As a cloud-based platform, Salesforce continues to rein the CRM space as it occupies a market share of around 20 percent. It is indeed the most popular and widely adopted CRM system due to the vast array of valuable features and functionalities offered by the platform. What makes it unique and one of the most preferred platforms is the release of new products and features year after year.
With several new releases and acquisitions back and forth, Salesforce has come a long way. With such an evolution, users of Salesforce technology should learn to stay ahead of the curve. Instead, customers need to understand how they can use technology to increase business ROI, which significantly impacts the bottom line.
Listed below are some great features that can help organizations optimize their Salesforce implementation for mitigating costs incurred due to customer and employee churn. It is always a good option to seek support from a reliable Salesforce consultant to know more about these features:
Lightning Page Performance: This powerful feature allows users to deal with inconsistent lightning pages that aren’t optimized while working in a Salesforce org. The Lightning page performance is built natively into the Lightning App Builder responsible for doing all the analysis. This feature provides analysis about the performance of the pages on desktop/ mobile while providing tips to enhance performance and user experience. By benefitting from the Lightning Page Performance and optimizing the placement of the lightning component, end users can accomplish their duties much quickly and efficiently while dealing with the urge of distractions while opening multiple pages to fulfill their daily tasks.
In-App Guidance: This feature assists employees with reminders, tips, and gradual walk-throughs to help them navigate the system appropriately. This feature can be configured to display a floating message or a prompt message in the utility bar. To measure the effectiveness of your implementation, data about the interaction of employees about guidance messages is recorded. This feature provides resources to users even before they recognize the need, thereby increasing the company’s ROI. This not just saves time but also improves efficiency. With supporting resources, and efficient workflows, employee morale is increased, and productivity is optimized.
Salesforce Survey: For an organization to improve their ROI, they need to understand where the opportunities for enhancement are. Shortcomings usually exist in lengthy sales processes, product-related issues, slow response time, and more. However, identifying the bottom of the matter is necessary for implementing change. To understand customer experience regarding their products and services, organizations can directly gather customer feedback by using Salesforce surveys. This feature is endowed with a wide array of functionalities and the ability to automate the sending of the survey, customize email templates, and more. By gathering and analyzing survey results, organizations can better serve their customers.
Social Studio: This feature is leveraged by organizations to connect with prospects and customers on social channels such as Facebook, Linked In, Twitter, and more. Eventually, this feature connects the sales, marketing, and service teams with their customers, enabling employees to develop meaningful relationships with customers and communicate with them on a common platform used both inside and outside of the workplace.
Social Studio allows organizations to identify what prospects/ customers are speaking about the company, respond and track prospects as leads, and much more.
With Social Studio, data-driven insights can be gained, which provides a deeper picture into how your customers engage with your social strategy, which can lead to enhanced lead generation and sales opportunities with the likelihood of maximum closure.
Final Words:
Businesses are seeking ways to save time and money by removing operational bottlenecks. The cost incurred as a result of employee and customer churn as a result of poor customer experiences can be alleviated by optimizing Salesforce and making the most of all the great features. To know more about these robust features, make sure you get in touch with one of the best Salesforce partners.
In this technology-driven era, businesses are leveraging technology solutions to stay ahead of the race. One such technology solution leveraged by companies to streamline their business processes and customer relationships is robust CRM software like Salesforce. In fact, Salesforce being a cloud-based CRM, enjoys enormous popularity and a wide adoption rate. Apart from this, it also offers a wide array of useful features, functionalities, and tools that are designed to resolve the unique issues of different businesses.
One such tool is the Salesforce community cloud that enables organizations to create branded web portals for connecting customers, employees, and partner engagement. In other words, it helps to build branded communities for seamless collaboration and streamlined business processes. By leveraging the Salesforce community cloud, organizations can launch communities for their partners and customers. Through these communities, organizations can create a channel of collaboration and communication for their stakeholders. It is essential to get in touch with one of the most Salesforce partners to know more about this platform.
Salesforce community cloud offers several benefits to the businesses adopting it. Listed below are some reasons why it is a must-have for organizations today:
Build Customer Community: The Salesforce community cloud allows customers to engage with company representatives and other fellow customers within an online community while providing them with customized solutions. It provides customers with access to tutorials, forum threads, articles, FAQs, and more so that they can seek answers to their questions and become self-dependent. They can buy products and connect with other users to share their experiences.
Enhanced Customer Experience: The online community cloud offers multiple self-service options such as articles, FAQs, etc. on the portal to be accessed by customers, thereby making them feel empowered. Customers can seek resolution to their issues through continuous service and support. All this translates to enhanced customer satisfaction as customers get a platform to collaborate and communicate with each other. This creates a strong connection between the company and the users.
Reduced Costs: Since custom templates and third-party apps are pre-built in the community cloud platform, creating customized in-house solutions is done away, resulting in cost savings. Apart from this, the cost involved in resolving a customer's ticket in the absence of useful information can also be saved. With a robust tool to manage organizational processes, organizations can save plenty of employee time, which otherwise might get wasted in analyzing disparate sets of information.
