UK falls behind when it comes to customer engagement

Research by the Epson Business Council has found that small businesses in the UK are falling behind its European counterparts when considering the importance of customer engagement.

As inspiresme.co.uk reports, only 29% of the small businesses taking part in the research believe customer service is an integral factor in differentiating from competition in the current economic climate. Comparatively, 84% of Spanish and 77% of Italian small businesses rate customer service more importantly. A similar pattern is found for customer engagement as three quarters of some European countries highly regard technology as a way to engage their customers while only 49% of UK small businesses believe this.

In B2B marketing and sales, it is essential to build a rapport with prospects while making the effort to maintain relationships with existing customers.  As the results from this survey show, technology is an effective way to improve customer engagement, however UK businesses are either not aware of its benefits or the return on investment it can deliver.

Profunnel offers marketing automation solutions which allow businesses to conduct their entire marketing activity from a single platform. With this technology, companies can integrate their email marketing and set tailored, automated messages to be sent in response to website activity. Additionally, prospect and client behaviour is incorporated into the CRM, the information provided here improves communications as sales people can discuss interests with potential buyers and nurture them more closely through the entire buying cycle.

Visit Profunnel for more information on marketing automation.

Email Marketing Provides Greatest ROI

The annual Email Marketing Census 2012 published by Econsultancy this week shows marketers believe email marketing delivers a better ROI than most other channels.

With results compiled from over 800 respondents, the census finds that 70% of the companies considered email marketing to generate either an “excellent” or “good” ROI. The findings also highlight how using an email service provider for more than just “basic broadcast” has had a positive effect on businesses’ ROI. By putting effort into segmenting their email campaigns and integrating email marketing with CRM and web analytics, marketers are 32% more likely to find their ROI to be either “excellent” or “good”.

The census also highlights how many marketers are not taking advantage of more sophisticated forms of email marketing – only 28% said they would send a trigger email to a sign-up or site visitor. These figures clearly identify the benefits of installing technology to assist with lead generation and increase customer sales. Profunnel offers intelligent email marketing solutions to work with other business functions such as web analytics, social media and CRM. The platform can assist company owners with complex marketing campaigns by placing focus on only warm leads. This improves productivity of marketing and sales teams meaning a greater return on investment is achieved.

Visit Profunnel for more information on email marketing.

Get in Shape for the New B2B Season

It’s never too early to start planning for the turn of the year. Organisations need to consider all their options in order to optimise the time and effort spent on generating new business.

Many companies are aware that their website is the best source for new leads. However there are key areas where improvements through integrated marketing solutions can create major success for the new business process.

The latest white paper from Profunnel offers practical advice on preparing for the new selling season, which includes:

• Website Content – ensuring your website contains the right keywords to increase SEO and drive traffic to your site
• CRM Database – an up-to-date CRM is essential for the start of the sales process and a large amount of data is required to maximise the results of emails and e-shots sent out
• Awareness of Digital Conversation – digital conversations will already be taking place between prospects and your services. By implementing social media tools you can tag and track online conversations, allowing you to view and understand positive and negative conversions
• Targeted Email Marketing– segmented email campaigns for different sectors and audiences are more beneficial for gaining interest and achieving positive responses than generic ‘email blasting’
• Marketing Automation System – the engine can provide email templates to assist with the design of your targeted campaigns while the system will check and test emails to assure you that they won’t be received as spam

Download the full version of the white paper here

Visit Profunnel for more information on the products and services available.

CRM at the Forefront of Business Recovery

As reported on Computing, a recent survey conducted by analyst group Gartner has revealed customer relationship management (CRM) is anticipated to see the largest investment of all the application software markets worldwide in 2011.

31% of respondents say they expect a rise in spending on CRM software. This result reflects Gartner’s prediction that as buyer confidence returns and businesses begin to refocus their attention on increasing revenue rather than reducing costs, the CRM market will start to recover.

For marketers CRM software is a vital component for successful customer retention and is necessary to enhance customer experience. Another key benefit is that marketing activity can be more accurately targeted.

Profunnel offers the only marketing automation solution which is built on a CRM database. This allows marketers to simply and affordably integrate their demand generation activity with the CRM. From the integrated platform, businesses can view client movements on the website incorporated with CRM and into the individual client profile. As a result, sales people can respond to visitor activity which will improve conversion rates and generated sales. Sales representatives are able to build stronger relationships with clients as they are aware of their interests – where and when they visit the website. Overall a streamlined marketing strategy can be implemented – facilitating lead management and ROI tracking.

Visit Profunnel for more information on CRM Integration

The Development of IT Has Changed the Face of Marketing

According to the Financial Times, the development of IT has changed and evolved the role of marketing and sales in business.

The article highlighted that the development of software such as CRM has become a key tool to improve efficiency in business, resulting directly in greater success.

However, the development of technology has moved on from simply employing CRM software – it now enables business to integrate a range of different approaches such as email marketing, social media and CRM systems. Only by bringing everything together and gaining insight into what works and when, can each channel be developed to reinforce the others, improving the success of the overall marketing and sales activity.

Technology such as Profunnel’s demand generation platform delivers incredible visibility over campaigns, together with the ability to enhance both tactical and strategic marketing activity. By integrating with the CRM system it means companies can create, control and manage campaigns across key media, while giving insight into why, when and how your customers are most likely to buy.

Click here for more information on the demand generation technology available.

Getting to Grips with Multi-Channel Marketing

The number of marketing channels continues to grow, meaning marketers have to become adept at co-ordinating, and juggling, a mix of activities - from direct marketing to pay-per-click, social media, email and more.

Companies big and small are quickly moving to a multi-channel approach, but those that are seeing a real improvement in their ROI are using the latest technology to co-ordinate their campaigns and maximise the impact of the work they do. Only by brining everything together and gaining insight into what works and when, can each channel be developed to reinforce the others, improving the success of the overall marketing activity.

Technology such as Profunnel’s demand generation platform delivers incredible visibility over campaigns, together with the ability to enhance both tactical and strategic marketing activity. By integrating with the CRM system it means companies can create, control and manage campaigns across key media, while giving insight into why, when and how your customers are most likely to buy.

For more information on multi-channel marketing click here

CRM and Social Media

With the rapid rise of social media, technology has been developed to help use this to a competitive advantage. Social media is now integral to nurturing customer relationships, and gaining a competitive edge to win sales.

The technology has developed to allow users to maximise the potential of social media and integrate with their CRM activity, providing a far greater insight and understanding into their customers’ activities, motivations and touchpoints. The results allow sales and marketing to deliver a more co-ordinated communication programme to generate sales, which in today’s competitive market can be crucial in winning business.

For example, many of our customers, through our system, now create social site-specific links (tracking URLs) back to homepages or landing pages with in-depth tracking and reporting capabilities. This means clients can now publish content on social networking sites through our system, while tracking and monitoring responses, which enables better understanding of potential business and drives enhanced future marketing from the best performing social media sources.