What is traditional marketing?
Traditional marketing is a rather broad category that incorporates many forms of advertising and marketing. It’s the most recognizable types of marketing, encompassing the advertisements that we see and hear every day. Most traditional marketing strategies fall under one of four categories: print, broadcast, direct mail, and telephone.
Print marketing is the oldest form of traditional marketing. Loosely defined as advertising in paper form, this strategy has been in use since ancient times, when Egyptians created sales messages and wall posters on papyrus. Today, print marketing usually refers to advertising space in newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and other printed materials intended for distribution.
Traditional Marketing Categories
- Print: Includes advertisements in newspapers, newsletters, magazines, brochures, and other printed material for distribution
- Broadcast: Includes radio and television commercials, as well as specialized forms like on-screen movie theatre advertising
- Direct mail: Includes fliers, postcards, brochures, letters, catalogues, and other material that is printed and mailed directly to consumers
- Telemarketing: Includes requested calling and cold calling of consumers over the phone
Broadcast marketing includes television and radio advertisements. Radio broadcasts have been around since the 1900s, and the first commercial broadcast—a radio program supported by on-air advertisements—aired on November 2, 1920. Television, the next step in entertainment technology, was quicker to adopt advertising, with less than ten years between its inception and the first television commercial in 1941.
Direct mail marketing uses printed material like postcards, brochures, letters, catalogs, and fliers sent through postal mail to attract consumers. One of the earliest and most well-known examples of direct mail is the Sears Catalogue, which was first mailed to consumers in 1888.
Finally, telephone marketing, or telemarketing, is the practice of delivering sales messages over the phone to convince consumers to buy a product or service. This form of marketing has become somewhat controversial in the modern age, with many telemarketers using aggressive sales tactics. The U.S. federal government has passed strict laws governing the use of telemarketing to combat some of these techniques.
Who implements traditional marketing strategies?
Because it encompasses so many different strategies, nearly every company selling a product or service uses one or more types of traditional marketing as part of an overall advertising strategy. For the most part, this form of advertising depends on the company’s available marketing budget.
Mid-sized companies and large corporations are most likely to use TV commercials. Advertising on television is usually the most expensive form of marketing, with prices depending on the time slots and programming content. For example, a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl 2012 was around $3.5 million, more than $100,000 per second—and that figure doesn’t include production costs.
Bigger companies also use direct mail more often, as the design, printing, and mailing expenses can add up to substantial amounts. Mid-sized and large businesses often use all forms of traditional marketing in one way or another.
Entrepreneurs and small businesses, who may have limited marketing budgets, most often use print marketing in newspapers or newsletters to advertise to local customers. Many also place local radio advertisements. Some use direct mail, and a few may employ limited telemarketing.
While network television commercials are usually out of the budget range for smaller companies, local cable programming has made television advertising more accessible for these types of businesses, with costs running as low as $15 for a 30-second spot, plus production expenses.
Most Memorable Traditional Marketing Campaigns
Traditional marketing campaigns often have the advantage of staying power. They can become iconic, and instantly familiar to millions of people. The top five memorable campaigns of the 20th century, according to network television powerhouse NBC, are:
- McDonalds: “You deserve a break today”
- Nike: “Just Do It”
- Marlboro’s “Marlboro Man”
- Coca-Cola: “The pause that refreshes”
- Volkswagen: “Think Small”
How is a traditional marketing plan developed?
The strategies for developing a traditional marketing plan vary widely, according to the form of advertising used and the type of business. In some companies, particularly small businesses, the entire staff will contribute to planning and execution. Larger companies often have marketing departments dedicated to creating advertising campaigns that use traditional marketing.
Interesting Traditional Marketing Stats
- Television is still the most effective form of advertising, with the highest ad revenue in the United States—totalling $78.5 billion in 2011
- In the UK, 57% of people consider television advertising the most impactful. The second highest is newspaper advertising, at just 15 percent.
- Radio advertising generated more than $17 billion in ad revenue during 2011. This form of advertising is also the least ignored, with nearly 70% of listeners keeping the station tuned in during commercials compared to the second highest—television, at just 20 percent.
- Print advertising generates nearly $30 billion in ad revenue every year. While revenue for print media has slightly declined as online revenue rises, this form of marketing is still effective for many businesses.
The first step in developing a plan is to choose print, broadcasting, direct mail, or telemarketing. This choice depends on the budget and the marketing message conveyed. For example, a store that’s announcing a sale will use more immediate impact strategies like broadcasting or print, while a business launching a general awareness campaign might choose direct mail, which stays in consumers’ hands for a longer period of time.
For print and broadcast marketing, the business must arrange to purchase advertising space. The timing of this step depends on the lead time, or how far in advance the advertising space must be purchased. Some print media, such as wide-circulation magazines, have lead times of several weeks. For example, an advertisement in Sports Illustrated magazine must be reserved at least five weeks in advance and longer for premium placement. Other markets have shorter times, with some newspapers allowing next-day ad placement.
The development of marketing materials also varies depending on the form. Direct mail and print campaigns require graphic design and copywriting. For telemarketing, the advertisers write a script for the sales representatives (or outsourced telemarketing company) to follow. Radio ads may be either produced and pre-recorded, or scripted and read by on-air personalities. Finally, television commercials can either be written by the marketing department and produced in-house, or contracted out to production companies.
A brand manager is responsible for planning, developing, and directing the marketing efforts for a particular product or brand. This may be an entire company, or a line of products within a large company.
Brand managers coordinate the activities for a team of marketers involved in several facets of operation, including research and development, production, sales and advertising, purchasing, distribution, packaging development, and financing. These professionals decide on marketing strategies, conceptualize and oversee marketing campaigns, and control the brand’s public image through advertising.
Education and Skills
A typical brand manager will hold a four-year bachelor’s degree in marketing or advertising. In addition, most large companies require at least four years of experience in lower marketing positions, such as sales representatives.
What do they do?
The job of an advertising sales director is to manage the entire advertising strategy of a company from all directions, including business, sales, and technical perspectives. Typically in charge of a team of sales representatives, these high-ranking managers oversee the development of sales materials, campaign implementation, and advertising budgets and projections.
Education and Skills
An advertising sales director must hold a four-year bachelor’s degree in marketing, sales, or advertising, and typically needs a minimum of 10 years’ experience in sales and marketing. Most businesses hire advertising sales directors who have proven track records in marketing success.
What do they do?
A media director typically works at an advertising agency that develops and implements marketing strategies for other companies. The job of the media director is to manage the purchase of print space and broadcast time for clients.
These professionals work with a client to choose the most effective avenues for traditional marketing, usually through market research and statistical models. They are also responsible for working with media sales representatives to place the advertisements.
Education and Skills
A four-year bachelor’s degree in sales, marketing, or advertising is required to become a media director. As with most management-level marketing professionals, a media director also needs at least 5 years of field experience, with a proven record of results.
How can a marketing school help you succeed?
Explore the bond between business and consumer behaviour with a degree in marketing.
Traditional marketing is a diverse field, involving many different strategies and methods. Earning a degree through a marketing program provides the knowledge and skills required to effectively use traditional marketing techniques — from print to broadcast.
Coursework in marketing programs are designed with traditional marketing strategies in mind. Many schools offer degree programs geared specifically toward print or broadcast marketing, such as Broadcasting Media and Graphic Design. This includes subjects like communication, which helps professionals understand the most effective ways to design and deliver traditional marketing campaign. Marketing programs will also have courses on consumer psychology, which teaches a strong understanding of buying habits and motivations.
To learn more about how a degree in marketing or advertising can help create effective traditional marketing campaigns, request more information from schools that offer these courses.
Key takeaway
- Traditional marketing is a rather broad category that incorporates many forms of advertising and marketing. It’s the most recognizable types of marketing, encompassing the advertisements that we see and hear every day. Most traditional marketing strategies fall under one of four categories: print, broadcast, direct mail, and telephone.
E-Marketing (a.k.a. electronic marketing) refers to the marketing conducted over the Internet. Two synonyms of E-Marketing are Internet Marketing and Online Marketing which are frequently interchanged. E-Marketing is the process of marketing a brand (company, product, or service) using the Internet through computers and mobile devices mediums. By such a definition, eMarketing encompasses all the activities a business conducts via the worldwide web with the aim of attracting new business, retaining current business and developing its brand identity.
- Ability to target your customers faster and cheaper
- Reduction of marketing costs through automation of electronic media
- Near real-time interaction between the marketer and the end user
- Ability to quantify and collect user data
- One-to-one marketing experience
- Increased interactivity
- Ability to implement marketing strategies in a short time-frame
- Ability to scale with the market
- Appeal to specific interests
- Geo-targeting
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Paid Advertising (PPC)
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
The return on investment (ROI) from E-Marketing can far exceed that of traditional marketing strategies. Also, the transparency of the internet allows the marketer to have access to analytics and data in a near real-time fashion which will allow the marketer to make changes to align with the market’s reaction thus making E-Marketing a preferred solution for Marketing Professionals.
Key takeaway
- E-Marketing (a.k.a. electronic marketing) refers to the marketing conducted over the Internet. Two synonyms of E-Marketing are Internet Marketing and Online Marketing which are frequently interchanged.
- E-Marketing is the process of marketing a brand (company, product, or service) using the Internet through computers and mobile devices mediums. By such a definition, eMarketing encompasses all the activities a business conducts via the worldwide web with the aim of attracting new business, retaining current business and developing its brand identity.
For creating a web site that is effective, the following objectives should be considered:
- To attract visitors to the Web site.
- To make the site interesting so that the visitor stay and explore.
- To persuade the visitors to follow the site's links to obtain information.
- To create the desired image of the organisation in the visitors mind.
- To reinforce positive images that the visitor may already have about the organisation.
Why do Visitors arrive at a Web site:
- To obtain general information about the company or organisation.
- Learning about the company's products or services.
- Buying the products and services offered by the company.
- Finding out the services conditions and warranties applicable for the products they have purchased.
- Obtaining financial information helpful in making investment or credit granting decision.
- Identifying the people who manage the company or organisation.
Business should try to meet the following goals while constructing their Web Sites:
- Convey an integrated image of the organisation
- Offer easily accessible facts about the organisation.
- Allow visitors to experience the site in different ways and at different levels.
- Provide visitors with a meaningful two way interactive communication link with the organisation.
- Sustain visitor attention and encourage return visits.
- Offer easily accessible information about products and services and how to use them.
Key takeaway
- To attract visitors to the Web site.
- To make the site interesting so that the visitor stay and explore.
- To persuade the visitors to follow the site's links to obtain information.
- To create the desired image of the organisation in the visitors mind.
- To reinforce positive images that the visitor may already have about the organisation.
The uniqueness of content is a valuable tool that influences the positioning of a company. Uniqueness provides a good indexing of a site, indicates to users the value of information, goods or services, and improves an overall perception of a brand. This is a broad concept, which includes not only the quality of the posted texts but also an overall corporate style of a site, the exclusivity of the products provided.
Aspects of the unique presentation of material
The concept of uniqueness is widely used on the Internet, and it is attributed mainly to a quality of a content. Texts should be exclusive, written to order. Words repeated in separate blocks of articles should not coincide with other search results. The nuances listed below can be attributed to the aspects of creating a unique content.
1. Creation of unique content for search engine robots
Search robots evaluate the uniqueness of the material submitted, using separate pieces of the text. They are entered into a search engine and checked. As a result of indexing, a verdict is made about the quality of the content, and the page of the site is risen or lowered in the search results.
2. Transferring unique experience to the visitors of a resource
Visitors of a site look for answers to specific questions. Usually, they use several resources at the same time. Among the information found, the most complete, useful and relevant content is accepted as worthy of attention. When creating informational texts, it is important to collect as much useful data as possible, to compose articles better than competitors do, and to add unique details that are absent on other resources.
In addition to the technical uniqueness of the text, the originality of the transmitted experience is also important. It is optimal if the text is written by a specialist in the chosen field because such a person can convey implicit nuances, and not just rewrite the topic. Good articles are quickly copied by sites-competitors, but during their existence, they manage to earn a good rating for their company.
3. The originality of the presentation of the finished content
The uniqueness of content can also mean its original presentation, which will interest users and encourage them to visit your resource or order the services of your enterprise. The creative approach creates a certain “boom”. This kind of uniqueness can also be attributed to the use of the original corporate style of the company that causes a number of associations and brand memorability.
What is paramount when promoting a website?
The uniqueness of content is important but not always the main factor of promotion. Its impact on the popularity of a project depends on the methods of obtaining traffic and the needs of visitors.
For example, an online clothing store that receives traffic from contextual advertising does not need to post 100% unique texts. For such a project, it is more important to create an informative content, where each product card will have an accurate description of the sizes, fabrics, functional features of a model, all those characteristics that a user will want to know before buying the goods. The uniqueness of the texts fades into the background and is an additional bonus.
A personal blog that will earn on advertising, on the contrary, should transfer to user’s not only technically unique information but also an exclusive experience. Articles should consider popular issues. Presentation of the topics should be attractive. The acquaintance of readers with new horizons of thinking, providing them with fresh impressions are welcome.
When planning a content, it is important to consider the attendance of the resource. What is the best way to draw the attention of users? What qualities of content are they interested in? What will cause them to move to other pages, to visit the site again? What will motivate them to make a call? For competent site design, it is important to understand the needs of the target audience well and create content that meets these needs.
About the uniqueness of pictures and videos
The uniqueness of the videos posted on the site can play a role in two cases:
- If you want to provide only exclusive content.
- If you promote your personal channel on YouTube through the site.
These two factors are directly related since it is quite irrational to create unique videos and not to spread them to earn money on hosting. When using such resources, uniqueness is determined not by the general standards of search engines, but according to the internal rules established by the video portal itself. Usually, it is necessary to use your own video and music materials when creating such content.
When placing videos on YouTube, their uniqueness is not controlled by indexing of search engines. The quality and usefulness of videos are evaluated only directly by visitors of the resource. Videos can enhance user activity, hold people on the site or, conversely, quickly become a cause of boredom. Everything depends on the quality of the resource and the preferences of the visitors.
As for the pictures, their uniqueness may slightly increase the rating of the site, but it does not matter that much today. The quality of the images affects the perception of the site by users, so it’s just important to choose the options with good resolution and color rendering. Pictures should carry the original meaning, convey your ideas and qualitatively attract attention.
The uniqueness of images plays a role only in the case of creating a portfolio site (for example, for a photographer) or a site where examples of specific works (such as cakes to order) are exhibited.
So, originality of visual material is not fixed by search engines, but it is useful for conveying the right message to visitors. It is much more important to create a unique text because it undergoes really strict checks.
Key takeaway
The uniqueness of content is a valuable tool that influences the positioning of a company. Uniqueness provides a good indexing of a site, indicates to users the value of information, goods or services, and improves an overall perception of a brand. This is a broad concept, which includes not only the quality of the posted texts but also an overall corporate style of a site, the exclusivity of the products provided.
To maximize repeat sales, a web site must meet the continuing needs of its users.
Unfortunately, many corporate web sites appear to be designed to meet the needs of their managers. A web site is not just another sales channel. Websites which don't produce the expected results are probably not meeting the continuing needs of their users.
Problems include:
- sites designed around the bricks and mortar corporate structure (products, services, brands, and distribution channels) instead of around the unique features of the Internet
- bandwidth hogging "cool" features and site structures that irritate the very customers the site is attempting to attract
- Confusing layouts.
A web site also must be kept up to date and interesting to its users, on a continuing basis. It is not enough to just build a web site and review its performance every three months. Market conditions change rapidly so a site and its market must be continuously monitored and appropriate changes made.
The Internet Marketing Engine can assist you to:
- keep abreast of market changes including changes to competitive sites
- identify areas where your site does not meet the continuing needs of your users
- experience your site as your visitors do
- meet the needs of your site visitors and exceed their expectations
- identify and implement site improvements with the most favourable cost/benefit ratios
- structure and implement a program of continuous site monitoring and improvement
Key takeaway
- To maximize repeat sales, a web site must meet the continuing needs of its users.
- Unfortunately, many corporate web sites appear to be designed to meet the needs of their managers. A web site is not just another sales channel. Websites which don't produce the expected results are probably not meeting the continuing needs of their users.
These days, everybody knows how important content marketing is in attracting your audience and winning leads and sales.
According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), content marketing is one of the most cost-effective promotional techniques. In fact, it delivers more leads at a lower cost than most other methods. (The only exception is email marketing.)
There’s just one problem.
If you’re a busy business owner or overwhelmed marketer, you want to be sure that the content you create will deliver real results.
Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.
Wouldn’t it be great if you had an easy way to figure out the forms of content that would bring guaranteed business results?
That’s why we’ve put together this list of the most engaging content formats to help you get better ROI from your content strategy.
We’ll tell you why each of the content formats is on this list, and suggest ways to get started with creating them.
By the end, you’ll be able to include some of the most engaging content types in your content strategy. That’ll help you win your audience’s attention, and boost leads and sales.
Let’s get started…
Before we get into the content formats, let’s look at why content marketing is such an essential marketing tool.
As we said, content is an essential part of email marketing which has a high ROI of around $40 for every dollar spent.
Content is also one of three main SEO search ranking factors. Get your content right, and people won’t just find your site in search results. They may also visit, stick around and become customers.
And content can help you build trust and authority. It does that by showing your expertise and giving visitors and customers helpful information.
But here’s the thing: no single type of content will appeal to every visitor. That’s why it makes sense to vary your content. The content formats listed below will help you get started. We’ve included a table of contents so you can jump to the one you want to try first.
- Blog Posts
- Long Form Articles
- Original Research
- Video
- Infographics
- Images
- Case Studies
- White Papers/Reports
- Ebooks
- Presentations
- Webinars
- Quizzes and Polls
- Podcasts
- Checklists
- Email Newsletters
Let’s start with blog posts. That’s the content format most people think of as content marketing.
Blog posts are relatively easy to produce, especially if they’re not too long and don’t contain a lot of images.
And the potential benefits are worth it.
Done right, blog posts can help you:
- Build up a set of authoritative content in your niche
- Get more citations from other trusted sources, leading to better search ranking
- Have content that you can change into other content formats
You can also use guest blogging to build up your inbound link profile.
Blogging covers many types of articles. These include how-tos, reviews, lists and more. Many of these are among the most shared content online.
To get started with writing blog posts:
- Use headline tools to help you find the best headline ideas
- Check out some blog post ideas for inspiration
- Optimize your content and link posts together for better SEO
Long-form articles are another form of content worth your time.
It’s a type of blogging, but long-form content can also stand alone. One example is Moz’s website migration guide, which is more than 17,000 words long.
According to the data, people love to share long-form articles on social media. That results in more traffic to your website. You also get the indirect SEO benefits of social signals.
If you want to use the long-form content format, then you’ll need to research and write content with real depth.
For example, some people publish “ultimate guides” to topics. These can have several chapters, each on its own URL. That means there are lots of chances for the guide to appear in search results.
One option is to use your own industry expertise to produce in-depth and well-researched long long-form content. Another is to check out the content that’s already around, and try to produce something better, fresher, and with more resources.
Original research is another of the popular content formats which get links and shares across many platforms. According to Buzzsumo, content related to research findings can attract millions of shares.
Original research is also a great way to get inbound links. This happens when people cite your work, and it’s great for SEO. An example of original research is the CMI’s annual report on B2B content marketing.
There’s only one issue: producing in-depth research can be time-consuming and costly.
If you want to speed up the process, carry out a survey, using WPForms. Then use the built-in reporting dashboard to get charts to help you visualize the results.
As our article on video marketing statistics shows, video is a proven attention-getter online. Most age groups watch video. It’s also one of the most popular content formats for mobile device users. And data from Google shows that video is a trusted source for 40% of millennials.
But video’s also one of the content formats that contribute to business revenue.
Aberdeen Group shows that marketers who use video get 66% more leads a year than those who don’t. Brand awareness improves too. And Wyzowl found that 81% of those using video marketing saw an increase in sales.
There are lots of ways you can use video in your business. Here are a few ideas:
- Use an explainer video to introduce people to your business
- Create a video showcasing features of your products or services
- Shoot a tutorial to give visitors step by step instructions on using your product
You can also get video views by tapping into popular culture or questioning social norms. One example is the Like a Girl campaign from Always. This turns a phrase that can be negative into a positive affirmation.
So, how do you get started with creating video content? Here are a few suggestions:
- YouTube makes it easy for anyone to have a video channel. You can even shoot video on your Smartphone and upload it via the YouTube Studio app.
- Use a video creation tool like the ones listed here.
- Or go live, as live video is now more popular.
If you want to take this last option, Facebook suggests you:
- Make sure you’ve got a great internet connection
- Let people know you’re planning to go live and encourage them to subscribe
- Write a catchy description; that’ll come in handy for people watching it later
Did you know that infographics are also among the most shared content online? And that 84% of those who use infographics to market their business find that content format effective?
These are just two reasons why infographics are a form of content you can’t ignore.
It’s important to get the graphic elements right and make your infographics attractive. But don’t forget to make the information is interesting and reliable. That creates a linkable, shareable resource, like this example from Marketing Profs:
If you want to use this content format, here are a few tips to get you started:
- Plan your infographic like any other piece of content so it tells a story. A blog post outline can be a good starting point
- Give it a good headline and interesting subheadings
- Use Canva, Piktochart, or another visual content marketing tool to create it.
While we’re on the topic of visuals, let’s not forget about images. Every internet minute, 15,000 GIFs are sent on Messenger, and 46,200 Instagram posts are uploaded.
Images make people more likely to share written content on both Facebook and Twitter.
Here are some options for using images as a content format:
- Turn the key takeaways from your blog post into a quote graphic with Canva or Stencil
- Visit Know Your Meme and pick a popular meme that you can adapt and share
- Use Google Photos to create a short animation from a couple of still photos
- Find or create a shareable GIF with Giphy
Case studies are one of the most effective content marketing formats for winning new business.
Case studies give you the chance to feature your customers and to:
- Show off what you’re doing right
- Create niche-specific content
- Build trust and authority
- Highlight your competitive advantage
White papers and reports can help to engage your audience.
In fact, according to Forbes 79% of B2B buyers share white papers with their colleagues. That adds up to a huge opportunity for you to win more business.
The best white papers aren’t a marketing pitch. Instead, they aim to help the target audience. Even without the hard sell, they’re effective.
The best white papers:
- Focus on one key issue. They are relatively short, at about 6 to 10 pages
- Use in-depth research
- Back up any claims with verifiable statistics
- Include charts, graphs, and pull quotes
- Have a call to action so readers know what to do next
Ebooks are another great way to create content quickly. Done right, an ebook can be an excellent lead magnet and can help solve your customers’ problems.
Hubspot uses ebooks as lead magnets on many blog posts, helping them become a hugely successful company. Check out the share numbers for some of their most popular lead magnets below:
If you’re planning to create an ebook, a good starting point is an in-depth blog post or piece of long form content.
If you’re already promoting your business with presentations, then this is a useful content format. Plus, it’s pretty easy to put them online with a SlideShare account.
Traffic Generation Cafe found SlideShare an effective way to:
- Generate traffic to the website
- Increase the number of Facebook fans
- Gain engagement on SlideShare itself
By uploading presentations to SlideShare, the site moved from 0 to 243,000 views within just 30 days.
To get started with SlideShare, just create and upload a presentation that’ll interest your target customers. Tag it with around three keywords to make it easy to find.
Add it to your LinkedIn profile (LinkedIn is SlideShare’s parent company) to make it even more visible. Promote your presentation via the usual marketing channels.
The stats show that webinars (which are online seminars) are an excellent business content marketing format. According to ReadyTalk, between 20% and 40% of those who attend webinars become qualified leads.
Meanwhile, the Branded Solopreneur found that between 2% and 5% of attendees actually make a purchase.
Those are pretty good numbers, aren’t they?
Webinars usually consist of a presentation plus a brief Q&A session. They help you show off your expertise. You can also demonstrate products and services so that attendees actually want to use them.
To test the water with creating a webinar, try using Zoom which lets you host a 40-minute online meeting with up to 100 attendees for free.
According to CMI, quizzes are one of the most engaging content formats. They will definitely get your audience’s attention.
Similarly, polls can boost engagement by making participants curious about the results.
Shareable, fun content makes a good addition to any content strategy. And since they’re usually easy to complete, that’s an added bonus for your audience.
To create quizzes online, use a tool like Quizzr or Playbuzz. For polls, use the tools built into many social sites, or try WPForms.
According to Edison Research, the number of podcast listeners has grown in the last five years. Today, 15% of the US population listens to a podcast at least weekly.
So it’s clear that a podcast is a great content format to engage your audience. Podcasts let people access your content at their own convenience. They are also another great option for repurposing existing content.
For example, if you’ve created a video, the audio can easily become a podcast. And you can also read a blog post to make that into a podcast episode too.
If you’re looking for an easy way to start your own podcast, follow this tutorial from WPBeginner.
Top Tools: Start your own podcast today with one of the best WordPress podcasting plugins from our list!
One of the easiest content formats to create is a checklist. They’re insanely popular, attracting hundreds of thousands of shares in some cases.
This type of content includes worksheets, tip sheets, and cheat sheets. They’re easy to make by pulling out the key points from another type of content (like a blog post).
Next, you can layout your cheat sheet in a Google Doc or Word document and export it as a PDF. Alternatively, use software like Canva to make it into a graphic and do your PDF export from there.
You probably don’t think of your email newsletter as a content format, but it totally is.
Sure, email newsletters are a great way to highlight the content you’ve created in other formats. However, they can also be something completely new.
As we saw earlier, email has great ROI. That’s why you can’t ignore this content marketing format. See our tips on how to create an email newsletter to get started.
Now you know some of the content formats you can use to improve your content marketing strategy. Next, check out some content marketing examples for inspiration, and learn about content curation.
There’s just one more thing to help you get more from your content: promotion. OptinMonster’s a great tool to help you with that. In fact, Social Media Examiner got 250,000 new subscribers by promoting its content with OptinMonster.
Key takeaway
- These days, everybody knows how important content marketing is in attracting your audience and winning leads and sales.
- According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), content marketing is one of the most cost-effective promotional techniques. In fact, it delivers more leads at a lower cost than most other methods. (The only exception is email marketing.)
Website maintenance is the act of regularly checking your website for issues and mistakes and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done on a consistent basis in order to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings.
Keeping a website well maintained and attractive is important to companies big and small in order to engage and retain customers. It’s easy for businesses, especially startups, to cut corners and let a few tasks slide.
Website maintenance can easily become one of those things as it doesn’t always present immediate issues. However, just like your health can fall apart if you go too long without a regular check up, so can the health of your website.
Regular monitoring of your website is a must for keeping your business running smoothly.
What Are the Steps in Website Maintenance? A Quick Checklist
There is a laundry list of tasks that should be done to keep your website running smoothly. The most time-sensitive of these are website security updates and patches. Without these, your website has the potential to be an actual danger to those who click on it.
With that in mind, here is a list of website maintenance tasks that should be completed regularly:
To be done weekly
- Check that all of your pages are loading without errors
- Run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored
- Make updates to website software and plugins
- Check that all of your forms are running properly
- Remove any spam comments from pages and posts
- Check your pages to see if there are any broken links
- Search for 404 errors and fix or redirect
- Write one or more blog posts to keep your community engaged and encourage SEO traffic.
To be done monthly
- Check the load speed of your website and ensure that nothing is bogging it down
- Review your security scans and make sure nothing is out of place
- Analyze website statistics from the previous month
- Check your blog to see if there are any articles that could be updated
To be done quarterly
- Review your website design and structure – can be it improved?
- Check graphics and images – should anything be updated?
- Review SEO and meta titles and descriptions to ensure they are as effective as possible
- Test and tweak popups, forms, and calls to action
- Review your workload for efficiencies to see if anything can be automated
- Test your website on all devices and browsers to see if it displays correctly
- Review advertising and marketing campaigns to see if anything needs to be changed or updated.
- Restore a previous version of the website to check your backup health
To be done yearly
- Update any reference to the current year
- Review each page for content accuracy, grammar, typos, and relevancy
- Check any active email addresses and see if any are excessive and can be deleted
- Ensure that your website domain name is renewed
- Consider whether a website design update is due
- Review all of your top performing blog articles and see if they can be updated with new content
A Proper Website Maintenance Plan Is a Circle
As you can see from our checklist, website maintenance should be a consistent part of your business. It grows on itself, and if not correctly implemented, can cause some serious problems and setbacks to your potential growth and business health.
Staying on top of website health takes awareness and organization. This is particularly the case for a large site with hundreds (or even thousands) of pages.
With the introduction of new tools to make website building easier, website sizes are growing each year. While it’s easy to add pages to most websites, it’s not as easy to keep all of your pages in a good state.
All that to say: keep on top of your website maintenance.
Why Is It Important to Do Website Maintenance?
Many new businesses already have a lot on their plates without worrying about constantly checking in on their website. It’s tempting to buy a domain name, throw up something temporary, and just worry about it later. There are many reasons why this is not a good idea. Maintaining a current, healthy, and active website is important for a number of reasons.
SEO
The whole point to starting a business is to have customers, clients, or an audience. To drive traffic to your website, you’ll need to keep it regularly updated.
Google wants to rank websites that have the most relevant and up-to-date information on their search engine results page . They may even de-index your website entirely if it hasn’t been updated recently enough and if they suspect it has been infected by malware. You must keep your website regularly updated with current content, news, keywords, and articles in order to rank well in search results.
Regularly website maintenance is invaluable for SEO strategy.
Customer Attraction/Engagement
If your website is gaining traction and traffic, it’s important to keep those potential customers. If they aren’t able to find what they are looking for, current information and relevant content, there is a good chance you’ll lose interest quickly. In order for your website to be the useful tool you want, you’ll need to ensure it is free from typos and grammar issues, has any and all information a customer could want, and looks engaging and consistent.
Security
This is the single most important reason to keep website maintenance on your radar, particularly if your website is storing any form of customer information. If you are using a website building platform like WordPress or Wix, you must ensure that you are installing regular software updates and security patches. It can be easy and attractive for hackers to find and target websites that have sat dormant for too long.
Corporate Image
It’s becoming more and more simple to create a website that looks well-designed and professional. There is an expectation for a professional website from professional companies. If your website doesn’t deliver on the promise of professionalism, your customers will often go elsewhere.
Your Sanity
Your website is a very important element of your business. If it is up-to-date and running smoothly, it can be a valuable support and asset. If it is not in a good state, it can cost you dearly. Once you are behind on your maintenance needs, it can be quite the process to bring the website back up to speed. Sometimes, if your maintenance has been ignored for too long, it is easier just to scrap everything and rebuild from the scratch.
Do yourself and your business a favor by staying on top of your website. This will repay you with simple ease of mind.
Keep up with Trends in Design and Technology
The sleeker your website is, the more you’ll convince potential customers that you are their ultimate choice. If you’re staying on top of your website maintenance, you’ll also have the opportunity to be an early adopter of new website technology that will help the back-end run more smoothly. If you’re installing software updates regularly, you’ll be able to take advantage of new features that install along with the updates.
You’ll also be able to tweak your design to stay on top of the latest website looks. It’s far more tempting to employ a company with a polished and modern website than one that looks like it hopped on a time travel device from 2003.
How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
There are different cost expectations based on what your website is used for, the size of your audience, and how much content is hosted. We’ve discussed the different pricing brackets below.
Small Personal Blog
A small blog typically does not have a lot of traffic and has very few needs. This can be hosted on a blogging site like Google Blogger with no costs whatsoever. Or, it could be self-hosted using a platform like WordPress with low monthly costs stemming from domain name renewal and hosting service.
Medium-Large Sized Active Blog with a Wide Audience
If you have a blog that is bringing in an income with an active audience, you will likely want to be self hosted with some customizations. This will require more frequent maintenance, updates, marketing and backups and a slightly larger monetary investment.
Company Website for the Purpose of Marketing Only
Similar to the medium-large size blog, this will need to be self hosted with a simple design template and limited content. It will be low maintenance for upkeep with regular updates, marketing, and backups.
This will be a larger financial investment as you’ll need to be vigilant about website maintenance. You’re handling a lot of content, code customization, and customer data. If you do not have an IT team on staff, we would recommend finding a web maintenance package to stay on top of your website needs.
Custom Built Web Application
This will be your largest financial investment. Your web application was custom built from the ground up for a specific purpose and it needs to be in top-notch working condition at all times or your company will suffer. This likely needs a dedicated staff of developers keeping a close eye on the maintenance.
Paying for Website Maintenance Services: The Advantages
Now that we’ve established that website maintenance is a must for websites of any size, it’s time to discuss the advantages to employing someone else to do that maintenance. You can, of course, take on these tasks yourself, but it will save time and stress to pay an agency for several reasons.
- You’ll be hiring a team of experts who take care of these tasks every day. They know what to look for and what to expect.
- You can focus on other areas of your business that need your attention.
- Hiring an outside agency is cost-effective and can scale with your company. Your package will reflect the needs of your company.
Determining If You Should Buy Website Maintenance Packages
There are several elements that go into determining whether you should purchase a website maintenance package.
- The size of your website
- The purpose of your website
- How much of your website is customized content
- How quickly is your business growing?
- How much experience do you have with website maintenance?
- Is your website currently out-of-date?
- How much time do you have to dedicate to website maintenance?
If you’ve read this whole article, you probably have a good idea if maintaining your own website is something you are currently capable of. If your website is simply sitting and taking up space on the internet, you should absolutely consider purchasing a website maintenance package. Your website should be a tool that is supporting and helping your business grow. It is a living and breathing entity that deserves your time and attention in order to fulfill its potential.
Key takeaway
- Website maintenance is the act of regularly checking your website for issues and mistakes and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done on a consistent basis in order to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings.
- Keeping a website well maintained and attractive is important to companies big and small in order to engage and retain customers. It’s easy for businesses, especially startups, to cut corners and let a few tasks slide.
- Website maintenance can easily become one of those things as it doesn’t always present immediate issues. However, just like your health can fall apart if you go too long without a regular check up, so can the health of your website.
Depending on where you are in your marketing journey, digital marketing is either a voodoo-like superstition or a teachable science anyone can master. If you’re in the former camp, you’re probably struggling to master your metrics; measuring results is the difference between wishful thinking and actual return on your marketing investment.
To be sure, there are literally hundreds of numbers, statistics, and analytical combinations you could track to give you insight into your marketing efforts and customer behaviour, and not every metric is relevant to your marketing plan. That said, there are a few key metrics in three broad categories (traffic, conversions, and revenue) that are universally applicable to judging your digital marketing success. Here are 18 important digital marketing metrics to watch.
This is the big-picture number you should monitor and track over time to give you a rough idea of how effective your campaigns are at driving traffic. This number should grow steadily over time; if it drops month to month, it’s time to take a hard look at your marketing channels to identify the problem.
