If you’re like many small business owners, you’ve probably heard about CRM, which stands for customer relationship management. A good CRM tool can help simplify the way you do business by allowing you to keep everything in one place, saving you valuable time and money. But you might think,
“Why do I need it? What’s it going to do for me?”
Glad you asked! Here are some ways you can determine if your small business needs CRM.
Your contacts are not all in one place.
In a perfect world, consumers reach out to your business via phone, email, or through your website. So keeping track of them is fairly straightforward. But what about the ones who reach out to you in less conventional ways?
Say a potential customer reaches out to you on Facebook or calls your cell, because your aunt gave them your number and told them how awesome your business is. Those are harder to keep track of, and you don’t want to lose out on a potential opportunity because their information got lost or you forgot to follow up on it.
If keeping your contacts organized in one easy-to-find place sounds appealing, that’s one sign your business needs CRM . Bonus points if it has a mobile app, because you can add people to your contact list even when you’re on-the-go. How convenient is that?
Communicating with your customers is overwhelming.
Let’s say you’ve got your contact list organized. Now you’ll want to engage with those clients and make sure you stay on their minds. They all have different needs and wants, so sending them blanket emails or texts isn’t the best approach. Instead, it may cause them to start ignoring you. So how do you customize your email and text campaigns without it taking up all of your time?
With a CRM, you can group customers in different ways, such as by interest, purchase history, or birthday, so you can send them something they’ll actually want to read. For example, if you own a plant nursery, you can email only your group of customers who grow tulips about a special on tulip bulbs. Or if you want to schedule an email to only customers who have birthdays in April and offer them a birthday discount that month, you can do that, too.
A personalized email increases the probability of client click-through by 14%, and conversion by 10%. So it’s a good idea to make your emails more relevant to your clients to decrease the chance they’ll get deleted. If your emails aren’t generating the business you want, a CRM may be just what you need.
You want to easily manage your social media profiles.
People live on social media these days. It only makes sense for small business owners to use the various platforms available to connect with and engage consumers. Perhaps you’ve got a Facebook page, Instagram and Twitter that you’re trying to keep updated. Without a doubt, your business needs CRM if the idea of having to separately manage all these profiles sounds overwhelming.
Sharing photo and video content in addition to posts and links doesn’t have to take all day. Not only can most CRM systems help you do this, but they can also push your content out all at once. This eliminates the need to go to each social profile individually.
Pro tip: It’s not enough to post it and forget it. Responding to people who engage with your business on social media is extremely important. When people ask questions or share their experiences with you, you should reply promptly.
You might think keeping up is an impossibility, but it’s far from it. A CRM can give you the ability to see and keep track of conversations on your social platforms. You’ll create better brand awareness and a better customer experience.
Your appointment book has too many holes.
Take a look at your appointment calendar. See any empty slots? Those empty slots are lost time, and as you’ve probably heard many times before, time equals money! Maybe you had a couple of cancellations, or you had a customer no-show. And now it’s too late to fill those slots. (Bummer.)
Let’s face it. Life happens, and sometimes an empty slot can’t be avoided, but that doesn’t mean you can’t put the odds back in your favor. You just need the right tool. And you guessed it — your business needs CRM.
Automation is your friend. It can cut the time you and your staff spend calling your customers about their appointments. If you run a nail salon and recommend your clients come in once a month for a pedicure, CRM allows you to not only send appointment confirmations, but also schedule follow-up reminders when it’s time to come back in. Your customers will appreciate it and will reward you with their loyalty.
You want to accurately measure your success.
There are many types of marketing software that help you organize your customer data and marketing campaigns. But how clear a picture do they paint of what it all means? Logging into multiple systems and trying to make sense of the information is time consuming. It may not give you the high-level view you need to make decisions. And it’s also a big clue (if not the biggest) that your business needs CRM.
Being able to manage client communications and marketing campaigns in one place is just one benefit a CRM can provide. You can also view insights that show how your campaigns are performing. This way, you’ll know what’s working and what’s not. Additionally, you can track actionable items like client follow-up reminders, so you stay on top of your tasks.
If any of these challenges sound familiar, it’s time to look into a CRM like Thryv to help grow your business and keep it running efficiently. With Thryv, you can organize your contacts and manage campaigns and social media in one location. Plus, you’ll get the stats and analytics you need to get an accurate picture of how your business is doing.
