Email Marketing - A Chimp's Play :)

Why do you need a CRM?

6 ways your brand can be a part of more than 300 billion pieces of content every day

Its startling to know that since 2014 there are approximately:

• 294 billion emails sent every day,
• 6 billion Google searches each day,
• 44 billion new people join Facebook every month,
• 45 billion facebook messages are sent every day,
• 40 Million Tweets shared each day

Incidentally, there are ways your brand can leverage on this online chatter for marketing initiatives towards a custom audience. Here are 6 ways to do it:

1. Blogmint: Blogmint identifies itself as Asia’s first automated influencer marketing platform that connects brands with social influencers. It helps brands connect and engage with over 10,000 Bloggers, Vloggers (video bloggers) and Micro-bloggers to create powerful social and video content.  
   
   Blogs quite impact the purchasing decisions of consumers during the research phase of product evaluation. Blogger influencing and detailed analyticsprovided by Blogmint ensure that your brand awareness or product launch campaigns are an online success
2. Indieblogger: IndiBlogger.in is a congregation of more than 30,000 Indian bloggers. It acts like a LinkedIn for bloggers with an exclusive dashboard, and activity feeds that let them track other blog posts, and more.
   
   With its blogs IndiBlogger helps brands build more trust and credibility amongst netizens. Starting with their first brand engagement with Microsoft through a blogger meet in 2007, they have worked with brands like Samsung, Pepsi, HUL, Castrol, Cleartrip and Tata Docomo for various online engagements through their blogger network
3. Blogadda: It is a platform for bloggers to connect with each other, showcase their blogs and participate in interesting activities. They engage bloggers by having handpicked blog posts being featured every week, curated content, contests, funny tweets etc . BlogAdda has partnered with companies like Tata Motors, Renault Duster, P&G, Colgate Palmolive, Yash Raj Films, and others for influencer marketing campaigns through its blogger community
4. Fromote: Fromote defines itself as India’s first online marketplace of influencers present on various social networks such as facebook, twitter, linkedin, youtube, etc. 
   
   Brands post their ad campaign as a project on Fromote and select the target market demographics for the same. Influencers from the appropriate demographics bid for the project and the same are reviewed by the brand. Once the scope of work is fixed with the right influencers, the brand then leverages upon their network by paying a nominal fee.
5. Adfluenz: ADFluenz identifies itself as an online marketing platform whereinfluencers collaborate with brands to co-create the trendiest content.They have an algorithm that automatically matches an influencer’s interest with the brand’s campaign present on the website to facilitate an interaction. For brands, they have a CPIA (Cost per Influencer Action) Metric to understand which influencer works best for them
   
   They also claim to be developing a social score which will be based on the quality of the influencer’s current social content and the engagement they are receiving on social channels.
6. GetEvangelized: GetEvangelized aims to be a platform that will help thought leaders, influencers and micro celebrities on social media discover digital endorsement opportunities from relevant brands and agencies. Currently, theyenable brands to engage with twitter influencers through custom packages starting as low as Rs.5000 for a single campaign.

If you are looking for further information on a targeted influencer marketing campaign for your brand, lets connect over a cup of tea.  You can reach me on sonesh@cmooutsourced.com

How to use a million abusive customers to develop goodwill for your brand?

“Very poor customer service. I called twice to customer care to know whether my new plan activated on my postpaid number or not? But they are saying that they do not know anything. Also very rude staff.”

A brief glance at any leading Telecom player’s facebook brand page would reveal similar voices of disgruntled customers spewing venom on their facebook pages. Similarly the Banking and Airline Industry is also plagued by frequent online rants of dissatisfied and sometimes disgraced customers. The apparent virality promised by these social mediums adds fuel to the fire and spreads the ire to sometimes unmanageable proportions.  So how do these industries tackle their supposedly tarnished online reputation before things get out of hand?

Social Media Business Intelligence tools like Simplify360 enable businesses to analyse social media conversations in real-time. By using these tools, leading Banks, Telecom Players and Airlines have managed to decrease their FTR (First Time to Response) time thus decreasing the spread of negative sentiments around the brand.

