Author: GoCRM Team

5 Marketing Automations Your Business Needs

Posted on February 12, 2020 by - Tips & Tricks

Marketing automation is a very powerful tool that can boost your marketing to a whole new level, however, unfortunately, many marketers are not using marketing automation to its full capacity and in fact, some marketers don’t fully understand the term “Marketing automation” and how to get started with it.

Marketing automation is, as the term suggests, is putting marketing tasks on the autopilot. It includes all marketing channels; email, social media, texting, chat, and even your business website.

Think of all the repetitive time-consuming tasks that marketing includes and consider the possibility of having all that work done automatically, efficiently sent to the right people at the perfect times. Sounds magical?! No! That’s marketing automation. Read on to learn the 5 very important and very basic automation to boost your sales and grow your business!

1.New Lead Auto-Reply

Having a salesperson on the watch for 24/7 to immediately reach out to leads is very pricy and hard to achieve, that’s why setting a lead auto-reply is very essential for immediate actions and for build connections with your customers.

Studies found that there is a direct correlation between follow-up timing and conversion rates. With the auto-reply automation, you can set many important aspects such as waiting time before the reply, assigning leads to a sales member, changing status of the lead-based on “open/read” action of your message and finally to get your prospects ready to the next step in your sales to funnel.

There are many channels that you can utilize auto-reply through but the most effective ones are texting and emails. While marketing automation software can take care of sending the message to your leads, it’s your task to make sure that you have set the right filters including days, hours and waiting time and putting time into crafting a catchy and personalized welcome message with a clear call to action such as scheduling a call.

2. Lead Re-engagement

Cold leads, or basically people who were interested and then stopped answering follow-ups or those who said “I will think about” and never got back to you should not be forgotten about. While your sales team might be busy with your hot leads and busy with trying to get people who signed up for a trial or a demo call into paying customers, the marketing automation software can take care of cold leads re-engagement for you.

A great marketing automation software will save you the time and auto-filter the leads for you to find the cold leads and directly creating “segment” for them.

Again, when creating the automation, timing is very important. Set the best hours that are believed to offer higher chances for your email to be read and avoid Mondays so your email doesn’t get lost with the weekend backlog.

Make sure your template is personalized and that you understand the cold lead needs and aware of where they last stopped in your sales process.

3. Customer On-Boarding

Congratulation on winning the deal and converting your lead into a customer! Now real work starts. That’s right! The real first impression that customers take about your business is your on-boarding process and your customer service with no marketing or sales fancy phrases anymore. It’s now your business talking for itself.

Using automation is critical to make these first moments of your customers interacting with your business fun, interesting, and worthy of their time and money.

Create a workflow with a lovely welcoming process that offers clear instructions of all steps they need to be aware of and will face. Be a step ahead of them and guide them with all necessary video/article tutorials to make the most out of your service/software.

Using automation to take care of all accounts and invoicing related topics is also very important to save your time and make sure nothing slips.

Don’t forget about checking on your customers regularly and make sure they are happy with everything and willing to continue. Customer onboarding is your customer’s first experience that really counts. If you get it right, you will reduce churn and even win yourself great reviews that will help you bring in future business.

4. Internal team-cooperation automation “Assigning Leads”

One essential aspect to lead a successful business is to have everything organized and in the right place. Automation can be used to internally help your team boost their performance and not just with your leads and customers.

Creating a workflow for your team to be on top of their tasks, assigning them leads and filtering leads for them based on location, available hours or leads score. All this and more can be done through automation with triggering reminders and setting tasks to make sure your team is not missing in any detail and making the most out of their time.

5. Birthdays and Anniversaries

Let’s face it, this automation will be easily figured out by your customers, but it will still leave a smile on their face. It brings a friendly touch and it reminds churned customers of your business. You might want to use this Birthday wish or Anniversary celebration to add a call to action such as check our new updates, or by offering a promo code to enjoy a discount or an extended membership.

There are thousands of possibilities to utilize marketing automation to best serve your business needs and your goals, but you want to always make sure you got “first-things-first” and starting right with basics must-have automation that will help you get your business running successfully and growing immensely. Are you ready to automate your business? Sign-up for your GoCRM Free trial and join our Automations beta today!

Promotional or Transactional SMS – What’s Better For Brands?

Posted on September 13, 2019 by - Marketing, Sales

Transactional & Promotional Text Messages Comparison

Promotional Text Messages vs Transactional SMS Texting – What’s the difference and benefits for brands?

How can your business take advantage of modern text messaging tools? Brands, organizations or businesses send promotional text messages to their audiences to:

  • Drive sales or awareness about specific products, services or events; or,
  • Follow up or automate customer interactions.

As expected, there are important differences between promotional and transactional text messages. It’s crucial to understand these differences to execute better marketing campaigns.

What’s a promotional text message?

Example of a promotional text message

Promotional text messages are messages sent to promote, up-sell or advertise a product. Promotional text messages are pure marketing & sales messages. These messages abide by traditional phone call etiquette. Promotional messages limit to a 9 am/pm time frame.

Outside of adhering to opt-in procedures, promotional text messages are not solicited.

What’s a transactional text message?

