As a small-business owner you or your business need always to be in contact with your current customers and your potential customers.
You want to manage your current customers to ensure that everything is ok, and they are satisfied.
You want always to expand your business with new customers, contacting your potential customers.
How you can do this, simple but important tasks for your business? You need Customers Relationship Management – CRM system.
Why Are You Need CRM?
The purpose of your CRM system is to enable your business to:
- Identify and target your best customers.
- Make segmentation of the customers.
- Manage different marketing campaigns for different segments.
- Tracking conversion metrics.
- Build personalized relationships with customers to improve their satisfaction and maximize your profits.
- Increase knowledge about your customers.
- Learn more about your customers.
- Know what they want and what don’t want.
- Know exactly who are the customers, and who are the potential customers.
Gmail as CRM Tool
If you don’t have enough resources to buy some commercial products that exist on the market, a good starting point for your business can be a simple Gmail account, especially if your biggest need is simply to track who you contacted, when you contacted, what was the subject of contacting, what was the answer and what will be the future steps of your company.
What you can easily make with a Gmail as a CRM tool for your business?
- You can collect informations about your customers.
- You can collect informations about your potential customers.
- You can simply segment your customers.
- You can track your marketing activities with each of them.
- You can learn more about them.
- Build better relationships with them.
Let’s take a look how you can use these activities within your Gmail account.
Collecting Informations
You need to collect contact informations from your customers and potential customers. Because, today one of the most-used forms of contacting is emails, this job with Gmail becomes much easier.
Each Gmail account comes with a contact database that can automatically store contact details from anyone with whom you have some type of correspondence.
You can also import external contacts or add them manually.
There are many more informations that you can add than only email and name. You can add birthday, relationship, URL to their web sites, but what is the best is that you can add a custom field according to your business needs.
Segmenting Customers, Tracking Activities
The best thing when it comes to Gmail and using it as a CRM for your small business is the groups. Groups are something that will enable you to make different segments from your contacts. For example, you can have customers group, prospects group, partners group…
Another way or addition to your segmentation with groups is to use different folders for different segments.
If you want to track your activities, you have several options. One is integrated here in Gmail account and other is to add them to a task or appointment in Google Calendar. I like to use Add Note field on each contact where I can write about when was the person contacted, what was the subject of contacting, what was the answer and what will be the future steps that I need to take.
Learn More About Them and Build Better Relationships
One of the best solutions to learn more about your customers and potential customers, and thus to build better relationships is to use free 3rd party browser plugin called Rapportive as a tool that will add social media data to your contacts. When you know that data, you can simply go to one step ahead in your relationships with your customers from your contact list.