2. Traffic by Sources or Channels
This is useful for segmenting your traffic sources to pinpoint which ones are over and underperforming in your overall marketing campaigns. In general, you should break these down into the following four channels/sources:
- Direct Visitors – These are the ones who come to your website by typing your URL into their browser.
- Organic/Search – These are visitors who arrive at your site based on a search query.
- Referrals – These visitors arrived at your side from a link on another website or blog.
- Social Media – If you have a social media presence (and who doesn’t?), you’ll want to measure the visitors who arrive at your site from your social media platforms. Social traffic also gives you some general insight into the overall effectiveness of your content marketing and other digital campaigns, as well, since social traffic is a good indicator of engagement and awareness.
3. Number of New Visitors versus Number of Return Visitors
This is an important distinction to track; return visitors give you an indication of the usefulness and quality of your content—whether it’s “sticky” enough to attract multiple visits. Tracking this ratio week over week and month over month shows you how your new content is performing. For example, if you have a high ratio of new visitors to return visitors compared to a previous month, it’s an indication that new content is doing its job driving traffic, but the rest of your website doesn’t meet the needs of these new visitors.
This is a more detailed analysis of your website traffic, but it yields actionable insight if you know how to interpret it. You’ll want to look at variables such as how many pages a user visits, how long they stay on individual pages, and what they do on each page (leave a review, for example).
Don’t confuse interactions with conversions, although the ultimate goal is to have your interactions lead to more conversions such as downloads, subscriptions, purchases, etc. An analysis of your interactions per visit gives you the opportunity to discover which activities and behaviors are keeping visitors on your site and what you can do to encourage more of them.
This is a corollary to interactions per visit and gives you insight into the level of interest and engagement of your website visitors. This is a good all-purpose indicator of how well your site is performing, since visitors who spend a lot of time on your site are finding useful content. Visitors who spend a lot of time on your site are also most likely to be your most committed customers; knowing where these visitors spend their time interacting with your site helps you optimize content for these customers to increase their lifetime value.
The bounce rate is the number of people who visit your site and leave right away without performing any meaningful action. A high bounce rate can point to several flaws in your digital marketing: Poor campaign targeting, irrelevant traffic sources, weak landing pages, etc.
If you have an e-commerce site, your bounce rate is synonymous with the abandonment rate and this usually indicates problems with your checkout process. Is pricing transparent? Do you load people up with last-minute offers? Spend some time evaluating how to improve the checkout experience.
This is a helpful metric, especially for websites that have a multi-page conversion process. The exit rate differs from the bounce rate in that the exit rate measures the number of people who left the site from a particular page as a percentage of all people who viewed that particular page. This helps you identify drop-off points in your conversion process so you can optimize accordingly.
With the rise of mobile dominance in content consumption, it’s almost negligent not to track your mobile visitor metrics so you can understand your mobile customers and increase your conversions. Here’s what you need to know:
- What percent of your traffic is mobile?
- What devices and browsers do they use?
- Where are they coming from (direct, organic, referral, social, etc.)
- What content are they consuming?
Finally, you should take a look at your site speed because slow load times actually affects pretty much every one of your mobile marketing metrics, from SEO to conversions.
8. Cost Per Visitor (CPV) and Revenue Per Visitor (RPV)
These broad measurements give you a simple formula for the profitability of each marketing channel: If your RPV exceeds your CPV, you’re on your way. These numbers also help shape your budgets for certain types of paid campaigns.
Take AdWords, for example. Imagine that for a particular month, you attributed 10 sales with a value of $15,000 to your AdWords campaign. During that same period, AdWords generated 1,000 visitors to your site. This means that your RPV for your AdWords campaign last month was $15 ($15,000/1,000=$15). This gives you a hard ceiling ($15 per visitor or less) for your marketing budget in this channel before you start losing money.
Your CPV is calculated by dividing your total investment in a particular channel by the total number of visitors it generated. You should run these numbers for each of your traffic sources (search, social, email, etc.) to give you a rough basis to measure success for each channel.
One way to define conversions is the number of anonymous site visitors who become digital records in your CRM or marketing database, whether by making a purchase, downloading an asset, or subscribing to a mailing list. This is the number your financial department will be most interested in, the ultimate measure of success for a marketer. Low conversion rates are indicative of any number of problems, from poorly designed websites to unattractive offers.
Pretty much all marketers track overall, or “macro” conversions, but to really drill deep into your mobile marketing metrics, it’s a good idea to track conversions at the campaign level, or “micro” conversions, to ensure that these smaller KPIs are contributing to your overall marketing strategy.
For example, if you have very high conversion rates pushing a new lead magnet such as an e-book, but an extremely small number of leads move to the next stage of the funnel, you’ve got a problem. Even though this campaign is posting good metrics, it’s really not advancing your overall marketing goals, and tracking these micro conversions can help you identify the source of the problem.
Rand Fishkin, the “wizard of Moz,” considers these metrics one of the three most important overall for digital marketers. He defines them as “knowing the percent of potential customers that make it through each step of a given conversion process, and which channels or behaviors predict that they’ll make it further.” Inherent in this is a deeper understanding of how each stage of the funnel affects your ultimate ROI and where to direct your resources.
Measuring click-through rates (CTR) is essential for email marketing and paid ad campaigns. For PPC campaigns, a higher than average CTR can dramatically decrease your cost per click (up to 50 percent on AdWords, for example), while a lower than average score can drive costs through the roof (up to 400 percent higher on AdWords).
13. New/Unique Visitor Conversions versus Return Visitor Conversions
The way a new visitor interacts with your website is very different from the way a regular visitor behaves. For many marketers, tracking these numbers yields useful information for reducing your bounce rate and increasing your return visitor rates, conversions, and customer lifetime value through upselling and marketing automation, for example.
Depending on how you define conversion, this can be called cost per lead, cost per referral, etc., but the overall metric is extremely important, because it ultimately determines your margins. Why? A high cost per conversion can turn a high conversion rate into a negative if the costs are so high they drop your net income too much.
This is a simple metric to compute: Divide your total number of leads by your total number of sales/closes. Although this is more a measurement of your sales efficiency—and you’ll want to investigate a low close rate—you’ll also need it for your marketing ROI projections.
This isn’t necessarily simply a revenue metric; it’s actually tied to your interactions numbers. It’s also a difficult value to quantify, because your visitors add value every time they come to your site or read your blog (think page views and traffic for cpm advertising). Obviously, in e-commerce, tangible value is added when dollars are spent on a purchase, but intangible value is also created if a customer leaves a review or shares a product on social media.
Many marketers assign an arbitrary value to these customer actions and then calculate a total value, including purchases, for a set period of time. They then divide that number by the total number of visits to arrive at a VPV metric.
Tracking this metric over time gives you insight into how successful you are at getting customers to perform a certain value-added action, such as writing a review, leaving a comment, socially sharing, or otherwise interacting with your site.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) differs from cost per conversion because CPA is all about revenue; this metric kicks in once someone becomes a paying customer, the Holy Grail of marketing. CPA tells you exactly how many marketing dollars you have to spend to get someone to open his wallet.
Sometimes it’s tempting to focus on metrics like cost per click, which you must track in paid campaigns, but it’s a short-sighted metric. Imagine you’ve developed a new PPC campaign and it seems to be performing well—CTRs are up from previous campaigns and your CPC is lower.
But then you track revenue and discover you’ve only acquired three or four paying customers, meaning your entire marketing spend on that channel added virtually nothing to your bottom line. In this case, your campaign metrics look great, but your CPA is astronomical. Your CPA keeps the big picture always in focus.
18. Return on Investment (Real and Projected)
This is the ultimate measure of your marketing success: Are your marketing technologies and efforts profitable and delivering results to your bottom line? Here’s where your lead-to-close ratio comes into play to help keep you on track. If you’re spending $25 per lead and your closing rate is 25 percent, it costs you $100 to acquire a new customer. If your average customer value exceeds that amount, you’re in the black on projected marketing ROI.
Depending where you are on the digital marketing spectrum, you may or may not want to formally track each of these metrics, but doing so will give you a pretty accurate view of how you’re doing, what channels are effective, and where your efforts need improvement. Ideally, you’ll get into a rhythm that lets you easily identify trends and variances—and make rapid adjustments to ensure a steady stream of leads and paying customers.
Key takeaway
- Depending on where you are in your marketing journey, digital marketing is either a voodoo-like superstition or a teachable science anyone can master. If you’re in the former camp, you’re probably struggling to master your metrics; measuring results is the difference between wishful thinking and actual return on your marketing investment.
- To be sure, there are literally hundreds of numbers, statistics, and analytical combinations you could track to give you insight into your marketing efforts and customer behaviour, and not every metric is relevant to your marketing plan. That said, there are a few key metrics in three broad categories (traffic, conversions, and revenue) that are universally applicable to judging your digital marketing success.
Internet marketing has become more and more popular nowadays among businesses around the world. After discovering the wide range benefits of internet marketing in promoting products and services online, it has soon become the leading medium for marketing all over the world.
Unlike mass marketing, which effectively piques the interest of the local audience by means of radio spots, newspapers and print media, internet marketing allows companies to nurture a more personal relationship with their consumers from all over the world. With internet marketing, businesses can deliver content to their customers through personalized and cost-effective communication.
With all the benefits that internet marketing can offer your business, developing a professional internet marketing campaign can attract more customers to your product or brand to grow your business more.
Here our top 15 advantages of internet marketing for your business.
1. Convenience and Quick Service
The incredible convenience of marketing online is one of the biggest advantages of internet marketing. The internet has extremely easy accessibility with consumers using the internet and reaching markets anywhere in the world. Because of this, purchasing goods from across borders now reduces the cost of transportation.
For importers, this is a huge advantage as it means they can order online right from the comforts of their home. In addition, you can easily track sales items online as they make their way into delivery. You can download digital products from the internet with just a click of a mouse. Internet marketing is great for business as it gives consumers a better and more comfortable shopping experience. The convenience plays a very big role in making the buying decision.
One of the main advantages of online marketing for businesses is its low operating cost. You can advertise cheaper with internet marketing than with traditional methods of advertisement such as ads in newspapers, on television and on the radio. In online marketing, you can easily get a free listing in a wide range of business directories.
In addition, the internet allows you to contact your customers more in comparison to how you would contact them traditionally. Online communication is more affordable than traditional communication methods such as sending mail and printing brochures. For example, you can send the same information in an email rather than a mail-out, saving you on printing, paper, and postage.
An aspect of internet marketing that is rarely available with traditional marketing is the ability to measure and track results. With online marketing, your business can utilize varying tools for tracking the results of your advertising campaigns. Using these tools, not only can you measure and track but also illustrate the progress of your marketing campaign in detailed graphics. The ability to quantify your marketing efforts is the best possible thing that can be there.
Measuring and tracking results gives your business a better idea of how your marketing campaign is faring. It gives you an idea of how you can better grow your traffic, leads, sales, and conversions. Without the ability to measure and track your results, you cannot alter or modify your marketing campaign so that it can better deliver the results you desire.
Marketing your products and services online gives you the ability to target audiences based on demography. This allows you to concentrate your efforts on the audience that you truly want to offer your products or services. With demographic targeting, you can better target your marketing efforts on specific demographic regions. Never has it been easier for you to target an area miles away from your office. With internet marketing, it is possible now to target different demographics.
Demographic targeting gives you the ability to target specific customers you think are likely to purchase your product or hire your services. Every time someone visits your website and fills in a form, it gives you an idea of who your customers really are and lets you discover important details about them such as age and interests, which better shapes your services to match their needs.
The ability to market your products and services globally is one of the biggest advantages of global marketing for business. Within several months of aggressive SEO, you can secure millions of viewers and reach huge audiences from across the world. You can now reach every corner of the world, where there is internet.
With internet marketing, you can easily reach beyond your geography to offer your products or services to customers worldwide. Wherever your target audiences are, you can easily reach them 24/7 and from any country all over the world. If your audience consists of more than your local market, utilizing global marketing offers you a great advantage.
One of the core benefits of online marketing is its ability to handling millions of customers at the same time. As long as a website’s infrastructure is efficient, numerous transactions can easily take place simultaneously.
However, even with a large number of transactions taking place, your website is capable of providing satisfactory service to every customer who makes a purchase online, without the risk of diminished satisfaction. This high adaptability of internet marketing is an important benefit that businesses can take advantage of to provide their consumers with the best shopping experience.
Internet marketing reduces cost and runs around the clock. That means that your marketing campaigns run for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Compared to traditional marketing, internet marketing does not constrain you with opening hours. At the same time, you would not be worrying about overtime pay for your staff.
In addition to this, there is no regional or international time difference for you to worry about that will affect the reachability or availability of your offers or online campaigns. Whenever someone opens their computer and connects to the internet, there is a higher chance of them seeing your marketing campaign. Furthermore, customers can look for your product at their most convenient time.
8. Automated, Tech-Savvy Marketing
Another advantage of internet marketing is that marketing this way is easy with one-mouse-click automation. Compared to traditional offline marketing where marketers delegate various tasks to the best hands and talents, internet marketing takes advantage of a more tech-savvy method. With internet marketing, everything can go automated.
Internet marketing gives you the chance to turn every aspect of your business’s operations into a fully automated system. All you need to do is find the right tool and technology suited to your marketing campaign and you are done. By automating your marketing campaign, you can choose to do something more valuable with your time.
9. Data Collection for Personalization
Transactions through the internet allow you to collect data. Whenever a customer purchases a product through a company’s website, the data is captured. Your business can use this data in varying ways. Most businesses analyze the data to find out what products and/or services sell frequently.
Furthermore, the data collected can help segment customers, so your business can send them ads and other promotional materials based on their buying habits and interests. There are various ways that you can collect customer data including customer profiles or through their behaviour while on your website.
The information collected through this method typically includes age, gender, location, how they came to your site, what sites they visited after they left, viewed products and the pages visited on your site.
Another way of collecting customer data is through the use of internet tools or with a tracking software. Compared to traditional marketing, online marketing allows for better data collection as well as personalization.
Through this advantage of internet marketing, businesses can serve millions of customers with various items and products based on their personal interests. Thus, shoppers can easily get their desired products without having to comb through the internet all day.
10. Diversified Marketing and Advertising
When targeting your audience, diversification plays an important role in your marketing and advertising campaigns. Diversification means that you can use a variety of tactics and strategies in order to reach your prospects. With online marketing, diversification becomes a lot easier. In addition to that, it is possible for you to run varying marketing techniques simultaneously to better implement your marketing campaign.
11. Easy Tweaking to Your Marketing and Advertising Campaigns
It is inevitable in marketing and advertising that something needs to be tweaked in order to optimize your campaigns. Compared to traditional marketing, online advertising is much easier to tweak. Whenever the campaign needs to be modified, online marketing allows the modification to happen without having to worry about downtime, service interruption or even halting the entire system.
This means that you can easily change the appearance of your online shopping mall – your website – by changing a few lines in the CSS that link to the web page.
12. Instant Transaction Service
Executing transactions is easy and nearly instant online. You can do this through a digital payment service so that there is no need for cash to go between the marketer and the customer to buy and sell merchandise. This is all possible due to payment processing solutions executed by third party payment processing companies such as PayPal.
13. Better Sales Relationships
In traditional marketing, merchants often give their business cards or pamphlets to their customers after a sale. However, what happens is often on such occasions, the customers lose the cards or misplace it. The only time the seller would remember about the card as if they had the intention of visiting the seller again.
In the end, most customers do not remember the seller much less the card, so this marketing method does not work to convince buyers to return. This is different from internet marketing where the marketers can easily collect email addresses of their prospects and buyers, which they can use in reaching out and forming a relationship with the customer.
The marketer can use this email address to provide customers with valuable information such as information about the purchased product, available coupons on their products and services, special discounts and introducing new products. Aside from email addresses, they can also use social media for consistent interaction with customers.
Unlike traditional marketing, internet marketing is easy to start and quick to implement. You can easily set up a marketing campaign at any time that is convenient for you. In fact, you can set up email marketing for your business within only a matter of hours. Within the next few minutes, you can set up an autoresponder and create a marketing list for your business.
15. Continued Marketing Campaign
The marketing campaign’s later effects are one of the greatest advantages of internet marketing for business. For example, content marketing efforts, such as blogs, and websites have the capacity to remain functional and promote your products and services years after you started your marketing campaign. Almost every online marketing technique has viral and long-term effects that can continually improve your site’s traffic.
Online marketing offers you a variety of benefits. If you’re looking for better ways to reach out to your audience, Edkent Media is here to help. There are many services to choose from including email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization and pay per click marketing.
Key takeaway
- Internet marketing has become more and more popular nowadays among businesses around the world. After discovering the wide range benefits of internet marketing in promoting products and services online, it has soon become the leading medium for marketing all over the world.
- Unlike mass marketing, which effectively piques the interest of the local audience by means of radio spots, newspapers and print media, internet marketing allows companies to nurture a more personal relationship with their consumers from all over the world. With internet marketing, businesses can deliver content to their customers through personalized and cost-effective communication.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with your customers and potential customers. It helps you improve your profitability.
More commonly, when people talk about CRM they are usually referring to a CRM system, a tool which helps with contact management, sales management, workflow processes, productivity and more.
Customer Relationship Management enables you to focus on your organisation’s relationships with individual people – whether those are customers, service users, colleagues or suppliers. CRM is not just for sales. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can come from moving beyond CRM as a sales and marketing tool and embedding it in your business – from HR to customer services and supply-chain management.
If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. You’ll already have targets relating to sales, business objectives and profitability. But getting up-to-date, reliable information on your progress towards your goals can be tricky. How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales teams, customer service staff, marketers and social media monitoring into useful business information?
Using a CRM system can give you a clear overview of your customers. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customisable dashboard that can tell you a customer's previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.
You can even choose to include information from their public social media activity – their likes and dislikes, what they are saying and sharing about you. Marketers can use CRM to better understand the pipeline of sales or prospective work coming in, making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You'll have clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you the clear path from enquiries to sales.
And though it’s traditionally been used as a sales and marketing tool, customer service teams are seeing great benefits from CRM systems. Today’s customer might raise an issue in one channel – say, Twitter – and then switch to email or telephone to resolve it in private. A CRM platform enables you to manage the enquiry across channels without losing track.
More administration, less selling.
An active sales team generates a flood of data. They can be out on the road talking to customers, meeting prospects and finding out valuable information – but all this information gets stored in handwritten notes, laptops, or inside the heads of your salespeople.
On top of this your customers may be contacting you on a range of different platforms – phone, email and social media. Asking questions, following up on orders or complaining. Without a common platform for customer interactions, communications can be missed or lost in the flood of information – leading to an unsatisfactory response to your customer.
Details can get lost, meetings are not followed up promptly and prioritising customers can be a matter of guesswork rather than a rigorous exercise based on fact. And it can all be compounded if a key salesperson moves on.
Even if you do successfully collect all this data, you’re faced with the challenge of making sense of it. It can be difficult to extract intelligence. Reports can be hard to create and waste valuable selling time. Managers can lose sight of what their team are up to in reality, which means that they can't offer the right support at the right time – while a lack of oversight can also result in a lack of accountability from the team.
Luckily, there’s an answer.
“How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”
Bill Gates
Introducing a CRM platform has many benefits which have been shown to produce real results – including direct improvements to the bottom line. CRM applications have a proven track record of increasing:
- Sales by up to 37%
- Sales Productivity by up to 44%
- Forecast accuracy by 48%
One of the main benefits of a CRM system is that it can help you to identify and add new leads easily and quickly and categorise them accurately. You can create customised pitch documents in less time, cutting down on response time and enabling sales teams to move on to the next opportunity.
With complete, accurate, centrally held information about clients and prospects, sales staff can focus their attention and energy on the right clients and gain a competitive advantage.
Increase referrals from existing customers
By understanding your customers better, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities become clear – giving you the chance to win new business from existing customers.
With better information you'll also be able to keep your customers happy with better service. Happy customers are likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers spend more – up to 33% more according to some studies.
An often overlooked benefit of CRM software is that it will gather information from a huge variety of sources across your business. This gives you unprecedented insights into how your customers feel and what they are saying about your organisation – so you can improve what you offer, spot problems early and identify gaps.
See how harnessing the power of social networks in your CRM improves performance:
CRM & the Cloud Computing Revolution
Perhaps the most significant recent development in CRM systems has been the move to cloud computing. Freed from the need to install software on hundreds or thousands of desktop PCs and mobile devices, organisations worldwide are discovering the benefits of moving data, software and services into a secure online environment.
Cloud-based CRM systems, such as Sales force, mean every user has the same information, all the time. Your sales force out on the road can check data, update it instantly after a meeting or work from anywhere. The same information is available to anyone who needs it, from the sales team to the customer service representatives.
Find out more about the value of mobile CRM for your business:
CRM can be quick and easy to implement. A cloud-based system doesn’t need special installation and there's no hardware to set up, keeping IT costs low and removing the headache of version control and update schedules.
Generally, cloud-based CRM systems are priced on the number of users who access the system and the kinds of features you need. This can be very cost-effective in terms of capital outlay, and is also extremely flexible – enabling you to scale up and add more people as your business grows. Cloud-CRM platforms such as Sales force are flexible in terms of functionality, too – you're not paying for any features that are not useful to you.
- Faster deployment
- Automatic software updates
- Cost-effectiveness and scalability
- The ability to work from anywhere, on any device
- Increased collaboration
Key takeaway
Marketing automation is all about using software to automate marketing activities. Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns -- not just for the sake of efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalized experience for their customers. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.
At its best, marketing automation is a combination of software and strategy. It should allow you to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to delighted customers.
Think of effective marketing automation like growing a garden. You need fertile soil, ripe for growth. You need seeds to sow. And you need water and light to nurture those seeds into a lush, blooming plant. With good marketing automation, it's easier to nurture leads (the seedlings) well enough to produce paying customers (a lush, full-grown plant).
But it doesn't end there. Customers are more than just the output of successful marketing automation. They should be at the center of everything you do, which means marketing automation should continue to play an important role in your relationship with them.
That's why the most successful marketing automation strategies don't consider customers an afterthought at the end of a traditional funnel. Instead, customers should be at the center of a flywheel that gets more efficient when you add force to that flywheel, and reduce points of customer friction.
Successful marketing automation strategies will reduce that friction and speed up your flywheel, helping you continue to nurture customer relationships well after they've been passed to Sales and the deal has been won.
Because of the popularity of marketing automation, a misconception has grown that marketing automation software can be a salve for any slowdowns in marketing growth -- including the need to generate new leads. This misconception leaves many marketers with sophisticated tools to automate the middle of their funnel, but no solution for generating new leads to nurture in the first place.
The consequence is that marketers begin buying lists of email addresses to nurture instead of generating inbound leads. While it seems like a quick fix, it's not a long-term solution, nor does it create the fertile ground for a healthy, long-term relationship with your customers.
Many marketers also continue to think of marketing automation in the context of a funnel, instead of a flywheel. Generate a lead, put them in an automated email queue, and pass hand-raisers over to Sales. This creates a disjointed experience for prospects and customers as they move from Marketing, to Sales, to Customer Service. Instead of building a contextual, efficient experience based on each individual's needs, marketing automation becomes a way to force people through a funnel with arbitrary touch points and irrelevant content.
When marketing automation operates in a silo like this, points of friction are introduced that stall and strain what could have been productive, long-term customer relationships.
Key takeaway
- Marketing automation is all about using software to automate marketing activities. Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns -- not just for the sake of efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalized experience for their customers. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.
The term “enterprise CRM” can be confusing for someone who has just started searching for CRM solutions for their business. With so many vendors offering so many editions, it’s easy to get confused when trying to decide if a business needs enterprise CRM.
To make matters even more confusing, some vendors offer enterprise CRM, but call it by a different name. This has led some people to believe that CRM and enterprise CRM are the same thing, just with a different volume of licenses. While they do share certain features, there are vast differences between enterprise CRM and standard CRM products. Understanding these differences should make it easier for a business to decide which solution best fits their needs.
Systems such as Nimble, Capsule CRM, and Highrise are typically targeted toward smaller, less complex organizations. With smaller businesses, there are usually fewer people who interact directly with the customers. In most small-business settings, the bulk of customer interactions are carried out by the sales and marketing departments. As such, these CRM vendors focus more on the needs of the salespeople with features like contact management and calendars. These standard CRM editions have a limited feature set, and are primarily useful for businesses with a single sales department and a small number of salespeople.
The relatively low cost of standard CRM can make it appealing to SMBs and mid-markets. These editions of CRM are usually offered at a flat, per-user rate–allowing the business to add or remove seats as needed. The low cost often comes with some hidden expenses. Many CRM vendors require a one-time startup fee to get the implementation up and running. Smaller editions of CRM also have limited interoperability with mobile devices and popular Microsoft Office applications like Outlook and Access.
Enterprise CRM solutions, like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SAP are designed for larger, more complex businesses with more customer-facing department’s larger databases, and more robust needs. In an enterprise setting, it’s not unusual to have multiple departments and sales teams, all of which need instant access to customer and company data. Everyone from management to shipping is involved in the business process workflow, so it makes sense for all of them to be working with the same information. Enterprise CRM also allows for a greater degree of automation, such as logging customer interactions or generating alerts when problems arise.
Enterprise CRM can be substantially more expensive than standard CRM. Much of the cost can be attributed to the time and effort involved in customizing the system and deploying it throughout the enterprise. With some enterprise solutions, there are additional costs to purchase servers, for on-premise installations, and annual maintenance and upgrade fees. The extra cost also includes more robust support for issues such as implementation, training, and creating mobile applications. Enterprise editions usually offer easier integration with Office products and can be customized to work with almost any mobile device.
Deciding which edition to purchase largely depends on the size and vision of the business. For SMBs and mid-market businesses that aren’t projecting a large expansion in the near future, standard CRM may be the best bet. It will allow salespeople to collect and organize the data they need to do their jobs well. With a lower price point, standard CRM is a good way to increase sales in a smaller office.
A business should consider enterprise CRM if it has more than one sales department or multiple departments that deal directly with customers. It’s important for everyone who deals with customers to be working from the same information. Enterprise CRM is more expensive, but eventually pays for itself in improved customer service across all departments.
Key takeaway
- The term “enterprise CRM” can be confusing for someone who has just started searching for CRM solutions for their business. With so many vendors offering so many editions, it’s easy to get confused when trying to decide if a business needs enterprise CRM.
- To make matters even more confusing, some vendors offer enterprise CRM, but call it by a different name. This has led some people to believe that CRM and enterprise CRM are the same thing, just with a different volume of licenses. While they do share certain features, there are vast differences between enterprise CRM and standard CRM products. Understanding these differences should make it easier for a business to decide which solution best fits their needs.
CRM aligns marketing processes and drive customer demand using functionality to enhance management of marketing resources, segments and lists, campaigns, leads, trade promotions, and marketing analytics.
CRM enables you to acquire, grow, and retain profitable relationships with functionality for sales planning and forecasting and the management of territories, accounts, contacts, activities, opportunities, quotations, orders, product configuration, pricing, billing, and contracts.
CRM can drive service revenue and profitability with support for service sales and marketing. More effectively manage service orders, contracts, complaints and returns, in-house and depot repairs, warranties, resource planning, e-service, and service analytics. Functionality to support call centers, field service, and e-service provides flexible delivery options.
With CRM you can attain a more profitable and loyal indirect channel by managing partner relationships and empowering channel partners. Improve processes for partner recruitment and management, communications, channel marketing and forecasting, collaborative selling, partner order management, channel service, and analytics for partners and channel managers.
Customer interaction centers are places where you meet your customer face to face. With CRM, you can maximize customer loyalty, cut costs, and boost revenue by transforming your interaction center into a strategic delivery channel for marketing, sales, and service efforts across all touch points. Effectively handle activities such as telemarketing, telesales, customer service, human resources, IT support, and interaction center management.
Increase sales and reduce transaction costs by turning the Internet into a valuable sales, marketing, and service channel for businesses and consumers. Increase profitability and reach new markets with a fully integrated Web channel, including support for e-marketing, e-commerce, e-service, and Web channel analytics.
Business communications management
Manage inbound and outbound contacts across multiple locations and channels. Integrate multichannel communications with customer-facing business processes to provide customers and partners with seamless, consistent experiences across all channels, including voice, text messaging, the Web, and e-mail.
Turn all customer interactions into opportunities to build customer relationships and generate revenue. Plan, develop, and execute cross-selling, up-selling, and retention offers; service-level agreements; and more. Take appropriate subsequent actions to enhance customer relationships and ensure relevant and personalized customer interactions.
CRM will boost a company’s brand presence and profits with visibility into and control of all trade related processes. Increase accounting accuracy of trade and financial results with back-office integration. Gain key business insights to help you optimize trade activities. Increase your trade promotion success with analytics and enhanced management of trade funds, promotions, claims, and retail execution.
Key takeaway
- CRM aligns marketing processes and drive customer demand using functionality to enhance management of marketing resources, segments and lists, campaigns, leads, trade promotions, and marketing analytics.
To understand the steps of the CRM process, you have to understand the customer lifecycle. It’s one of the first concepts you learn as a sales rep to understand how a person becomes a loyal customer.
The CRM cycle involves marketing, customer service, and sales activities. It starts with outreach and customer acquisition and ideally leads to customer loyalty.
There are five key stages in the CRM cycle:
- Reaching a potential customer
- Customer acquisition
- Conversion
- Customer retention
- Customer loyalty
The CRM process is that concept in action. It’s the tangible steps an organization must take to help drive consumers through the cycle of learning about your brand and ultimately becoming repeat customers.
According to the customer lifecycle, we know that the first step in the CRM process is maximizing reach with leads. In practice, reach is using your CRM platform to generate brand awareness through targeted marketing campaigns.
Every stage in the customer lifecycle corresponds with an actionable step in the CRM process. The key is knowing what those steps are and how to execute them.
What are the 5 steps in the CRM process?
The five steps of the CRM process are a collaborative effort between marketing, sales, and support departments. To help you understand how each team works together, we’ll walk through how each step works in practice. We’ll cover not only how each part of the process can be completed with a CRM tool but also who is responsible for each step.
The first step to acquiring new customers is to introduce them to your business. The marketing team typically takes on this task through a number of measures:
1. Learning about your target audience. Marketers will conduct research to identify their audience’s target demographics, interests, preferred channels of communication, what messaging they respond most to, and what they care about.
2. Segmenting your target audience. Audience personas are created to segment a brand’s target audience into similar groups based on similar interests or demographics. This helps marketers identify which types of people are most likely to become customers and who their campaigns should target.
3. Creating marketing campaigns that speak to those target demographics. A/B tests and marketing automation can be used to identify what works and what doesn’t, to create unique campaigns for unique customer segments such as on social media or email, and to create strategies for lead acquisition.
When it comes to completing these steps, a CRM solution is a wealth of information. The tool can show patterns in past leads and customers to give marketing teams a clear picture of their target audience. Beyond understanding similarities in demographics, marketers can also analyze sales notes in their CRM technology to understand what led to conversions in the past. By understanding what resonated with leads, marketers are better equipped to create effective campaigns.
Introducing your brand to a potential customer is just the beginning of the CRM process. From there, you have to encourage them to learn more about your business and engage with it.
Depending on how your company is structured, this lead acquisition step could be a marketing or sales team responsibility — or both. Your marketing team, for example, might encourage website visitors to share their email with a newsletter signup CTA or a social media giveaway. Sales, on the other hand, could use their CRM system to set up live chat on your site. With this feature, your team can proactively reach out to potential customers who land on your website.
If your CRM technology comes equipped with a lead enrichment tool, like Reach, lead acquisition is unbelievably simple. All the tool needs is a lead’s email address to instantly reveal detailed information about the person. With customer data, you can personalize your outreach with the lead to start the relationship off on the right note. Not to mention, you can save tons of time by not needing to research leads yourself.
3. Convert leads into customers
You’ve successfully engaged with your leads, and they’re interested. Now it’s time to turn those leads into customers.
To do so, sales reps must first be skilled at identifying how interested leads are and, specifically, whether they’re interested enough to make a purchase. A CRM system is very helpful here. The historical data from past successful sales can be used to identify lead-qualification criteria. These criteria can be added as “attributes” to your CRM’s lead-scoring tool to help reps identify opportunities with the highest probability of a sale.
If leads do seem likely to make a purchase, reps must then be able to nurture them further and build their trust enough to convert. One way to do this is for reps to send leads case studies, white papers, and other resources that may sway their decision.* *
Reps should also use their CRM platform to set reminders and tasks to follow up with interested leads. After all, studies have shown that “63% of consumers need to hear a company’s claim 3-5 times before they actually believe it." Use your CRM’s dashboard to help you remember to follow up to ensure that no opportunities are missed.
4. Provide superior customer service
You’ve successfully converted your lead into a customer. Great! But the CRM process doesn’t end when a customer converts. In order to grow as a company, you need to retain customers. How do you keep that customer coming back? Excellent service from support.
According to Zendesk’s 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report, customer service is the biggest factor that determines a consumer’s loyalty to a brand. Conversely, poor customer service can cost you customers and negatively impact your reputation. Support teams must be able to deliver superior support whenever, wherever, and however their customers expect it.
Forty-nine percent of customers say being able to resolve their issue quickly is the most important aspect of a good customer service experience. With CRM software, support agents can easily access the historical customer information they need to resolve a ticket quickly.
Fifty-seven percent of customers expect to have a choice of channels when reaching out to customer support. CRM features allow support agents to not only provide omni channel support but also manage those conversations in a single, unified view.
With the right CRM, your agents have the customer information and resources they need to resolve a customer’s issues quickly and effortlessly. This allows for a stress-free and efficient experience for both the customer and the support agent.
When we think of a returning customer, we imagine a shopper continually coming back to the same business to buy the products they know and love. But there is another key way existing customers provide value — by upgrading to more expensive products.
How do you convince customers to switch products? Personalized recommendations via email are a great place to start. You can use your CRM to organize customers into smart lists based on similar purchase histories. You can then create custom email templates that send relevant product releases to entire lists of customers at once. This way, you can be sure the promotional deals or releases you send are reaching the people most likely to buy them.
If your business is service-based, you may find upsell opportunities through check-in calls. Set reminders in your CRM to regularly reach out to repeat customers to ask how they’re doing and whether there is any way you could improve your service. Their needs may very well have changed since the last time you spoke, and they may be ready for an upsell.
With a CRM process, the customer lifecycle no longer feels abstract. The right CRM enables you to create a deliberate, personalized experience that naturally drives leads through your sales pipeline.
Key takeaway
- To understand the steps of the CRM process, you have to understand the customer lifecycle. It’s one of the first concepts you learn as a sales rep to understand how a person becomes a loyal customer.
- The CRM cycle involves marketing, customer service, and sales activities. It starts with outreach and customer acquisition and ideally leads to customer loyalty.