The robust cloud platform can help businesses develop a good relationship with their customers and employees who can act as brand champions later on. This can help them save money, which they would otherwise spend on encouraging brand stories across different portals.
Product Improvement: It is possible to create customer, employee, and partner communities, acting as a research hub. By gathering and analyzing communicating data, meaningful insights regarding customers, partners and employees can be gathered. Customers can have access to the answers to the most frequently asked questions. It has also been observed that marketing leaders can seek help from online communities to manage their customer relationships online.
The Bottom Line:
In a nutshell, it can be inferred that Salesforce communities provide organizations the space they need to reach their business objectives regardless of what they are looking forward to, including improved customer satisfaction, increased sales, and employee inclusivity. In short, organizations can make things complex or straightforward with such a high degree of customization. The software can seamlessly be integrated with the existing systems as it is highly affordable. It is prudent to partner with one of the best Salesforce Consultants to implement the software successfully.
Creating and sustaining a memorable customer experience is necessary for organizations to survive today’s competitive business world. Compared to yesteryears, an average buyer’s journey has drastically changed, with consumer expectations evolving steadily. Today, with the advent of technology, marketers have access to marketing automation tools that help automate repetitive tasks while augmenting the efficiency and output of marketing and sales teams.
What is Marketing Automation?
Marketing automation is the usage of the software that organizes the activities of a marketing campaign such as social media, emails, blog posts, and more, thereby making these tasks more manageable and less time-consuming. Marketing automation empowers marketers to create an ongoing, one-on-one cross-channel journey that provides a connected customer experience. One of its primary purposes is to deliver the right content, to the right customers, at the right time while nurturing their trust in the brand.
Apart from this, marketing automation helps in tracking and analyzing customers’ behavior, as well as their buying patterns. This data can then be leveraged to segment target audiences for delivering personalized messaging.
Benefits of Marketing Automation
There are several benefits of marketing automation for businesses. It helps organizations to stay relevant while keeping up with the demands of their customers. Benefits of marketing automation software include the following:
Improve the Efficiency of Marketing Team: Once your team gets introduced to marketing automation basics, it becomes easy for them to create and manage automation campaigns. In fact, sending targeted and relevant messages to their targeted audience becomes possible. This helps organizations to improve their customer experience.
Increased Customer Retention: Organizations can connect with buyers seamlessly through multiple channels by leveraging marketing automation tools. Organizations can keep their customers engaged all through their buying journey through relevant content. If a buyer gains an excellent shopping experience purchasing from a brand, they will likely become a brand loyalist.
Personalization: Marketing automation empowers brands to create a tailored and unique experience for every customer. This increases engagement and boosts sales.
Increase the Average Purchase: One of the significant benefits of marketing automation is growing the average purchase. This can be done by cross-selling and upselling after buyers have finished their purchase by recommending compatible products or offering some perks.
Find Bottlenecks: Marketing automation helps organizations to identify bottlenecks in the process, thereby making operations efficient.
Keep the CRM Active: Apart from gathering data from various sources, marketing automation works the other way by enriching the CRM data by adding its actions to their accounts. This makes operations more customer-oriented and improves customer management.
Convert Better: Prospects come to know about your brand through various sources. However, only a part of them turns into buying customers. However, with a marketing automation tool like HubSpot in place, the conversion rates increase significantly as a robust platform keeps customers constantly engaged.
Final Words:
Embracing marketing automation isn’t just about assuaging your marketing department from executing repetitive tasks. Instead, it is all about optimizing the customer experience, the efficiency of the campaign process, and the marketing team’s time. To make the most of a marketing automation tool like HubSpot, you must seek HubSpot Consulting from a reliable service provider.
The business landscape, especially the internet marketing industry, has become highly competitive. As the internet continues to revolutionize the way we find, sell, buy and interact with brands, it's evident that marketing is transforming on a fundamental level. Today, the traditional and intrusive marketing tactics are losing their luster, and new models of inbound marketing are gaining momentum by providing value to customers.
While the benefits offered by inbound marketing are endless, organizations should address some common challenges that might prevent them from realizing the benefits:
Incomplete Strategy: Inbound marketing strategy is all about attracting qualified leads and turning them into customers. As a result, you need to create a strategy that is built around the clear personas of your buyers while having in place a plan of action for each stage of the buyer's journey. For instance, if you're willing to do social media marketing, you'll have to recognize the social sites that your prospects are utilizing while creating a posting schedule. With clear strategies in place, the challenges of inbound marketing can be eliminated or reduced.
Sufficient Resources: Inbound marketing is all about producing relevant content consistently, which requires an ample amount of time and resources. The success of your inbound marketing can be inhibited if you do not have the necessary time and resources to push your marketing rigor.
Persona Alignment: It's essential to ensure that your inbound marketing and content strategy aligns with your target audience. When you curate content specifically for your target audience, the content required can be reduced. When you narrow down your search, you place quality over quantity, thereby helping you reach your potential customers. Besides reaching potential clients, you will generate qualified leads, collect insights, improve engagement across different channels, and create a great customer experience while maximizing your ROI.