Example of a transactional text message

Transactional text messages are messages sent to already registered customers/audience, namely to continue an interaction. These messages are not for promotional, sales or marketing purposes. Their goal is passing transactional information about an interaction, of a product or service your customers are already using.

Regardless of a customers’ DND (Do Not Disturb) status, transactional messages work 24/7. Disclosure of message frequency does not apply to transactional texting. Nonetheless, consumers should be made aware of how to unsubscribe from them.

Best practices for promotional texting

Heavy fines can incur if an organization starts sending promotional messages to users who have not provided consent. Thus it is important to understand the best practices of promotional text messages.

Promotional texting five best practices are:

  1. Your business can’t buy a list of consumer’s contact information.
  2. If a brand wants to send out promotional messages, the brand must first obtain permission from recipients.
  3. SMS opt-in text messages, web-based signup pages, or a physical signature are all valid permission formats.
  4. Recurring message programs must be disclosed to subscribers.
  5. How to unsubscribe from recurring message programs should be communicated to recipients.

Promotional vs Transactional messages examples

Here are some examples of how promotional vs transactional texting compares:

Comparison of promotional vs transactional text messages

Text message marketing stats

Still hesitant about the potential of text messaging in your marketing communication program? Here are five SMS marketing stats to get you enticed.

  • 75% of consumers agree to receive messages from brands (if they’ve opted-in).
  • 90% of text messages are read within 3 minutes.
  • SMS messages have a huge 98% open rate.
  • Text messages have over 200% higher response rates than email, phone or Facebook.
  • Consumers redeem coupons received via SMS 10x more than other forms.

Benefits of a robust text messaging marketing and communication program

The benefits of having a robust marketing communication program are immense. A professional text messaging service for your business can help you:

  • Send SMS text promotions to your entire customer base with a few clicks.
  • Shape your business by collecting critical feedback with mass surveys to customers.
  • Reliably and quickly communicate with your mobile workforce in the field.
  • Send alerts to your staff on important safety and security procedures or events.
  • Distribute discount vouchers or coupons to your customers directly on their mobiles.
  • Send transactional information such as text message notifications & alerts to all staff.
  • Send & attach menus, posters, flyers or other files in bulk to your customers and staff.

Manually texting your entire customer base is time-consuming and daunting. GoCRM can help you create marketing campaigns that include transactional and promotional messages. Not only will you be able to automate these features, but you will be able to track and follow-up accordingly. Learn a better way of doing business. Try GoCRM today!

Real Estate CRM With Text Messaging

Posted on July 31, 2019 by - Marketing, Real Estate CRM

CRM Text Messaging is a profitable way for Real Estate businesses to communicate with clients and prospects in real-time

Real estate text marketing serves an important purpose. It cuts down on the turn-around time. When buyers, sellers, and real estate agents stay in touch on-the-go, closing deals become more efficient and profitable.

Text marketing offers three main advantages:

  1. Texts are sent and received swiftly
  2. Texts are opened and read in a flash
  3. Texts stay in the inbox longer than email

Real estate customers openly favor text messaging so much that almost half of the messages receive a positive reply from them. The wait in-between is just 90 seconds on average. In a bleak contrast, if four real estate emails are sent out, clients are likely to open just one.

Real Estate Text Messaging – A Game of Time

Real estate text marketing is here to say. It works on principles of social communication and time management. You need not live and breathe technology to make use of text messaging.

Seamless communication throughout the sales process

Real estate brokers who use mobile devices like phones and tablets can seamlessly adapt to text marketing.

Besides creating texts for customers, using a CRM can give you the advantage of automated messages and responders. You will never miss an important response from prospective buyers and sellers.

Whether it’s a new listing on the block or a comprehensive free-of-cost report, texting keeps your customers invested every step of the way. Coupled with images of the property or location, or a video tour of their next new home, SMS marketing for real estate adds a personal touch hardly matched by other means. Texting draws the customer in deeper and heightens the likelihood of their doing business with your firm.

Better engagement with all parties involved

One of the easiest ways to sustain customer interest is to consolidate the process and make it easy for them to engage with you. When combined with a complete and in-depth customer relationship management (CRM), text marketing can get streamlined.

There is no need to toggle between multiple platforms, misplaced data and incur extra charges. Automation is the present and GoCRM serves marketing automation on a platter for lead conversion and closing more sales.

Top reasons why a CRM with text marketing works wonders for real estate

1. The finest text marketing platforms are also the most user-friendly and even novice clients can utilize them to their advantage.

2. Text messages add a friendly touch to customer interactions and they are more social than emails.

3. Text marketing with a CRM helps you better plan your texts, keep your customers engaged and stock up on unique solutions to common problems.

If the above is not enough, consider as many as 40% of prospective buyers choose texting to connect with brokers. It is no surprise text messaging has emerged as the preferred mode of communication in the real estate industry.

Clearly, the benefits of text marketing in real estate cannot be overstated. Having a solid system that monitors and tracks all these messages is a no brainer. That’s why is important to consider a real estate CRM system that relies on text messages as its core. With GoCRM you will be able to create an immersive experience for your clients and develop a blueprint for your future business plans. Sign-up for your GoCRM Free trial