These tools can automatically classify social data with respect to sentiment, demographics, region, gender, topics, intent etc. The technology is available to users through an intuitive web interface where users can manage all their social media interaction platforms – Facebook, Twitter, Linkedin etc through a single dashboard. The platform can help you carry out the following:

• Publish content to all your social media properties from a single dashboard
• Listen to conversations around your brand happening in cyberspace (social media platforms, blogs, discussion forums etc)
• Provide real time customer support for queries being posted on your facebook and twitter brand pages. You can create a workflow to let the queries be managed by the right member of your support team and track their responsiveness in real time.
• Conduct targeted marketing campaigns towards your customers by understanding their detailed demographics and psycho-graphics through the social profiling capabilities of the tool. For eg, Just by inputting the email ids of your customers, the tool can scan their social media profiles and give you an insightful social map of their activities and interests which can be leveraged by you for targeted marketing campaigns.
• Find prospective leads for your products and services by listening to online chatter around them on social media platforms and connecting with the prospects in real time. For eg, you can search and listen to people who have generated interest in your product/service on twitter and connect with them directly. Such leads can be shared with your sales team as well through the platform which has capabilities to integrate with your CRM solution as well.
• Track your competitors activities on social media channels and compare your audience engagement levels with that of your competition

There are many more insightful ways one can use Simplify360. Do drop me a message to know more about how it can help your business do targeted marketing campaigns, generate leads and manage customer support.

How to do your Monday morning sales review without your sales team?

“Let me confirm with my national sales head about the most recent additions to the lead pipeline”, the CEO of a SME logistics firm said in a meeting with me. We were discussing about developing high impact marketing collateral's for improving their lead generation initiatives. After trying to reach the National Sales Head for the next 5 minutes, he apologized and said that he will discuss the latest sales figures later. While he apologized, I was smiling in my head about the umpteenth such interaction I had been privy to in the last few months. So here is a company with a sizable annual turnover but no streamlined sales and support processes in place. No wonder, an independent study states that the CRM software solutions market in India is around Rs.1600 crore currently and is only poised to grow exponentially.

Time and again, I have come across SME businesses in India who haven’t considered graduating from excel sheets for managing their sales pipelines. The result is a plethora of excel sheets floating around in emails across the hierarchy and no one has a single view of their communication with the customer. This is where the right CRM solution can change the way you conduct your business for good.

Coming back to my meeting with the CEO of the logistics firm, I suggested them to strongly consider implementing a CRM solution for their sales process. They hired me for evaluating the right CRM solution for them and help in the implementation process. During ongoing discussions with their team, I realized that its not just the sales process which was plagued with inefficiencies but even service requests by clients were mismanaged due to improper documentation and tracking. Hence the search began for a CRM software system which could effectively streamline these processes.

I evaluated Salesforce, Zoho CRM and some local CRM vendors and finally implemented Zoho CRM considering their scalability requirements and budget.Since most CRM Solutions these days are cloud based offerings, implementation isn’t time consuming and SME organizations can start using the service from day one post signing up. To ensure that the sales team is updating the CRM system regularly with their leads, their weekly sales reviews started happening directly from the CRM solution. Infact, the CEO had a view of the complete sales pipeline even when he was travelling and wasn’t able to conduct the sales review in person. Due to real time transparency in the sales pipeline, the top management’s intervention in the sales process increased which ultimately resulted in a 20% increase in sales closure effectiveness in the first month of implementation itself.  The CRM solution also helped them improve their customer support process as all the queries were now effectively tracked from origination to closure.

On a recent Monday morning, I got a call from the CEO to discuss some ongoing marketing initiatives. I casually asked him how come he wasn’t busy with his customary Monday Morning Sales review meeting. He replied that those days are passé as he no longer needed the sales team to be physically present for the review post the CRM implementation. I was smiling in my head again. This time for a job well done :)

After reading this article, do connect with me if you think you would be interested in having a discussion on improving your company’s sales, marketing and service processes :)