see which are the best tools to grow your business that you can implement and leverage today!

Essential Marketing Tools to Grow Your Business

Marketing no doubt is one of the most critical activities for your business. While your overall marketing mix can comprise of several activities like paid digital advertisements, search engine optimization, point of sales promotions, traditional advertisements on print and televisions, etc; you must identify tools that let you run your marketing activities as smoothly as possible. A tool-driven approach here makes your marketing more personal, effective, and measurable.

So here are some awesome marketing tools to grow your business!

Email Campaign

Email campaigns are still one of the most cost-effective and measurable forms of digital marketing. In fact, according to a study, personalized emails deliver 6X higher transaction rate. Sounds interesting? If you already have an email list for your audience, then all it takes is to implement the right email campaign tool to reap the benefits.

Here’s how you can truly leverage an email campaign tool to grow your business:

  • Personalize the emails. And this goes way beyond addressing your audience by the first or last name. Don’t send emails en masse. Separate your audience by their preferences, interests, latest activities, and send personalized targeted emails. This way your emails will be more relevant and interesting.
  • Educate your audience with drip campaigns. Accordingly, to a study conducted in 2018, the human attention span is a meager 8 seconds. More shockingly it shows the tendency to decrease by 88% every year. So, how do you share complex concepts or information with your audience? Here drip campaign could be your savior! With the right email campaign tool in place, you can create a set of effective emails that share information, ideas, training, etc at a regular interval. Whatmore, every time a new person joins the list, they start receiving the emails from the very beginning. This means, once you have set-up the drip, it goes on auto-pilot!
  • Measure success effectively. With the right email campaign tool in place, you can measure success (like open rate, click rate), gather valuable insights, and make your communication more effective. Plan your campaign, measure success, learn from it, and repeat!

Live Chat/Chatbot on Website

Having a Live Chat functionality is perhaps the most important feature that you can offer your audience on your website. In fact, a study conducted by Forrester suggests that a whopping 53% of customers are likely to abandon their online shopping cart if they cannot find a quick answer to their questions. The ability to interact in real-time often mimics the familiar offline shopping experience where customers can walk up to a sales rep and get the information they need.

Now, one of the major reasons for shying away from implementing a tool this useful is TIME. Most businesses (especially small and mid-sized ones) find it difficult to be active on the Live Chat console throughout the day. Here a ChatBot can be of much help. In fact, a study conducted in 2019 shows customer satisfaction goes up 7% when the chat starts with a bot.

AI-powered chatbots that can answer questions, offer information, and if needed transfer the chat to a human agent could drive up your website interaction significantly.

Join our upcoming webinar on 18th June on how ChatBots can improve website interaction to know more. Register here.

Social Media Marketing

Did you know nearly 54% of social browsers use social media to research products? While social media presence may not always lead to direct sales, it goes a long way in building awareness and brand recognition.

But, the problem that most businesses face is consistency here. To be successful in social media, one has to be consistent. Regular updates about your products and services, offers and discounts, or even simply sharing information and greetings will take your brand awareness to the next level. Here also TIME becomes a crucial factor. Here, an effective social media marketing tool that lets you schedule your posts across channels can be of great help.

Sales Tools to Grow Your Business

Sales is, without a doubt, the life-blood of any business. This is why it is crucial to have tools in place to streamline your sales process and identify areas that can bring in more revenue.

So, here are two essential Sales tools to grow your business!

Customer Relationship Management (CRM)

This is inarguably the most important tool that you can use for your business. And businesses across the globe have realized this. The staggering growth of the CRM industry is proof of that. In 2019, overall CRM usage has increased from 56% to 74% globally.

Here’s how a CRM helps you in growing your business.

Centralize Your Database

CRM centralizes your database like no other tool. One of the major problems that businesses face while working out of the spreadsheet is inconsistency and inaccessibility. With data lying on individual desks, it becomes difficult to read and leverage it.

The fact that 74% of businesses who use CRM see measurable improvements in the accessibility of customer data proves the point.

Better Understanding of Customer Journey

CRM lets you see your customers’ journey into the sales cycle. It is especially true if you have an average to a long sales cycle. In such scenarios, it is crucial to keep track of where the customer is in their purchase journey. Without a system in place, this intelligence is often scattered in multiple spreadsheets and inboxes.

Centralize Activities

Like most businesses, if you too have to keep track of different activities such as meetings, visits, follow-ups, etc, it is essential to have a centralized view of the same. While individual team members can often manage these activities with their personal calendar or planner, without a CRM in place managing team activities and raising the flag if one is not complete becomes difficult.

Centralize Communication

Emails are till date the most effective mode of business communication. However, today with hundreds if not thousands of emails hitting your inbox, it is super easy to lose track of communications with particular leads and customers. With a CRM system (integrated with your email account) in place, you would never have to worry about this.

Now that you know how CRM helps you in growing your business, there’s one thing you need to keep in mind.

CRM is not a magic wand! Just implementing it does not ensure business success. Yes, you read it right! In fact, multiple studies over the years have shown the failure rate of CRM implementation is somewhere between 30% to 70%. So, for successful implementation, you need to keep certain points in mind.

  • Go for a tailored CRM system that mimics your business process. Most CRM tools available off-the-shelf are horizontal systems. Trying to use a horizontal CRM system without customization will only lead to usability issues. The solution here is to either go for an industry-specific CRM system like a Travel Agency CRM or Real Estate Agency CRM; or to tailor your CRM to fit your business process.
  • One of the major reasons for CRM failure is adoption. Any system no matter how great it is will fail to add value if you are not using it properly. Therefore, you must ensure acceptance and adoption among your team members from early on. The best way to do this is to identify influencers within your team and let them work actively with smaller groups.

Robust Reporting

Increasing your sales is all about reading your data properly and gather intelligence from there. So, it is essential that you have a robust tool that lets you view your data more comprehensively. Connect your reporting tool with all your marketing and sales systems, and you could get actionable intel on every aspect of your business.

Support Tool to Improve Customer Satisfaction

Customer satisfaction is the best marketing strategy. ?

And it affects your bottom-line quite directly. In fact, even a 5% increase in customer retention can increase your sales by 25%.

So, the question is how to increase customer satisfaction?

Speed and regular updates on resolution are the cornerstones for creating customer satisfaction. No matter what industry you are working in, this holds true. Here, putting in place a support tool that lets you centralize all support requests (from email, phone, or support portal), assign them to relevant teams, and keep the customer updated on progress can make a world of difference.

Last Words…

As mentioned at the beginning of this (long) article, business growth is often the result of forces working together. So, if these tools for business growth are the forces, they must work seamlessly for creating a unified system. Going for tools that are islands of excellence may not be the right choice here. Instead, look for unified solution platforms like Zoho One Suite of Applications that brings together all the essential tools under one log-in and lets you create an integrated system that propels your business growth!

Want to know about how you can leverage Zoho One Suite of Applications for your business growth? Let us help you! We have implemented Zoho One for hundreds of businesses across the globe and helped them see a measurable growth in their business. If you too are looking at implementing tools to grow your business, we would be happy to get together for a 1-hour No-Obligation session with you to understand your business process and suggest the tools you need. Click here to book your session with our Zoho One experts today!

 

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