At my Constant Contact seminars, attendees consistently ask me if Constant Contact is a CRM system.
While Constant Contact is not a true CRM, it does have some CRM functionality.
In this article, I will tell you a little more about what a CRM is, how Constant Contact relates to CRM tools, and how you can use Constant Contact and CRM tools together.
First, let’s define what a CRM is. CRM is short for Customer Relationship Management. A CRM helps you understand your customers, your clients and your team.
With Constant Contact, you can do a few basic CRM types of functions. For example, with Constant Contact, you are able to enter names, email addresses, company info, social media profiles, and notes. You can also search through your contacts and pull up their contact information.
Constant Contact also allows for tagging of your contacts.
More importantly, with Constant Contact, you can view your previous email campaigns and see who interacted with each campaign. From there, you can tag the contact for further follow up. This follow up could be an additional email campaign, a one on one email communication, a direct mail piece or simply a phone call.
However, I would not define Constant Contact as a full CRM system.
According to the Zapier blog, most CRM systems have a combination of the following tools:
- Contact: The simplest of all, Contacts are the records for the people you’ve listed in your CRM. Just like in your address book, they can contain the names and personal info of your customers and clients. You’ll likely also see Company and/or Account in your CRM; these are specialized contacts for the organizations you work with, and you’ll likely link your individual contacts to a Company or Account.
- Lead: Some contacts are special: they seem likely to want to do business with your team in the future. Leads are these special people, to whom you’ll want to pay particular attention.
- Opportunity: Turns out, that lead was really interested, and you think you’re going to be able to sell them your product or service. Now they’re an Opportunity, and you’ll want to list info about what exactly this opportunity is and track it in your CRM.
- Quote: You’ve worked with a Contact, turned that Lead into an Opportunity, and now you’re almost ready to make a deal—and so you’ll Quote them a price and the service or products they’ll get for it. That’s what Quotes are for—and no, it’s not the place to store your inspiring business quotations.
- Deal: Everything worked out and you’ve sold your product—or perhaps it didn’t, and the Opportunity fell through. You’ll track both of those with Deals, which will show your Won and Lost Deals.
- Profiles: Typically, these would be the people inside your own company that are using your CRM app. Each of them may have a Role, or a particular set of permissions in the app.
- Campaign: Marketing is one of the main reasons you’d use a CRM, and Campaigns refer to your marketing campaigns. As such, they’d list the contacts and companies most crucial to your next marketing campaign, along with results, notes, and more.
- Tag: Similar to tags in Gmail or metadata on your photos, tags give you a way to add extra info to a Contact, Deal, or anything else in your company. This extra data gives you more ways to filter and sort through your CRM.
- Activity: Activity in a CRM typically refers to anything that’s happened in the app—new Deals, Contacts, Opportunities, or perhaps just a message from your colleagues. They’ll usually be listed in a Facebook-like news feed so you can look over them easily.
Before you decide on a CRM system for your business, you need to ask yourself what you want your CRM system to do for you. How will it make you more productive?
There are dozens of CRM systems on the market today and each one operates a little bit differently. You need to determine which features are best for how you operate, the size of your team and your budget. Used correctly, a CRM will make you more productive.
For small business owners, there are dozens of CRM tools on the market right now and choosing one can be overwelming.
Currently, I use one called Less Annoying CRM. It’s simple and easy to use and the price is very reasonable, $10 a month for unlimited contacts. They offer a 30 day trial, but if you use my referral link here, they will extend that to 60 days.
Less Annoying CRM is one of dozens of CRM tools on the market today. Inthis article on the Zapier blog, you can read reviews of 25 of the most popular CRM products.
Most CRM tools come with a free trial and you should try 2 or 3 of them out before making a final decision for your business.
You may be wondering if you will need to enter the information multiple times. Luckily, tools like Zapier and Cazoomi allow you to sync up your CRM data with your Constant Contact list. Enter it once and you are good to go!
Having a CRM is a great system once you get the hang of it. I’m much more organized than I was in the past.
Need help getting your CRM to work with Constant Contact?
Reach out to me with your question and I’ll help you figure it out.
This article originally appeared on the Mr. Leads Blog
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