INTRODUCTION
Using the Internet and e-business to provide products and services and information to customers requires that you really know and understand your customer’sneeds. When customers contact is traditional business by visiting the store or office or contacting someone personally by phone, you have the opportunity to hear their questions and offer solutions based on personal communication. If they have a misunderstanding about our product or a sales objection we can deal with it immediately. When people visit our online business at website, we will not even know they are there. we do not have the opportunity to ask or answer questions. It is therefore vitally important that we anticipate their questions and concerns and provide the needed information in a way that makes it easy for them to fully understand our offering. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to get the maximum value from your e-business investment.
CRM
CRM is the broad category of concepts, tools, and processes that allows an organization to understand and serve everyone with whom it comes into contact. CRM is about gathering information that is used to serve customer basic information, such as name, address, meeting and purchase history, and service and support contacts. In a supplier relationship it might be procurement history, terms and conditions, or contact information. This information is then used to better serve the clients.
Implementing CRM
Customer relationship management is a corporate level strategy, focusing on creating and maintaining relationships with customers. Several commercial CRM software packages are available which vary in their approach to CRM. However, CRM is not a technology itself, but rather a holistic approach to an organisation's philosophy, placing the emphasis firmly on the customer.
CM governs an organization's philosophy at all levels, including policies and processes, front of house customer service, employee training, marketing, systems and information management. CRM systems are integrated end-to-end across marketing, sales, and customer service.
A CRM system should:
- Promote a customer-oriented philosophy
- Identify factors important to clients.
- Adopt customer-based measures
- Develop end-to-end processes to serve customers
- Provide successful customer support
- Handle customer complaints
- Track all aspects of sales
- Create a holistic view of customers' sales & services information
CRM Architecture
There are three fundamental components in CRM:
Operational - automation of basic business processes (marketing, sales, service)
Analytical - analysis of customer data and behavior using business intelligence
Collaborative - communicating with clients
Operational CRM
Operational CRM provides automated support to xxx "front office" business processes (sales, marketing and service). Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer's history, and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database as necessary.
According to Gartner Group, operational CRM typically involves three general areas:
Sales force automation (SFA)
SFA automates some of a company's critical sales and sales force management tasks, such as forecasting, sales administration, tracking customer preferences and demographics, performance management, lead management, account management, contact management and quote management.
Customer service and support (CSS)
CSS automates certain service requests, complaints, product returns and enquiries.
Enterprise marketing automation (EMA)
EMA provides information about the business environment, including information on competitors, industry trends, and macroenvironmental variables. EMA applications are used to improve marketing efficiency.
Integrated CRM software is often known as a "front office solution", as it deals directly with customers.
Many call centers use CRM software to store customer information. When a call is received, the system displays the associated customer information (determined from the number of the caller). During and following the call, the call center agent dealing with the customer can add further information.
Some customer services can be fully automated, such as allowing customers to access their bank account details online or via a WAP phone.
Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM analyses data (gathered as part of operational CRM, or from other sources) in an attempt to identify means to enhance a company's relationship with its clients. The results of an analysis can be used to design targeted marketing campaigns, for example:
Acquisition:Cross-selling,up-selling
Retention: Retaining existing customers (antonym: customer attrition)
Information: Providing timely and regular information to customers
Other examples of the applications of analyses include:
- Contact optimization
- Evaluating and improving customer satisfaction
- Optimizing sales coverage
- Fraud detection
- Financial forecasts
- Price optimization
- Product development
- Program evaluation
- Risk assessment and management
- Strategic Marketing
- Operational marketing
Data collection and analysis is viewed as a continuing and iterative process. Ideally, business decisions are refined over time, based on feedback from earlier analyses and decisions. Most analytical CRM projects use a data warehouse to manage data.
Collaborative CRM
- Collaborative CRM focuses on the interaction with customers (personal interaction, letter, fax, phone, Internet, e-mail etc.)
- Collaborative CRM includes:
- Providing efficient communication with customers across a variety of communications channels
- Providing online services to reduce customer service costs
- Providing access to customer information while interacting with customers
- Driven by authors from the Harvard Business School (Kracklauer/Mills/Seifert), Collaborative CRM also seems to be the new paradigma to succeed the leading Efficient Consumer Response and
Category Management concept in the industry/ trade relationship.
Uses
In its broadest sense, CRM covers all interaction and business with customers. A good CRM program allows a business to acquire customers, provide customer services and retain valued customers.
Customer services can be improved by:
- Providing online access to product information and technical assistance around the clock
- Identifying what customers value and devising appropriate service strategies for each customer
- Providing mechanisms for managing and scheduling follow-up sales calls
- Tracking all contacts with a customer
- Identifying potential problems before they occur
- Providing a user-friendly mechanism for registering customer complaints
- Providing a mechanism for handling problems and complaints
- Providing a mechanism for correcting service deficiencies
- Storing customer interests in order to target customers selectively
- Providing mechanisms for managing and scheduling maintenance, repair, and on-going support
Technical
The following factors need to be considered:
Scalability: the system should be highly scalable, as the volume of data stored in the system grows over time
Communication channels: CRM can interface with a variety of different channels (phone, WAP, Internet etc.)
Workflow - a company's business processes need to be represented by the system with the ability to track the individual stages and transfer information between steps
Assignment - the ability to assign requests, such as service requests, to a person or group.
Database - the means of storing customer data and histories (in a data warehouse) Customer privacy considerations, such as data encryption and legislation.
Improving Customer Relationships
CRM applications often track customer interests and requirements, as well as their buying habits. This information can be used to target customers selectively. Furthermore, the products a customer has purchased can be tracked throughout the product's life cycle, allowing customers to receive information concerning a product or to target customers with information on alternative products once a product begins to be phased out.
Repeat purchases rely on customer satisfaction, which in turn comes from a deeper understanding of each customer and their individual needs. CRM is an alternative to the "one size fits all" approach. In industrial markets, the technology can be used to coordinate the conflicting and changing purchase criteria of the sector.
Privacy and Ethical Concerns
The data gathered as part of CRM raises concerns over customer privacy and enables persuasive sales techniques. However, CRM does not necessarily involve gathering new data, but also includes making better use of customer information gathered as a result of routine customer interaction.
The privacy debate generally focuses on the customer information stored in the centralised database itself, and fears over a company's handling of this information. For example, there is virtually no way a consumer can determine if the company shares private (personally identifiable) data with third parties. Furthermore, companies may not always accurately declare to the consumer the types of information collected by CRM systems and the specific purposes for which the information is used.
Electronic Customer Relationship Management- e CRM
It is integration between the traditional CRM and e-business application. This small has full potential to act as a gigantic E, boosting the organizations performance and the overall structure of business. Essentially, e- enables an organization to extend its infrastructure to customers and partners in a way that offers new opportunities to learn customer needs, add value, gain new economies, reach new customers, and do all of this in real time.
e-CRM is not just customer service, self-service web applications, sales force automation tools or the analysis of customers' purchasing behaviors on the internet. e-CRM is all of these initiatives working together to enable an organization to respond more effectively to its customers' needs and to market to them on a one-to-one basis.
Reason for e-CRM
Globalization brought in its spate a new emerging trend of e-business reinforcing further the customer centric approach. Customers now-a-days hold supremacy as the de-facto rulers of the market since they drive the market trends, with their rational approach. This emerging scenario impelled companies to take a U-turn in their thought process and follow a customer-oriented methodology. At present companies cannot leap ahead on the basis of their capabilities and services, as it is the customers who matter at the end of the day.
According to industry research, it is 10 times more expensive to pursue new customers than to sell to existing ones. CRM can help gain a greater share of a loyal customer's business. Customers have always been at the core of business. The Internet economy has empowered the customer with more information and choice than ever before
Features
Integrated Real-Time Information
The comprehensive Intelebiz CRM system captures every order, every payment transaction, every shipment, every communication, and every aspect involving customer relationship, all in real-time. Our E-CRM is integrated with its multi-channel sales, order engines and marketing engine. Customer support is made easy by virtue of having all relevant information in a single unified view.
Prioritization and Personalization
The application tracks all valuable customers and encourages them to do more business with company. It provides loyalty program, special offers, special pricing, special products and other exclusive services.
Buying Groups and Organizations
The system supports groups and other form of buying organizations that receive special pricing, aggregate their orders to a sum benefit, and need cumulative reporting.
Activity Management
The system has a configurable activity management system with a complete calendar, notations, categorized issue tracking, and resolution management.
Customer Communications- Trouble Ticket and Live Chat
Customer communications enables all email communications as well as trouble tickets and live chat supported by a configurable communications engine. Customers can easily submit a trouble ticket. A system events engine automates communications in step with order management workflow.
Customer Service and Self-Service
Our integrated service tools increase customer loyalty while reducing support costs. Customers can log in anytime to view their order histories, track packages, request refunds or view quotes. Customers can also submit trouble tickets while reviewing responses to their previous inquiries, or read through a published knowledge base.
New Customer Acquisition and Prospecting
This functionality enables tracking of all prospects according to stage of development and likeliness to make a purchase. Prospect records seamlessly convert into customer records with password protection and entitlements.
Attributes
The attribution system enables the definition and storage of any number of aspects of each customer for use in prioritization, loyalty programs, determining customer acquisition sources, entitlements, and contractual obligations. Configuration of attributes is user-driven including the data type, display type, the universe of acceptable values, and behaviors, including whether or not ranges of values are accepted and whether the attribute is visible to customer.
Pricing Tiers, Volume Pricing, and Customer Specific Pricing
The pricing engine enables any number of pricing tiers (for loyalty programs and wholesale/distributor/retail pricing) and enables volume pricing (discounts for bulk purchases) within each tier. The pricing engine is connected to Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) such that customers can sign-in and get access to their own special pricing.
Benefits of e-CRM
Most of the organizations are investing huge amount of money in defining and automating their core business processes. No doubt, they have benefited by standardizing the processes, yet there are some unpredictable and unforeseen circumstances, wherein the expertise of the individuals is called for. This is where e-CRM comes into the picture.
Captures and Reuses past experiences
Ensures Knowledge Management- A strategy to organize and use available information, experience and expertise
Focus on customers across organization
Linking employees with customers
Lower cost of service as servicing a customer online costs less because all functional areas of servicing a customer (sales, marketing and services)
Help to capitalize on your most profitable customers
Ability to increase marketing capabilities through gathering enhanced demographic data, e-CRM allows organizations to profitable consumer profiles for new customer acquisition
e-CRM is an essential tool for any organization's high performance and depends on worker's effectiveness more than their efficiency. By doing so, companies can engage their customers in an ongoing knowledge exchange in which the company can learn more about market and customer needs and work to develop and deliver the products and services that can exceed the customers' expectations and leap ahead of market trends.
Effective customer relation management through customer knowledge management
Customer relationship management starts with in depth knowledge of customers, their habits, desires and this needs, by analyzing their cognitive, affect behavior and attributes. CRM applies this knowledge to develop and design-marketing strategies, to develop and cultivate, long lasting mutually beneficial interaction and relationship with the customer. Customer knowledge and customer interaction on the basis of this knowledge are the two pillars on which any CRM design and its successful implementation rests.
Dynamic changes in the form of evolution of marketing environment and development of web as marketing medium and its global acceptance have forced organizations to change the way in which business is conducted, thus E-business has evolved and is expected that within few years it will become so mature that it will be the sole survivor in terms of way of conducting business. Supply chain management system and customer relation management system are integrated to the existing ERP systems of the organizations to deliver value to the customer.
THE CRM VALUE CHAIN
Customer data -> customer information -> customer knowledge -> Wisdom to completely satisfy customers
Winning markets through effective customer relationship management
Information technology and Internet are rapidly changing the face of what is possible in customer contact, care and insight. Moreover customer expectations for quality service, and value are rising continually. Keeping this in mind, successful companies are now gearing to organize their business around the types of customers they serve rather than organizing their business along the product lines or geographic business units. Today, with ever increasing focus on customers, companies are taking a process-oriented approach to customer relationship management.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENTA FRAMEWORK
Customer relationship management (CRM) is comprehensive sales marketing approach to building long-term customer relationships and improving business performance. A frame works in designing a strategy for effective customer relationship management developing customer insight, use of technology in CRM customer contact, personalizing customer interaction, and achieving superior customer experience.
CRM solutions platform needs to be based on interactive technology and process. It should assist the company in developing and enhancing customer interactions and one-to-one marketing through the applications of suitable intelligent agents that help develop front-line relationship with customers. Such a system should identify appropriate data inputs at each customer interaction site and use analytical platforms to generate appropriate knowledge output for front-line staff during customer interactions. In addition, implementation tools to support interactive solutions for customer profitability analysis, customer segmentation, demand generation, account planning, opportunity management, contact management, integrated marketing communications, customer care strategies, customer problem solving, virtual team management of large global accounts, and measuring CRM performance would be the next level of solutions sought by most enterprises.
Key takeaway
- Using the Internet and e-business to provide products and services and information to customers requires that you really know and understand your customer’sneeds. When customers contact is traditional business by visiting the store or office or contacting someone personally by phone, you have the opportunity to hear their questions and offer solutions based on personal communication. If they have a misunderstanding about our product or a sales objection we can deal with it immediately.
- When people visit our online business at website, we will not even know they are there. we do not have the opportunity to ask or answer questions. It is therefore vitally important that we anticipate their questions and concerns and provide the needed information in a way that makes it easy for them to fully understand our offering. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to get the maximum value from your e-business investment.
Imagine if at the start of every new project, you had to forget everything that you know about customers within that domain. Everything you know about what’s important to them. The products and services they use. The pain points they experience. The challenges they face. Rather than building on existing customer insights, you’d have to start from scratch every time. It would be a crazy way to work, and yet many teams do such a bad job of consolidating and communicating pre-existing customer insights, that they may as well take this approach.
Trying to locate existing customer insights can all too often feel like hunting for fossils. Most of the time you’ll just find tiny fragments, which on their own really aren’t that insightful. Every so often, you’ll hit the jackpot in the form of some fossilised insights, a customer persona, or perhaps a long-lost customer research report. Like the fragments of a dinosaur skeleton there will be missing details and elements that you’ll have to piece together, but slowly over time a more fully formed picture will start to form. Whilst hunting for fossils might be fun (if you’re into that sort of thing), hunting for customer insights certainly isn’t.
To ensure that what is already known about customers doesn’t remain buried deep in the ground the DB DevOps teams at Redgate have started building a customer insights repository place to better store, share and utilise customer insights. That one place is the Database DevOps customer research dashboard.
Introducing the Database DevOps customer research dashboard
The Database DevOps customer research dashboard is the Natural History Museum of customer insights. A place where everyone within Redgate can go to learn about DB DevOps customers; to discover and explore customer insights and to access the vast collection of customer insight fossils available within.
Like the floors of a museum, the dashboard has different levels of information about customers. This allows the wood to be seen, along with the trees. The different levels are as follows:
- High-level insights
- Individual observations
- Raw research data
The different layers of a customer insights repository
At the top are the high-level insights that have come out of research activities, such as research calls and customer feedback. Insights are often in the form of documents, such as personas, empathy maps, job maps and value proposition statements.
In the middle are individual customer observations and pieces of feedback, such as observations from customer calls, usability issues identified during usability testing and survey responses. Importantly these are date stamped and tagged to allow observations to be easily searched, filtered and grouped by topic.
Forming the foundation of the customer research repository is the raw customer research data. This includes notes from customer calls and visits, and full unfiltered survey responses.
Building a customer research repository
There are a growing number of platforms out there which promise to provide a quick and easy to set-up customer insights repository, such as the excellently named Nom and Dovetail. However, the team felt that none of the platforms out there ticked enough of the boxes to warrant paying for yet another tool, so instead we have built a repository using the following pre-existing or free tools.
Confluence is used to present the high-level insights as an easy to navigate Wiki (at least that’s the idea) and to store some of the raw data, such as customer interview notes (OneDrive is also used to store raw customer research data).Refamer
Reframer is a splendid qualitative data analysis tool from Optimal Workshop. It allows research observation notes to be entered (or imported) and tagged with a pre-set taxonomy. Tagged notes can then be browsed within Reframer and exported as an Excel Spreadsheet.
Reframer is used to slice and dice the raw customer research data into individual observations and to add consistent tags which reflect the topics covered by the observations. This is important to allow the observations to be easily searched, filtered and grouped within airtable.
Airtable is like a cross between a spreadsheet and a database. It allows the information to be easily cross-referenced, filtered, searched and grouped by topic. Observations are exported from Reframer and added to Airtable along with details of the research participants.
Slack is used to communicate updates, such as new customer insights being available. Importantly Slack isn’t used to deliver the customer insights themselves as insights delivered via Slack tend to be very transient. They don’t persist very long and invariably get lost in the Slack-hole that forms over time.
Populating the customer research repository
Having a customer research repository has meant that there is a little bit more work when it comes to recording customer research, but trust me, that extra work has been well worth it in the long run. The process for populating the customer research repository is as follows.
1. Capture & upload customer insights
Raw customer research, in the form of usability testing sessions, research calls, survey results etc… are captured and uploaded to Confluence, or OneDrive.
2. Record details of customer research
Details of customer research undertaken, such as research calls and usability testing sessions are recorded within airtable, along with a link to the raw customer research (e.g. research notes). The table within airtable provides a record of the research that has been undertaken, and the customers that have been involved.
2. Identify and tag individual observations
Individual insights and observations, such as usability issues, quotes, survey answers and research observations are tagged using Reframer. The raw data is then downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet and pasted into airtable.
High-level insights are updated. For example, details of jobs to be done, personas and key usability issues. Where possible high-level insights are referenced back to the originating customer research (e.g. call notes).
Establishing a customer research repository has not only provided a home to customer insights, but the process of extracting and tagging individual observations has helped to more systematically build all important high-level insights, such as personas, jobs to be done and value propositions. The repository has already proved useful for better answering research questions and for ensuring that the DB DevOps teams are making informed product decisions based on genuine customer insights.
Key takeaway
- Imagine if at the start of every new project, you had to forget everything that you know about customers within that domain. Everything you know about what’s important to them. The products and services they use. The pain points they experience. The challenges they face. Rather than building on existing customer insights, you’d have to start from scratch every time. It would be a crazy way to work, and yet many teams do such a bad job of consolidating and communicating pre-existing customer insights, that they may as well take this approach.
- Trying to locate existing customer insights can all too often feel like hunting for fossils. Most of the time you’ll just find tiny fragments, which on their own really aren’t that insightful. Every so often, you’ll hit the jackpot in the form of some fossilised insights, a customer persona, or perhaps a long-lost customer research report. Like the fragments of a dinosaur skeleton there will be missing details and elements that you’ll have to piece together, but slowly over time a more fully formed picture will start to form. Whilst hunting for fossils might be fun (if you’re into that sort of thing), hunting for customer insights certainly isn’t.
Campaigns are created in an organization to improve the sales, to improve the image of products, create new opportunities for add on sales, etc. In SAP CRM, you can implement different inbound and outbound campaigns which are multichannel and they can be used to define and implement best possible marketing strategy by using constraint-based optimization techniques to determine the best marketing mix.
Campaigns can be created in CRM by using multiple ways, some of which are −
- Using Campaign Wizard−You can create simple campaigns using the campaign wizard that target to a single group and that doesn’t require full functionality of campaign management. You should have business function Campaign Wizard (CRM_MKT_CPG_WIZARD) activated to use this function.
- Using Campaign Templates
- Using Existing Campaigns
To perform campaign execution, you should have at least one campaign created in CRM. You have created a campaign in Marketing→ Campaigns and it contains the necessary information such as communication medium and target group.
Go to Marketing →Campaigns, you have to select the campaign or the campaign element you want to execute.
The next step is to release the campaign by changing the status to Release in General Data. After this, click Start on the Campaign Details page to start processing the campaign.
Key takeaway
- Campaigns are created in an organization to improve the sales, to improve the image of products, create new opportunities for add on sales, etc. In SAP CRM, you can implement different inbound and outbound campaigns which are multichannel and they can be used to define and implement best possible marketing strategy by using constraint-based optimization techniques to determine the best marketing mix.
When you hear the phrase "marketing automation," what do you think of first? A detailed diagram of emails sent to different segments, broken out by email engagement, drawing a line from lead to customer? This has become the norm, yet it is among the least effective automation paths you can set up as a marketer.
The inherent flaw in this strategy is that it starts with the marketer's timeline rather than the prospect's. The marketer sits down and defines what information the prospect will consume next, what actions the prospect will take next, and the path the prospect will take from becoming a lead to becoming a customer.
But if we're honest with ourselves, we would admit that the world is not as straightforward as that. You might define the funnel stages as Lead to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) to Opportunity to Customer, where leads download an ebook, then become an MQL when they start a trial, an SQL when the sales person follows up with that prospect, an opportunity when they do a trial review call, and customer when they purchase.
... But what if they start a trial and then download an ebook? Or what if they get into a sales conversation after just downloading an ebook, never become a customer, and then go cold until they start a trial months later? The reality is that you can't control what your prospect does or in what order your prospect does it. What you can control, however, is how you react to your prospect's behaviors. And this is where automation and trigger marketing becomes powerful.
Trigger marketing refers to the use of marketing automation software to perform a task as a result of an event, often an action taken by a prospect or customer.
The "triggering" event can be anything measurable by your CRM and automation software. Here are just a few examples:
- Form conversions
- Email opens (or lack thereof)
- Number of pages viewed
- Chatbot interactions
- Meeting certain descriptive criteria
As a result of the triggering event, you can automate tasks/actions with your marketing automation software. Here are some examples:
- Send them an email (or sequence of emails)
- Update their CRM record
- Add them to a list
- Assign them to a sales rep
- Send an internal notification about them
- Understand your buyer persona.
- Think in terms of 'ifs' and 'thens.'
- Figure out your triggering events.
- Determine the actions you want your system to perform.
- Craft personalized messaging.
- Identify and eliminate repetitive marketing tasks.
- Increase the value of your CRM.
1. Understand your buyer persona.
Know your buyer persona: It should go without saying in the context of any marketing activity, but in marketing automation, it's doubly important.
If you think through the lifecycle stages, pains, and motivations of your target audience(s), you can craft better trigger marketing strategies to guide them along their path to purchase.
The goal of marketing automation is to provide a great experience at scale, and part of that means meeting them where they are. When 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences, it just makes sense.
2. Think in terms of 'ifs' and 'thens.'
Software is simple. It sees in black and white rather than the complex outcome that you're moving toward. However, you can reverse engineer a great trigger marketing strategy using automation by thinking through your outcome and the path to get there as a series of if/then statements:
- If x happens, then do y.
- If the prospect fills out this form, then send them this email.
- If the prospect has visited the pricing page, then notify a rep.
The "if" is the criteria. The "then" is the action you want to take.
3. Figure out your triggering events.
In order to get your messaging to the right people at the right time, you must identify the "trigger" (in HubSpot, it's called "enrollment criteria"). This is the "if" part of the equation, the concrete indicator that the software can use as a green light to execute the actions.
Triggering events are only limited by the information you have in your system and your marketing automation's capabilities. Common ones include:
- Actions taken on the website
- Criteria met in the database
- Responses to past emails or campaigns
4. Determine the actions you want your system to perform.
Once you know your "trigger" or enrollment/starting criteria, then you can decide what happens next. This is the "then" part of the equation. Common actions include:
- Sending an email
- Enrolling in a sequence
- Categorizing the contact in the database
5. Craft personalized messaging.
Remember that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase after a personalized experience? If your action ("then" statement) includes a marketing task such as email sends or campaign enrollment, it's critical to know exactly how this contact is different from others in your CRM and what messaging will uniquely appeal to them. Ask yourself:
- Where are they at in their journey?
- How can I provide value and move them to the next step?
6. Identify and eliminate repetitive marketing tasks.
If you're still not sure where to begin with marketing automation, start by creating a list of your most repetitive tasks. For example, if you send the same email over and over again to multiple contacts, using automation to eliminate this task from your day will increase productivity and, as a result, performance. This will help you focus on higher impact tasks that can't be automated.
7. Increase the value of your CRM.
As mentioned previously, your only limits are the capabilities of the software you're using and the quality of your data. If you have messy data, marketing automation may hurt you. If you have incomplete data, you won't be able to do the advanced personalization and segmentation that will make a world of difference.
With that in mind, you will have to understand how to make the most of your CRM. Part of this comes down to using automation to update CRM records and categorize contacts, but ultimately you'll have to think about how your organization uses their CRM and ask yourself these questions:
- What data can you gather about your prospects (and when) to help the effectiveness of your campaigns?
- How can you use automation to ensure the cleanliness and accuracy of your database?
- How often can you audit your database to ensure the integrity of these efforts?
We briefly discussed that marketing automation provides a big opportunity for email marketing efforts. Triggered emails -- automated marketing messages based on a prospect's behaviors -- are powerful because they are inherently relevant and timely. The key to an effective email is relevance plus timeliness plus value, and the first two are baked into triggered emails. It's up to the marketer to jump on that opportunity and align a valuable offer to those recipients.
Not using triggered emails? Here are a few recipes of triggered marketing automation to get you started.
Trigger: Downloaded an Educational Offer
This is a great place to start if you don't have any triggered emails set up, as this is the broadest trigger -- engaging the prospects at the earliest stage of the buyer's journey.
What to Send: Transactional Email With Next Step Call-to-Action
In this situation, your triggered email can be a transactional email -- confirming the download (or registration or request) and including any information related to that download.
For example, if this is a follow-up to downloading an ebook, include the name of the ebook and a link to the PDF. If it's a follow-up to registering for a webinar, include the webinar information, including the time and date and how to log in.
Once you've covered your bases on the transactional information, it's time to think about what you want your prospect to do next. You have their attention -- take advantage of it! Do you want them to convert on a middle-of-the-funnel offer like a demo request or complementary consultation? Or do you want to encourage them to share this offer with their network, to expand the reach of your content? Think about that ideal next step, and include a call-to-action for that in your follow up email.
Trigger: Took One Action in a Series, but Not the Next
Say your prospect gets close to taking the action you want -- like starting a trial of your product -- but they don't quite get to the finish line. They visit the trial landing page, or view some content about your product, but don't start that trial. This is an opportunity for you to follow up to get them to cross that finish line.
What to Send: Related Content and an Alternative Action
Perhaps they didn't complete that action because of some hesitation -- they didn't want to fill out a form, or they had some additional questions that stopped them from starting that trial. This is an opportunity to follow up with related content (like product videos or resources for the trial) and an alternative action (maybe they don't want to use a trial, they simply want to get a demo or speak directly with a sales rep).
You can even simply ask them in your email ... what stopped you from signing up? Anything we can do to help? You'll be surprised by how many responses you'll get. After all, these are people who got close to taking an action but had some specific hesitation. You want to both discover and address that hesitation head-on.
Trigger: Viewed Specific Content
Whether you have content on specific topics (product pain points, for example), or content aligned with specific parts of the funnel (product pages vs. blog articles), when your prospects view that content, you have more data to use in your follow-up emails.
What to Send: Tailored Follow-Up Content
Whether you trigger an email immediately or save this intelligence for future communications, the data you collect about which content people view can be used to make your marketing that much more relevant on a one-to-one basis.
For example, if you have content on your website (case studies, blog articles, etc.) that's related to specific industries or target markets, you can infer that people who view that content are in that industry, and tailor your future marketing messages accordingly. Or, if you have content on your website that is related to specific topics of interest or pain points that you address, you can infer that people who view that content care about that pain point, and tailor your future marketing messages around that topic.
Think about the various behavioral data points you have about your prospects, and what you can draw from that to determine what they care about.
Trigger: Recently and Highly Engaged or Lacking in Engagement
Figure out what your bar is for a highly engaged prospect (perhaps they downloaded at least three ebooks and viewed at least ten blog articles) as well as an unengaged prospect, and respond and market to them accordingly.
What to Send: Timely Next Step Call-to-Action or Reengagement Campaign
For your highly engaged prospects, you once again have attention you can leverage. One great option is to encourage them to share the content they just downloaded. But also remember that triggered marketing automation does not need to be solely external (sent to prospects), it can also be internal (sent to your fellow employees)!
When a prospect becomes highly engaged, this is a great opportunity to notify that prospect's sales representative that this is a good time to follow up with the prospect. For your unengaged prospects, send a proactive reengagement email. You may even want to have multiple trigger points (e.g. haven't clicked on an email in three months, six months, one year) where you send different campaigns to reengage these prospects.
For example, after three months, send a reminder to update their email preferences. After six months, ask them if the content is irrelevant and offer them to unsubscribe. And finally, after one year, tell them you will not email them anymore unless they respond.
Trigger: Interacted With Your Company, or Mentioned Your Competitors or Industry, in Social Media
As you listen to what your prospects are saying in social media, you have the opportunity to follow up with those who interact with your company, or those who mention your competitors or specific pain points that you address.
What to Send: Comparison Guides, Product Information, or Educational Content
Pick a common and valuable interaction that occurs between you and your prospects in social media -- it may be asking questions about your product, mentioning that they're evaluating a competitor, or simply asking a question that relates to the pain points your product addresses.
If responding by social media, you likely don't actually want to automate your response -- it will be very easy for your prospect to recognize the impersonal nature of that interaction. However, you can supplement your one-to-one social media engagement with a triggered email campaign with supporting content. For example, if your prospect asks questions about your product, you can send how-to and product feature information. If your prospect mentions they're evaluating a competitor, you can send comparison guides, third party reviews, or case studies for them to use in their evaluation process. Or if your prospect simply asks a question related to your industry, you can follow up with educational content on the topic of interest.
At the end of the day, any of these triggered emails are likely to get a higher response -- and higher return on your effort -- compared to the typical linear marketing automation campaign. Using some of the same technology, you can reorient your marketing to work around your prospect's timeline instead of your own, while continuing to drive the actions you desire.
Key takeaway
- When you hear the phrase "marketing automation," what do you think of first? A detailed diagram of emails sent to different segments, broken out by email engagement, drawing a line from lead to customer? This has become the norm, yet it is among the least effective automation paths you can set up as a marketer.
- The inherent flaw in this strategy is that it starts with the marketer's timeline rather than the prospect's. The marketer sits down and defines what information the prospect will consume next, what actions the prospect will take next, and the path the prospect will take from becoming a lead to becoming a customer.
Your developers may be great at writing code, but you don’t want them making ill-informed decisions about the way the business works. Likewise, business analysts should focus on making business decisions rather than try to translate them into excruciatingly detailed requirements. One way for a company to make the most of each side's strengths is by deploying a business rules management system (BRMS).
A BRMS can bring the business and IT much closer by giving control of the logic - and even the code - to business analysts. This heretical idea relies on a fundamentally different approach to development, where developers isolate an application’s business logic from its data validation logic and from its flow control. The business logic then gets its own container, the BRMS, in which business analysts "code" business rules in a simple, English-like programming language.
BRMS engines normally embed themselves in vertical enterprise applications which simulate human expertise, such as those that handle underwriting, loan applications or complex scheduling. It gives the business side direct control over the rules that govern how enterprise applications behave. And when business analysts decide that business rules have to change, they can make the alterations themselves rather than waiting for IT to get around to it.
The result is much lower maintenance costs and much higher confidence that software is implementing business rules properly.
Break the logic logjam
Business analysts typically have a far more distant relationship with enterprise applications than they do with, say, a desktop spreadsheet. If people on the business side want a new application built or changes made to an existing program, they submit a request to the IT department, which probably hasn’t the foggiest what they’re talking about. So begins an endless round of meetings between the business and IT to iron out the ambiguities.
At some point, developers start writing the code, either building business rules into software components running on an application server or implementing them in stored database procedures. The development team then tests the code and hands it back to business analysts for verification. It's at this point the code is rejected because the results are nothing like what the business analysts envisioned. A few months and a few code rewrites later, the business side finally gets something it can live with.
With a BRMS, business analysts not only determine the business logic, they write it too. All they need to know is how to write a rule in English.
A business rule typically goes like this: if certain events occur or conditions exist, then certain events should happen or else other events should happen. Each If-Then-Else statement is a business rule. Each rule is a declaration and may interact with other rules. A BRMS allows business analysts to see, understand, code and maintain rules with (almost) no help from IT.
A BRMS chews on a set of rules until it comes up with a solution. It loops through the rules again and again until no more can be executed. The idea is that changing data drives the way rules execute - and that interacting rules reduce the need for human intervention. Related sets of rules may govern loan approvals, insurance policies, choice of distributor, and so on.
By contrast, conventional application development arranges rules in an incredibly fragile, top-down fashion.
For example, if the Then part of a rule changes the data used by the If part of another rule, the whole process must be examined to put the rules in the right order. That’s why it takes so long to write, change, and maintain business rules using ordinary application development.
Tiers without fears
Diagrammatically, a BRMS-driven application looks much like a conventional one. In a multi-tier system that contains the usual combination of web server, application server and database, the BRMS occupies a fourth tier that puts the logic in the hands of business analysts. Thanks to the English-like nature of BRMS statements, even the chief executive can jump in and check the rules. Any rule can be changed, added or deleted; sent to the IT department for integration and testing; and put into production - all in a matter of days or even hours.
This can save companies a bundle in change management, but they should also prepare for a sizable initial investment in BRMS development and training. It’s almost impossible to evaluate how much time it will take to write the business rules because it all depends on how many rules you will write - inevitably, you will end up with more than you originally anticipated.
Business analysts may also baulk at the notion of coding business rules. As with any big IT adventure, a BRMS project must begin with the understanding and support of top management.
Practical applications
A BRMS would be overkill for a small-scale, single-function application. And many big enterprise applications, such as ERP or CRM systems, already include rules engines, although they may be invisible to end-users. But many of the larger applications developed in-house can benefit from a BRMS, particularly if the business logic is isolated from the rest of the application in the original design.
Things get trickier when determining whether to integrate a BRMS into an existing system. The IT department and business analysts must collaborate in extracting business logic from the control logic and data validation code it is mixed up with.
Software components may break when the business logic is extracted - and deciding which rule goes where can be a laborious exercise. It may seem obvious, for example, that business rules do not affect data validation. But in some cases, data validation parameters change frequently - date ranges may shift, pick list categories may be dynamic - and so must come under the control of the business analysts.
Another stumbling block in refactoring existing systems is that the existing rules are rarely entirely correct. Inconsistencies may create political problems or spawn long discussions on the business side as business analysts work to resolve issues they may have otherwise avoided facing.
Ultimately, each existing piece of business logic must be examined to see how it will fit in the new system. New objects may also be necessary, although most database applications can be extended by the BRMS without database modifications. New GUI screens should also be considered because the entire application will be more sophisticated and require more information.
Many organisations hire consultants to help them determine the amount of work involved in deploying a BRMS. It may be easier to scrap an existing application and start from scratch, using old data validation and control code only when it saves time and effort.
Take the fire drill out of finance
Financial institutions provide some of the best examples of the BRMS in action because they allow the business side to get creative without incurring excessive IT overhead.
