Do you wish your business had more leads coming in? If the answer is yes (which it should be), then today is your lucky day. In this article I'll explain five ways to use your CRM system to generate leads.
If you already have a CRM then no harm no foul, you might as well get your money's worth. If you don't have a CRM, and are interested how to start, read the What is CRM article.
Every business needs leads, without leads your sales team would have nobody to try and sell, and your business would have no new customers. Leads are vital for all businesses, and keep the wheels turning.
According to Lean-Labs, some lead generation services charge on average $11,000 per month. For that kind of money it is worth investing your time upfront to get leads for free down the road.
Send Email Campaigns
Many CRM's offer Campaigns, a feature to manage your marketing campaigns. However that feature does more than just organize your marketing data.
In Snapforce CRM, the Campaigns module allows you to send email blasts to 100,000 emails per month, and tracks the activity of each campaign you send. The activity it tracks include which recipients open your emails, click on your emails, which emails bounce, the reason for the bounce, and many other data points.
This type of monthly volume is unheard of in the email marketing industry. For example Constant Contact charges $20 per 10,000 emails. That means you can use your existing CRM system and send ten times the number of emails without spending any extra money.
Capture Leads With Web Forms
Most CRM systems in 2021 include a web forms feature, that lets you create web forms that you can paste onto your website. You can create a web form to capture leads from your website, just paste the web form html snippet onto your landing pages.
Any visitors to your landing pages that submit their information on your web form will automatically funnel into your CRM.
Many of these web form features offered by CRM systems provide easily styled forms. They provide ways to easily change the color, input field size, font size, and other web form styling to match your website's look. There is no web design experience required to use this type of feature.
SMS Marketing
Many CRM systems offer sms marketing functionality. Allowing you to send an sms blast to all of your old leads to try and stir up some leads.
In order to use this type of feature, the leads in your system must have mobile phone numbers. You don't want to mistakenly send these messages to a home phone number.
In Snapforce when you send sms messages to leads and customers, any reply messages they send automatically show up in their activity timeline. You can also reply back to them as well, and manage the entire message thread right from within the lead record.
Create Surveys
Setting up surveys is a great way to engage with potential leads and website visitors to capture contact information of your visitors and learn about their needs and wants.
If your CRM system does not offer a feature to create surveys and manage them from within their system, they may integrate with a third party survey system. Some of these third party services are Survey Monkey and SurveySparrow. Both of these services can be integrated with Snapforce.
It is also possible to post surveys on your social media accounts like Twitter and Facebook. When people answer these surveys the results can be sent to your CRM, with the people's contact information that answered them.
Live Chat Tool
A live chat tool is a great way to drum up new leads. Visitors to your website usually are looking for answers to their questions quickly. According to the Nielson Norman Group if visitors to your website do not find what they're looking for within 15 seconds they will leave and look elsewhere.
Some CRM systems offer live chat features that provide you a javascript snippet that you copy and paste onto your website. The benefit with this is that any chats you have on your site automatically create a new lead in your system and allow you to chat with the visitor right from within the CRM.
If your CRM does not offer this feature, they probably offer third party integrations with Live Chat services. Some of the third party Live Chat services that integrate with Snapforce include LiveChatInc. and Zopim.
Conslusion
To get the most out of your CRM it requires out of the box thinking, and there are many ways to accomplish this. We just discussed five of those ways to use your CRM system to generate more leads.