Top 12 Benefits of Contact Management
Contact management and networking are an integral part of any business development plan. The ultimate goal is to retain customers and cater to their needs and requirements via up-selling and cross-selling. As a result, streamlining and organizing contact data plays a crucial role. Gone are the days where organizations store contact data in spreadsheets and emails. Upgrade from these traditional, time-consuming processes to cloud-based data storage facilities. How exactly do you do that? The one-stop-shop solution to your contact data management problems is contact management software.
CRM and Contact Management
Contact management software is best leveraged when combined with the power of CRM software. Manage relationships and interactions with prospects and potential customers with this powerful combination of CRM and contact management. Apart from contact data management, CRM offers several other benefits such as marketing, sales, and service automation. Contact management software offers cloud-based data storage capacity, which allows you to automatically update information on the cloud. This is possible because all the data is stored in a single database on the cloud, hence updated information is instantly available to every person in the business. CRM software comes with built-in contact data management, which makes it easy for users to access the full potential of the combined power. It is easy to use and saves time and dime automating several business processes.
According to Business Wire – “With a return of $5.60 for every dollar spent, investing in CRM is a no-brainer. Further, that investment has significant staying power. As vendors add social, marketing, analytics, and mobile access capabilities to their offerings, organizations have an opportunity to gain even more returns from CRM.”
All About Contact Management
How do you decide if contact management is necessary for your business? In a growing business environment, leads multiply and customers increase on a daily base, ultimately giving rise to the need for contact data management. Streamline and document data of incoming leads and potential prospects with contact management software. Furthermore, contact management software helps you close deals faster by automatically saving the entire purchase history of each contact in the database. Indeed, contact management is an integral part of CRM automation.
Contact management software organizes and stores contact information such that, any department in your organization can access data 24/7. It further simplifies the management of deals throughout the sales pipeline. Automate your emails and track customer information from a single platform. Contact management in CRM gives you a 360 view of customer information, activities, communication history of the customer, and more on a single system. Being a cloud-based software, your sales team has the liberty to access information from anywhere using any device. It helps you store and access client data with much ease while you’re on the go.
CRM automation easily transfers the data from emails to contact database management. Any person who has been contacted by the sales reps and has shown a positive response is known to be a lead. A lead turns into a contact, directly when the lead expresses interest towards your products or services before converting into a deal. Nurture these leads throughout your sales funnel to convert them into paying customers.
Contact management software seamlessly integrates your sales and marketing teams on a single platform to significantly increase customer conversion rate. It creates a common database which is used for communication purposes with all the necessary contact data information such as name, address, email, phone number, call notes, follow-ups, and many more. It helps you reduce lead leakage and pushes your contacts towards the sales funnel. It eliminates the duplication of contacts and updates your contact information more efficiently.
According to GetApp Lab, just over half of the existing small businesses are using an online calendar to schedule appointments with ease. Contact management system offers an easy-to-use tool to manage your business information and customer profiles online in the most streamlined and efficient way possible.
A contact displays a person’s name, title, phone number, email, and other business information and documents gathered from past interactions with that contact. You can also tag contacts with specific characteristics to indicate what that contact means to your business. Contact management plays a vital role in every company’s success. Efficient contact management software can significantly increase the productivity of your business.
The purpose of contact management is to streamline the process of organizing customer contact information effectively. The contact management software makes it easy for organizations to store and retrieve contact information in an orderly fashion.
Contact management software in CRM helps businesses with their marketing efforts. It is easier to access call records about prospective clients, which help you make informed decisions which aid in converting prospects into customers. Every interaction with a customer can now be tracked, using the CRM software. you can enable reminders such that you’ll never miss another follow-up. Contact management software keeps everyone in sync, automatically.
Benefits of Contact Management Software and CRM
1. Create a centralized platform for contact information
As your business expands, the number of customers increases and to keep track of multiple contacts from different platforms can be a challenging task. Contact management software imports contacts from various online and offline sources such as email, landing pages, social media, spreadsheets, etc. It also helps you export contacts from inside your CRM to other sources. It allows you to scan business cards and automatically pulls contact information into your CRM.
2. Build long-lasting customer relationships
CRM stores a massive amount of customers’ information which includes demographic and geographic data, such as name, location, gender, age, and more. CRM tool tracks each customer activity and stores this data in the CRM for future reference. For example, every time a customer opens an email, visits your website, subscribes to your email list, and purchases a product, this information gets automatically updated in the CRM. The information gathered is helpful to marketing, sales, and service teams to get a detailed view of the customers’ profile, including their purchase history.