Financial services company E-Loan turned over $6bn (£3.24bn) last year, mainly via a BRMS developed with the Jess Java rules engine. The company used the source code provided with Jess to write its own BRMS user interface so business analysts could enter simple rules to generate code for loan approval. E-Loan's chief technology officer says the improvement in customer relations brought about by faster decision easily justified the application development cost, which was lower than with traditional solutions.
At CitiStreet, chief information officer Andy Marsh sorely needed a system that business analysts could understand. Ilog’sJRules allowed him to express all his rules in the lingua franca of both his company and the financial industry, halving the average analysis time required by the company's business analysts. He is now contemplating how to extend the benefits ot the company's workflow management process.
Lisa Fiondella, senior vice-president of product management at Equifax, says the driving force behind her adoption of JRules "was the reduction of translation errors between the business users and the programmers". Other reasons include greater efficiency in overall IT operations and a shorter time to market for a new web-based loan-credit product. Fiondella says using the BRMS eliminates the "fire drill" response to demands for business logic changes in existing applications.
BRMS technology is spreading to other areas too. Telecom companies often use a BRMS for everything from determining how to route messages, to scheduling maintenance downtime and handling customer relations. Another frequent telecom application is to help achieve compliance with statutory regulations.
In deploying a BRMS, companies often face a conceptual hurdle in teasing out the rules that govern various business functions. After that Rubicon is crossed, however, and analysts focus on rules that change dynamically, organisations can apply a BRMS in some unexpected places.
One business that gains from using a BRMS to react fast to competitive pressure and customer behaviour is casino giant Harrah. According to chief information officer Tim Stanley, the casino's marketing managers analyse activity at each location every day to come up with new promotions. Within 24 hours the new rules have been tested and gone into production.
"Sometimes I walk out of my office and see a group of customers actively playing at a time that used to be slow," he says, "and I say to myself, ‘They wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for the one-off promotions I can do with our rules system.’"
Which is right for you?
BRMS tools cover everything from open-source languages to full-blown enterprise systems. If you want to test the BRMS water, you could begin with Jess, which is a free download.
But major development projects require collaborative communication between all participants - business analysts, coders, the chief executive, end-users, finance directors, and so on. And that means a BRMS with all the bells and whistles.
Ilog’sJRules (the Java version) and Rules (the C/C++ version), and Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor are enterprise tools with debugging, testing and analysis tools. Enterprise customers that need blinding speed but are willing to live with limited tools would do well to consider PST's Official Production System for Java (OPSJ).
And IT department that has staff already trained in OPS or the C Language Interface for Production Systems (Clips) might want to take a look at Haley’s Authorete, PST’s Clips/R2, or Sandia National Laboratories’ Jess.
New tools with new twists to consider include PegaRules from PegaSystems, and Corticon, which has a spreadsheet interface for rules input.
The more polished products, such as JRules or Blaze Advisor, make self-service rule changes easier for business analysts, but experts in business rules logic must always be available to ensure the BRMS works smoothly. According to Gartner analysts, a properly implemented and supported BRMS can cut IT operating costs by between 10% and 15%. And that estimate doesn’t take into account the soft benefits of rapid response to shifting business demands.
The idea of isolating and consolidating business logic may seem odd, but the pay-off is all but inevitable.
Key takeaway
- A BRMS can bring the business and IT much closer by giving control of the logic - and even the code - to business analysts. This heretical idea relies on a fundamentally different approach to development, where developers isolate an application’s business logic from its data validation logic and from its flow control. The business logic then gets its own container, the BRMS, in which business analysts "code" business rules in a simple, English-like programming language.
- BRMS engines normally embed themselves in vertical enterprise applications which simulate human expertise, such as those that handle underwriting, loan applications or complex scheduling. It gives the business side direct control over the rules that govern how enterprise applications behave. And when business analysts decide that business rules have to change, they can make the alterations themselves rather than waiting for IT to get around to it.
Are you facing difficulties in inventory management? Are you looking for accurate sales forecasting and are curious to learn about some factors impacting your sales?
Today, businesses must be well equipped to not only predict sales targets but also be able to anticipate the changing market trends. Otherwise, they will miss out on critical business opportunities and will not be able to meet customer demands.
Forecasting enables you to control your business by anticipating risks and opportunities. It helps you improve your inventory management, hence leading to a higher rate of ‘On-time In-full’ delivery. Furthermore, it helps you with supply chain management and excellent control of internal operations. Predictions help in planning your finances and marketing campaigns. To sum it all up, forecasting is the secret to continuous improvement in your business.
Accurate forecasting is as essential to your business as weather forecasting is to the captain of a Boeing 747. Just as the captain is responsible to give orders to his crew and ensure the well-being of the passengers, it is the management’s responsibility to give direction to their teams and Improve Customer Experiences. Furthermore, just as the Boeing captain’s orders are effective only as long as the data provided to him is accurate, a manager’s decisions will only be correct when the tools that he uses to make forecasts provide him with accurate results.
For some, manual forecasting may seem easy. But collecting relevant data history and applying it to construct models, which make sense, can become a formidable task. Thankfully, today, solutions such as Sugar CRM, combined with CRM Integrations, are available to do the math for you.
CRM makes use of data history to create trends and patterns to give you a clear picture of what the future may look like. It is a useful tool for the sales team to set their targets and for the marketing teams to focus on the trends before they launch their next campaign. A CRM, with its various built-in features, not only keeps the managers on the same page with their teams but also allows them to anticipate revenue and plan future activities.
A salesperson can be optimistic about the current position of sales, however, may be pessimistic when it comes to setting future targets. A CRM, on the other hand, cannot be biased. The projections will be based on facts and figures so that you always get an accurate sales forecast.
When BoxOp, a Copenhagen based mailbox and installation services company, experienced rapid business growth, they realized that they needed a new CRM system. A system which could solve their planning and forecasting problems and help them anticipate demand with increased efficiency. BoxOp found the perfect solution in SugarCRM. This allowed them to create accurate reports and sales forecasts as their business expanded to multiple locations across Denmark. BoxOp’s Sugar Implementation should act as an example for small, medium and large businesses alike since growth can be, at often times, unprecedented.
Forecasting without the right tools is just as good as flipping a coin to help you make business decisions. Sugar helps ensure that your numbers are accurate and realistic. Sales reps can create and modify unlimited scenarios, with the option of Best, Worst, and Likely cases, before committing to a forecast. Sales managers can easily see all committed targets, modify quotas and forecasts, track changes, adjust commitments, and assign quotas.
Sugar keeps you updated about forecast submissions and a review of previous submissions can assist you in identifying patterns. In addition to this, Sugar lets you intelligently identify factors affecting your sales. Hence, essentially, it gives you the authority to control your sales.
Sugar gives you the ability to review and manage forecasts of each member of the team through a single worksheet. Assigning quotas, adjusting individual forecasts and analyzing the performance of individuals are no longer considered tedious tasks. For Sugar users, the solution to all these tasks can be achieved with a single click.
Sugar also allows your enterprise to keep track of customer activities. If you’re at a managerial level in your company, Sugar will intelligently shift your focus to more paramount issues. Hence, it saves the day at not only the sales level but at the managerial level as well. It allows your business to observe patterns without overriding complications and provides your company with some brilliant insights into factors affecting sales and marketing. To sum it up, Sugar makes forecasting effortless and precise giving control back to you.
Every business manager wishes to make the forecasting within their organization, at the managerial level, as smooth as possible. Equipped with team-wide forecast visibility, Sugar is the ultimate choice. It allows you to review and manage forecasts of your entire team.
Sugar, with its forecast feature, offers unlimited what-if scenarios and allows a real-time graphical view of the progress in sales. Moreover, managers and team leads can view the entire team’s quotas and forecasts on a single page or platform.
Intuitive pipeline management allows the sales representative to effortlessly focus when needed. This is a stand out feature of Sugar. Pipeline Management in Sugar CRM is possible across various time periods so you can plan things accordingly. In addition to this, Sugar allows forecasting using opportunity records, giving you the authority to choose which record to select for forecasting and see the distance to quota with every addition or subtraction of opportunity record. To sum up, Sugar offers control at the level of opportunity records to help forecast and telling you where to focus.
In a world where companies invest in the latest technologies to improve their efficiency, you cannot live in the past and rely on traditional or inefficient forecasting methods. It’s time to set the course and use a CRM solution that keeps your business one step ahead of your competitors in the future.
Key takeaway
- Forecasting enables you to control your business by anticipating risks and opportunities. It helps you improve your inventory management, hence leading to a higher rate of ‘On-time In-full’ delivery. Furthermore, it helps you with supply chain management and excellent control of internal operations. Predictions help in planning your finances and marketing campaigns. To sum it all up, forecasting is the secret to continuous improvement in your business.
- Accurate forecasting is as essential to your business as weather forecasting is to the captain of a Boeing 747. Just as the captain is responsible to give orders to his crew and ensure the well-being of the passengers, it is the management’s responsibility to give direction to their teams and Improve Customer Experiences. Furthermore, just as the Boeing captain’s orders are effective only as long as the data provided to him is accurate, a manager’s decisions will only be correct when the tools that he uses to make forecasts provide him with accurate results.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to identify, acquire, and retain customers – a business’ greatest asset. By providing the means to manage and coordinate customer interactions, CRM helps companies maximise the value of every customer interaction and in turn improve corporate performance.
E-CRM, or Electronic Customer Relationship Management, is an integrated online sales, marketing and service strategy that is used to identify, attract and retain an organisation’s customers. It describes improved and increased communication between an organisation and its clients by creating and enhancing customer interaction through innovative technology. E-CRM software provides profiles and histories of each interaction the organisation has with its customers, making it an important tool for all small and medium businesses.
E-CRM software systems may contain a selection of the following features:
i. Customer management:
Provides access to all customer information including enquiry status and Correspondence
ii. Knowledge management:
A centralised knowledge base that handles and shares customer Information
iii. Account management:
Access to customer information and history, allowing sales teams and customer service teams to function efficiently
iii. Case management:
Captures enquiries, escalates priority cases and notifies management of unresolved issues
iv. Back-end integration:
Blends with other systems such as billing, inventory and logistics through relevant customer contact points such as websites and call centres
v. Reporting and analysis:
Report generation on customer behaviour and business criteria
Evolutions of E-CRM:
Customer Support – A Historical Perspective:
The Customer is King. This mantra, although used for a long time, has not been put into practice until recently. Forget the notion of royal treatment, customers were not even treated with dignity by most organizations.
As recently as the 1970s and 80s, the concept of customer support meant that organizations were doing a favor by answering a few questions for the customer on the phone – after putting them on hold for an hour! Standing in line to buy something was common and expected. Remember when the customers had to go to the airports to buy tickets only because the airlines kept them there? Organizations simply lost touch with the realization – that they existed because of these customers.
Evolution of Customer Relationship:
The 1990s brought two new concepts that challenged the prevailing business landscape: deregulation and the Internet. These forces brought down the barriers of entry resulting in an environment of intense competition.
Stores faced competition from on-line start-ups. Traditional bricks-and-mortar banks fought for customers with online or virtual banks. Airline tickets were increasingly purchased from the convenience of your home. The explosion in information allowed consumers to compare features, and prices across multiple providers. Products became commodities and prices could not be lowered further to ensure survival.
Customer service became the only major differentiator in many cases. Customers received what they have always deserved – respect. The customer was now truly the king. Business customers, although always treated with more respect than individual consumers, were more or less ignored in the early stages of the Internet boom.
The emphasis focused on expanding the consumer base regardless of positive cash flow, revenues, and margins. The demise of many dot-coms brought an epiphany. Companies realized that they needed to focus on their enterprise customers. The advent of e-CRM applications was the first big step toward providing better support to the strategic business customers. Although these solutions provided automated self-service to customers, they still treated all customers the same.
Furthermore, the focus of these applications is more on improving call-center productivity.
Clearly, these applications add value and help many organizations execute their CRM initiatives.
However, they are not effective in meeting the needs of an organization’s strategic enterprise customers. Each enterprise customer has its own needs and craves personalized support.
Evolution of Customer Relationship Management:
The genesis of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) lies in Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools. Companies like Siebel and Vantive (now part of PeopleSoft) took the early lead by introducing tools to help the sales personnel become more efficient in tracking their customers.
There were also a few problem-tracking tools for help desk such as Remedy. As companies focused more on customer relationships, additional applications emerged in areas of customer support, field support, and marketing automation. Most CRM companies today a retrying to address these four areas usually by partnering with other companies. Most of the ERP players are also expanding their solutions to include CRM. There are a number of niche players focused only on certain pieces of CRM such as e-mail management, sales force automation, technical support, marketing campaigns, among others.
“CRM is a business strategy designed to optimize profitability, revenue, and customer satisfaction” – Gartner Group
Although there are quite a few vendors providing CRM related products and services, there is still a lot of confusion around the concept of CRM. CRM is not just an application or a technology that can be thrown at the customer satisfaction problem to make it go away.
CRM, essentially, is a strategy that involves applications, processes, policies, business context, and people, to enable companies to manage and increase profitable relationships with their customers. An enterprise’s strategic customers expect top-notch treatment. They want the vendor to understand their needs. They want companies to build a strong relationship with them – on a 1- to- 1 basis.
Current CRM and E-Support Environment:
There are currently over 200 CRM software vendors and the number continues to grow. Although, there are various types of applications included in CRM suites, as described earlier, the core application within the CRM landscape that truly builds customer relationships is the customer service application. Other pieces, though useful, are focused on helping the vendor rather than the customer.
Many of these applications were initially focused on providing an environment to improve the productivity of call-centers. In addition, some of these applications integrated message queuing functionality to provide a common environment for all channels. So, whether the customer was trying to reach the call-center by making a call, via e-mail, by fax, or through the Web site, their query is prioritized and channeled through the same mechanism. Most customer service applications now provide Web-based self-service features for companies to offer their customers.
Customers can look up their basic information like billing ,order status, etcetera by logging in to the vendor’s Web site. While this solution works for a B2Cmodel, for enterprise customers with hundreds of users and hundreds of products to support, this simply doesn’t work.
Enterprise customers demand personalized support in order to access their information quickly and easily. In the era of information-glut, they want specific and relevant information. Companies are trying to manage relationships with their customers, partners, and suppliers in a personalized and automated manner. True personalization is not easy as each customer has its own needs and requirements. The issue is further complicated by the fact that
Business Benefits of E-CRM:
Implementation of an E-CRM system enables an organisation to streamline processes and provide sales, marketing and service personnel with better, more complete customer information. The result is that E-CRM allows organisations to build more profitable customer relationships and decrease operating costs.
Direct benefits of an E-CRM system include:
i. Service level improvements:
Using an integrated database to deliver consistent and improved customer responses
ii. Revenue growth:
Decreasing costs by focusing on retaining customers and using interactive service tools to sell additional products
iii. Productivity:
Consistent sales and service procedures to create efficient work processes
iv. Customer satisfaction:
Automatic customer tracking and detection will ensure enquiries are met and issues are managed. This will improve the customer’s overall experience in dealing with the organisation.
v. Automation:
E-CRM software helps automate campaigns including:
(i) Telemarketing
(ii) Telesales
(iii) Direct mail
(iv) Lead tracking and response
(v) Opportunity management
(vi) Quotes and order configuration
Across every sector and industry, effective CRM is a strategic imperative for corporate growth and survival:
a. Sales organisations can shorten the sales cycle and increase key sales-performance metrics such as revenue per sales representative, average order size and revenue per customer.
b. Marketing organisations can increase campaign response rates and marketing driven revenue while simultaneously decreasing lead generation and customer acquisition costs.
c. Customer service organisations can increase service agent productivity and customer retention while decreasing service costs, response times and request-resolution times.
Working of E-CRM:
In today’s world, customers interact with an organisation via multiple communication channels—the World Wide Web, call centres, field salespeople, dealers and partner networks. Many organisations also have multiple lines of business that interact with the same customers.
E-CRM systems enable customers to do business with the organisation the way the customer wants – any time, via any channel, in any language or currency—and to make customers feel that they are dealing with a single, unified organisation that recognises them every step of the way.
The E-CRM system does this by creating a central repository for customer records and providing a portal on each employee’s computer system allowing access to customer information by any member of the organisation at any time. Through this system, E-CRM gives you the ability to know more about customers, products and performance results using real time information across your business.
Implementation of an E-CRM System:
When approaching the development and implementation of E-CRM there are important considerations to keep in mind:
i. Define customer relationships:
Generate a list of key aspects of your customer relationships and the importance of these relationships to your business.
ii. Develop a plan:
Create a broad Relationship Management program that can be customized to smaller customer segments. A suitable software solution will help deliver this goal.
iii. Focus on customers:
The focus should be on the customer, not the technology. Any technology should have specific benefits in making customers’ lives easier by improving support, lowering their administrative costs, or giving them reasons to shift more business to your company.
iv. Save money:
Focus on aspects of your business that can contribute to the bottom line. Whether it is through cutting costs or increasing revenue, every capability you implement should have a direct measurable impact on the bottom line.
v. Service and support:
By tracking and measuring the dimensions of the relationship, organisations can identify their strengths and weaknesses in the relationship management program and continually fine tune it based on ongoing feedback from customers.
Key takeaway
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to identify, acquire, and retain customers – a business’ greatest asset. By providing the means to manage and coordinate customer interactions, CRM helps companies maximise the value of every customer interaction and in turn improve corporate performance.
- E-CRM, or Electronic Customer Relationship Management, is an integrated online sales, marketing and service strategy that is used to identify, attract and retain an organisation’s customers. It describes improved and increased communication between an organisation and its clients by creating and enhancing customer interaction through innovative technology. E-CRM software provides profiles and histories of each interaction the organisation has with its customers, making it an important tool for all small and medium businesses.
Meaning of E-CRM:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to identify, acquire, and retain customers – a business’ greatest asset. By providing the means to manage and coordinate customer interactions, CRM helps companies maximise the value of every customer interaction and in turn improve corporate performance.
E-CRM, or Electronic Customer Relationship Management, is an integrated online sales, marketing and service strategy that is used to identify, attract and retain an organisation’s customers. It describes improved and increased communication between an organisation and its clients by creating and enhancing customer interaction through innovative technology. E-CRM software provides profiles and histories of each interaction the organisation has with its customers, making it an important tool for all small and medium businesses.
E-CRM software systems may contain a selection of the following features:
i. Customer management:
Provides access to all customer information including enquiry status and Correspondence
ii. Knowledge management:
A centralised knowledge base that handles and shares customer Information
iii. Account management:
Access to customer information and history, allowing sales teams and customer service teams to function efficiently
iii. Case management:
Captures enquiries, escalates priority cases and notifies management of unresolved issues
iv. Back-end integration:
Blends with other systems such as billing, inventory and logistics through relevant customer contact points such as websites and call centres
v. Reporting and analysis:
Report generation on customer behaviour and business criteria
Evolutions of E-CRM:
Customer Support – A Historical Perspective:
The Customer is King. This mantra, although used for a long time, has not been put into practice until recently. Forget the notion of royal treatment, customers were not even treated with dignity by most organizations.
As recently as the 1970s and 80s, the concept of customer support meant that organizations were doing a favor by answering a few questions for the customer on the phone – after putting them on hold for an hour! Standing in line to buy something was common and expected. Remember when the customers had to go to the airports to buy tickets only because the airlines kept them there? Organizations simply lost touch with the realization – that they existed because of these customers.
Evolution of Customer Relationship:
The 1990s brought two new concepts that challenged the prevailing business landscape: deregulation and the Internet. These forces brought down the barriers of entry resulting in an environment of intense competition.
Stores faced competition from on-line start-ups. Traditional bricks-and-mortar banks fought for customers with online or virtual banks. Airline tickets were increasingly purchased from the convenience of your home. The explosion in information allowed consumers to compare features, and prices across multiple providers. Products became commodities and prices could not be lowered further to ensure survival.
Customer service became the only major differentiator in many cases. Customers received what they have always deserved – respect. The customer was now truly the king. Business customers, although always treated with more respect than individual consumers, were more or less ignored in the early stages of the Internet boom.
The emphasis focused on expanding the consumer base regardless of positive cash flow, revenues, and margins. The demise of many dot-coms brought an epiphany. Companies realized that they needed to focus on their enterprise customers. The advent of e-CRM applications was the first big step toward providing better support to the strategic business customers. Although these solutions provided automated self-service to customers, they still treated all customers the same.
Furthermore, the focus of these applications is more on improving call-center productivity.
Clearly, these applications add value and help many organizations execute their CRM initiatives.
However, they are not effective in meeting the needs of an organization’s strategic enterprise customers. Each enterprise customer has its own needs and craves personalized support.
Evolution of Customer Relationship Management:
The genesis of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) lies in Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools. Companies like Siebel and Vantive (now part of PeopleSoft) took the early lead by introducing tools to help the sales personnel become more efficient in tracking their customers.
There were also a few problem-tracking tools for help desk such as Remedy. As companies focused more on customer relationships, additional applications emerged in areas of customer support, field support, and marketing automation. Most CRM companies today a retrying to address these four areas usually by partnering with other companies. Most of the ERP players are also expanding their solutions to include CRM. There are a number of niche players focused only on certain pieces of CRM such as e-mail management, sales force automation, technical support, marketing campaigns, among others.
“CRM is a business strategy designed to optimize profitability, revenue, and customer satisfaction” – Gartner Group
Although there are quite a few vendors providing CRM related products and services, there is still a lot of confusion around the concept of CRM. CRM is not just an application or a technology that can be thrown at the customer satisfaction problem to make it go away.
CRM, essentially, is a strategy that involves applications, processes, policies, business context, and people, to enable companies to manage and increase profitable relationships with their customers. An enterprise’s strategic customers expect top-notch treatment. They want the vendor to understand their needs. They want companies to build a strong relationship with them – on a 1- to- 1 basis.
Current CRM and E-Support Environment:
There are currently over 200 CRM software vendors and the number continues to grow. Although, there are various types of applications included in CRM suites, as described earlier, the core application within the CRM landscape that truly builds customer relationships is the customer service application. Other pieces, though useful, are focused on helping the vendor rather than the customer.
Many of these applications were initially focused on providing an environment to improve the productivity of call-centers. In addition, some of these applications integrated message queuing functionality to provide a common environment for all channels. So, whether the customer was trying to reach the call-center by making a call, via e-mail, by fax, or through the Web site, their query is prioritized and channeled through the same mechanism. Most customer service applications now provide Web-based self-service features for companies to offer their customers.
Customers can look up their basic information like billing ,order status, etcetera by logging in to the vendor’s Web site. While this solution works for a B2Cmodel, for enterprise customers with hundreds of users and hundreds of products to support, this simply doesn’t work.
Enterprise customers demand personalized support in order to access their information quickly and easily. In the era of information-glut, they want specific and relevant information. Companies are trying to manage relationships with their customers, partners, and suppliers in a personalized and automated manner. True personalization is not easy as each customer has its own needs and requirements. The issue is further complicated by the fact that
Business Benefits of E-CRM:
Implementation of an E-CRM system enables an organisation to streamline processes and provide sales, marketing and service personnel with better, more complete customer information. The result is that E-CRM allows organisations to build more profitable customer relationships and decrease operating costs.
Direct benefits of an E-CRM system include:
i. Service level improvements:
Using an integrated database to deliver consistent and improved customer responses
ii. Revenue growth:
Decreasing costs by focusing on retaining customers and using interactive service tools to sell additional products
iii. Productivity:
Consistent sales and service procedures to create efficient work processes
iv. Customer satisfaction:
Automatic customer tracking and detection will ensure enquiries are met and issues are managed. This will improve the customer’s overall experience in dealing with the organisation.
v. Automation:
E-CRM software helps automate campaigns including:
(i) Telemarketing
(ii) Telesales
(iii) Direct mail
(iv) Lead tracking and response
(v) Opportunity management
(vi) Quotes and order configuration
Across every sector and industry, effective CRM is a strategic imperative for corporate growth and survival:
a. Sales organisations can shorten the sales cycle and increase key sales-performance metrics such as revenue per sales representative, average order size and revenue per customer.
b. Marketing organisations can increase campaign response rates and marketing driven revenue while simultaneously decreasing lead generation and customer acquisition costs.
c. Customer service organisations can increase service agent productivity and customer retention while decreasing service costs, response times and request-resolution times.
Working of E-CRM:
In today’s world, customers interact with an organisation via multiple communication channels—the World Wide Web, call centres, field salespeople, dealers and partner networks. Many organisations also have multiple lines of business that interact with the same customers.
E-CRM systems enable customers to do business with the organisation the way the customer wants – any time, via any channel, in any language or currency—and to make customers feel that they are dealing with a single, unified organisation that recognises them every step of the way.
The E-CRM system does this by creating a central repository for customer records and providing a portal on each employee’s computer system allowing access to customer information by any member of the organisation at any time. Through this system, E-CRM gives you the ability to know more about customers, products and performance results using real time information across your business.
Implementation of an E-CRM System:
When approaching the development and implementation of E-CRM there are important considerations to keep in mind:
i. Define customer relationships:
Generate a list of key aspects of your customer relationships and the importance of these relationships to your business.
ii. Develop a plan:
Create a broad Relationship Management program that can be customized to smaller customer segments. A suitable software solution will help deliver this goal.
iii. Focus on customers:
The focus should be on the customer, not the technology. Any technology should have specific benefits in making customers’ lives easier by improving support, lowering their administrative costs, or giving them reasons to shift more business to your company.
iv. Save money:
Focus on aspects of your business that can contribute to the bottom line. Whether it is through cutting costs or increasing revenue, every capability you implement should have a direct measurable impact on the bottom line.
v. Service and support:
By tracking and measuring the dimensions of the relationship, organisations can identify their strengths and weaknesses in the relationship management program and continually fine tune it based on ongoing feedback from customers.
The following is a set of technical e-CRM capabilities and applications that collectively and ideally comprise a full e-CRM solution. They are,
- Customer analytic software.
- Data mining software.
- Campaign management software
- Business simulation software.
- Real time decision engine.
Customer analytic software
Customer analytic software predicts, measures, and interprets customer behaviours, allowing companies to understand the effectiveness of e-CRM efforts across both inbound outbound channels. Most importantly, customer analytic should integrate with customer-communications software to enable companies to transform customer findings into ROI-producing initiatives.
Data mining software
Data mining software builds predictive models to identify customers most likely to perform a particular behaviour such as purchase an upgrade or churn from the company. Modeling must be tightly integrated with campaign management software to keep pace with multiple campaigns running daily or weekly.
Campaign management software
Campaign management software leverages the data warehouse to plan and execute multiple, highly targeted campaigns overtime, using triggers that respond timed events and customer behaviour. Campaign management software tests various offers against control groups, capture promotion history for each customer and prospect, and produces output for virtually any on-line or off-line customer touch point channel.
Business simulation
Business simulation used in conjunction with campaign management software optirnises offer; messaging and channel delivery prior to the execution of campaigns, and compares planned costs and ROI projections with actual results. A Real time decision engine co-ordinates and synchronises communications across disparate customer touch point systems. It contains business intelligence to determine and communicate the most appropriate message, offer, and channel delivery in real time, and support two-way dialogue with the customer.
Key takeaway
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to identify, acquire, and retain customers – a business’ greatest asset. By providing the means to manage and coordinate customer interactions, CRM helps companies maximise the value of every customer interaction and in turn improve corporate performance.
- E-CRM, or Electronic Customer Relationship Management, is an integrated online sales, marketing and service strategy that is used to identify, attract and retain an organisation’s customers. It describes improved and increased communication between an organisation and its clients by creating and enhancing customer interaction through innovative technology. E-CRM software provides profiles and histories of each interaction the organisation has with its customers, making it an important tool for all small and medium businesses.
Supply chain management is the integrated process-oriented planning and control of the flow of goods, information and money across the entire value and supply chain from the customer to the raw material supplier.
“Supply chain management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and all logistics management activities. Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third party service providers, and customers. In essence, supply chain management integrates supply and demand management within and across companies.”
Why Does Supply Chain Management Matter?
The concept of labor division is undergoing a revolution. To increase profitability, companies used to divide the various work steps between their employees. Today, global organizations divide the various tasks in the value chain amongst each other. The sub-products travel gigantic distances. Nevertheless, the companies can manufacture more quickly and more cheaply than a single company could. In this way, integrated planning can open up new markets. However, the companies become dependent on each other. These business relationships require closer cooperation and a more intensive exchange of information.
The Difference Between Logistics and Supply Chain Management
Previously used as a synonym, supply chain management, in contrast to logistics, goes beyond the confines of a company. Both supply chain management and logistics deal with the organization of object flows along the process stages of the supply chain. Both are aimed at increasing customer benefits (effectiveness) and system-wide improvement of the cost-benefit ratio (efficiency).
Modern supply chain management goes a step further, especially in the areas of transport and warehousing within the company. SCM explicitly includes the organization and coordination of autonomous business units within a value chain it’s the analysis. This accentuates the inter-organisational aspect of logistics management. SCM takes a cross-company perspective on all business processes and connects all areas of business administration, such as purchasing, production, distribution, marketing, controlling, etc. Focused on the strategic aspects of functional areas, SCM leaves tactical questions to the individual participants.
Arizona State University demonstrates how supply chain management works by giving an example. Do not miss it!
Tasks and Objectives of Supply Chain Management
SCM ensures cross-company, process-oriented planning and control of the entire value chain. Consumers force logistics to rethink, which is why high customer expectations and short product life cycles are taken into account. Furthermore, relationships with suppliers are considered in order to optimally design and control goods deliveries, cash flows and information flows (Supplier Relationship Management).
Functions Within Supply Chain Management:
- Customer Relationship Management: Consistent focus on end customer demand to meet the increasing customer requirements and ensures a high degree of flexibility.
- Flexibility and demand-oriented production: Continuous cost reduction and resource optimization across all stages of the value chain.
- Synchronization of supply and demand: Increasing the adaptability and development capability of the supply chain.
Several sub-objectives can be derived from these long-term objectives:
- Inventory reduction along the value chain,
- Reduction of warehousing costs,
- Safeguarding the just-in-time supply,
- Acceleration of cash-to-cash cycles,
- Improvement of delivery reliability,
- Reduction of throughput times.
Supply Chain Management with Zara as an Example
How successful supply chain management works is demonstrated by Inditex, one of the largest textile companies in the world based in Arteixo (Spain), with its fashion brand Zara. There are many case studies about the success story of the Inditex model and they are worth reading. Zara's supply chain management expertise is confirmed by the benchmark of US market research firm Gartner, which provides an overview of the best supply chains in Europe.
In brief, the case is as follows:
Fashion brands are relocating their production to China. This saves costs, but complicates the management of the supply chain. Fashion trends, in particular, are short-lived. The journey of cargo in container ships halfway around the world complicates the principle of fast fashion.
Inditex, on the other hand, purchases more than half of its products from Spain, Portugal and Morocco. The costs are higher, but shorter supply chains allow them to react more quickly to trends. Zara no longer speculates on the latest fashion. Production is suspended until it is certain what the customer is actually going to buy. The goods are sold at full price and stocks remain minimal.
Motivation and Advantages of Supply Chain Management
Today, companies cannot guarantee competitiveness for their products and services on their own. The entire supply chain contributes to success. No longer are individual companies in competition, but entire supply chains. With the promise of a long-term win-win situation for each individual participant, companies can be persuaded to become part of a supply chain. Tip: The Guide for the successful integration of companies in supply chains provides valuable support!
Unsolved Supply Chain Management Problems Can Lead to Disadvantages
The rapid development in information technology has made all of this progress possible. Nevertheless, there are numerous problems along the supply chain that make successful implementation of supply chain management difficult in practice.
- Mutually exclusive goals: The companies involved in the supply chain can pursue different, sometimes mutually exclusive goals.
- Distribution of costs, risks and profits: A further hurdle is the fair distribution of cost and financing burdens or risks and the distribution of value-added shares.
- Lack of transparency of the processes: The different competence levels of the partners and the fear of the exploitation of knowledge causes a lack of transparency of the processes between the actors.
- Lack of uniform key figures: Agreement with the partner companies on internal, uniform key figures and technical transfer standards.
- Increasing dependency: Companies need to work more closely together and exchange information more intensively.
- Legal issues: What do contracts look like between partners exchanging sensitive internal company data and how are violations of the agreement punished?
- Building relationships based on partnership: How do you organize trust without being dependent on a handful of employees who maintain these relationships? Management concepts for building and maintaining such relationships are required.
Sustainability through Sustainable Supply Chain Management
Sustainability - a principle of resource consumption in which the preservation of essential properties, stability and the natural regenerative capacity of a system take top priority - is becoming a worldwide trend. The SSCM is guided by this approach. Driven by the demands of stakeholders such as the end consumer, the criteria of ecology, economy and society are derived. It is important for companies that strive to achieve the future-oriented mindset of the SSCM to pay equal attention to the three dimensions of sustainability. In contrast to conventional supply chain management, both the origin of the products and their use and disposal after sale are important. If your SSCM does not correspond to the practical situation in German companies, there are 5 approaches for sustainable intralogistics to keep in mind.
7 Prerequisites for a More Successful SCM
For companies, SCM entails a change of processes and culture. Its objective is to optimize processes, increase performance characteristics, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction. In order to be successful in supply chain management, you must meet these seven requirements:
1. Interdisciplinary Cooperation
Process networking requires comprehensive cooperation. This awareness is necessary to build up the necessary know-how.
Our recommendations:
- Make yourself aware that SCM does not end at the company premises.
- Know and understand the process chain and its relationships.
- Focus on joint solutions instead of self-optimization.
- Make your contribution to optimization.
- Minimize the risk in the entire chain and not only your own risks.
- Adapt the SCM process to changing circumstances.
2. Open Exchange of Information
Aim for an open exchange of information with all companies involved in the supply chain. Confirm unrealistic plans: The intelligent and the qualified are successful, not the stronger one.
Our recommendations:
- Talk openly about the strengths and weaknesses of your technical processes.
- Admit internal risks to your business partners.
- Report changes openly and at short notice.
- Position your business partner so that his or her strengths can help you.
- Use the opportunities to motivate your business partner with your honesty.
3. Fast Responsiveness
The ability to react more quickly to changes represents qualified process networking.
Our recommendations:
- Create opportunities to illustrate the required changes, e.g. a change in customer needs.
- Adjust customer and material purchase orders to current material replacement times so that the planning horizon corresponds to the supply documents.
- Identify the need for action by projecting the actual status within the process chain using key figures.
- Motivate your employees to embrace this rapid responsiveness.
- Prevent any delay to avoid lasting damage to the process chain.
- Pay attention to quality despite this speed.
4. Short Process Times
The relation between the production times and the process times in the upstream processes serves as an indicator for the reaction speed. While the production times amount to a few hours or days, the operative process times in upstream processes may take several days. Put these times into question.
Our recommendations:
- Measure the process times away from production.
- Determine how long it takes for a customer to be provided with a reliable order confirmation.
