One of the best ways to measure how efficient your business can be is to compare its revenues to that of its expenditure. If this difference is low profit, the business may not be growing. Applying analytical metrics to the business’ customer satisfaction, customer retention rates, repeat purchases, etc., can guide the way to pinpointing what needs to change within the working process or business offerings. Research has shown that businesses that try to perform every task on their own whether in-house or those that are outsourced, exhausting marketing activities, tend to have slim profits.
Therefore, experts have agreed that the best way to streamline activities that are draining is to use technology to automate such processes.
Software such Enterprise Resource Planning or Customer Relationship Management CRM and Marketing
Automation have been proven to impact revenues while outgrowing their competitors positively:
1. Enterprise Resource Planning:
Using ERP is one of the quickest ways to simplify operations and drastically cut down time taken by employees to manually organize, store and analyze data. With new technologies such as Internet of things, big data, and cloud computing, ERP has become even easier to setup and operate seamlessly.
2. Marketing Automation:
With huge amounts of data in the form of lists and segregations, marketing automation serves to undertake all repetitive tasks within the marketing department. Though similar in many points, CRM and Marketing automation are not the same. Activities such as collecting lead data from your business website, blog or social media page, which is subsequently used to create lists that fit into different segments. This is one such tedious and repetitive task.
Matching emails to each list and keeping in touch with these leads is another task and even updating social media pages regularly and finally performing analytics on the wealth of data such as predictive analysis and marketing metrics are just a few of the tasks that are efficiently handled by marketing automation. Studies have shown that 53% higher conversion rates (leads to customers) are experienced by firms that use marketing automation software.
3. Customer Relationship Management:
The stage of marketing that entails a great deal of face to face interaction with potential customers is the Sales phase where the lead is accompanied into becoming a customer by a sales team member. Data regarding the potential customer, previous history of interactions between the potential customer and the business, etc., are all documented and can be pulled up instantly by the sales team member through the CRM software. CRM, therefore, does not itself handle sales activities but is used extensively by the sales team almost as a virtual assistant. Research has shown that 63% of companies that use these softwares outgrow their competitors.
The effectiveness of Marketing Automation, CRM, ERP, etc., is unmistakable. It’s our recommendation that businesses should not turn a blind eye on these areas as the savings in cost and time, as well as the increased revenues, must be gained to thrive in business today.
