Tag Archives: contact management software

How ACT! Contact Management Software Can Build Your Business Credibility

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Customizing Your Messaging Through Personalization and Segmentation

What helps your business attract customers? Chances are that based on your industry, your company has a very specific value proposition. But ultimately, that value proposition is worth little without a degree of credibility for your brand in the eyes of your audience.

In other words, your brand messaging needs to be both believable and authentic. When your potential customers comes across as less credible than one of your similar competitors, their choice will be easy. To prevent that from happening, you need to make sure your messages are relevant. It’s UnMarketing in action: promote your business subtly, not obviously.

Fortunately, building your credibility is far from impossible. To make it happen, though, you need a software that allows you to gather and organize enough customer and lead data to build more relevant messaging. In other words, you need ACT! Contact Management Software.

The Benefits of a CRM

At its core, ACT! is a CRM – short for customer relationship management system. The benefits of CRMs for businesses across industries range widely, but tend to come back to organization. Put simply, a platform like ACT! allows you to gather as much information as you can about potential customers in a centralized space.

The results, in many cases, are increased productivity and better marketing-sales symbiosis through a singular system. But at the same time, don’t underestimate the potential for increasing your credibility through the same functionality, as well.

Building a Reliable Lead Database

Through ACT!, you can build your lead database. You might have heard about inbound marketing, a promotional philosophy that has taken the internet by storm. It emphases organic lead generation by offering valuable content in exchange for signing up, rather than purchasing or sourcing leads for money.

Of course, you need a place in which to store your new leads. Given that only a quarter of the leads entering your database are actually sales ready, your CRM acts as more than just a pool for new leads. It’s the system through which you can slowly nurture them to become customers.

Customizing Your Messaging Through Personalization and Segmentation

At the core of ACT!, much like many other CRM platforms, is email marketing. You can easily send beautiful emails to every contact in your database. For the sake of your credibility, though, you shouldn’t. Instead, use the features available for you to maximize the relevancy of your messaging. You can increase your messaging relevance in two ways:

  • Personalize your emails. Use the software’s integrated personalization tool to substitute individual details about your leads into each message. From first name to company size, personalization will maximize your engagement rates.
  • Segment your audience lists. Instead of treating every potential customer the same way, consider segmenting them into relatively homogenous lists based on common characteristics. Now, you can build more relevant messages targeted specifically toward that segment’s needs and pain points.

Through this type of customization, your credibility will maximize. Put simply, a potential customers who signs up on your website expects messages that are not promotional, but relevant to their individual needs. A company who can deliver on that expectations quickly and effectively will incur significant goodwill.

Get Started in Implementing ACT!

To build your credibility, especially among new leads, you need to increase your relevance. The authenticity and quality of your messages also matters, but personalization and segmentation are vital first steps.

That, in turn, requires a CRM platform specifically optimize to accomplish your credibility goals. And as it turns out, that’s exactly where ACT! enters the equation. Through its contact management and email tools, you can build a marketing strategy designed to increase your credibility and grow your business. To learn more about implementing the software and optimizing your marketing efforts, contact us.

Contact Management After the Fact: How Small Businesses Can Keep Their Contacts Clean After ACT! Contact Management Software Integration

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Managing your business's contacts is key to turning leads into customers.

Managing your business’s contacts is key to turning leads into customers.

Developing an effective contact management is crucial for any small business, potentially making the difference between a lead becoming a customer and a customer who walks to a competitor. That’s why following best practices when moving your contacts to a new CRM is absolutely crucial.

But the worst thing you could do to your small business success is think of contact management as a one-time ordeal that is done once you’ve fully implemented your CRM. While customer relationship management software is undoubtedly helpful in managing your contacts for you, your strategy must continue in order to allow you to manage contacts as well as possible. Here are 3 ways you can optimize your processes after moving to ACT! contact management software.

1) Keep a Dynamic Contact List

One of the major benefits you will enjoy from Act! is the fact that your contacts are not managed on a static list. Depending on their interactions with your brand, their profile will grow, giving you a fuller picture on just who they are – and how you can convince them to become customers or repeat customers.