- Capture all process times and develop a concept to shorten them.
- A lengthy process time is often caused by the quality of the work tools, the lack of transparency and the lack of process speed. The key to success is an ERP system.
International Survey
5. Powerful ERP System
The prerequisite for the required speed and dynamism within the supply chain is a qualified ERP system. The manual execution of standard processes is a thing of the past. We recommend to examine the suitability of the ERP system carefully. Establish a sustainable performance profile with IT systems to reduce complexity in logistics.
Suitable ERP systems support your employees in the following areas:
- Automated production planning processes,
- Intelligent review processes in order management,
- Notification of employees in charge if action is required,
- Automated dunning processes,
- Automated import of parts lists,
- Support tools for quotation calculations.
6. Holistic Logistics
The integration of information, material and process logistics is not a simple task. Adjust these processes to fit into the chain and do not underestimate the impact of disturbed chain links.
Our recommendations:
- Are you familiar with batch sizes, framework agreements and customer purchase commitments?
- Avoid delays in communicating changes.
- Reduce risks by using comprehensive logistics systems.
- Facilitate fast action by establishing time-saving IT connections between the participants in the supply chain.
- Increase the chance for your own adaptation by acting quickly without causing damage.
- Safeguard the success of supply chain management by integrating all areas concerned: Production planning, customers, suppliers, purchasing, sales and production.
7. Clear and Binding Rules
A qualified supply chain can only be created if clear process rules and responsibilities are established. A discreet omission of these guidelines poses a typical vulnerability. Define clear rules and follow them.
We recommend the adoption of the following rules:
- Processes including process times,
- Responsibilities,
- Requirements within the supply chain,
- Harmonized key figures for internal and external evaluation,
- Escalation mechanisms that ensure successful conflict management.
Corona Crisis
Hard Times for the Mechanical Engineering Industry
Supply Chain Management Software and Systems
Software solutions for the value chain are required. Companies are aiming for higher investments in software and technology in their supply chain. At the same time, the focus is shifting from pure cost reduction and resource optimization in the process chain to the needs of customers. In view of the constantly changing industry environment, choosing the right software is crucial. What are your long-term objectives? The guide to software for the manufacturing industry is intended to help manufacturers find the best system. The guide discusses five key areas relevant to any successful manufacturing operation, including supply chain management software systems.
Identifying Limits — Even in Supply Chain Management
Due to lower transport costs, the shipping costs per volume or mass unit is often no longer a factor in planning.
Just-in-time systems cause two major problems in practice:
- Overloaded docks and loading ramps due to CEP services and small-scale deliveries
- Vulnerable structures (traffic jams, strikes, ...) due to long and frequent transport operations
Telematics systems alleviate the symptoms, but do not eliminate the cause. Clear guidelines put pressure on suppliers to cooperate and minimize risk by introducing additional criteria when planning the value chain. No matter how sophisticated supply chain management may be, lack of communication between customer and supplier and inadequate specifications can lead to major losses in the market or for the customer.
External influences can also show the limits of good supply chain management. This has been clearly shown by the latest developments around the corona crisis. After the rapid spread of the coronavirus led to a shutdown almost worldwide and stopped production in all industries, global supply chains were also put into question. The fact that the shutdown took place at different times in different countries meant that the delivery of goods was sometimes delayed by months, so that supply bottlenecks were one of the core problems during the crisis. This problem led to the realization that maintaining a local supply chain management can be an advantage.
What Is Supply Chain Management (SCM)?
Supply chain management is the management of the flow of goods and services and includes all processes that transform raw materials into final products. It involves the active streamlining of a business's supply-side activities to maximize customer value and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
SCM represents an effort by suppliers to develop and implement supply chains that are as efficient and economical as possible. Supply chains cover everything from production to product development to the information systems needed to direct these undertakings.
How Supply Chain Management Works
Typically, SCM attempts to centrally control or link the production, shipment, and distribution of a product. By managing the supply chain, companies are able to cut excess costs and deliver products to the consumer faster. This is done by keeping tighter control of internal inventories, internal production, distribution, sales, and the inventories of company vendors.
SCM is based on the idea that nearly every product that comes to market results from the efforts of various organizations that make up a supply chain. Although supply chains have existed for ages, most companies have only recently paid attention to them as a value-add to their operations.
In SCM, the supply chain manager coordinates the logistics of all aspects of the supply chain which consists of five parts:
- The plan or strategy
- The source (of raw materials or services)
- Manufacturing (focused on productivity and efficiency)
- Delivery and logistics
- The return system (for defective or unwanted products)
The supply chain manager tries to minimize shortages and keep costs down. The job is not only about logistics and purchasing inventory. According to Salary.com, supply chain managers, “make recommendations to improve productivity, quality, and efficiency of operations.”
Improvements in productivity and efficiency go straight to the bottom line of a company and have a real and lasting impact. Good supply chain management keeps companies out of the headlines and away from expensive recalls and lawsuits.
A supply chain is the connected network of individuals, organizations, resources, activities, and technologies involved in the manufacture and sale of a product or service. A supply chain starts with the delivery of raw materials from a supplier to a manufacturer and ends with the delivery of the finished product or service to the end consumer.
SCM oversees each touchpoint of a company's product or service, from initial creation to the final sale. With so many places along the supply chain that can add value through efficiencies or lose value through increased expenses, proper SCM can increase revenues, decrease costs, and impact a company's bottom line.
- Supply chain management (SCM) is the centralized management of the flow of goods and services and includes all processes that transform raw materials into final products.
- By managing the supply chain, companies are able to cut excess costs and deliver products to the consumer faster.
- Good supply chain management keeps companies out of the headlines and away from expensive recalls and lawsuits.
Understanding the importance of SCM to its business, Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. placed focused effort on transforming its supply chain in 2016. The company operates one of the largest pharmacy chains in the United States and needs to efficiently manage and revise its supply chain so it stays ahead of the changing trends and continues to add value to its bottom line.
As of July 5, 2016, Walgreens has invested in the technology portion of its supply chain. It implemented a forward-looking SCM that synthesizes relevant data and uses analytics to forecast customer purchase behavior, and then it works its way back up the supply chain to meet that expected demand.
For example, the company can anticipate flu patterns, which allow it to accurately forecast needed inventory for over-the-counter flu remedies, creating an efficient supply chain with little waste. Using this SCM, the company can reduce excess inventory and all of the inventories' associated costs, such as the cost of warehousing and transportation.
What is supply chain management?
Supply chain management is the practice of coordinating the various activities necessary to produce and deliver goods and services to a business’s customers. Depending on the business in question, this could involve activities such as monitoring the manufacturing of a product, shipping the product by air, sea, or land; ensuring that it meets quality standards, and delivering the product to customers.
Why is supply chain management important?
Supply chain management is important because it can help achieve several business objectives. For instance, controlling manufacturing processes can improve product quality, reducing the risk of recalls and lawsuits while helping to build a strong consumer brand. At the same time, controls over shipping procedures can improve customer service by avoiding costly shortages or periods of inventory oversupply. Overall, supply chain management provides several opportunities for companies to improve their profit margins, and is especially important for companies with large and international operations.
What are the five elements of supply chain management?
Supply chain management is often described as having five key elements: planning, sourcing of raw materials, manufacturing, delivery, and returns. The planning phase refers to developing an overall strategy for the supply chain, while the other four elements specialize in the key requirements for executing on that plan. Companies must develop expertise in all five elements in order to have an efficient supply chain and avoid expensive bottlenecks.
Key takeaway
- Supply chain management is the integrated process-oriented planning and control of the flow of goods, information and money across the entire value and supply chain from the customer to the raw material supplier.
- “Supply chain management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and all logistics management activities. Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third party service providers, and customers. In essence, supply chain management integrates supply and demand management within and across companies.”
What is E-Supply chain management (E-SCM)?
E-Supply chain management is practiced in manufacturing industries. E-SCM involves using internet to carry out value added activities so that the products produced by the manufacturer meets customers’ and result in good return on investment.
E-SCM is the effective utilization of internet and business processes that help in delivering goods, services and information from the supplier to the consumer in an organized and efficient way.
Players of E-Supply Chain Management
ESCM chain consists of the following players — manufacturer, logistics companies, distributors, suppliers, retailers and customers. E-Supply Chain Management concentrates on the coordination between the various players in the chain. Coordination is very essential for the success of the organization. E-SCM focuses on reducing the inventory cost.
SCM flows can be divided into three main activities
- Product flow,
- Information flow and
- Financial flow.
1. Product Flow: The product flow includes the movement of goods from a supplier to a customer, and also any goods returned by customers.
2. Information flow: The information flow involves transmitting orders and updating the status of delivery.
3. Financial flow: The financial flow consists of credit terms, payment schedules, consignment and title ownership arrangements.
Issues dealt by Supply Chain Management
Supply chain management deals with three issues:
1. Coordinating all the order processing activities that originate at the customer level, such as the process of order generation, order acceptance, entry into order processing system, prioritization, production, and material forecast.
2. Material related activities such as scheduling, production, distribution, fulfillment and delivery and
3. Financial activities such as invoicing, billing, fund transfer and accounting.
SCM involves counter checks of materials, information and finances as they move in a process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer. It involves coordinating and integrating these flows both within and among companies.
Extranet, intranet, Internet are used in e-supply chain. Extranet helps to connect the participating companies. It may be the supplier or the customer. A customer can check the order status. Likewise, a supplier can collect data about inventory to know about the replenishment of the inventory.
With the help of internet, a company can advertise about the product and accept online orders. With the help of intranet, an organization can maintain communication within the boundaries of the company. It is said that the ultimate goal of any effective SCM is to reduce inventory.
E-supply chain enables to link the supplier with the customer by exchanging information instantaneously. The organization has sufficient inventory when required. There will not be any shortage or surplus of inventory. Shortage of inventory brings down the reputation of the firm. Likewise, excess inventory blocks the funds of the firm unnecessarily.
Advantages of e-supply chain management
Companies implementing E-SCM can enjoy the following advantages:
1. It improves efficiency
2. It reduces inventory
3. It reduces cost
4. It helps to take competitive advantage over competitors.
5. It increases ability to implement just-in-time delivery, increases on-time deliveries, which enhances customer satisfaction.
6. It reduces cycle time, increases revenue, by providing improved customer service.
7. It improves order fulfillment, order management, decision making, forecasting, demand planning, and warehouse/distribution activities.
8. It reduces paperwork, administrative overheads, inventory build-up, and the number of hands that handle goods on their way to the end-user i.e., the customer.
Key takeaway
- E-Supply chain management is practiced in manufacturing industries. E-SCM involves using internet to carry out value added activities so that the products produced by the manufacturer meets customers’ and result in good return on investment.
Simple bread and butter with which we eat each day, actually gets to us through several processes. In this instance, bread begins its journey with the farmer who sows the seeds and sells the wheat to the businessman, who in turn sells it to the baker who bakes the bread. This is a description of supply chain management in a nutshell. In other words, supply chain management is a network of those businesses that are interconnected with each other in either the manufacturing of products, or delivering services, that are required by consumers.
It is very important for businesses to ensure two things for their supply chain to be effective, one is the supply chain should be cost effective and second it should deliver the results on time. We began with the description of supply chain management of bread. It is a very simple one. There are many complicated supply chain management processes that differ with the size of the business as well as the complexity of the chain and the number of products involved at each step. Thus, supply chain management begins at the origin of the product or service, and ends at the delivery and consumption of the same by the end user.
There are a million things which we use or consume in our everyday lives, and supply chain management weaves through it all, creating a harmonious and efficient environment. Any break in this chain can actually result in disruption of the system with a domino like effect. Supply chain management is made up of a few components that are very important as well as critical to the system. We shall discuss each of the components in brief.
This is one of the most important stages. Before the beginning of the entire supply chain, it is essential to finalise the strategies and put them into place. Checking the demand for the product or service, checking the viability, costing, profit, and manpower etc., are vital. Without a proper plan or strategy in place, it will be well-nigh impossible for the business to achieve effective and long term benefits. Therefore, enough time has to be devoted to this phase. Only after the finalisation of the plans and consideration of all pros and cons, can one proceed further. Every business needs a plan or blueprint or a roadmap based on which the strategies are made. Planning helps to identify the demand and supply trends in the market and this, in turn, helps to create a successful supply chain management system.
The world today is dominated by a continuous flow of information. In order to be successful, it is essential that a business stays abreast with all the latest information about the various aspects of its production. The market trends of supply and demand for a particular product can be best understood if the information is properly and timely disseminated through the many levels of the business. Information is crucial in a knowledge-based world economy, and ignorance about any aspect of business may actually spell doom for the prospects of the business.
Suppliers play a very crucial role in supply chain management systems. Products and services sold to the end user are created with the help of different sets of raw materials. It is therefore necessary that suitable quality raw materials are procured at cost effective rates. If a supplier is unable to supply on time, and within the stipulated budget, the business is bound to suffer losses and gain a negative reputation.
It is crucial that a company procures good quality resources so it can create good quality products and maintain its reputation in the market. This necessitates a strong role for suppliers in the supply chain management system.
For a highly effective supply chain management system it is essential that an inventory is kept and thoroughly maintained. An inventory means the ready list of items, raw materials and other essentials required for the product or service. This list has to be regularly updated to demarcate available stock and required stock. Inventory management is critical to the function of supply chain management, because without proper inventory management the production, as well as sale of the product, is not possible. Businesses have now started to pay more attention to this component simply because of its impact on the supply chain.
Production is one among the most important aspects of this system. It is only possible when all the other components of the supply chain are in tandem with each other. For the process of production to start it is essential that proper planning and supply of goods, as well as the inventory, are well maintained. The production of goods is followed by testing, packaging and the final preparation for delivery of the finished product.
Any business, that wants to survive as well as flourish, needs a location which is profitable for the business. Take for example, a carbonated drink factory is set up in an area where water supply is scarce. Water is a basic necessity of such business. The lack of water could hamper the production as well as affect the goodwill of the company. A business cannot survive if it has to share an already scarce raw material with the community. Hence, a suitable location, which is well connected, and very close to the source of essential resources for production is vital to a business’ prosperity. The requirement and availability of manpower must also be considered while setting up a business unit.
Transportation is vital in terms of carrying raw materials to the manufacturing unit and delivering the final product to the market. At each stage, timely transportation of goods is mandatory to sustain a smooth business process. Any business which pays attention to this component, and takes good care of it, will benefit from the production and transportation of its goods on time.
It is essential that a company works towards a safe and secure transportation process. Be it in-house or a third-party vendor, the transportation management system must ensure zero damage and minimal loss in transit. A well-managed logistics system along with flawless invoicing are the two pillars of secure transportation.
Among the various components that create a strong supply chain is the facility for the return of faulty/malfunctioning goods, along with a highly responsive consumer grievance redress unit.
No one is infallible. Even a machine may malfunction once in a million times if not more. As a part of a strong business process, one may expect the return of goods under various circumstances. Even the best quality control processes may have unavoidable momentary lapses. In the case of such lapses, inevitably followed by consumer complaints, a business must, instinctively, recall the product/s and issue an apology. This not only creates a good customer bonding, but also maintains goodwill in the long run.
The eight components discussed here are interdependent and ensure a smooth supply chain management system. It ensures the success and reputation of a business. A business must focus on all these components in order to create a flawless supply chain.
Businesses that have a strong supply chain management system in place always put great emphasis on all the components listed, and also ensure that management, as well as the teams at various levels, play by the rules. Profit is the bottom line and to make sure that the business achieves it, it is essential that the supply chain does not have any gaps. Any snag should be dealt with immediately and the weak links repaired or removed.
Demand and supply are two of the most important aspects of a business. For any business to be successful, trends, with respect to demand and supply, need to be studied carefully while implementing an effective plan of execution. A supply chain management system is required not just for the timely manufacture of goods; it is also a very critical system for ensuring that consumer requirements are met effectively.
Key takeaway
- Simple bread and butter with which we eat each day, actually gets to us through several processes. In this instance, bread begins its journey with the farmer who sows the seeds and sells the wheat to the businessman, who in turn sells it to the baker who bakes the bread. This is a description of supply chain management in a nutshell. In other words, supply chain management is a network of those businesses that are interconnected with each other in either the manufacturing of products, or delivering services, that are required by consumers.
- It is very important for businesses to ensure two things for their supply chain to be effective, one is the supply chain should be cost effective and second it should deliver the results on time. We began with the description of supply chain management of bread. It is a very simple one. There are many complicated supply chain management processes that differ with the size of the business as well as the complexity of the chain and the number of products involved at each step. Thus, supply chain management begins at the origin of the product or service, and ends at the delivery and consumption of the same by the end user.
- There are a million things which we use or consume in our everyday lives, and supply chain management weaves through it all, creating a harmonious and efficient environment. Any break in this chain can actually result in disruption of the system with a domino like effect. Supply chain management is made up of a few components that are very important as well as critical to the system.
Logistics is defined as “handling an operation that involves providing labour and materials to be supplied as needed”. E-logistics is defined to be “the mechanism of automating logistics processes and providing an integrated, end-to-end fulfilment and supply chain management services to the players of logistics processes. Those logistics processes that are automated by e-logistics provide supply chain visibility and can be part of existing e-Commerce or Workflow systems in an enterprise”. (Watson Research Center, 2007).
In a typical E-logistics process, three components come into play: Request for Quotes (RFQ), Shipping and Tracking. The Logistics intercommunicate with the business process manager in an e-commerce server. It is the role of the business service manager to invoke the RFQ (request for Quote) process. After getting the response, the purchase order is updated, after which the shipping process is invoked by the business process manager. Once the products are shipped for the specified destination, the tracking number is then provided to the customer. This tracking number is mapped to the PO number in an e-commerce system. This facilitates easy tracking of shipments for the customers. This is the essential interaction of a business process manager and e-logistics.
Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the operations of the supply chain as efficiently as possible. A retail supply chain may pose a few challenges like “linking the consumer in the supply chain planning process, managing product life cycles, promotional planning, planning for seasonal products, determining cost-effective supply channels, forecasting (CPFR) and scheduling in a volatile economic environment and many more”. (Wipro Technologies, 2007).
The process of Supply Chain Management includes the movement and storage of all raw materials, current inventory, and the finished commodities from point-of-origin to point-of-consumption. The Supply Chain Management process embraces all related aspects including planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing, procurement, conversion, and logistics management activities. It also involves effective integration of supply and demand management, both within and between companies.
The process of Supply Chain Management is all-inclusive, comprehensive, complex and needs to address issues like:
Distribution Strategy: Centralized versus decentralized, direct shipment, Cross docking, pull or push strategies, third party logistics; Distribution Network Configuration: Supplier location, number of suppliers, production facilities, distribution centres, warehouses and customers; Inventory Management; Cash-Flow and streamlined information process i.e. integration of systems and processes through the supply chain which includes information like demand signals, forecasts, inventory and transportation etc to be shared. (Wikipedia, 2007).
In order to stay within the league of competitors and successfully compete in the global market, it is important for the organizations that they rely on “effective” supply chains and networks.
In simple words, distribution can be described as a commercial activity of transporting and selling goods from a producer to a consumer. A distributor actually serves as a middle man between the manufacturer and retailer. Today, a distribution channel may constitute one or all of the following:
• Direct selling, via email or internet.
• An agent who sells on behalf of the producer
• A distributor (or wholesaler)who sells to the retailer
• A retailer who sells goods to its customers
Distribution in effect is an important aspect of marketing. The other aspects include product management, pricing and information.
Key takeaway
- Logistics is defined as “handling an operation that involves providing labour and materials to be supplied as needed”. E-logistics is defined to be “the mechanism of automating logistics processes and providing an integrated, end-to-end fulfilment and supply chain management services to the players of logistics processes. Those logistics processes that are automated by e-logistics provide supply chain visibility and can be part of existing e-Commerce or Workflow systems in an enterprise”.
Reference Books
- Computer Fundamentals by: Anita Goel, Pearson Education India ISBN: 9788131742136
- Connecting with Computer Science, by Greg Anderson, David Ferro, Robert Hilton, Course Technology, Cengage Learning,ISBN:9781439080351
- Fundamentals of Computer : For undergraduate courses in commerce and management, ITL Education Solutions Limited, Pearson Education, ISBN:9788131733349
- Introduction to Computer Science, 2/e, ITL Education Solutions Limited, Pearson Education, ISBN:9788131760307
- Frontiers of Electronic Commerce, Ravi Kalakota, Andrew B. Whinston, Pearson Education,ISBN:9788177583922
- Internet: The Complete Reference, Margaret Levine Young, Tata McGraw Hill Education Private Limited, ISBN: 9780070486997
- On the Way to the Web: The Secret History of the Internet and Its Founders, A. Banks,Apress Publication, ISBN: 9781430208693
- Computers and Commerce: A Study of Technology and Management at Eckert-MauchlyComputer Company, Engineering Research Associates, and Remingto, Arthur L. Norberg, MIT Press (MA),ISBN:9780262140904
- Essential of E-commerce technology By V.Rajaraman, Prentice Hall Inida Learning PriviteLimitated ISBN 9788120339378
- E-commerce Fundamental and Application By Henry Chan ,Wiley ISBN:-978126514694
- Information Technology ByDr.KishorJagtap, Tech-Max Publications, Pune
What is traditional marketing?
Traditional marketing is a rather broad category that incorporates many forms of advertising and marketing. It’s the most recognizable types of marketing, encompassing the advertisements that we see and hear every day. Most traditional marketing strategies fall under one of four categories: print, broadcast, direct mail, and telephone.
Print marketing is the oldest form of traditional marketing. Loosely defined as advertising in paper form, this strategy has been in use since ancient times, when Egyptians created sales messages and wall posters on papyrus. Today, print marketing usually refers to advertising space in newspapers, magazines, newsletters, and other printed materials intended for distribution.
Traditional Marketing Categories
- Print: Includes advertisements in newspapers, newsletters, magazines, brochures, and other printed material for distribution
- Broadcast: Includes radio and television commercials, as well as specialized forms like on-screen movie theatre advertising
- Direct mail: Includes fliers, postcards, brochures, letters, catalogues, and other material that is printed and mailed directly to consumers
- Telemarketing: Includes requested calling and cold calling of consumers over the phone
Broadcast marketing includes television and radio advertisements. Radio broadcasts have been around since the 1900s, and the first commercial broadcast—a radio program supported by on-air advertisements—aired on November 2, 1920. Television, the next step in entertainment technology, was quicker to adopt advertising, with less than ten years between its inception and the first television commercial in 1941.
Direct mail marketing uses printed material like postcards, brochures, letters, catalogs, and fliers sent through postal mail to attract consumers. One of the earliest and most well-known examples of direct mail is the Sears Catalogue, which was first mailed to consumers in 1888.
Finally, telephone marketing, or telemarketing, is the practice of delivering sales messages over the phone to convince consumers to buy a product or service. This form of marketing has become somewhat controversial in the modern age, with many telemarketers using aggressive sales tactics. The U.S. federal government has passed strict laws governing the use of telemarketing to combat some of these techniques.
Who implements traditional marketing strategies?
Because it encompasses so many different strategies, nearly every company selling a product or service uses one or more types of traditional marketing as part of an overall advertising strategy. For the most part, this form of advertising depends on the company’s available marketing budget.
Mid-sized companies and large corporations are most likely to use TV commercials. Advertising on television is usually the most expensive form of marketing, with prices depending on the time slots and programming content. For example, a 30-second commercial during Super Bowl 2012 was around $3.5 million, more than $100,000 per second—and that figure doesn’t include production costs.
Bigger companies also use direct mail more often, as the design, printing, and mailing expenses can add up to substantial amounts. Mid-sized and large businesses often use all forms of traditional marketing in one way or another.
Entrepreneurs and small businesses, who may have limited marketing budgets, most often use print marketing in newspapers or newsletters to advertise to local customers. Many also place local radio advertisements. Some use direct mail, and a few may employ limited telemarketing.
While network television commercials are usually out of the budget range for smaller companies, local cable programming has made television advertising more accessible for these types of businesses, with costs running as low as $15 for a 30-second spot, plus production expenses.
Most Memorable Traditional Marketing Campaigns
Traditional marketing campaigns often have the advantage of staying power. They can become iconic, and instantly familiar to millions of people. The top five memorable campaigns of the 20th century, according to network television powerhouse NBC, are:
- McDonalds: “You deserve a break today”
- Nike: “Just Do It”
- Marlboro’s “Marlboro Man”
- Coca-Cola: “The pause that refreshes”
- Volkswagen: “Think Small”
How is a traditional marketing plan developed?
The strategies for developing a traditional marketing plan vary widely, according to the form of advertising used and the type of business. In some companies, particularly small businesses, the entire staff will contribute to planning and execution. Larger companies often have marketing departments dedicated to creating advertising campaigns that use traditional marketing.
Interesting Traditional Marketing Stats
- Television is still the most effective form of advertising, with the highest ad revenue in the United States—totalling $78.5 billion in 2011
- In the UK, 57% of people consider television advertising the most impactful. The second highest is newspaper advertising, at just 15 percent.
- Radio advertising generated more than $17 billion in ad revenue during 2011. This form of advertising is also the least ignored, with nearly 70% of listeners keeping the station tuned in during commercials compared to the second highest—television, at just 20 percent.
- Print advertising generates nearly $30 billion in ad revenue every year. While revenue for print media has slightly declined as online revenue rises, this form of marketing is still effective for many businesses.
The first step in developing a plan is to choose print, broadcasting, direct mail, or telemarketing. This choice depends on the budget and the marketing message conveyed. For example, a store that’s announcing a sale will use more immediate impact strategies like broadcasting or print, while a business launching a general awareness campaign might choose direct mail, which stays in consumers’ hands for a longer period of time.
For print and broadcast marketing, the business must arrange to purchase advertising space. The timing of this step depends on the lead time, or how far in advance the advertising space must be purchased. Some print media, such as wide-circulation magazines, have lead times of several weeks. For example, an advertisement in Sports Illustrated magazine must be reserved at least five weeks in advance and longer for premium placement. Other markets have shorter times, with some newspapers allowing next-day ad placement.
The development of marketing materials also varies depending on the form. Direct mail and print campaigns require graphic design and copywriting. For telemarketing, the advertisers write a script for the sales representatives (or outsourced telemarketing company) to follow. Radio ads may be either produced and pre-recorded, or scripted and read by on-air personalities. Finally, television commercials can either be written by the marketing department and produced in-house, or contracted out to production companies.
A brand manager is responsible for planning, developing, and directing the marketing efforts for a particular product or brand. This may be an entire company, or a line of products within a large company.
Brand managers coordinate the activities for a team of marketers involved in several facets of operation, including research and development, production, sales and advertising, purchasing, distribution, packaging development, and financing. These professionals decide on marketing strategies, conceptualize and oversee marketing campaigns, and control the brand’s public image through advertising.
Education and Skills
A typical brand manager will hold a four-year bachelor’s degree in marketing or advertising. In addition, most large companies require at least four years of experience in lower marketing positions, such as sales representatives.
What do they do?
The job of an advertising sales director is to manage the entire advertising strategy of a company from all directions, including business, sales, and technical perspectives. Typically in charge of a team of sales representatives, these high-ranking managers oversee the development of sales materials, campaign implementation, and advertising budgets and projections.
Education and Skills
An advertising sales director must hold a four-year bachelor’s degree in marketing, sales, or advertising, and typically needs a minimum of 10 years’ experience in sales and marketing. Most businesses hire advertising sales directors who have proven track records in marketing success.
What do they do?
A media director typically works at an advertising agency that develops and implements marketing strategies for other companies. The job of the media director is to manage the purchase of print space and broadcast time for clients.
These professionals work with a client to choose the most effective avenues for traditional marketing, usually through market research and statistical models. They are also responsible for working with media sales representatives to place the advertisements.
Education and Skills
A four-year bachelor’s degree in sales, marketing, or advertising is required to become a media director. As with most management-level marketing professionals, a media director also needs at least 5 years of field experience, with a proven record of results.
How can a marketing school help you succeed?
Explore the bond between business and consumer behaviour with a degree in marketing.
Traditional marketing is a diverse field, involving many different strategies and methods. Earning a degree through a marketing program provides the knowledge and skills required to effectively use traditional marketing techniques — from print to broadcast.
Coursework in marketing programs are designed with traditional marketing strategies in mind. Many schools offer degree programs geared specifically toward print or broadcast marketing, such as Broadcasting Media and Graphic Design. This includes subjects like communication, which helps professionals understand the most effective ways to design and deliver traditional marketing campaign. Marketing programs will also have courses on consumer psychology, which teaches a strong understanding of buying habits and motivations.
To learn more about how a degree in marketing or advertising can help create effective traditional marketing campaigns, request more information from schools that offer these courses.
Key takeaway
- Traditional marketing is a rather broad category that incorporates many forms of advertising and marketing. It’s the most recognizable types of marketing, encompassing the advertisements that we see and hear every day. Most traditional marketing strategies fall under one of four categories: print, broadcast, direct mail, and telephone.
E-Marketing (a.k.a. electronic marketing) refers to the marketing conducted over the Internet. Two synonyms of E-Marketing are Internet Marketing and Online Marketing which are frequently interchanged. E-Marketing is the process of marketing a brand (company, product, or service) using the Internet through computers and mobile devices mediums. By such a definition, eMarketing encompasses all the activities a business conducts via the worldwide web with the aim of attracting new business, retaining current business and developing its brand identity.
- Ability to target your customers faster and cheaper
- Reduction of marketing costs through automation of electronic media
- Near real-time interaction between the marketer and the end user
- Ability to quantify and collect user data
- One-to-one marketing experience
- Increased interactivity
- Ability to implement marketing strategies in a short time-frame
- Ability to scale with the market
- Appeal to specific interests
- Geo-targeting
- Search Engine Optimization (SEO)
- Paid Advertising (PPC)
- Email Marketing
- Social Media Marketing
- Mobile Marketing
The return on investment (ROI) from E-Marketing can far exceed that of traditional marketing strategies. Also, the transparency of the internet allows the marketer to have access to analytics and data in a near real-time fashion which will allow the marketer to make changes to align with the market’s reaction thus making E-Marketing a preferred solution for Marketing Professionals.
Key takeaway
- E-Marketing (a.k.a. electronic marketing) refers to the marketing conducted over the Internet. Two synonyms of E-Marketing are Internet Marketing and Online Marketing which are frequently interchanged.
- E-Marketing is the process of marketing a brand (company, product, or service) using the Internet through computers and mobile devices mediums. By such a definition, eMarketing encompasses all the activities a business conducts via the worldwide web with the aim of attracting new business, retaining current business and developing its brand identity.
For creating a web site that is effective, the following objectives should be considered:
- To attract visitors to the Web site.
- To make the site interesting so that the visitor stay and explore.
- To persuade the visitors to follow the site's links to obtain information.
- To create the desired image of the organisation in the visitors mind.
- To reinforce positive images that the visitor may already have about the organisation.
Why do Visitors arrive at a Web site:
- To obtain general information about the company or organisation.
- Learning about the company's products or services.
- Buying the products and services offered by the company.
- Finding out the services conditions and warranties applicable for the products they have purchased.
- Obtaining financial information helpful in making investment or credit granting decision.
- Identifying the people who manage the company or organisation.
Business should try to meet the following goals while constructing their Web Sites:
- Convey an integrated image of the organisation
- Offer easily accessible facts about the organisation.
- Allow visitors to experience the site in different ways and at different levels.
- Provide visitors with a meaningful two way interactive communication link with the organisation.
- Sustain visitor attention and encourage return visits.
- Offer easily accessible information about products and services and how to use them.
Key takeaway
- To attract visitors to the Web site.
- To make the site interesting so that the visitor stay and explore.
- To persuade the visitors to follow the site's links to obtain information.
- To create the desired image of the organisation in the visitors mind.
- To reinforce positive images that the visitor may already have about the organisation.
The uniqueness of content is a valuable tool that influences the positioning of a company. Uniqueness provides a good indexing of a site, indicates to users the value of information, goods or services, and improves an overall perception of a brand. This is a broad concept, which includes not only the quality of the posted texts but also an overall corporate style of a site, the exclusivity of the products provided.
Aspects of the unique presentation of material
The concept of uniqueness is widely used on the Internet, and it is attributed mainly to a quality of a content. Texts should be exclusive, written to order. Words repeated in separate blocks of articles should not coincide with other search results. The nuances listed below can be attributed to the aspects of creating a unique content.
1. Creation of unique content for search engine robots
Search robots evaluate the uniqueness of the material submitted, using separate pieces of the text. They are entered into a search engine and checked. As a result of indexing, a verdict is made about the quality of the content, and the page of the site is risen or lowered in the search results.
2. Transferring unique experience to the visitors of a resource
Visitors of a site look for answers to specific questions. Usually, they use several resources at the same time. Among the information found, the most complete, useful and relevant content is accepted as worthy of attention. When creating informational texts, it is important to collect as much useful data as possible, to compose articles better than competitors do, and to add unique details that are absent on other resources.
In addition to the technical uniqueness of the text, the originality of the transmitted experience is also important. It is optimal if the text is written by a specialist in the chosen field because such a person can convey implicit nuances, and not just rewrite the topic. Good articles are quickly copied by sites-competitors, but during their existence, they manage to earn a good rating for their company.
3. The originality of the presentation of the finished content
The uniqueness of content can also mean its original presentation, which will interest users and encourage them to visit your resource or order the services of your enterprise. The creative approach creates a certain “boom”. This kind of uniqueness can also be attributed to the use of the original corporate style of the company that causes a number of associations and brand memorability.
What is paramount when promoting a website?
The uniqueness of content is important but not always the main factor of promotion. Its impact on the popularity of a project depends on the methods of obtaining traffic and the needs of visitors.
For example, an online clothing store that receives traffic from contextual advertising does not need to post 100% unique texts. For such a project, it is more important to create an informative content, where each product card will have an accurate description of the sizes, fabrics, functional features of a model, all those characteristics that a user will want to know before buying the goods. The uniqueness of the texts fades into the background and is an additional bonus.
A personal blog that will earn on advertising, on the contrary, should transfer to user’s not only technically unique information but also an exclusive experience. Articles should consider popular issues. Presentation of the topics should be attractive. The acquaintance of readers with new horizons of thinking, providing them with fresh impressions are welcome.
When planning a content, it is important to consider the attendance of the resource. What is the best way to draw the attention of users? What qualities of content are they interested in? What will cause them to move to other pages, to visit the site again? What will motivate them to make a call? For competent site design, it is important to understand the needs of the target audience well and create content that meets these needs.
About the uniqueness of pictures and videos
The uniqueness of the videos posted on the site can play a role in two cases:
- If you want to provide only exclusive content.
- If you promote your personal channel on YouTube through the site.
These two factors are directly related since it is quite irrational to create unique videos and not to spread them to earn money on hosting. When using such resources, uniqueness is determined not by the general standards of search engines, but according to the internal rules established by the video portal itself. Usually, it is necessary to use your own video and music materials when creating such content.
