In the past, we've talked about using your customer intelligence to improve content marketing. This article digs in further at how you can be generating more website traffic with SEO by leveraging your CRM data. Businesses rely on online visibility to attract new customers and connect with existing ones. Today, search engine optimization (SEO) remains one of the most effective ways to solidify a business's digital presence by ranking high in search engine results.

According to data from StatCounter, Google remains the search engine market leader at 93% of search traffic as of January 2023. Bing is the closest competitor with 3% global share while Yahoo!, Yandex, Baidu, and DuckDuckGo share the majority of the remaining 4% search traffic.

You can find out about your website's search engine traffic in your Google Analytics under the Acquisition reports and changing the dimension...

While we are huge fans of using a customer database tool such as Zoho CRM for your business, one of the biggest pain points can be CRM analytics and reporting. After you and your team have gone through the process of dutifully inputting data and keeping things up to date, how do you measure sales and marketing success?

This article aims at preparing CRM users, especially those using Zoho CRM, for how you can slice and dice your data to make the most of your CRM analytics. 

What is your goal for CRM Analytics?

Yes, this may initially seem like a silly question but we promise it is important. When we've asked clients this question, often there is a long pause. Sometimes the client will tell us they need to think about it more and get with the team. Why? Frankly, people know that data analytics is important but without a goal in mind it's just a bunch of...

Have you considered the hygiene of your CRM Data?

Yes, dirty data could be a major problem in your organization. Maybe you have been doing some spring cleaning around the house. Well, it's also a good time to give your CRM data clean-up. 

Clean, organized, and accurate data is essential for the success of your sales and marketing efforts. This is the data you use for personalization of your marketing campaigns and automations. 

How Does Your CRM Data Get "Dirty" to Begin with?

"Dirty" or bad data is information in your CRM that is inaccurate, duplicate, missing, outdated, or simply input in the wrong format. These are the most common ways for your CRM to have "dirty" data.

1. Information gets outdated every year... 

• 40% of email users change their email address at least once every two years
• 20% of postal addresses change each year
• 18% of phone...

What is your business doing to have a successful holiday season and wrap up the year nicely? 

We have a few ideas that may help you think about the joyful to-dos for your business this December. 

1. Send Personalized Cards

Yes, this is a no-brainer on your holiday to-do list as a business that cares for its customers. However, the important word in this to-do is "personalized." 

Whether you send a printed card, a gift, or even just an email, the important part of the experience for customers and partners is personalization. No one wants to feel like another number in your rolodex. Make sure they know that you know who they are and that they matter. 

Yes, there are semi-automated ways of doing this (if you really cannot afford the time). However, I emplore you (specifically B2B companies) to make time to think about your customers / clients. Aim to...

This is the fifth and final article in our business and marketing automation series. If you missed the other articles, we recommend checking them out too. Here's what we've talked about so far...

1. Sales Team Automations in Your CRM offers some specific ideas for automations you can setup to help your sales team close sales faster and make them work more efficiently. 

2. Email Sequences talks about the smart ways to use email automation that help your business and how they compare with email templates. 

3. Marketing Automations in Kajabi is a unique topic for our community interested in hosting online courses and using that platform. 

4. Automating Accounting and Bookkeeping shares automation ideas (mostly in the Zoho Finance Suite) to make your life easier. 

 Invest in Nurturing Client Relationships

What if you could...

Clever Email Automations to Engage Prospects and Customers

Email Automation Vs. Email Templates

Before jumping into the list of CRM email automation ideas, first we should identify whether your email SHOULD be automated or not. 

Both email automation and email templates are great tools. It's important to know how to use each one based on what you need to accomplish.

As long as your CRM data is clean, you can draw upon the information you have about prospects and contacts to send customize emails and deliver highly relevant information using email automation. This means that you and your team are vigilant about keeping things up to date and entering information in the correct data fields.

One way to gather clean information from prospects and customers is to quiz or survey them. Keep it simple. A few questions you could ask are: how did they hear about your company in...

These useful CRM Automation Ideas will help your sales team close deals faster

CRM automation is all about using software to automate your sales and marketing activities. You can automate the repetitive tasks in your business such as emails. Sales teams especially need automation for efficiency as well as creating more personalized experience. 

This is the first in a series of posts about automation workflows for marketing, sales and operations. Think about the sales team members who complain about having to enter information into the CRM and track their activities. 

How do you get your Sales Team to use your CRM?

1. Mindset First.

As the leader, you have the obligation to set the tone for how your team members view your CRM. It is a tool for understanding trends, business development, and measuring success. If you can explain that value to your entire...

You Don't Need Third-Party Cookies

Let's be honest, third-party cookies have become the creepy "big brother" of the advertising world. Learning about the deprecation of cookies from yet another browser wasn't all that surprising with the rise in digital privacy. 

Finding customers without third-party cookies is easier than you think. It begins with your customer data platform.

First Party Data

If you are stressed about the change in third-party cookies, there is a glaringly obvious direction to go... first party data. 

First party data is the information your business collects directly from your customers and prospects. This is data that you own. Usually, a business will gather this data from phone calls, emails, surveys, and buying history.

Let's discuss this a little more...

A not so long time ago, marketers spent a high degree of energy on collecting data from...

If you're shopping around CRM software, then you'll want a checklist of the most important features to include. Maybe our little list of "must-have" CRM features will help you decide which platform is best for you. We've used a ton of different CRM software over the years. Beckmann Collaborative settled on Zoho CRM for ourselves and many of our clients. However, you may find another platform such as Keap or Hubspot is a better fit for your business. 

10 "Must Have" Features in a CRM

1. EASY TO LEARN

Depending on your level of comfort with technology, you and your team may find different user experiences easier than others. For example, people who have previously used Salesforce or SugarCRM in enterprise companies often like Zoho in a small business. On the other hand, if you want something that has fewer features and can covers most basic needs such as...

What is your marketing automation strategy?

We often get requests to automate steps in a sales or marketing process. Sometimes it's because the sales guys don't have patience to "deal with" tracking their leads. It may be to avoid missing updates and details. 

Marketing automation can be a very smart tool for things like updating a field to reflect an update a Lead Status or generate a reminder task to follow up. However, there are the requests that cause me to shake my head and ask, "Is that really a strategic marketing automation? Or are we being lazy?"

This post offers you a few ideas for useful, strategic marketing automations that you can set up in your CRM, email, or marketing automation software. And if you have questions about how to do it, feel free to contact us and we can schedule a free consultation to discuss what you...