But of course, even the best CRM has its limits: it can not record interactions dynamically that happen offline. You may interact with your customers on the phone or face-to-face, and both are important interactions that help inform you about just who your contacts truly are. When these offline interactions happen, you should create manual entries in your contact files to ensure that a salesperson looking at the profile gets the full picture.

2) Clean Out As Needed 

Naturally, not all of your leads will become customers, and not all of your customers will give you business throughout their lifetime. So instead of wasting efforts trying to reach or interact with contacts who have “jumped off,” you should establish regular contact cleanings in which you sort out those contacts that aren’t worth reaching again.

Act! does some of the work for you. For example, some recipients of your email messages may simply choose to unsubscribe, and your software can ensure that they’re automatically excluded from future email communications. But are your unsusbscribes still getting phone calls or direct mail from you? If so, you may want to take them out of your contact lists altogether, or keep a master “do not contact” list.

3) Establish a Contact Quality Score

As we mention above, not all leads are created equal. Some will be more likely to become customers than others, and you can predict their likelihood to buy based on the number of interactions with your company.

It makes perfect sense: a lead who regularly clicks on or even responds to emails will be more likely to become a customer than one who may have filled out a form on your website once, but has never interacted with you since. That’s why Act! ‘s E-Marketing system can pick up and assign varying scores to leads based on these interactions, allowing your sales team to stop wasting time and only approach those leads who are most likely to convert to customers.

Such a lead scoring system can be time-consuming to set up, and requires continuous adjustment for maximum effectiveness. But done correctly, it is also an incredible contact management tool that helps you efficiently direct your sales efforts and maximize your ROI.

Contact Management can take some work, but the results will speak for themselves. And it certainly doesn’t hurt to have a tool that helps you maximize your efforts! That’s what Act! can do for you, so you can focus on the most important part: increasing your business by attracting, converting and delighting your leads. For more information on how the software can help with your contact management, contact us!

3 Reasons Why You Need ACT! Contact Management Software

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ACT! Contact Management Software keeps your contacts organized all in one place and seamlessly integrates with the tools you already use.

ACT! Contact Management Software keeps your contacts organized all in one place and seamlessly integrates with the tools you already use.

Would you like to grow your business quickly and simply?  Do you need to manage contacts, find leads, and follow up with prospects?  Trying to find a way to market your products or services more effectively?

If you answered “Yes!” to any of those questions, ACT! Contact Management Software might be the perfect solution for your business.  With more than 2.7 million users and 40,000 corporate customers, ACT! is the #1 best-selling contact management software.  Here are 3 reasons why you need contact management software…and more specifically, why you need ACT!:

1. Contact Organization: ACT! organizes all of your customer details (contact information, emails, meeting notes, calendars, etc.) in one convenient database that can be accessed by multiple users at once.  No more fumbling through a plethora of databases, spreadsheets, email archives, and sticky notes to find a crucial piece of customer information!

2. Integration Capabilities: ACT! seamlessly integrates with tools you already use – Office, Outlook, Google, Dropbox, iCloud, Facebook, LinkedIn, accounting systems, and many more – so you can streamline your work and increase productivity.  For example, the link between Outlook and ACT! allows you to have incoming Outlook emails archived to the corresponding contact in ACT!, creating an email history specific to each customer that can be quickly and easily reviewed.  ACT! allows you to coordinate and organize the information you are already gathering using these various business and social programs.

3. Targeted Marketing: Using ACT! marketing tools, you can study and sort your contacts to ensure that you are sending the right message to the right customers at the right time.  Template editing tools allow you to create, send, and track e-campaigns.  Email marketing tools generate graphs and reports that provide information about opens, clicks, bounces, opt-outs, and more.  Intelligent call lists automatically prioritize contacts and expedite follow-up.  ACT! helps take the guesswork out of marketing.

ACT! Contact Management Software is affordable, user-friendly, and can really make a difference for your company. Contact us today to learn more about how ACT! can help you take your business to the next level.