When placing videos on YouTube, their uniqueness is not controlled by indexing of search engines. The quality and usefulness of videos are evaluated only directly by visitors of the resource. Videos can enhance user activity, hold people on the site or, conversely, quickly become a cause of boredom. Everything depends on the quality of the resource and the preferences of the visitors.
As for the pictures, their uniqueness may slightly increase the rating of the site, but it does not matter that much today. The quality of the images affects the perception of the site by users, so it’s just important to choose the options with good resolution and color rendering. Pictures should carry the original meaning, convey your ideas and qualitatively attract attention.
The uniqueness of images plays a role only in the case of creating a portfolio site (for example, for a photographer) or a site where examples of specific works (such as cakes to order) are exhibited.
So, originality of visual material is not fixed by search engines, but it is useful for conveying the right message to visitors. It is much more important to create a unique text because it undergoes really strict checks.
Key takeaway
The uniqueness of content is a valuable tool that influences the positioning of a company. Uniqueness provides a good indexing of a site, indicates to users the value of information, goods or services, and improves an overall perception of a brand. This is a broad concept, which includes not only the quality of the posted texts but also an overall corporate style of a site, the exclusivity of the products provided.
To maximize repeat sales, a web site must meet the continuing needs of its users.
Unfortunately, many corporate web sites appear to be designed to meet the needs of their managers. A web site is not just another sales channel. Websites which don't produce the expected results are probably not meeting the continuing needs of their users.
Problems include:
- sites designed around the bricks and mortar corporate structure (products, services, brands, and distribution channels) instead of around the unique features of the Internet
- bandwidth hogging "cool" features and site structures that irritate the very customers the site is attempting to attract
- Confusing layouts.
A web site also must be kept up to date and interesting to its users, on a continuing basis. It is not enough to just build a web site and review its performance every three months. Market conditions change rapidly so a site and its market must be continuously monitored and appropriate changes made.
The Internet Marketing Engine can assist you to:
- keep abreast of market changes including changes to competitive sites
- identify areas where your site does not meet the continuing needs of your users
- experience your site as your visitors do
- meet the needs of your site visitors and exceed their expectations
- identify and implement site improvements with the most favourable cost/benefit ratios
- structure and implement a program of continuous site monitoring and improvement
Key takeaway
- To maximize repeat sales, a web site must meet the continuing needs of its users.
- Unfortunately, many corporate web sites appear to be designed to meet the needs of their managers. A web site is not just another sales channel. Websites which don't produce the expected results are probably not meeting the continuing needs of their users.
These days, everybody knows how important content marketing is in attracting your audience and winning leads and sales.
According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), content marketing is one of the most cost-effective promotional techniques. In fact, it delivers more leads at a lower cost than most other methods. (The only exception is email marketing.)
There’s just one problem.
If you’re a busy business owner or overwhelmed marketer, you want to be sure that the content you create will deliver real results.
Otherwise, you’re just wasting your time.
Wouldn’t it be great if you had an easy way to figure out the forms of content that would bring guaranteed business results?
That’s why we’ve put together this list of the most engaging content formats to help you get better ROI from your content strategy.
We’ll tell you why each of the content formats is on this list, and suggest ways to get started with creating them.
By the end, you’ll be able to include some of the most engaging content types in your content strategy. That’ll help you win your audience’s attention, and boost leads and sales.
Let’s get started…
Before we get into the content formats, let’s look at why content marketing is such an essential marketing tool.
As we said, content is an essential part of email marketing which has a high ROI of around $40 for every dollar spent.
Content is also one of three main SEO search ranking factors. Get your content right, and people won’t just find your site in search results. They may also visit, stick around and become customers.
And content can help you build trust and authority. It does that by showing your expertise and giving visitors and customers helpful information.
But here’s the thing: no single type of content will appeal to every visitor. That’s why it makes sense to vary your content. The content formats listed below will help you get started. We’ve included a table of contents so you can jump to the one you want to try first.
- Blog Posts
- Long Form Articles
- Original Research
- Video
- Infographics
- Images
- Case Studies
- White Papers/Reports
- Ebooks
- Presentations
- Webinars
- Quizzes and Polls
- Podcasts
- Checklists
- Email Newsletters
Let’s start with blog posts. That’s the content format most people think of as content marketing.
Blog posts are relatively easy to produce, especially if they’re not too long and don’t contain a lot of images.
And the potential benefits are worth it.
Done right, blog posts can help you:
- Build up a set of authoritative content in your niche
- Get more citations from other trusted sources, leading to better search ranking
- Have content that you can change into other content formats
You can also use guest blogging to build up your inbound link profile.
Blogging covers many types of articles. These include how-tos, reviews, lists and more. Many of these are among the most shared content online.
To get started with writing blog posts:
- Use headline tools to help you find the best headline ideas
- Check out some blog post ideas for inspiration
- Optimize your content and link posts together for better SEO
Long-form articles are another form of content worth your time.
It’s a type of blogging, but long-form content can also stand alone. One example is Moz’s website migration guide, which is more than 17,000 words long.
According to the data, people love to share long-form articles on social media. That results in more traffic to your website. You also get the indirect SEO benefits of social signals.
If you want to use the long-form content format, then you’ll need to research and write content with real depth.
For example, some people publish “ultimate guides” to topics. These can have several chapters, each on its own URL. That means there are lots of chances for the guide to appear in search results.
One option is to use your own industry expertise to produce in-depth and well-researched long long-form content. Another is to check out the content that’s already around, and try to produce something better, fresher, and with more resources.
Original research is another of the popular content formats which get links and shares across many platforms. According to Buzzsumo, content related to research findings can attract millions of shares.
Original research is also a great way to get inbound links. This happens when people cite your work, and it’s great for SEO. An example of original research is the CMI’s annual report on B2B content marketing.
There’s only one issue: producing in-depth research can be time-consuming and costly.
If you want to speed up the process, carry out a survey, using WPForms. Then use the built-in reporting dashboard to get charts to help you visualize the results.
As our article on video marketing statistics shows, video is a proven attention-getter online. Most age groups watch video. It’s also one of the most popular content formats for mobile device users. And data from Google shows that video is a trusted source for 40% of millennials.
But video’s also one of the content formats that contribute to business revenue.
Aberdeen Group shows that marketers who use video get 66% more leads a year than those who don’t. Brand awareness improves too. And Wyzowl found that 81% of those using video marketing saw an increase in sales.
There are lots of ways you can use video in your business. Here are a few ideas:
- Use an explainer video to introduce people to your business
- Create a video showcasing features of your products or services
- Shoot a tutorial to give visitors step by step instructions on using your product
You can also get video views by tapping into popular culture or questioning social norms. One example is the Like a Girl campaign from Always. This turns a phrase that can be negative into a positive affirmation.
So, how do you get started with creating video content? Here are a few suggestions:
- YouTube makes it easy for anyone to have a video channel. You can even shoot video on your Smartphone and upload it via the YouTube Studio app.
- Use a video creation tool like the ones listed here.
- Or go live, as live video is now more popular.
If you want to take this last option, Facebook suggests you:
- Make sure you’ve got a great internet connection
- Let people know you’re planning to go live and encourage them to subscribe
- Write a catchy description; that’ll come in handy for people watching it later
Did you know that infographics are also among the most shared content online? And that 84% of those who use infographics to market their business find that content format effective?
These are just two reasons why infographics are a form of content you can’t ignore.
It’s important to get the graphic elements right and make your infographics attractive. But don’t forget to make the information is interesting and reliable. That creates a linkable, shareable resource, like this example from Marketing Profs:
If you want to use this content format, here are a few tips to get you started:
- Plan your infographic like any other piece of content so it tells a story. A blog post outline can be a good starting point
- Give it a good headline and interesting subheadings
- Use Canva, Piktochart, or another visual content marketing tool to create it.
While we’re on the topic of visuals, let’s not forget about images. Every internet minute, 15,000 GIFs are sent on Messenger, and 46,200 Instagram posts are uploaded.
Images make people more likely to share written content on both Facebook and Twitter.
Here are some options for using images as a content format:
- Turn the key takeaways from your blog post into a quote graphic with Canva or Stencil
- Visit Know Your Meme and pick a popular meme that you can adapt and share
- Use Google Photos to create a short animation from a couple of still photos
- Find or create a shareable GIF with Giphy
Case studies are one of the most effective content marketing formats for winning new business.
Case studies give you the chance to feature your customers and to:
- Show off what you’re doing right
- Create niche-specific content
- Build trust and authority
- Highlight your competitive advantage
White papers and reports can help to engage your audience.
In fact, according to Forbes 79% of B2B buyers share white papers with their colleagues. That adds up to a huge opportunity for you to win more business.
The best white papers aren’t a marketing pitch. Instead, they aim to help the target audience. Even without the hard sell, they’re effective.
The best white papers:
- Focus on one key issue. They are relatively short, at about 6 to 10 pages
- Use in-depth research
- Back up any claims with verifiable statistics
- Include charts, graphs, and pull quotes
- Have a call to action so readers know what to do next
Ebooks are another great way to create content quickly. Done right, an ebook can be an excellent lead magnet and can help solve your customers’ problems.
Hubspot uses ebooks as lead magnets on many blog posts, helping them become a hugely successful company. Check out the share numbers for some of their most popular lead magnets below:
If you’re planning to create an ebook, a good starting point is an in-depth blog post or piece of long form content.
If you’re already promoting your business with presentations, then this is a useful content format. Plus, it’s pretty easy to put them online with a SlideShare account.
Traffic Generation Cafe found SlideShare an effective way to:
- Generate traffic to the website
- Increase the number of Facebook fans
- Gain engagement on SlideShare itself
By uploading presentations to SlideShare, the site moved from 0 to 243,000 views within just 30 days.
To get started with SlideShare, just create and upload a presentation that’ll interest your target customers. Tag it with around three keywords to make it easy to find.
Add it to your LinkedIn profile (LinkedIn is SlideShare’s parent company) to make it even more visible. Promote your presentation via the usual marketing channels.
The stats show that webinars (which are online seminars) are an excellent business content marketing format. According to ReadyTalk, between 20% and 40% of those who attend webinars become qualified leads.
Meanwhile, the Branded Solopreneur found that between 2% and 5% of attendees actually make a purchase.
Those are pretty good numbers, aren’t they?
Webinars usually consist of a presentation plus a brief Q&A session. They help you show off your expertise. You can also demonstrate products and services so that attendees actually want to use them.
To test the water with creating a webinar, try using Zoom which lets you host a 40-minute online meeting with up to 100 attendees for free.
According to CMI, quizzes are one of the most engaging content formats. They will definitely get your audience’s attention.
Similarly, polls can boost engagement by making participants curious about the results.
Shareable, fun content makes a good addition to any content strategy. And since they’re usually easy to complete, that’s an added bonus for your audience.
To create quizzes online, use a tool like Quizzr or Playbuzz. For polls, use the tools built into many social sites, or try WPForms.
According to Edison Research, the number of podcast listeners has grown in the last five years. Today, 15% of the US population listens to a podcast at least weekly.
So it’s clear that a podcast is a great content format to engage your audience. Podcasts let people access your content at their own convenience. They are also another great option for repurposing existing content.
For example, if you’ve created a video, the audio can easily become a podcast. And you can also read a blog post to make that into a podcast episode too.
If you’re looking for an easy way to start your own podcast, follow this tutorial from WPBeginner.
Top Tools: Start your own podcast today with one of the best WordPress podcasting plugins from our list!
One of the easiest content formats to create is a checklist. They’re insanely popular, attracting hundreds of thousands of shares in some cases.
This type of content includes worksheets, tip sheets, and cheat sheets. They’re easy to make by pulling out the key points from another type of content (like a blog post).
Next, you can layout your cheat sheet in a Google Doc or Word document and export it as a PDF. Alternatively, use software like Canva to make it into a graphic and do your PDF export from there.
You probably don’t think of your email newsletter as a content format, but it totally is.
Sure, email newsletters are a great way to highlight the content you’ve created in other formats. However, they can also be something completely new.
As we saw earlier, email has great ROI. That’s why you can’t ignore this content marketing format. See our tips on how to create an email newsletter to get started.
Now you know some of the content formats you can use to improve your content marketing strategy. Next, check out some content marketing examples for inspiration, and learn about content curation.
There’s just one more thing to help you get more from your content: promotion. OptinMonster’s a great tool to help you with that. In fact, Social Media Examiner got 250,000 new subscribers by promoting its content with OptinMonster.
Key takeaway
- These days, everybody knows how important content marketing is in attracting your audience and winning leads and sales.
- According to the Content Marketing Institute (CMI), content marketing is one of the most cost-effective promotional techniques. In fact, it delivers more leads at a lower cost than most other methods. (The only exception is email marketing.)
Website maintenance is the act of regularly checking your website for issues and mistakes and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done on a consistent basis in order to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings.
Keeping a website well maintained and attractive is important to companies big and small in order to engage and retain customers. It’s easy for businesses, especially startups, to cut corners and let a few tasks slide.
Website maintenance can easily become one of those things as it doesn’t always present immediate issues. However, just like your health can fall apart if you go too long without a regular check up, so can the health of your website.
Regular monitoring of your website is a must for keeping your business running smoothly.
What Are the Steps in Website Maintenance? A Quick Checklist
There is a laundry list of tasks that should be done to keep your website running smoothly. The most time-sensitive of these are website security updates and patches. Without these, your website has the potential to be an actual danger to those who click on it.
With that in mind, here is a list of website maintenance tasks that should be completed regularly:
To be done weekly
- Check that all of your pages are loading without errors
- Run a backup and make sure a previous version of your site is stored
- Make updates to website software and plugins
- Check that all of your forms are running properly
- Remove any spam comments from pages and posts
- Check your pages to see if there are any broken links
- Search for 404 errors and fix or redirect
- Write one or more blog posts to keep your community engaged and encourage SEO traffic.
To be done monthly
- Check the load speed of your website and ensure that nothing is bogging it down
- Review your security scans and make sure nothing is out of place
- Analyze website statistics from the previous month
- Check your blog to see if there are any articles that could be updated
To be done quarterly
- Review your website design and structure – can be it improved?
- Check graphics and images – should anything be updated?
- Review SEO and meta titles and descriptions to ensure they are as effective as possible
- Test and tweak popups, forms, and calls to action
- Review your workload for efficiencies to see if anything can be automated
- Test your website on all devices and browsers to see if it displays correctly
- Review advertising and marketing campaigns to see if anything needs to be changed or updated.
- Restore a previous version of the website to check your backup health
To be done yearly
- Update any reference to the current year
- Review each page for content accuracy, grammar, typos, and relevancy
- Check any active email addresses and see if any are excessive and can be deleted
- Ensure that your website domain name is renewed
- Consider whether a website design update is due
- Review all of your top performing blog articles and see if they can be updated with new content
A Proper Website Maintenance Plan Is a Circle
As you can see from our checklist, website maintenance should be a consistent part of your business. It grows on itself, and if not correctly implemented, can cause some serious problems and setbacks to your potential growth and business health.
Staying on top of website health takes awareness and organization. This is particularly the case for a large site with hundreds (or even thousands) of pages.
With the introduction of new tools to make website building easier, website sizes are growing each year. While it’s easy to add pages to most websites, it’s not as easy to keep all of your pages in a good state.
All that to say: keep on top of your website maintenance.
Why Is It Important to Do Website Maintenance?
Many new businesses already have a lot on their plates without worrying about constantly checking in on their website. It’s tempting to buy a domain name, throw up something temporary, and just worry about it later. There are many reasons why this is not a good idea. Maintaining a current, healthy, and active website is important for a number of reasons.
SEO
The whole point to starting a business is to have customers, clients, or an audience. To drive traffic to your website, you’ll need to keep it regularly updated.
Google wants to rank websites that have the most relevant and up-to-date information on their search engine results page . They may even de-index your website entirely if it hasn’t been updated recently enough and if they suspect it has been infected by malware. You must keep your website regularly updated with current content, news, keywords, and articles in order to rank well in search results.
Regularly website maintenance is invaluable for SEO strategy.
Customer Attraction/Engagement
If your website is gaining traction and traffic, it’s important to keep those potential customers. If they aren’t able to find what they are looking for, current information and relevant content, there is a good chance you’ll lose interest quickly. In order for your website to be the useful tool you want, you’ll need to ensure it is free from typos and grammar issues, has any and all information a customer could want, and looks engaging and consistent.
Security
This is the single most important reason to keep website maintenance on your radar, particularly if your website is storing any form of customer information. If you are using a website building platform like WordPress or Wix, you must ensure that you are installing regular software updates and security patches. It can be easy and attractive for hackers to find and target websites that have sat dormant for too long.
Corporate Image
It’s becoming more and more simple to create a website that looks well-designed and professional. There is an expectation for a professional website from professional companies. If your website doesn’t deliver on the promise of professionalism, your customers will often go elsewhere.
Your Sanity
Your website is a very important element of your business. If it is up-to-date and running smoothly, it can be a valuable support and asset. If it is not in a good state, it can cost you dearly. Once you are behind on your maintenance needs, it can be quite the process to bring the website back up to speed. Sometimes, if your maintenance has been ignored for too long, it is easier just to scrap everything and rebuild from the scratch.
Do yourself and your business a favor by staying on top of your website. This will repay you with simple ease of mind.
Keep up with Trends in Design and Technology
The sleeker your website is, the more you’ll convince potential customers that you are their ultimate choice. If you’re staying on top of your website maintenance, you’ll also have the opportunity to be an early adopter of new website technology that will help the back-end run more smoothly. If you’re installing software updates regularly, you’ll be able to take advantage of new features that install along with the updates.
You’ll also be able to tweak your design to stay on top of the latest website looks. It’s far more tempting to employ a company with a polished and modern website than one that looks like it hopped on a time travel device from 2003.
How Much Does Website Maintenance Cost?
There are different cost expectations based on what your website is used for, the size of your audience, and how much content is hosted. We’ve discussed the different pricing brackets below.
Small Personal Blog
A small blog typically does not have a lot of traffic and has very few needs. This can be hosted on a blogging site like Google Blogger with no costs whatsoever. Or, it could be self-hosted using a platform like WordPress with low monthly costs stemming from domain name renewal and hosting service.
Medium-Large Sized Active Blog with a Wide Audience
If you have a blog that is bringing in an income with an active audience, you will likely want to be self hosted with some customizations. This will require more frequent maintenance, updates, marketing and backups and a slightly larger monetary investment.
Company Website for the Purpose of Marketing Only
Similar to the medium-large size blog, this will need to be self hosted with a simple design template and limited content. It will be low maintenance for upkeep with regular updates, marketing, and backups.
This will be a larger financial investment as you’ll need to be vigilant about website maintenance. You’re handling a lot of content, code customization, and customer data. If you do not have an IT team on staff, we would recommend finding a web maintenance package to stay on top of your website needs.
Custom Built Web Application
This will be your largest financial investment. Your web application was custom built from the ground up for a specific purpose and it needs to be in top-notch working condition at all times or your company will suffer. This likely needs a dedicated staff of developers keeping a close eye on the maintenance.
Paying for Website Maintenance Services: The Advantages
Now that we’ve established that website maintenance is a must for websites of any size, it’s time to discuss the advantages to employing someone else to do that maintenance. You can, of course, take on these tasks yourself, but it will save time and stress to pay an agency for several reasons.
- You’ll be hiring a team of experts who take care of these tasks every day. They know what to look for and what to expect.
- You can focus on other areas of your business that need your attention.
- Hiring an outside agency is cost-effective and can scale with your company. Your package will reflect the needs of your company.
Determining If You Should Buy Website Maintenance Packages
There are several elements that go into determining whether you should purchase a website maintenance package.
- The size of your website
- The purpose of your website
- How much of your website is customized content
- How quickly is your business growing?
- How much experience do you have with website maintenance?
- Is your website currently out-of-date?
- How much time do you have to dedicate to website maintenance?
If you’ve read this whole article, you probably have a good idea if maintaining your own website is something you are currently capable of. If your website is simply sitting and taking up space on the internet, you should absolutely consider purchasing a website maintenance package. Your website should be a tool that is supporting and helping your business grow. It is a living and breathing entity that deserves your time and attention in order to fulfill its potential.
Key takeaway
- Website maintenance is the act of regularly checking your website for issues and mistakes and keeping it updated and relevant. This should be done on a consistent basis in order to keep your website healthy, encourage continued traffic growth, and strengthen your SEO and Google rankings.
- Keeping a website well maintained and attractive is important to companies big and small in order to engage and retain customers. It’s easy for businesses, especially startups, to cut corners and let a few tasks slide.
- Website maintenance can easily become one of those things as it doesn’t always present immediate issues. However, just like your health can fall apart if you go too long without a regular check up, so can the health of your website.
Depending on where you are in your marketing journey, digital marketing is either a voodoo-like superstition or a teachable science anyone can master. If you’re in the former camp, you’re probably struggling to master your metrics; measuring results is the difference between wishful thinking and actual return on your marketing investment.
To be sure, there are literally hundreds of numbers, statistics, and analytical combinations you could track to give you insight into your marketing efforts and customer behaviour, and not every metric is relevant to your marketing plan. That said, there are a few key metrics in three broad categories (traffic, conversions, and revenue) that are universally applicable to judging your digital marketing success. Here are 18 important digital marketing metrics to watch.
This is the big-picture number you should monitor and track over time to give you a rough idea of how effective your campaigns are at driving traffic. This number should grow steadily over time; if it drops month to month, it’s time to take a hard look at your marketing channels to identify the problem.
2. Traffic by Sources or Channels
This is useful for segmenting your traffic sources to pinpoint which ones are over and underperforming in your overall marketing campaigns. In general, you should break these down into the following four channels/sources:
- Direct Visitors – These are the ones who come to your website by typing your URL into their browser.
- Organic/Search – These are visitors who arrive at your site based on a search query.
- Referrals – These visitors arrived at your side from a link on another website or blog.
- Social Media – If you have a social media presence (and who doesn’t?), you’ll want to measure the visitors who arrive at your site from your social media platforms. Social traffic also gives you some general insight into the overall effectiveness of your content marketing and other digital campaigns, as well, since social traffic is a good indicator of engagement and awareness.
3. Number of New Visitors versus Number of Return Visitors
This is an important distinction to track; return visitors give you an indication of the usefulness and quality of your content—whether it’s “sticky” enough to attract multiple visits. Tracking this ratio week over week and month over month shows you how your new content is performing. For example, if you have a high ratio of new visitors to return visitors compared to a previous month, it’s an indication that new content is doing its job driving traffic, but the rest of your website doesn’t meet the needs of these new visitors.
This is a more detailed analysis of your website traffic, but it yields actionable insight if you know how to interpret it. You’ll want to look at variables such as how many pages a user visits, how long they stay on individual pages, and what they do on each page (leave a review, for example).
Don’t confuse interactions with conversions, although the ultimate goal is to have your interactions lead to more conversions such as downloads, subscriptions, purchases, etc. An analysis of your interactions per visit gives you the opportunity to discover which activities and behaviors are keeping visitors on your site and what you can do to encourage more of them.
This is a corollary to interactions per visit and gives you insight into the level of interest and engagement of your website visitors. This is a good all-purpose indicator of how well your site is performing, since visitors who spend a lot of time on your site are finding useful content. Visitors who spend a lot of time on your site are also most likely to be your most committed customers; knowing where these visitors spend their time interacting with your site helps you optimize content for these customers to increase their lifetime value.
The bounce rate is the number of people who visit your site and leave right away without performing any meaningful action. A high bounce rate can point to several flaws in your digital marketing: Poor campaign targeting, irrelevant traffic sources, weak landing pages, etc.
If you have an e-commerce site, your bounce rate is synonymous with the abandonment rate and this usually indicates problems with your checkout process. Is pricing transparent? Do you load people up with last-minute offers? Spend some time evaluating how to improve the checkout experience.
This is a helpful metric, especially for websites that have a multi-page conversion process. The exit rate differs from the bounce rate in that the exit rate measures the number of people who left the site from a particular page as a percentage of all people who viewed that particular page. This helps you identify drop-off points in your conversion process so you can optimize accordingly.
With the rise of mobile dominance in content consumption, it’s almost negligent not to track your mobile visitor metrics so you can understand your mobile customers and increase your conversions. Here’s what you need to know:
- What percent of your traffic is mobile?
- What devices and browsers do they use?
- Where are they coming from (direct, organic, referral, social, etc.)
- What content are they consuming?
Finally, you should take a look at your site speed because slow load times actually affects pretty much every one of your mobile marketing metrics, from SEO to conversions.
8. Cost Per Visitor (CPV) and Revenue Per Visitor (RPV)
These broad measurements give you a simple formula for the profitability of each marketing channel: If your RPV exceeds your CPV, you’re on your way. These numbers also help shape your budgets for certain types of paid campaigns.
Take AdWords, for example. Imagine that for a particular month, you attributed 10 sales with a value of $15,000 to your AdWords campaign. During that same period, AdWords generated 1,000 visitors to your site. This means that your RPV for your AdWords campaign last month was $15 ($15,000/1,000=$15). This gives you a hard ceiling ($15 per visitor or less) for your marketing budget in this channel before you start losing money.
Your CPV is calculated by dividing your total investment in a particular channel by the total number of visitors it generated. You should run these numbers for each of your traffic sources (search, social, email, etc.) to give you a rough basis to measure success for each channel.
One way to define conversions is the number of anonymous site visitors who become digital records in your CRM or marketing database, whether by making a purchase, downloading an asset, or subscribing to a mailing list. This is the number your financial department will be most interested in, the ultimate measure of success for a marketer. Low conversion rates are indicative of any number of problems, from poorly designed websites to unattractive offers.
Pretty much all marketers track overall, or “macro” conversions, but to really drill deep into your mobile marketing metrics, it’s a good idea to track conversions at the campaign level, or “micro” conversions, to ensure that these smaller KPIs are contributing to your overall marketing strategy.
For example, if you have very high conversion rates pushing a new lead magnet such as an e-book, but an extremely small number of leads move to the next stage of the funnel, you’ve got a problem. Even though this campaign is posting good metrics, it’s really not advancing your overall marketing goals, and tracking these micro conversions can help you identify the source of the problem.
Rand Fishkin, the “wizard of Moz,” considers these metrics one of the three most important overall for digital marketers. He defines them as “knowing the percent of potential customers that make it through each step of a given conversion process, and which channels or behaviors predict that they’ll make it further.” Inherent in this is a deeper understanding of how each stage of the funnel affects your ultimate ROI and where to direct your resources.
Measuring click-through rates (CTR) is essential for email marketing and paid ad campaigns. For PPC campaigns, a higher than average CTR can dramatically decrease your cost per click (up to 50 percent on AdWords, for example), while a lower than average score can drive costs through the roof (up to 400 percent higher on AdWords).
13. New/Unique Visitor Conversions versus Return Visitor Conversions
The way a new visitor interacts with your website is very different from the way a regular visitor behaves. For many marketers, tracking these numbers yields useful information for reducing your bounce rate and increasing your return visitor rates, conversions, and customer lifetime value through upselling and marketing automation, for example.
Depending on how you define conversion, this can be called cost per lead, cost per referral, etc., but the overall metric is extremely important, because it ultimately determines your margins. Why? A high cost per conversion can turn a high conversion rate into a negative if the costs are so high they drop your net income too much.
This is a simple metric to compute: Divide your total number of leads by your total number of sales/closes. Although this is more a measurement of your sales efficiency—and you’ll want to investigate a low close rate—you’ll also need it for your marketing ROI projections.
This isn’t necessarily simply a revenue metric; it’s actually tied to your interactions numbers. It’s also a difficult value to quantify, because your visitors add value every time they come to your site or read your blog (think page views and traffic for cpm advertising). Obviously, in e-commerce, tangible value is added when dollars are spent on a purchase, but intangible value is also created if a customer leaves a review or shares a product on social media.
Many marketers assign an arbitrary value to these customer actions and then calculate a total value, including purchases, for a set period of time. They then divide that number by the total number of visits to arrive at a VPV metric.
Tracking this metric over time gives you insight into how successful you are at getting customers to perform a certain value-added action, such as writing a review, leaving a comment, socially sharing, or otherwise interacting with your site.
Cost per acquisition (CPA) differs from cost per conversion because CPA is all about revenue; this metric kicks in once someone becomes a paying customer, the Holy Grail of marketing. CPA tells you exactly how many marketing dollars you have to spend to get someone to open his wallet.
Sometimes it’s tempting to focus on metrics like cost per click, which you must track in paid campaigns, but it’s a short-sighted metric. Imagine you’ve developed a new PPC campaign and it seems to be performing well—CTRs are up from previous campaigns and your CPC is lower.
But then you track revenue and discover you’ve only acquired three or four paying customers, meaning your entire marketing spend on that channel added virtually nothing to your bottom line. In this case, your campaign metrics look great, but your CPA is astronomical. Your CPA keeps the big picture always in focus.
18. Return on Investment (Real and Projected)
This is the ultimate measure of your marketing success: Are your marketing technologies and efforts profitable and delivering results to your bottom line? Here’s where your lead-to-close ratio comes into play to help keep you on track. If you’re spending $25 per lead and your closing rate is 25 percent, it costs you $100 to acquire a new customer. If your average customer value exceeds that amount, you’re in the black on projected marketing ROI.
Depending where you are on the digital marketing spectrum, you may or may not want to formally track each of these metrics, but doing so will give you a pretty accurate view of how you’re doing, what channels are effective, and where your efforts need improvement. Ideally, you’ll get into a rhythm that lets you easily identify trends and variances—and make rapid adjustments to ensure a steady stream of leads and paying customers.
Key takeaway
- Depending on where you are in your marketing journey, digital marketing is either a voodoo-like superstition or a teachable science anyone can master. If you’re in the former camp, you’re probably struggling to master your metrics; measuring results is the difference between wishful thinking and actual return on your marketing investment.
- To be sure, there are literally hundreds of numbers, statistics, and analytical combinations you could track to give you insight into your marketing efforts and customer behaviour, and not every metric is relevant to your marketing plan. That said, there are a few key metrics in three broad categories (traffic, conversions, and revenue) that are universally applicable to judging your digital marketing success.
Internet marketing has become more and more popular nowadays among businesses around the world. After discovering the wide range benefits of internet marketing in promoting products and services online, it has soon become the leading medium for marketing all over the world.
Unlike mass marketing, which effectively piques the interest of the local audience by means of radio spots, newspapers and print media, internet marketing allows companies to nurture a more personal relationship with their consumers from all over the world. With internet marketing, businesses can deliver content to their customers through personalized and cost-effective communication.
With all the benefits that internet marketing can offer your business, developing a professional internet marketing campaign can attract more customers to your product or brand to grow your business more.
Here our top 15 advantages of internet marketing for your business.
1. Convenience and Quick Service
The incredible convenience of marketing online is one of the biggest advantages of internet marketing. The internet has extremely easy accessibility with consumers using the internet and reaching markets anywhere in the world. Because of this, purchasing goods from across borders now reduces the cost of transportation.
For importers, this is a huge advantage as it means they can order online right from the comforts of their home. In addition, you can easily track sales items online as they make their way into delivery. You can download digital products from the internet with just a click of a mouse. Internet marketing is great for business as it gives consumers a better and more comfortable shopping experience. The convenience plays a very big role in making the buying decision.
One of the main advantages of online marketing for businesses is its low operating cost. You can advertise cheaper with internet marketing than with traditional methods of advertisement such as ads in newspapers, on television and on the radio. In online marketing, you can easily get a free listing in a wide range of business directories.
In addition, the internet allows you to contact your customers more in comparison to how you would contact them traditionally. Online communication is more affordable than traditional communication methods such as sending mail and printing brochures. For example, you can send the same information in an email rather than a mail-out, saving you on printing, paper, and postage.
An aspect of internet marketing that is rarely available with traditional marketing is the ability to measure and track results. With online marketing, your business can utilize varying tools for tracking the results of your advertising campaigns. Using these tools, not only can you measure and track but also illustrate the progress of your marketing campaign in detailed graphics. The ability to quantify your marketing efforts is the best possible thing that can be there.
Measuring and tracking results gives your business a better idea of how your marketing campaign is faring. It gives you an idea of how you can better grow your traffic, leads, sales, and conversions. Without the ability to measure and track your results, you cannot alter or modify your marketing campaign so that it can better deliver the results you desire.
Marketing your products and services online gives you the ability to target audiences based on demography. This allows you to concentrate your efforts on the audience that you truly want to offer your products or services. With demographic targeting, you can better target your marketing efforts on specific demographic regions. Never has it been easier for you to target an area miles away from your office. With internet marketing, it is possible now to target different demographics.
Demographic targeting gives you the ability to target specific customers you think are likely to purchase your product or hire your services. Every time someone visits your website and fills in a form, it gives you an idea of who your customers really are and lets you discover important details about them such as age and interests, which better shapes your services to match their needs.
The ability to market your products and services globally is one of the biggest advantages of global marketing for business. Within several months of aggressive SEO, you can secure millions of viewers and reach huge audiences from across the world. You can now reach every corner of the world, where there is internet.
With internet marketing, you can easily reach beyond your geography to offer your products or services to customers worldwide. Wherever your target audiences are, you can easily reach them 24/7 and from any country all over the world. If your audience consists of more than your local market, utilizing global marketing offers you a great advantage.
One of the core benefits of online marketing is its ability to handling millions of customers at the same time. As long as a website’s infrastructure is efficient, numerous transactions can easily take place simultaneously.
However, even with a large number of transactions taking place, your website is capable of providing satisfactory service to every customer who makes a purchase online, without the risk of diminished satisfaction. This high adaptability of internet marketing is an important benefit that businesses can take advantage of to provide their consumers with the best shopping experience.
Internet marketing reduces cost and runs around the clock. That means that your marketing campaigns run for 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. Compared to traditional marketing, internet marketing does not constrain you with opening hours. At the same time, you would not be worrying about overtime pay for your staff.
In addition to this, there is no regional or international time difference for you to worry about that will affect the reachability or availability of your offers or online campaigns. Whenever someone opens their computer and connects to the internet, there is a higher chance of them seeing your marketing campaign. Furthermore, customers can look for your product at their most convenient time.
8. Automated, Tech-Savvy Marketing
Another advantage of internet marketing is that marketing this way is easy with one-mouse-click automation. Compared to traditional offline marketing where marketers delegate various tasks to the best hands and talents, internet marketing takes advantage of a more tech-savvy method. With internet marketing, everything can go automated.
Internet marketing gives you the chance to turn every aspect of your business’s operations into a fully automated system. All you need to do is find the right tool and technology suited to your marketing campaign and you are done. By automating your marketing campaign, you can choose to do something more valuable with your time.
9. Data Collection for Personalization
Transactions through the internet allow you to collect data. Whenever a customer purchases a product through a company’s website, the data is captured. Your business can use this data in varying ways. Most businesses analyze the data to find out what products and/or services sell frequently.