Proper Marketing Tech Stack: One of the primary challenges faced by marketers practicing inbound marketing is the lack of appropriate resources. It might be challenging to choose the right tool that best meets the needs of your business. It's important to work smarter while selecting the tools that need to be integrated into your overall strategy. In fact, without a marketing tech stack like a CRM, marketing automation tool, analytics, email marketing tool, CMS, etc., it isn't possible to run an inbound marketing strategy. Choosing the right tools like HubSpot can enable your team to take your marketing to the next level by automating manual tasks, aligning sales and marketing teams, streamlining processes, and more. It makes sense to seek Hubspot Consulting from a reliable service provider.
Low User Engagement: If you are witnessing poor user engagement even after having the right tech, time, resources, and strategy that matches your buyer personas, then you might wonder if something isn't right with the strategy. Rather than throwing it out of the window, make sure you check your website. One of the significant challenges of inbound marketing is a poor website experience, which is evident through the high bounce rates and low on-page time. A poor website experience can be due to poor mobile optimization, website design, and user experience.
Misalignment of Marketing and Sales: One of the common challenges faced by organizations is the misalignment of sales and marketing teams, as each one of them has a different viewpoint. To get traction in your inbound marketing strategy, you must focus on aligning marketing and sales teams.
Final Words:
These are some of the challenges that need to be addressed to pave the way for a successful inbound marketing strategy. However, overcoming all the challenges doesn't ensure that you would be able to grow your website traffic, generate leads while converting them into paying customers instantly. It's essential to have realistic expectations that are well-aligned and set up-front. Though inbound marketing challenges can be difficult to overcome, it's worth all your time and energy. However, if you or your team find it difficult to manage everything on their own, then you must consider getting in touch with a reliable HubSpot Implementation partner.
Every marketer has a common goal of attracting more and better leads. However, the cut-throat business landscape has made it challenging for marketers to get qualified leads that can be converted to sales. The answer to this is a marketing methodology called inbound marketing that has transformed the way marketers drive quality leads to their websites.
As a robust and cloud-based CRM (Customer Relationship Management) platform, Salesforce enjoys widespread popularity and adoption rate. Besides the wide array of features, functionalities, and components, Salesforce releases new products and features year after year, which sets it apart from its counterparts.
Consequently, those leveraging Salesforce must learn to make the most of this robust platform to stay ahead of the curve. For most customers, the idea of evolution requires comprehending how this platform can be utilized to increase ROI, and improve the bottom line. For this, both customers and internal employees need to be taken into consideration. The cost incurred as a result of poor customer experiences can be alleviated by optimizing Salesforce implementation and making the most of all the great features out there.
Listed below are some of the robust features of Salesforce that can increase the ROI. To make the most of these features, it’s prudent to get in touch with one of the best Salesforce implementation partners.
In-app Guidance: The in-app guidance feature offered by Salesforce provides employees with tips, walk-throughs, reminders, etc to help them navigate the system. This feature can be configured to showcase prompt messaging in the utility bar. To measure the efficacy of your implementation, data regarding the interaction between employee and guidance message is recorded. This feature improves the ROI of an organization by providing users with resources even before they feel the need to have one. This results in improved efficiency in terms of time and performance.
Salesforce Survey: This feature helps in gathering feedback regarding customer experiences around the product and services of a company by implementing a strategy for collecting feedback at any phase of the sales, marketing, and sales cycle. This feature offers a wide array of functionalities such as customizing email templates for workflows, automating the sending of a survey. Businesses can figure out ways to serve their customers in a better way by analyzing gathered survey data.
Social Studio: This feature helps organizations to communicate with prospects and customers on social media platforms such as Facebook, Linked In, Instagram, Twitter, etc. This feature helps organizations to connect with the sales, service, and marketing teams of their clients and helps employees to develop personal and decisive relationships with customers while communicating with them on their terms. Social studio helps users to understand the opinion and perception held by customers and prospects about the company while being able to respond via social platforms, track leads, and more. The social studio also helps to gather data-driven insights about customers and the way they engage with your social strategy. This will lead to the generation of qualified leads and sales opportunities with the highest probability of closure.
Command Centre: This is an advanced feature by Salesforce that envisages statistics as to how customers engage with a brand by allotting all touchpoints and evaluations under one roof. By centralizing real-time data across Sales, service, and marketing cloud, the Command center drives health statistics across all customer touchpoints. This feature offers users a peep into the resolution time of customer issues and efficacy of emails, ads, etc, which helps companies to accurately predict the best way of retaining and enhancing customer portfolios.
Final Words:
These are some of the many features that can be leveraged by organizations to increase their ROI. By optimizing Salesforce implementation, businesses can help remove bottlenecks from their operations while improving customer experiences by making the most of all the useful features. It’s important to seek assistance from a Salesforce consultant to know more about the features of Salesforce.