CRM helps you interact with prospects, leads, and customers on a personal level. Contact management in CRM helps you focus on increasing loyal customers by building a trust factor within your buyers.
3. Cost reduction
Since the rise of the CRM industry, this product has been sold like hotcakes, especially to small and medium-sized businesses. What is so lovable about this product anyways? CRM software aims at reducing business operating costs by eliminating the need for manual labor. How does it do this? The CRM system has built-in sales, marketing, and service automation, which automates several business processes, eliminating the need to pay employees. It offers all-in-one automation, which saves you purchasing cost for multiple systems.
4. Improves customer satisfaction
Customer satisfaction is a vital element for any business, aiming to increase business revenue. Contact management in CRM allows you to view the complete history of the customer with your business. By automating business processes, you can align your team to perform better by correctly utilizing the free time to interact effectively with your prospects and customers. It is easy to use CRM for delivering better customer experience, which would never have been possible without a CRM in place.
5. Quick reach for information
Contact management and CRM software provide transparent analytical reporting, which helps you identify any issues to improve performance. Contact management software gives complete information on contacts anytime, anywhere. CRM provides a centralized contact management database for the entire company to store and share contact information available to all the users.
Accessing a centralized platform to share customer interactions is crucial for keeping all the employees on the same page. For a quicker search, the robust search bar technology pulls the entire record of customer’s past interactions when you search for a contact by name or email address.
6. Improves data management
When the contact information is stored in spreadsheets, you may face the risk of human error during the data entry process. Using CRM, all your contact data is automatically stored in a single platform, accessible to all. When new data information appears in web forms, it is automatically updated to contact database without the intervention of human errors. All the members of the team can have access to data stored in a centralized platform.
7. Improves customer experience
Contact management software has all your customer’s information, which helps you understand your customers’ interactions (likes, interests, and preferences). Great customer experience drives high customer satisfaction levels. Through contact management software, every employee in the organization can access and update customer information to reduce repetition. Impress your customers with quick and efficient responses to enhance customer satisfaction. Storing all your customer information on a single platform helps you access necessary information in a jiffy, which ultimately results in exceptional customer experience due to a quicker first-response rate.
8. Increase return on investment
Contact data management offers deep insights into customer behavior. CRM software delivers timely reports on market trends, and customer activities, which help you put together a winning sales strategy. Customize your sales and marketing campaigns to your target markets and maximize the return on investment in less than no time. Target your customers with the right messages to promote up-selling and cross-selling strategies.
9. Track customer information with robust web analytics
The exciting part of any business is to learn more about your customers. Contact management software gives CRM insights into customers and prospects of web activities. Analyze your customers’ interests and get a complete report along with real-time alerts. If the prospect has spent more time on your web page, he/she might be interested in your product. Prepare a customized campaign to urge these interested prospects to purchase your product or service. You can offer a special discount to hurry up the sale.
Web analytics in contact management can display which page the customer has visited, time spent on each page, on which page they left the website, the customer’s location, etc. It allows you to target the right content to the right set of audience.
10. Integration with social media
The cloud CRM can be used to analyze social interactions and conversations of contacts on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and other social platforms. Contact management software can give an organization a real-time view of all their customer interactions. Social media interactions guide you through what customers have to say about your product or service and give you a chance to get involved in the conversation and respond to their queries. Integrating contact management with social media helps you enhance your product features.
11. Increases sales
The most effective sales strategy involves getting in touch with the right people at the right time. Contact management software enables your sales team to pull all the right contacts and send group emails, which increases the chances of converting a sale. Businesses benefit from a centralized cloud-based contact management system due to its flexible usability, and round the clock accessibility to crucial business data, which exponentially increases sales.
12. Contact management automation in CRM
To ensure that the process of contact management becomes efficient, profitable and cost-effective, you should ideally automate the entire process to a single automation system, capable of performing all activities related to contact management.
For example, The automation system can perform tasks such as contacting a potential customer at regular intervals, automatically updating new lead information, and pushing emails to inform prospects about various offers and discounts and simultaneously asking for their feedback. You can also automate post-sales services to ensure your customers stay happy and satisfied.
Bottom Line
If you are missing deals because you didn’t follow-up or forgot to call or send an email to a potential client, then contact management software is the best solution you can ever ask for. It elevates collaborations, increases productivity, raises the level of satisfaction among your customers, adding up to faster revenue and better business growth.
Now that you understand the power of CRM software with built-in contact management, we urge you to take the first step towards the betterment of your organization. If you aren’t already a CRM user, today is the time to start.