Furthermore, the data collected can help segment customers, so your business can send them ads and other promotional materials based on their buying habits and interests. There are various ways that you can collect customer data including customer profiles or through their behaviour while on your website.
The information collected through this method typically includes age, gender, location, how they came to your site, what sites they visited after they left, viewed products and the pages visited on your site.
Another way of collecting customer data is through the use of internet tools or with a tracking software. Compared to traditional marketing, online marketing allows for better data collection as well as personalization.
Through this advantage of internet marketing, businesses can serve millions of customers with various items and products based on their personal interests. Thus, shoppers can easily get their desired products without having to comb through the internet all day.
10. Diversified Marketing and Advertising
When targeting your audience, diversification plays an important role in your marketing and advertising campaigns. Diversification means that you can use a variety of tactics and strategies in order to reach your prospects. With online marketing, diversification becomes a lot easier. In addition to that, it is possible for you to run varying marketing techniques simultaneously to better implement your marketing campaign.
11. Easy Tweaking to Your Marketing and Advertising Campaigns
It is inevitable in marketing and advertising that something needs to be tweaked in order to optimize your campaigns. Compared to traditional marketing, online advertising is much easier to tweak. Whenever the campaign needs to be modified, online marketing allows the modification to happen without having to worry about downtime, service interruption or even halting the entire system.
This means that you can easily change the appearance of your online shopping mall – your website – by changing a few lines in the CSS that link to the web page.
12. Instant Transaction Service
Executing transactions is easy and nearly instant online. You can do this through a digital payment service so that there is no need for cash to go between the marketer and the customer to buy and sell merchandise. This is all possible due to payment processing solutions executed by third party payment processing companies such as PayPal.
13. Better Sales Relationships
In traditional marketing, merchants often give their business cards or pamphlets to their customers after a sale. However, what happens is often on such occasions, the customers lose the cards or misplace it. The only time the seller would remember about the card as if they had the intention of visiting the seller again.
In the end, most customers do not remember the seller much less the card, so this marketing method does not work to convince buyers to return. This is different from internet marketing where the marketers can easily collect email addresses of their prospects and buyers, which they can use in reaching out and forming a relationship with the customer.
The marketer can use this email address to provide customers with valuable information such as information about the purchased product, available coupons on their products and services, special discounts and introducing new products. Aside from email addresses, they can also use social media for consistent interaction with customers.
Unlike traditional marketing, internet marketing is easy to start and quick to implement. You can easily set up a marketing campaign at any time that is convenient for you. In fact, you can set up email marketing for your business within only a matter of hours. Within the next few minutes, you can set up an autoresponder and create a marketing list for your business.
15. Continued Marketing Campaign
The marketing campaign’s later effects are one of the greatest advantages of internet marketing for business. For example, content marketing efforts, such as blogs, and websites have the capacity to remain functional and promote your products and services years after you started your marketing campaign. Almost every online marketing technique has viral and long-term effects that can continually improve your site’s traffic.
Online marketing offers you a variety of benefits. If you’re looking for better ways to reach out to your audience, Edkent Media is here to help. There are many services to choose from including email marketing, social media marketing, search engine optimization and pay per click marketing.
Key takeaway
- Internet marketing has become more and more popular nowadays among businesses around the world. After discovering the wide range benefits of internet marketing in promoting products and services online, it has soon become the leading medium for marketing all over the world.
- Unlike mass marketing, which effectively piques the interest of the local audience by means of radio spots, newspapers and print media, internet marketing allows companies to nurture a more personal relationship with their consumers from all over the world. With internet marketing, businesses can deliver content to their customers through personalized and cost-effective communication.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a strategy for managing all your company's relationships and interactions with your customers and potential customers. It helps you improve your profitability.
More commonly, when people talk about CRM they are usually referring to a CRM system, a tool which helps with contact management, sales management, workflow processes, productivity and more.
Customer Relationship Management enables you to focus on your organisation’s relationships with individual people – whether those are customers, service users, colleagues or suppliers. CRM is not just for sales. Some of the biggest gains in productivity can come from moving beyond CRM as a sales and marketing tool and embedding it in your business – from HR to customer services and supply-chain management.
If your business is going to last, you know that you need a strategy for the future. You’ll already have targets relating to sales, business objectives and profitability. But getting up-to-date, reliable information on your progress towards your goals can be tricky. How do you translate the many streams of data coming in from sales teams, customer service staff, marketers and social media monitoring into useful business information?
Using a CRM system can give you a clear overview of your customers. You can see everything in one place — a simple, customisable dashboard that can tell you a customer's previous history with you, the status of their orders, any outstanding customer service issues, and more.
You can even choose to include information from their public social media activity – their likes and dislikes, what they are saying and sharing about you. Marketers can use CRM to better understand the pipeline of sales or prospective work coming in, making forecasting simpler and more accurate. You'll have clear visibility of every opportunity or lead, showing you the clear path from enquiries to sales.
And though it’s traditionally been used as a sales and marketing tool, customer service teams are seeing great benefits from CRM systems. Today’s customer might raise an issue in one channel – say, Twitter – and then switch to email or telephone to resolve it in private. A CRM platform enables you to manage the enquiry across channels without losing track.
More administration, less selling.
An active sales team generates a flood of data. They can be out on the road talking to customers, meeting prospects and finding out valuable information – but all this information gets stored in handwritten notes, laptops, or inside the heads of your salespeople.
On top of this your customers may be contacting you on a range of different platforms – phone, email and social media. Asking questions, following up on orders or complaining. Without a common platform for customer interactions, communications can be missed or lost in the flood of information – leading to an unsatisfactory response to your customer.
Details can get lost, meetings are not followed up promptly and prioritising customers can be a matter of guesswork rather than a rigorous exercise based on fact. And it can all be compounded if a key salesperson moves on.
Even if you do successfully collect all this data, you’re faced with the challenge of making sense of it. It can be difficult to extract intelligence. Reports can be hard to create and waste valuable selling time. Managers can lose sight of what their team are up to in reality, which means that they can't offer the right support at the right time – while a lack of oversight can also result in a lack of accountability from the team.
Luckily, there’s an answer.
“How you gather, manage, and use information will determine whether you win or lose.”
Bill Gates
Introducing a CRM platform has many benefits which have been shown to produce real results – including direct improvements to the bottom line. CRM applications have a proven track record of increasing:
- Sales by up to 37%
- Sales Productivity by up to 44%
- Forecast accuracy by 48%
One of the main benefits of a CRM system is that it can help you to identify and add new leads easily and quickly and categorise them accurately. You can create customised pitch documents in less time, cutting down on response time and enabling sales teams to move on to the next opportunity.
With complete, accurate, centrally held information about clients and prospects, sales staff can focus their attention and energy on the right clients and gain a competitive advantage.
Increase referrals from existing customers
By understanding your customers better, cross-selling and up-selling opportunities become clear – giving you the chance to win new business from existing customers.
With better information you'll also be able to keep your customers happy with better service. Happy customers are likely to become repeat customers, and repeat customers spend more – up to 33% more according to some studies.
An often overlooked benefit of CRM software is that it will gather information from a huge variety of sources across your business. This gives you unprecedented insights into how your customers feel and what they are saying about your organisation – so you can improve what you offer, spot problems early and identify gaps.
See how harnessing the power of social networks in your CRM improves performance:
CRM & the Cloud Computing Revolution
Perhaps the most significant recent development in CRM systems has been the move to cloud computing. Freed from the need to install software on hundreds or thousands of desktop PCs and mobile devices, organisations worldwide are discovering the benefits of moving data, software and services into a secure online environment.
Cloud-based CRM systems, such as Sales force, mean every user has the same information, all the time. Your sales force out on the road can check data, update it instantly after a meeting or work from anywhere. The same information is available to anyone who needs it, from the sales team to the customer service representatives.
Find out more about the value of mobile CRM for your business:
CRM can be quick and easy to implement. A cloud-based system doesn’t need special installation and there's no hardware to set up, keeping IT costs low and removing the headache of version control and update schedules.
Generally, cloud-based CRM systems are priced on the number of users who access the system and the kinds of features you need. This can be very cost-effective in terms of capital outlay, and is also extremely flexible – enabling you to scale up and add more people as your business grows. Cloud-CRM platforms such as Sales force are flexible in terms of functionality, too – you're not paying for any features that are not useful to you.
- Faster deployment
- Automatic software updates
- Cost-effectiveness and scalability
- The ability to work from anywhere, on any device
- Increased collaboration
Key takeaway
Marketing automation is all about using software to automate marketing activities. Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns -- not just for the sake of efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalized experience for their customers. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.
At its best, marketing automation is a combination of software and strategy. It should allow you to nurture prospects with highly personalized, useful content that helps convert prospects to delighted customers.
Think of effective marketing automation like growing a garden. You need fertile soil, ripe for growth. You need seeds to sow. And you need water and light to nurture those seeds into a lush, blooming plant. With good marketing automation, it's easier to nurture leads (the seedlings) well enough to produce paying customers (a lush, full-grown plant).
But it doesn't end there. Customers are more than just the output of successful marketing automation. They should be at the center of everything you do, which means marketing automation should continue to play an important role in your relationship with them.
That's why the most successful marketing automation strategies don't consider customers an afterthought at the end of a traditional funnel. Instead, customers should be at the center of a flywheel that gets more efficient when you add force to that flywheel, and reduce points of customer friction.
Successful marketing automation strategies will reduce that friction and speed up your flywheel, helping you continue to nurture customer relationships well after they've been passed to Sales and the deal has been won.
Because of the popularity of marketing automation, a misconception has grown that marketing automation software can be a salve for any slowdowns in marketing growth -- including the need to generate new leads. This misconception leaves many marketers with sophisticated tools to automate the middle of their funnel, but no solution for generating new leads to nurture in the first place.
The consequence is that marketers begin buying lists of email addresses to nurture instead of generating inbound leads. While it seems like a quick fix, it's not a long-term solution, nor does it create the fertile ground for a healthy, long-term relationship with your customers.
Many marketers also continue to think of marketing automation in the context of a funnel, instead of a flywheel. Generate a lead, put them in an automated email queue, and pass hand-raisers over to Sales. This creates a disjointed experience for prospects and customers as they move from Marketing, to Sales, to Customer Service. Instead of building a contextual, efficient experience based on each individual's needs, marketing automation becomes a way to force people through a funnel with arbitrary touch points and irrelevant content.
When marketing automation operates in a silo like this, points of friction are introduced that stall and strain what could have been productive, long-term customer relationships.
Key takeaway
- Marketing automation is all about using software to automate marketing activities. Many marketing departments automate repetitive tasks such as email marketing, social media posting, and even ad campaigns -- not just for the sake of efficiency, but so they can provide a more personalized experience for their customers. The technology of marketing automation makes these tasks easier.
The term “enterprise CRM” can be confusing for someone who has just started searching for CRM solutions for their business. With so many vendors offering so many editions, it’s easy to get confused when trying to decide if a business needs enterprise CRM.
To make matters even more confusing, some vendors offer enterprise CRM, but call it by a different name. This has led some people to believe that CRM and enterprise CRM are the same thing, just with a different volume of licenses. While they do share certain features, there are vast differences between enterprise CRM and standard CRM products. Understanding these differences should make it easier for a business to decide which solution best fits their needs.
Systems such as Nimble, Capsule CRM, and Highrise are typically targeted toward smaller, less complex organizations. With smaller businesses, there are usually fewer people who interact directly with the customers. In most small-business settings, the bulk of customer interactions are carried out by the sales and marketing departments. As such, these CRM vendors focus more on the needs of the salespeople with features like contact management and calendars. These standard CRM editions have a limited feature set, and are primarily useful for businesses with a single sales department and a small number of salespeople.
The relatively low cost of standard CRM can make it appealing to SMBs and mid-markets. These editions of CRM are usually offered at a flat, per-user rate–allowing the business to add or remove seats as needed. The low cost often comes with some hidden expenses. Many CRM vendors require a one-time startup fee to get the implementation up and running. Smaller editions of CRM also have limited interoperability with mobile devices and popular Microsoft Office applications like Outlook and Access.
Enterprise CRM solutions, like Salesforce, Microsoft Dynamics CRM, and SAP are designed for larger, more complex businesses with more customer-facing department’s larger databases, and more robust needs. In an enterprise setting, it’s not unusual to have multiple departments and sales teams, all of which need instant access to customer and company data. Everyone from management to shipping is involved in the business process workflow, so it makes sense for all of them to be working with the same information. Enterprise CRM also allows for a greater degree of automation, such as logging customer interactions or generating alerts when problems arise.
Enterprise CRM can be substantially more expensive than standard CRM. Much of the cost can be attributed to the time and effort involved in customizing the system and deploying it throughout the enterprise. With some enterprise solutions, there are additional costs to purchase servers, for on-premise installations, and annual maintenance and upgrade fees. The extra cost also includes more robust support for issues such as implementation, training, and creating mobile applications. Enterprise editions usually offer easier integration with Office products and can be customized to work with almost any mobile device.
Deciding which edition to purchase largely depends on the size and vision of the business. For SMBs and mid-market businesses that aren’t projecting a large expansion in the near future, standard CRM may be the best bet. It will allow salespeople to collect and organize the data they need to do their jobs well. With a lower price point, standard CRM is a good way to increase sales in a smaller office.
A business should consider enterprise CRM if it has more than one sales department or multiple departments that deal directly with customers. It’s important for everyone who deals with customers to be working from the same information. Enterprise CRM is more expensive, but eventually pays for itself in improved customer service across all departments.
Key takeaway
- The term “enterprise CRM” can be confusing for someone who has just started searching for CRM solutions for their business. With so many vendors offering so many editions, it’s easy to get confused when trying to decide if a business needs enterprise CRM.
- To make matters even more confusing, some vendors offer enterprise CRM, but call it by a different name. This has led some people to believe that CRM and enterprise CRM are the same thing, just with a different volume of licenses. While they do share certain features, there are vast differences between enterprise CRM and standard CRM products. Understanding these differences should make it easier for a business to decide which solution best fits their needs.
CRM aligns marketing processes and drive customer demand using functionality to enhance management of marketing resources, segments and lists, campaigns, leads, trade promotions, and marketing analytics.
CRM enables you to acquire, grow, and retain profitable relationships with functionality for sales planning and forecasting and the management of territories, accounts, contacts, activities, opportunities, quotations, orders, product configuration, pricing, billing, and contracts.
CRM can drive service revenue and profitability with support for service sales and marketing. More effectively manage service orders, contracts, complaints and returns, in-house and depot repairs, warranties, resource planning, e-service, and service analytics. Functionality to support call centers, field service, and e-service provides flexible delivery options.
With CRM you can attain a more profitable and loyal indirect channel by managing partner relationships and empowering channel partners. Improve processes for partner recruitment and management, communications, channel marketing and forecasting, collaborative selling, partner order management, channel service, and analytics for partners and channel managers.
Customer interaction centers are places where you meet your customer face to face. With CRM, you can maximize customer loyalty, cut costs, and boost revenue by transforming your interaction center into a strategic delivery channel for marketing, sales, and service efforts across all touch points. Effectively handle activities such as telemarketing, telesales, customer service, human resources, IT support, and interaction center management.
Increase sales and reduce transaction costs by turning the Internet into a valuable sales, marketing, and service channel for businesses and consumers. Increase profitability and reach new markets with a fully integrated Web channel, including support for e-marketing, e-commerce, e-service, and Web channel analytics.
Business communications management
Manage inbound and outbound contacts across multiple locations and channels. Integrate multichannel communications with customer-facing business processes to provide customers and partners with seamless, consistent experiences across all channels, including voice, text messaging, the Web, and e-mail.
Turn all customer interactions into opportunities to build customer relationships and generate revenue. Plan, develop, and execute cross-selling, up-selling, and retention offers; service-level agreements; and more. Take appropriate subsequent actions to enhance customer relationships and ensure relevant and personalized customer interactions.
CRM will boost a company’s brand presence and profits with visibility into and control of all trade related processes. Increase accounting accuracy of trade and financial results with back-office integration. Gain key business insights to help you optimize trade activities. Increase your trade promotion success with analytics and enhanced management of trade funds, promotions, claims, and retail execution.
Key takeaway
- CRM aligns marketing processes and drive customer demand using functionality to enhance management of marketing resources, segments and lists, campaigns, leads, trade promotions, and marketing analytics.
To understand the steps of the CRM process, you have to understand the customer lifecycle. It’s one of the first concepts you learn as a sales rep to understand how a person becomes a loyal customer.
The CRM cycle involves marketing, customer service, and sales activities. It starts with outreach and customer acquisition and ideally leads to customer loyalty.
There are five key stages in the CRM cycle:
- Reaching a potential customer
- Customer acquisition
- Conversion
- Customer retention
- Customer loyalty
The CRM process is that concept in action. It’s the tangible steps an organization must take to help drive consumers through the cycle of learning about your brand and ultimately becoming repeat customers.
According to the customer lifecycle, we know that the first step in the CRM process is maximizing reach with leads. In practice, reach is using your CRM platform to generate brand awareness through targeted marketing campaigns.
Every stage in the customer lifecycle corresponds with an actionable step in the CRM process. The key is knowing what those steps are and how to execute them.
What are the 5 steps in the CRM process?
The five steps of the CRM process are a collaborative effort between marketing, sales, and support departments. To help you understand how each team works together, we’ll walk through how each step works in practice. We’ll cover not only how each part of the process can be completed with a CRM tool but also who is responsible for each step.
The first step to acquiring new customers is to introduce them to your business. The marketing team typically takes on this task through a number of measures:
1. Learning about your target audience. Marketers will conduct research to identify their audience’s target demographics, interests, preferred channels of communication, what messaging they respond most to, and what they care about.
2. Segmenting your target audience. Audience personas are created to segment a brand’s target audience into similar groups based on similar interests or demographics. This helps marketers identify which types of people are most likely to become customers and who their campaigns should target.
3. Creating marketing campaigns that speak to those target demographics. A/B tests and marketing automation can be used to identify what works and what doesn’t, to create unique campaigns for unique customer segments such as on social media or email, and to create strategies for lead acquisition.
When it comes to completing these steps, a CRM solution is a wealth of information. The tool can show patterns in past leads and customers to give marketing teams a clear picture of their target audience. Beyond understanding similarities in demographics, marketers can also analyze sales notes in their CRM technology to understand what led to conversions in the past. By understanding what resonated with leads, marketers are better equipped to create effective campaigns.
Introducing your brand to a potential customer is just the beginning of the CRM process. From there, you have to encourage them to learn more about your business and engage with it.
Depending on how your company is structured, this lead acquisition step could be a marketing or sales team responsibility — or both. Your marketing team, for example, might encourage website visitors to share their email with a newsletter signup CTA or a social media giveaway. Sales, on the other hand, could use their CRM system to set up live chat on your site. With this feature, your team can proactively reach out to potential customers who land on your website.
If your CRM technology comes equipped with a lead enrichment tool, like Reach, lead acquisition is unbelievably simple. All the tool needs is a lead’s email address to instantly reveal detailed information about the person. With customer data, you can personalize your outreach with the lead to start the relationship off on the right note. Not to mention, you can save tons of time by not needing to research leads yourself.
3. Convert leads into customers
You’ve successfully engaged with your leads, and they’re interested. Now it’s time to turn those leads into customers.
To do so, sales reps must first be skilled at identifying how interested leads are and, specifically, whether they’re interested enough to make a purchase. A CRM system is very helpful here. The historical data from past successful sales can be used to identify lead-qualification criteria. These criteria can be added as “attributes” to your CRM’s lead-scoring tool to help reps identify opportunities with the highest probability of a sale.
If leads do seem likely to make a purchase, reps must then be able to nurture them further and build their trust enough to convert. One way to do this is for reps to send leads case studies, white papers, and other resources that may sway their decision.* *
Reps should also use their CRM platform to set reminders and tasks to follow up with interested leads. After all, studies have shown that “63% of consumers need to hear a company’s claim 3-5 times before they actually believe it." Use your CRM’s dashboard to help you remember to follow up to ensure that no opportunities are missed.
4. Provide superior customer service
You’ve successfully converted your lead into a customer. Great! But the CRM process doesn’t end when a customer converts. In order to grow as a company, you need to retain customers. How do you keep that customer coming back? Excellent service from support.
According to Zendesk’s 2020 Customer Experience Trends Report, customer service is the biggest factor that determines a consumer’s loyalty to a brand. Conversely, poor customer service can cost you customers and negatively impact your reputation. Support teams must be able to deliver superior support whenever, wherever, and however their customers expect it.
Forty-nine percent of customers say being able to resolve their issue quickly is the most important aspect of a good customer service experience. With CRM software, support agents can easily access the historical customer information they need to resolve a ticket quickly.
Fifty-seven percent of customers expect to have a choice of channels when reaching out to customer support. CRM features allow support agents to not only provide omni channel support but also manage those conversations in a single, unified view.
With the right CRM, your agents have the customer information and resources they need to resolve a customer’s issues quickly and effortlessly. This allows for a stress-free and efficient experience for both the customer and the support agent.
When we think of a returning customer, we imagine a shopper continually coming back to the same business to buy the products they know and love. But there is another key way existing customers provide value — by upgrading to more expensive products.
How do you convince customers to switch products? Personalized recommendations via email are a great place to start. You can use your CRM to organize customers into smart lists based on similar purchase histories. You can then create custom email templates that send relevant product releases to entire lists of customers at once. This way, you can be sure the promotional deals or releases you send are reaching the people most likely to buy them.
If your business is service-based, you may find upsell opportunities through check-in calls. Set reminders in your CRM to regularly reach out to repeat customers to ask how they’re doing and whether there is any way you could improve your service. Their needs may very well have changed since the last time you spoke, and they may be ready for an upsell.
With a CRM process, the customer lifecycle no longer feels abstract. The right CRM enables you to create a deliberate, personalized experience that naturally drives leads through your sales pipeline.
Key takeaway
- To understand the steps of the CRM process, you have to understand the customer lifecycle. It’s one of the first concepts you learn as a sales rep to understand how a person becomes a loyal customer.
- The CRM cycle involves marketing, customer service, and sales activities. It starts with outreach and customer acquisition and ideally leads to customer loyalty.
INTRODUCTION
Using the Internet and e-business to provide products and services and information to customers requires that you really know and understand your customer’sneeds. When customers contact is traditional business by visiting the store or office or contacting someone personally by phone, you have the opportunity to hear their questions and offer solutions based on personal communication. If they have a misunderstanding about our product or a sales objection we can deal with it immediately. When people visit our online business at website, we will not even know they are there. we do not have the opportunity to ask or answer questions. It is therefore vitally important that we anticipate their questions and concerns and provide the needed information in a way that makes it easy for them to fully understand our offering. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to get the maximum value from your e-business investment.
CRM
CRM is the broad category of concepts, tools, and processes that allows an organization to understand and serve everyone with whom it comes into contact. CRM is about gathering information that is used to serve customer basic information, such as name, address, meeting and purchase history, and service and support contacts. In a supplier relationship it might be procurement history, terms and conditions, or contact information. This information is then used to better serve the clients.
Implementing CRM
Customer relationship management is a corporate level strategy, focusing on creating and maintaining relationships with customers. Several commercial CRM software packages are available which vary in their approach to CRM. However, CRM is not a technology itself, but rather a holistic approach to an organisation's philosophy, placing the emphasis firmly on the customer.
CM governs an organization's philosophy at all levels, including policies and processes, front of house customer service, employee training, marketing, systems and information management. CRM systems are integrated end-to-end across marketing, sales, and customer service.
A CRM system should:
- Promote a customer-oriented philosophy
- Identify factors important to clients.
- Adopt customer-based measures
- Develop end-to-end processes to serve customers
- Provide successful customer support
- Handle customer complaints
- Track all aspects of sales
- Create a holistic view of customers' sales & services information
CRM Architecture
There are three fundamental components in CRM:
Operational - automation of basic business processes (marketing, sales, service)
Analytical - analysis of customer data and behavior using business intelligence
Collaborative - communicating with clients
Operational CRM
Operational CRM provides automated support to xxx "front office" business processes (sales, marketing and service). Each interaction with a customer is generally added to a customer's history, and staff can retrieve information on customers from the database as necessary.
According to Gartner Group, operational CRM typically involves three general areas:
Sales force automation (SFA)
SFA automates some of a company's critical sales and sales force management tasks, such as forecasting, sales administration, tracking customer preferences and demographics, performance management, lead management, account management, contact management and quote management.
Customer service and support (CSS)
CSS automates certain service requests, complaints, product returns and enquiries.
Enterprise marketing automation (EMA)
EMA provides information about the business environment, including information on competitors, industry trends, and macroenvironmental variables. EMA applications are used to improve marketing efficiency.
Integrated CRM software is often known as a "front office solution", as it deals directly with customers.
Many call centers use CRM software to store customer information. When a call is received, the system displays the associated customer information (determined from the number of the caller). During and following the call, the call center agent dealing with the customer can add further information.
Some customer services can be fully automated, such as allowing customers to access their bank account details online or via a WAP phone.
Analytical CRM
Analytical CRM analyses data (gathered as part of operational CRM, or from other sources) in an attempt to identify means to enhance a company's relationship with its clients. The results of an analysis can be used to design targeted marketing campaigns, for example:
Acquisition:Cross-selling,up-selling
Retention: Retaining existing customers (antonym: customer attrition)
Information: Providing timely and regular information to customers
Other examples of the applications of analyses include:
- Contact optimization
- Evaluating and improving customer satisfaction
- Optimizing sales coverage
- Fraud detection
- Financial forecasts
- Price optimization
- Product development
- Program evaluation
- Risk assessment and management
- Strategic Marketing
- Operational marketing
Data collection and analysis is viewed as a continuing and iterative process. Ideally, business decisions are refined over time, based on feedback from earlier analyses and decisions. Most analytical CRM projects use a data warehouse to manage data.
Collaborative CRM
- Collaborative CRM focuses on the interaction with customers (personal interaction, letter, fax, phone, Internet, e-mail etc.)
- Collaborative CRM includes:
- Providing efficient communication with customers across a variety of communications channels
- Providing online services to reduce customer service costs
- Providing access to customer information while interacting with customers
- Driven by authors from the Harvard Business School (Kracklauer/Mills/Seifert), Collaborative CRM also seems to be the new paradigma to succeed the leading Efficient Consumer Response and
Category Management concept in the industry/ trade relationship.
Uses
In its broadest sense, CRM covers all interaction and business with customers. A good CRM program allows a business to acquire customers, provide customer services and retain valued customers.
Customer services can be improved by:
- Providing online access to product information and technical assistance around the clock
- Identifying what customers value and devising appropriate service strategies for each customer
- Providing mechanisms for managing and scheduling follow-up sales calls
- Tracking all contacts with a customer
- Identifying potential problems before they occur
- Providing a user-friendly mechanism for registering customer complaints
- Providing a mechanism for handling problems and complaints
- Providing a mechanism for correcting service deficiencies
- Storing customer interests in order to target customers selectively
- Providing mechanisms for managing and scheduling maintenance, repair, and on-going support
Technical
The following factors need to be considered:
Scalability: the system should be highly scalable, as the volume of data stored in the system grows over time
Communication channels: CRM can interface with a variety of different channels (phone, WAP, Internet etc.)
Workflow - a company's business processes need to be represented by the system with the ability to track the individual stages and transfer information between steps
Assignment - the ability to assign requests, such as service requests, to a person or group.
Database - the means of storing customer data and histories (in a data warehouse) Customer privacy considerations, such as data encryption and legislation.
Improving Customer Relationships
CRM applications often track customer interests and requirements, as well as their buying habits. This information can be used to target customers selectively. Furthermore, the products a customer has purchased can be tracked throughout the product's life cycle, allowing customers to receive information concerning a product or to target customers with information on alternative products once a product begins to be phased out.
Repeat purchases rely on customer satisfaction, which in turn comes from a deeper understanding of each customer and their individual needs. CRM is an alternative to the "one size fits all" approach. In industrial markets, the technology can be used to coordinate the conflicting and changing purchase criteria of the sector.
Privacy and Ethical Concerns
The data gathered as part of CRM raises concerns over customer privacy and enables persuasive sales techniques. However, CRM does not necessarily involve gathering new data, but also includes making better use of customer information gathered as a result of routine customer interaction.
The privacy debate generally focuses on the customer information stored in the centralised database itself, and fears over a company's handling of this information. For example, there is virtually no way a consumer can determine if the company shares private (personally identifiable) data with third parties. Furthermore, companies may not always accurately declare to the consumer the types of information collected by CRM systems and the specific purposes for which the information is used.
Electronic Customer Relationship Management- e CRM
It is integration between the traditional CRM and e-business application. This small has full potential to act as a gigantic E, boosting the organizations performance and the overall structure of business. Essentially, e- enables an organization to extend its infrastructure to customers and partners in a way that offers new opportunities to learn customer needs, add value, gain new economies, reach new customers, and do all of this in real time.
e-CRM is not just customer service, self-service web applications, sales force automation tools or the analysis of customers' purchasing behaviors on the internet. e-CRM is all of these initiatives working together to enable an organization to respond more effectively to its customers' needs and to market to them on a one-to-one basis.
Reason for e-CRM
Globalization brought in its spate a new emerging trend of e-business reinforcing further the customer centric approach. Customers now-a-days hold supremacy as the de-facto rulers of the market since they drive the market trends, with their rational approach. This emerging scenario impelled companies to take a U-turn in their thought process and follow a customer-oriented methodology. At present companies cannot leap ahead on the basis of their capabilities and services, as it is the customers who matter at the end of the day.
According to industry research, it is 10 times more expensive to pursue new customers than to sell to existing ones. CRM can help gain a greater share of a loyal customer's business. Customers have always been at the core of business. The Internet economy has empowered the customer with more information and choice than ever before
Features
Integrated Real-Time Information
The comprehensive Intelebiz CRM system captures every order, every payment transaction, every shipment, every communication, and every aspect involving customer relationship, all in real-time. Our E-CRM is integrated with its multi-channel sales, order engines and marketing engine. Customer support is made easy by virtue of having all relevant information in a single unified view.
Prioritization and Personalization
The application tracks all valuable customers and encourages them to do more business with company. It provides loyalty program, special offers, special pricing, special products and other exclusive services.
Buying Groups and Organizations
The system supports groups and other form of buying organizations that receive special pricing, aggregate their orders to a sum benefit, and need cumulative reporting.
Activity Management
The system has a configurable activity management system with a complete calendar, notations, categorized issue tracking, and resolution management.
Customer Communications- Trouble Ticket and Live Chat
Customer communications enables all email communications as well as trouble tickets and live chat supported by a configurable communications engine. Customers can easily submit a trouble ticket. A system events engine automates communications in step with order management workflow.
Customer Service and Self-Service
Our integrated service tools increase customer loyalty while reducing support costs. Customers can log in anytime to view their order histories, track packages, request refunds or view quotes. Customers can also submit trouble tickets while reviewing responses to their previous inquiries, or read through a published knowledge base.
New Customer Acquisition and Prospecting
This functionality enables tracking of all prospects according to stage of development and likeliness to make a purchase. Prospect records seamlessly convert into customer records with password protection and entitlements.
Attributes
The attribution system enables the definition and storage of any number of aspects of each customer for use in prioritization, loyalty programs, determining customer acquisition sources, entitlements, and contractual obligations. Configuration of attributes is user-driven including the data type, display type, the universe of acceptable values, and behaviors, including whether or not ranges of values are accepted and whether the attribute is visible to customer.
Pricing Tiers, Volume Pricing, and Customer Specific Pricing
The pricing engine enables any number of pricing tiers (for loyalty programs and wholesale/distributor/retail pricing) and enables volume pricing (discounts for bulk purchases) within each tier. The pricing engine is connected to Customer Relationship Manager (CRM) such that customers can sign-in and get access to their own special pricing.
Benefits of e-CRM
Most of the organizations are investing huge amount of money in defining and automating their core business processes. No doubt, they have benefited by standardizing the processes, yet there are some unpredictable and unforeseen circumstances, wherein the expertise of the individuals is called for. This is where e-CRM comes into the picture.
Captures and Reuses past experiences
Ensures Knowledge Management- A strategy to organize and use available information, experience and expertise
Focus on customers across organization
Linking employees with customers
Lower cost of service as servicing a customer online costs less because all functional areas of servicing a customer (sales, marketing and services)
Help to capitalize on your most profitable customers
Ability to increase marketing capabilities through gathering enhanced demographic data, e-CRM allows organizations to profitable consumer profiles for new customer acquisition
e-CRM is an essential tool for any organization's high performance and depends on worker's effectiveness more than their efficiency. By doing so, companies can engage their customers in an ongoing knowledge exchange in which the company can learn more about market and customer needs and work to develop and deliver the products and services that can exceed the customers' expectations and leap ahead of market trends.
Effective customer relation management through customer knowledge management
Customer relationship management starts with in depth knowledge of customers, their habits, desires and this needs, by analyzing their cognitive, affect behavior and attributes. CRM applies this knowledge to develop and design-marketing strategies, to develop and cultivate, long lasting mutually beneficial interaction and relationship with the customer. Customer knowledge and customer interaction on the basis of this knowledge are the two pillars on which any CRM design and its successful implementation rests.
Dynamic changes in the form of evolution of marketing environment and development of web as marketing medium and its global acceptance have forced organizations to change the way in which business is conducted, thus E-business has evolved and is expected that within few years it will become so mature that it will be the sole survivor in terms of way of conducting business. Supply chain management system and customer relation management system are integrated to the existing ERP systems of the organizations to deliver value to the customer.
THE CRM VALUE CHAIN
Customer data -> customer information -> customer knowledge -> Wisdom to completely satisfy customers
Winning markets through effective customer relationship management
Information technology and Internet are rapidly changing the face of what is possible in customer contact, care and insight. Moreover customer expectations for quality service, and value are rising continually. Keeping this in mind, successful companies are now gearing to organize their business around the types of customers they serve rather than organizing their business along the product lines or geographic business units. Today, with ever increasing focus on customers, companies are taking a process-oriented approach to customer relationship management.
CUSTOMER RELATIONSHIP MANAGEMENTA FRAMEWORK
Customer relationship management (CRM) is comprehensive sales marketing approach to building long-term customer relationships and improving business performance. A frame works in designing a strategy for effective customer relationship management developing customer insight, use of technology in CRM customer contact, personalizing customer interaction, and achieving superior customer experience.
CRM solutions platform needs to be based on interactive technology and process. It should assist the company in developing and enhancing customer interactions and one-to-one marketing through the applications of suitable intelligent agents that help develop front-line relationship with customers. Such a system should identify appropriate data inputs at each customer interaction site and use analytical platforms to generate appropriate knowledge output for front-line staff during customer interactions. In addition, implementation tools to support interactive solutions for customer profitability analysis, customer segmentation, demand generation, account planning, opportunity management, contact management, integrated marketing communications, customer care strategies, customer problem solving, virtual team management of large global accounts, and measuring CRM performance would be the next level of solutions sought by most enterprises.
Key takeaway
- Using the Internet and e-business to provide products and services and information to customers requires that you really know and understand your customer’sneeds. When customers contact is traditional business by visiting the store or office or contacting someone personally by phone, you have the opportunity to hear their questions and offer solutions based on personal communication. If they have a misunderstanding about our product or a sales objection we can deal with it immediately.
- When people visit our online business at website, we will not even know they are there. we do not have the opportunity to ask or answer questions. It is therefore vitally important that we anticipate their questions and concerns and provide the needed information in a way that makes it easy for them to fully understand our offering. Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to get the maximum value from your e-business investment.
Imagine if at the start of every new project, you had to forget everything that you know about customers within that domain. Everything you know about what’s important to them. The products and services they use. The pain points they experience. The challenges they face. Rather than building on existing customer insights, you’d have to start from scratch every time. It would be a crazy way to work, and yet many teams do such a bad job of consolidating and communicating pre-existing customer insights, that they may as well take this approach.
Trying to locate existing customer insights can all too often feel like hunting for fossils. Most of the time you’ll just find tiny fragments, which on their own really aren’t that insightful. Every so often, you’ll hit the jackpot in the form of some fossilised insights, a customer persona, or perhaps a long-lost customer research report. Like the fragments of a dinosaur skeleton there will be missing details and elements that you’ll have to piece together, but slowly over time a more fully formed picture will start to form. Whilst hunting for fossils might be fun (if you’re into that sort of thing), hunting for customer insights certainly isn’t.
To ensure that what is already known about customers doesn’t remain buried deep in the ground the DB DevOps teams at Redgate have started building a customer insights repository place to better store, share and utilise customer insights. That one place is the Database DevOps customer research dashboard.
Introducing the Database DevOps customer research dashboard
The Database DevOps customer research dashboard is the Natural History Museum of customer insights. A place where everyone within Redgate can go to learn about DB DevOps customers; to discover and explore customer insights and to access the vast collection of customer insight fossils available within.
Like the floors of a museum, the dashboard has different levels of information about customers. This allows the wood to be seen, along with the trees. The different levels are as follows:
- High-level insights
- Individual observations
- Raw research data
The different layers of a customer insights repository
At the top are the high-level insights that have come out of research activities, such as research calls and customer feedback. Insights are often in the form of documents, such as personas, empathy maps, job maps and value proposition statements.
In the middle are individual customer observations and pieces of feedback, such as observations from customer calls, usability issues identified during usability testing and survey responses. Importantly these are date stamped and tagged to allow observations to be easily searched, filtered and grouped by topic.
Forming the foundation of the customer research repository is the raw customer research data. This includes notes from customer calls and visits, and full unfiltered survey responses.
Building a customer research repository
There are a growing number of platforms out there which promise to provide a quick and easy to set-up customer insights repository, such as the excellently named Nom and Dovetail. However, the team felt that none of the platforms out there ticked enough of the boxes to warrant paying for yet another tool, so instead we have built a repository using the following pre-existing or free tools.
Confluence is used to present the high-level insights as an easy to navigate Wiki (at least that’s the idea) and to store some of the raw data, such as customer interview notes (OneDrive is also used to store raw customer research data).Refamer
Reframer is a splendid qualitative data analysis tool from Optimal Workshop. It allows research observation notes to be entered (or imported) and tagged with a pre-set taxonomy. Tagged notes can then be browsed within Reframer and exported as an Excel Spreadsheet.
Reframer is used to slice and dice the raw customer research data into individual observations and to add consistent tags which reflect the topics covered by the observations. This is important to allow the observations to be easily searched, filtered and grouped within airtable.
Airtable is like a cross between a spreadsheet and a database. It allows the information to be easily cross-referenced, filtered, searched and grouped by topic. Observations are exported from Reframer and added to Airtable along with details of the research participants.
Slack is used to communicate updates, such as new customer insights being available. Importantly Slack isn’t used to deliver the customer insights themselves as insights delivered via Slack tend to be very transient. They don’t persist very long and invariably get lost in the Slack-hole that forms over time.
Populating the customer research repository
Having a customer research repository has meant that there is a little bit more work when it comes to recording customer research, but trust me, that extra work has been well worth it in the long run. The process for populating the customer research repository is as follows.
1. Capture & upload customer insights
Raw customer research, in the form of usability testing sessions, research calls, survey results etc… are captured and uploaded to Confluence, or OneDrive.
2. Record details of customer research
Details of customer research undertaken, such as research calls and usability testing sessions are recorded within airtable, along with a link to the raw customer research (e.g. research notes). The table within airtable provides a record of the research that has been undertaken, and the customers that have been involved.
2. Identify and tag individual observations
Individual insights and observations, such as usability issues, quotes, survey answers and research observations are tagged using Reframer. The raw data is then downloaded as an Excel spreadsheet and pasted into airtable.
High-level insights are updated. For example, details of jobs to be done, personas and key usability issues. Where possible high-level insights are referenced back to the originating customer research (e.g. call notes).
Establishing a customer research repository has not only provided a home to customer insights, but the process of extracting and tagging individual observations has helped to more systematically build all important high-level insights, such as personas, jobs to be done and value propositions. The repository has already proved useful for better answering research questions and for ensuring that the DB DevOps teams are making informed product decisions based on genuine customer insights.
Key takeaway
- Imagine if at the start of every new project, you had to forget everything that you know about customers within that domain. Everything you know about what’s important to them. The products and services they use. The pain points they experience. The challenges they face. Rather than building on existing customer insights, you’d have to start from scratch every time. It would be a crazy way to work, and yet many teams do such a bad job of consolidating and communicating pre-existing customer insights, that they may as well take this approach.
- Trying to locate existing customer insights can all too often feel like hunting for fossils. Most of the time you’ll just find tiny fragments, which on their own really aren’t that insightful. Every so often, you’ll hit the jackpot in the form of some fossilised insights, a customer persona, or perhaps a long-lost customer research report. Like the fragments of a dinosaur skeleton there will be missing details and elements that you’ll have to piece together, but slowly over time a more fully formed picture will start to form. Whilst hunting for fossils might be fun (if you’re into that sort of thing), hunting for customer insights certainly isn’t.
Campaigns are created in an organization to improve the sales, to improve the image of products, create new opportunities for add on sales, etc. In SAP CRM, you can implement different inbound and outbound campaigns which are multichannel and they can be used to define and implement best possible marketing strategy by using constraint-based optimization techniques to determine the best marketing mix.
Campaigns can be created in CRM by using multiple ways, some of which are −
- Using Campaign Wizard−You can create simple campaigns using the campaign wizard that target to a single group and that doesn’t require full functionality of campaign management. You should have business function Campaign Wizard (CRM_MKT_CPG_WIZARD) activated to use this function.
- Using Campaign Templates
- Using Existing Campaigns
To perform campaign execution, you should have at least one campaign created in CRM. You have created a campaign in Marketing→ Campaigns and it contains the necessary information such as communication medium and target group.
Go to Marketing →Campaigns, you have to select the campaign or the campaign element you want to execute.
The next step is to release the campaign by changing the status to Release in General Data. After this, click Start on the Campaign Details page to start processing the campaign.
Key takeaway
- Campaigns are created in an organization to improve the sales, to improve the image of products, create new opportunities for add on sales, etc. In SAP CRM, you can implement different inbound and outbound campaigns which are multichannel and they can be used to define and implement best possible marketing strategy by using constraint-based optimization techniques to determine the best marketing mix.
When you hear the phrase "marketing automation," what do you think of first? A detailed diagram of emails sent to different segments, broken out by email engagement, drawing a line from lead to customer? This has become the norm, yet it is among the least effective automation paths you can set up as a marketer.
The inherent flaw in this strategy is that it starts with the marketer's timeline rather than the prospect's. The marketer sits down and defines what information the prospect will consume next, what actions the prospect will take next, and the path the prospect will take from becoming a lead to becoming a customer.
But if we're honest with ourselves, we would admit that the world is not as straightforward as that. You might define the funnel stages as Lead to Marketing Qualified Lead (MQL) to Sales Qualified Lead (SQL) to Opportunity to Customer, where leads download an ebook, then become an MQL when they start a trial, an SQL when the sales person follows up with that prospect, an opportunity when they do a trial review call, and customer when they purchase.
... But what if they start a trial and then download an ebook? Or what if they get into a sales conversation after just downloading an ebook, never become a customer, and then go cold until they start a trial months later? The reality is that you can't control what your prospect does or in what order your prospect does it. What you can control, however, is how you react to your prospect's behaviors. And this is where automation and trigger marketing becomes powerful.
Trigger marketing refers to the use of marketing automation software to perform a task as a result of an event, often an action taken by a prospect or customer.
The "triggering" event can be anything measurable by your CRM and automation software. Here are just a few examples:
- Form conversions
- Email opens (or lack thereof)
- Number of pages viewed
- Chatbot interactions
- Meeting certain descriptive criteria
As a result of the triggering event, you can automate tasks/actions with your marketing automation software. Here are some examples:
- Send them an email (or sequence of emails)
- Update their CRM record
- Add them to a list
- Assign them to a sales rep
- Send an internal notification about them
- Understand your buyer persona.
- Think in terms of 'ifs' and 'thens.'
- Figure out your triggering events.
- Determine the actions you want your system to perform.
- Craft personalized messaging.
- Identify and eliminate repetitive marketing tasks.
- Increase the value of your CRM.
1. Understand your buyer persona.
Know your buyer persona: It should go without saying in the context of any marketing activity, but in marketing automation, it's doubly important.
If you think through the lifecycle stages, pains, and motivations of your target audience(s), you can craft better trigger marketing strategies to guide them along their path to purchase.
The goal of marketing automation is to provide a great experience at scale, and part of that means meeting them where they are. When 80% of customers are more likely to make a purchase when brands offer personalized experiences, it just makes sense.
2. Think in terms of 'ifs' and 'thens.'
Software is simple. It sees in black and white rather than the complex outcome that you're moving toward. However, you can reverse engineer a great trigger marketing strategy using automation by thinking through your outcome and the path to get there as a series of if/then statements:
- If x happens, then do y.
- If the prospect fills out this form, then send them this email.
- If the prospect has visited the pricing page, then notify a rep.
The "if" is the criteria. The "then" is the action you want to take.
3. Figure out your triggering events.
In order to get your messaging to the right people at the right time, you must identify the "trigger" (in HubSpot, it's called "enrollment criteria"). This is the "if" part of the equation, the concrete indicator that the software can use as a green light to execute the actions.
Triggering events are only limited by the information you have in your system and your marketing automation's capabilities. Common ones include:
- Actions taken on the website
- Criteria met in the database
- Responses to past emails or campaigns
4. Determine the actions you want your system to perform.
Once you know your "trigger" or enrollment/starting criteria, then you can decide what happens next. This is the "then" part of the equation. Common actions include:
- Sending an email
- Enrolling in a sequence
- Categorizing the contact in the database
5. Craft personalized messaging.
Remember that 80% of customers are more likely to purchase after a personalized experience? If your action ("then" statement) includes a marketing task such as email sends or campaign enrollment, it's critical to know exactly how this contact is different from others in your CRM and what messaging will uniquely appeal to them. Ask yourself:
- Where are they at in their journey?
- How can I provide value and move them to the next step?
6. Identify and eliminate repetitive marketing tasks.
If you're still not sure where to begin with marketing automation, start by creating a list of your most repetitive tasks. For example, if you send the same email over and over again to multiple contacts, using automation to eliminate this task from your day will increase productivity and, as a result, performance. This will help you focus on higher impact tasks that can't be automated.
7. Increase the value of your CRM.
As mentioned previously, your only limits are the capabilities of the software you're using and the quality of your data. If you have messy data, marketing automation may hurt you. If you have incomplete data, you won't be able to do the advanced personalization and segmentation that will make a world of difference.
With that in mind, you will have to understand how to make the most of your CRM. Part of this comes down to using automation to update CRM records and categorize contacts, but ultimately you'll have to think about how your organization uses their CRM and ask yourself these questions:
- What data can you gather about your prospects (and when) to help the effectiveness of your campaigns?
- How can you use automation to ensure the cleanliness and accuracy of your database?
- How often can you audit your database to ensure the integrity of these efforts?
We briefly discussed that marketing automation provides a big opportunity for email marketing efforts. Triggered emails -- automated marketing messages based on a prospect's behaviors -- are powerful because they are inherently relevant and timely. The key to an effective email is relevance plus timeliness plus value, and the first two are baked into triggered emails. It's up to the marketer to jump on that opportunity and align a valuable offer to those recipients.
Not using triggered emails? Here are a few recipes of triggered marketing automation to get you started.
Trigger: Downloaded an Educational Offer
This is a great place to start if you don't have any triggered emails set up, as this is the broadest trigger -- engaging the prospects at the earliest stage of the buyer's journey.
What to Send: Transactional Email With Next Step Call-to-Action
In this situation, your triggered email can be a transactional email -- confirming the download (or registration or request) and including any information related to that download.
For example, if this is a follow-up to downloading an ebook, include the name of the ebook and a link to the PDF. If it's a follow-up to registering for a webinar, include the webinar information, including the time and date and how to log in.
Once you've covered your bases on the transactional information, it's time to think about what you want your prospect to do next. You have their attention -- take advantage of it! Do you want them to convert on a middle-of-the-funnel offer like a demo request or complementary consultation? Or do you want to encourage them to share this offer with their network, to expand the reach of your content? Think about that ideal next step, and include a call-to-action for that in your follow up email.
Trigger: Took One Action in a Series, but Not the Next
Say your prospect gets close to taking the action you want -- like starting a trial of your product -- but they don't quite get to the finish line. They visit the trial landing page, or view some content about your product, but don't start that trial. This is an opportunity for you to follow up to get them to cross that finish line.
What to Send: Related Content and an Alternative Action
Perhaps they didn't complete that action because of some hesitation -- they didn't want to fill out a form, or they had some additional questions that stopped them from starting that trial. This is an opportunity to follow up with related content (like product videos or resources for the trial) and an alternative action (maybe they don't want to use a trial, they simply want to get a demo or speak directly with a sales rep).
You can even simply ask them in your email ... what stopped you from signing up? Anything we can do to help? You'll be surprised by how many responses you'll get. After all, these are people who got close to taking an action but had some specific hesitation. You want to both discover and address that hesitation head-on.
Trigger: Viewed Specific Content
Whether you have content on specific topics (product pain points, for example), or content aligned with specific parts of the funnel (product pages vs. blog articles), when your prospects view that content, you have more data to use in your follow-up emails.
What to Send: Tailored Follow-Up Content
Whether you trigger an email immediately or save this intelligence for future communications, the data you collect about which content people view can be used to make your marketing that much more relevant on a one-to-one basis.
For example, if you have content on your website (case studies, blog articles, etc.) that's related to specific industries or target markets, you can infer that people who view that content are in that industry, and tailor your future marketing messages accordingly. Or, if you have content on your website that is related to specific topics of interest or pain points that you address, you can infer that people who view that content care about that pain point, and tailor your future marketing messages around that topic.
Think about the various behavioral data points you have about your prospects, and what you can draw from that to determine what they care about.
Trigger: Recently and Highly Engaged or Lacking in Engagement
Figure out what your bar is for a highly engaged prospect (perhaps they downloaded at least three ebooks and viewed at least ten blog articles) as well as an unengaged prospect, and respond and market to them accordingly.
What to Send: Timely Next Step Call-to-Action or Reengagement Campaign
For your highly engaged prospects, you once again have attention you can leverage. One great option is to encourage them to share the content they just downloaded. But also remember that triggered marketing automation does not need to be solely external (sent to prospects), it can also be internal (sent to your fellow employees)!
When a prospect becomes highly engaged, this is a great opportunity to notify that prospect's sales representative that this is a good time to follow up with the prospect. For your unengaged prospects, send a proactive reengagement email. You may even want to have multiple trigger points (e.g. haven't clicked on an email in three months, six months, one year) where you send different campaigns to reengage these prospects.
For example, after three months, send a reminder to update their email preferences. After six months, ask them if the content is irrelevant and offer them to unsubscribe. And finally, after one year, tell them you will not email them anymore unless they respond.
Trigger: Interacted With Your Company, or Mentioned Your Competitors or Industry, in Social Media
As you listen to what your prospects are saying in social media, you have the opportunity to follow up with those who interact with your company, or those who mention your competitors or specific pain points that you address.
What to Send: Comparison Guides, Product Information, or Educational Content
Pick a common and valuable interaction that occurs between you and your prospects in social media -- it may be asking questions about your product, mentioning that they're evaluating a competitor, or simply asking a question that relates to the pain points your product addresses.
If responding by social media, you likely don't actually want to automate your response -- it will be very easy for your prospect to recognize the impersonal nature of that interaction. However, you can supplement your one-to-one social media engagement with a triggered email campaign with supporting content. For example, if your prospect asks questions about your product, you can send how-to and product feature information. If your prospect mentions they're evaluating a competitor, you can send comparison guides, third party reviews, or case studies for them to use in their evaluation process. Or if your prospect simply asks a question related to your industry, you can follow up with educational content on the topic of interest.
At the end of the day, any of these triggered emails are likely to get a higher response -- and higher return on your effort -- compared to the typical linear marketing automation campaign. Using some of the same technology, you can reorient your marketing to work around your prospect's timeline instead of your own, while continuing to drive the actions you desire.
Key takeaway
- When you hear the phrase "marketing automation," what do you think of first? A detailed diagram of emails sent to different segments, broken out by email engagement, drawing a line from lead to customer? This has become the norm, yet it is among the least effective automation paths you can set up as a marketer.
- The inherent flaw in this strategy is that it starts with the marketer's timeline rather than the prospect's. The marketer sits down and defines what information the prospect will consume next, what actions the prospect will take next, and the path the prospect will take from becoming a lead to becoming a customer.
Your developers may be great at writing code, but you don’t want them making ill-informed decisions about the way the business works. Likewise, business analysts should focus on making business decisions rather than try to translate them into excruciatingly detailed requirements. One way for a company to make the most of each side's strengths is by deploying a business rules management system (BRMS).
A BRMS can bring the business and IT much closer by giving control of the logic - and even the code - to business analysts. This heretical idea relies on a fundamentally different approach to development, where developers isolate an application’s business logic from its data validation logic and from its flow control. The business logic then gets its own container, the BRMS, in which business analysts "code" business rules in a simple, English-like programming language.
BRMS engines normally embed themselves in vertical enterprise applications which simulate human expertise, such as those that handle underwriting, loan applications or complex scheduling. It gives the business side direct control over the rules that govern how enterprise applications behave. And when business analysts decide that business rules have to change, they can make the alterations themselves rather than waiting for IT to get around to it.
The result is much lower maintenance costs and much higher confidence that software is implementing business rules properly.
Break the logic logjam
Business analysts typically have a far more distant relationship with enterprise applications than they do with, say, a desktop spreadsheet. If people on the business side want a new application built or changes made to an existing program, they submit a request to the IT department, which probably hasn’t the foggiest what they’re talking about. So begins an endless round of meetings between the business and IT to iron out the ambiguities.
At some point, developers start writing the code, either building business rules into software components running on an application server or implementing them in stored database procedures. The development team then tests the code and hands it back to business analysts for verification. It's at this point the code is rejected because the results are nothing like what the business analysts envisioned. A few months and a few code rewrites later, the business side finally gets something it can live with.
With a BRMS, business analysts not only determine the business logic, they write it too. All they need to know is how to write a rule in English.
A business rule typically goes like this: if certain events occur or conditions exist, then certain events should happen or else other events should happen. Each If-Then-Else statement is a business rule. Each rule is a declaration and may interact with other rules. A BRMS allows business analysts to see, understand, code and maintain rules with (almost) no help from IT.
A BRMS chews on a set of rules until it comes up with a solution. It loops through the rules again and again until no more can be executed. The idea is that changing data drives the way rules execute - and that interacting rules reduce the need for human intervention. Related sets of rules may govern loan approvals, insurance policies, choice of distributor, and so on.
By contrast, conventional application development arranges rules in an incredibly fragile, top-down fashion.
For example, if the Then part of a rule changes the data used by the If part of another rule, the whole process must be examined to put the rules in the right order. That’s why it takes so long to write, change, and maintain business rules using ordinary application development.
Tiers without fears
Diagrammatically, a BRMS-driven application looks much like a conventional one. In a multi-tier system that contains the usual combination of web server, application server and database, the BRMS occupies a fourth tier that puts the logic in the hands of business analysts. Thanks to the English-like nature of BRMS statements, even the chief executive can jump in and check the rules. Any rule can be changed, added or deleted; sent to the IT department for integration and testing; and put into production - all in a matter of days or even hours.
This can save companies a bundle in change management, but they should also prepare for a sizable initial investment in BRMS development and training. It’s almost impossible to evaluate how much time it will take to write the business rules because it all depends on how many rules you will write - inevitably, you will end up with more than you originally anticipated.
Business analysts may also baulk at the notion of coding business rules. As with any big IT adventure, a BRMS project must begin with the understanding and support of top management.
Practical applications
A BRMS would be overkill for a small-scale, single-function application. And many big enterprise applications, such as ERP or CRM systems, already include rules engines, although they may be invisible to end-users. But many of the larger applications developed in-house can benefit from a BRMS, particularly if the business logic is isolated from the rest of the application in the original design.
Things get trickier when determining whether to integrate a BRMS into an existing system. The IT department and business analysts must collaborate in extracting business logic from the control logic and data validation code it is mixed up with.
Software components may break when the business logic is extracted - and deciding which rule goes where can be a laborious exercise. It may seem obvious, for example, that business rules do not affect data validation. But in some cases, data validation parameters change frequently - date ranges may shift, pick list categories may be dynamic - and so must come under the control of the business analysts.
Another stumbling block in refactoring existing systems is that the existing rules are rarely entirely correct. Inconsistencies may create political problems or spawn long discussions on the business side as business analysts work to resolve issues they may have otherwise avoided facing.
Ultimately, each existing piece of business logic must be examined to see how it will fit in the new system. New objects may also be necessary, although most database applications can be extended by the BRMS without database modifications. New GUI screens should also be considered because the entire application will be more sophisticated and require more information.
Many organisations hire consultants to help them determine the amount of work involved in deploying a BRMS. It may be easier to scrap an existing application and start from scratch, using old data validation and control code only when it saves time and effort.
Take the fire drill out of finance
Financial institutions provide some of the best examples of the BRMS in action because they allow the business side to get creative without incurring excessive IT overhead.
Financial services company E-Loan turned over $6bn (£3.24bn) last year, mainly via a BRMS developed with the Jess Java rules engine. The company used the source code provided with Jess to write its own BRMS user interface so business analysts could enter simple rules to generate code for loan approval. E-Loan's chief technology officer says the improvement in customer relations brought about by faster decision easily justified the application development cost, which was lower than with traditional solutions.
At CitiStreet, chief information officer Andy Marsh sorely needed a system that business analysts could understand. Ilog’sJRules allowed him to express all his rules in the lingua franca of both his company and the financial industry, halving the average analysis time required by the company's business analysts. He is now contemplating how to extend the benefits ot the company's workflow management process.
Lisa Fiondella, senior vice-president of product management at Equifax, says the driving force behind her adoption of JRules "was the reduction of translation errors between the business users and the programmers". Other reasons include greater efficiency in overall IT operations and a shorter time to market for a new web-based loan-credit product. Fiondella says using the BRMS eliminates the "fire drill" response to demands for business logic changes in existing applications.
BRMS technology is spreading to other areas too. Telecom companies often use a BRMS for everything from determining how to route messages, to scheduling maintenance downtime and handling customer relations. Another frequent telecom application is to help achieve compliance with statutory regulations.
In deploying a BRMS, companies often face a conceptual hurdle in teasing out the rules that govern various business functions. After that Rubicon is crossed, however, and analysts focus on rules that change dynamically, organisations can apply a BRMS in some unexpected places.
One business that gains from using a BRMS to react fast to competitive pressure and customer behaviour is casino giant Harrah. According to chief information officer Tim Stanley, the casino's marketing managers analyse activity at each location every day to come up with new promotions. Within 24 hours the new rules have been tested and gone into production.
"Sometimes I walk out of my office and see a group of customers actively playing at a time that used to be slow," he says, "and I say to myself, ‘They wouldn’t be here now if it weren’t for the one-off promotions I can do with our rules system.’"
Which is right for you?
BRMS tools cover everything from open-source languages to full-blown enterprise systems. If you want to test the BRMS water, you could begin with Jess, which is a free download.
But major development projects require collaborative communication between all participants - business analysts, coders, the chief executive, end-users, finance directors, and so on. And that means a BRMS with all the bells and whistles.
Ilog’sJRules (the Java version) and Rules (the C/C++ version), and Fair Isaac’s Blaze Advisor are enterprise tools with debugging, testing and analysis tools. Enterprise customers that need blinding speed but are willing to live with limited tools would do well to consider PST's Official Production System for Java (OPSJ).
And IT department that has staff already trained in OPS or the C Language Interface for Production Systems (Clips) might want to take a look at Haley’s Authorete, PST’s Clips/R2, or Sandia National Laboratories’ Jess.
New tools with new twists to consider include PegaRules from PegaSystems, and Corticon, which has a spreadsheet interface for rules input.
The more polished products, such as JRules or Blaze Advisor, make self-service rule changes easier for business analysts, but experts in business rules logic must always be available to ensure the BRMS works smoothly. According to Gartner analysts, a properly implemented and supported BRMS can cut IT operating costs by between 10% and 15%. And that estimate doesn’t take into account the soft benefits of rapid response to shifting business demands.
The idea of isolating and consolidating business logic may seem odd, but the pay-off is all but inevitable.
Key takeaway
- A BRMS can bring the business and IT much closer by giving control of the logic - and even the code - to business analysts. This heretical idea relies on a fundamentally different approach to development, where developers isolate an application’s business logic from its data validation logic and from its flow control. The business logic then gets its own container, the BRMS, in which business analysts "code" business rules in a simple, English-like programming language.
- BRMS engines normally embed themselves in vertical enterprise applications which simulate human expertise, such as those that handle underwriting, loan applications or complex scheduling. It gives the business side direct control over the rules that govern how enterprise applications behave. And when business analysts decide that business rules have to change, they can make the alterations themselves rather than waiting for IT to get around to it.
Are you facing difficulties in inventory management? Are you looking for accurate sales forecasting and are curious to learn about some factors impacting your sales?
Today, businesses must be well equipped to not only predict sales targets but also be able to anticipate the changing market trends. Otherwise, they will miss out on critical business opportunities and will not be able to meet customer demands.
Forecasting enables you to control your business by anticipating risks and opportunities. It helps you improve your inventory management, hence leading to a higher rate of ‘On-time In-full’ delivery. Furthermore, it helps you with supply chain management and excellent control of internal operations. Predictions help in planning your finances and marketing campaigns. To sum it all up, forecasting is the secret to continuous improvement in your business.
Accurate forecasting is as essential to your business as weather forecasting is to the captain of a Boeing 747. Just as the captain is responsible to give orders to his crew and ensure the well-being of the passengers, it is the management’s responsibility to give direction to their teams and Improve Customer Experiences. Furthermore, just as the Boeing captain’s orders are effective only as long as the data provided to him is accurate, a manager’s decisions will only be correct when the tools that he uses to make forecasts provide him with accurate results.
For some, manual forecasting may seem easy. But collecting relevant data history and applying it to construct models, which make sense, can become a formidable task. Thankfully, today, solutions such as Sugar CRM, combined with CRM Integrations, are available to do the math for you.
CRM makes use of data history to create trends and patterns to give you a clear picture of what the future may look like. It is a useful tool for the sales team to set their targets and for the marketing teams to focus on the trends before they launch their next campaign. A CRM, with its various built-in features, not only keeps the managers on the same page with their teams but also allows them to anticipate revenue and plan future activities.
A salesperson can be optimistic about the current position of sales, however, may be pessimistic when it comes to setting future targets. A CRM, on the other hand, cannot be biased. The projections will be based on facts and figures so that you always get an accurate sales forecast.
When BoxOp, a Copenhagen based mailbox and installation services company, experienced rapid business growth, they realized that they needed a new CRM system. A system which could solve their planning and forecasting problems and help them anticipate demand with increased efficiency. BoxOp found the perfect solution in SugarCRM. This allowed them to create accurate reports and sales forecasts as their business expanded to multiple locations across Denmark. BoxOp’s Sugar Implementation should act as an example for small, medium and large businesses alike since growth can be, at often times, unprecedented.
Forecasting without the right tools is just as good as flipping a coin to help you make business decisions. Sugar helps ensure that your numbers are accurate and realistic. Sales reps can create and modify unlimited scenarios, with the option of Best, Worst, and Likely cases, before committing to a forecast. Sales managers can easily see all committed targets, modify quotas and forecasts, track changes, adjust commitments, and assign quotas.
Sugar keeps you updated about forecast submissions and a review of previous submissions can assist you in identifying patterns. In addition to this, Sugar lets you intelligently identify factors affecting your sales. Hence, essentially, it gives you the authority to control your sales.
Sugar gives you the ability to review and manage forecasts of each member of the team through a single worksheet. Assigning quotas, adjusting individual forecasts and analyzing the performance of individuals are no longer considered tedious tasks. For Sugar users, the solution to all these tasks can be achieved with a single click.
Sugar also allows your enterprise to keep track of customer activities. If you’re at a managerial level in your company, Sugar will intelligently shift your focus to more paramount issues. Hence, it saves the day at not only the sales level but at the managerial level as well. It allows your business to observe patterns without overriding complications and provides your company with some brilliant insights into factors affecting sales and marketing. To sum it up, Sugar makes forecasting effortless and precise giving control back to you.
Every business manager wishes to make the forecasting within their organization, at the managerial level, as smooth as possible. Equipped with team-wide forecast visibility, Sugar is the ultimate choice. It allows you to review and manage forecasts of your entire team.
Sugar, with its forecast feature, offers unlimited what-if scenarios and allows a real-time graphical view of the progress in sales. Moreover, managers and team leads can view the entire team’s quotas and forecasts on a single page or platform.
Intuitive pipeline management allows the sales representative to effortlessly focus when needed. This is a stand out feature of Sugar. Pipeline Management in Sugar CRM is possible across various time periods so you can plan things accordingly. In addition to this, Sugar allows forecasting using opportunity records, giving you the authority to choose which record to select for forecasting and see the distance to quota with every addition or subtraction of opportunity record. To sum up, Sugar offers control at the level of opportunity records to help forecast and telling you where to focus.
In a world where companies invest in the latest technologies to improve their efficiency, you cannot live in the past and rely on traditional or inefficient forecasting methods. It’s time to set the course and use a CRM solution that keeps your business one step ahead of your competitors in the future.
Key takeaway
- Forecasting enables you to control your business by anticipating risks and opportunities. It helps you improve your inventory management, hence leading to a higher rate of ‘On-time In-full’ delivery. Furthermore, it helps you with supply chain management and excellent control of internal operations. Predictions help in planning your finances and marketing campaigns. To sum it all up, forecasting is the secret to continuous improvement in your business.
- Accurate forecasting is as essential to your business as weather forecasting is to the captain of a Boeing 747. Just as the captain is responsible to give orders to his crew and ensure the well-being of the passengers, it is the management’s responsibility to give direction to their teams and Improve Customer Experiences. Furthermore, just as the Boeing captain’s orders are effective only as long as the data provided to him is accurate, a manager’s decisions will only be correct when the tools that he uses to make forecasts provide him with accurate results.
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to identify, acquire, and retain customers – a business’ greatest asset. By providing the means to manage and coordinate customer interactions, CRM helps companies maximise the value of every customer interaction and in turn improve corporate performance.
E-CRM, or Electronic Customer Relationship Management, is an integrated online sales, marketing and service strategy that is used to identify, attract and retain an organisation’s customers. It describes improved and increased communication between an organisation and its clients by creating and enhancing customer interaction through innovative technology. E-CRM software provides profiles and histories of each interaction the organisation has with its customers, making it an important tool for all small and medium businesses.
E-CRM software systems may contain a selection of the following features:
i. Customer management:
Provides access to all customer information including enquiry status and Correspondence
ii. Knowledge management:
A centralised knowledge base that handles and shares customer Information
iii. Account management:
Access to customer information and history, allowing sales teams and customer service teams to function efficiently
iii. Case management:
Captures enquiries, escalates priority cases and notifies management of unresolved issues
iv. Back-end integration:
Blends with other systems such as billing, inventory and logistics through relevant customer contact points such as websites and call centres
v. Reporting and analysis:
Report generation on customer behaviour and business criteria
Evolutions of E-CRM:
Customer Support – A Historical Perspective:
The Customer is King. This mantra, although used for a long time, has not been put into practice until recently. Forget the notion of royal treatment, customers were not even treated with dignity by most organizations.
As recently as the 1970s and 80s, the concept of customer support meant that organizations were doing a favor by answering a few questions for the customer on the phone – after putting them on hold for an hour! Standing in line to buy something was common and expected. Remember when the customers had to go to the airports to buy tickets only because the airlines kept them there? Organizations simply lost touch with the realization – that they existed because of these customers.
Evolution of Customer Relationship:
The 1990s brought two new concepts that challenged the prevailing business landscape: deregulation and the Internet. These forces brought down the barriers of entry resulting in an environment of intense competition.
Stores faced competition from on-line start-ups. Traditional bricks-and-mortar banks fought for customers with online or virtual banks. Airline tickets were increasingly purchased from the convenience of your home. The explosion in information allowed consumers to compare features, and prices across multiple providers. Products became commodities and prices could not be lowered further to ensure survival.
Customer service became the only major differentiator in many cases. Customers received what they have always deserved – respect. The customer was now truly the king. Business customers, although always treated with more respect than individual consumers, were more or less ignored in the early stages of the Internet boom.
The emphasis focused on expanding the consumer base regardless of positive cash flow, revenues, and margins. The demise of many dot-coms brought an epiphany. Companies realized that they needed to focus on their enterprise customers. The advent of e-CRM applications was the first big step toward providing better support to the strategic business customers. Although these solutions provided automated self-service to customers, they still treated all customers the same.
Furthermore, the focus of these applications is more on improving call-center productivity.
Clearly, these applications add value and help many organizations execute their CRM initiatives.
However, they are not effective in meeting the needs of an organization’s strategic enterprise customers. Each enterprise customer has its own needs and craves personalized support.
Evolution of Customer Relationship Management:
The genesis of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) lies in Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools. Companies like Siebel and Vantive (now part of PeopleSoft) took the early lead by introducing tools to help the sales personnel become more efficient in tracking their customers.
There were also a few problem-tracking tools for help desk such as Remedy. As companies focused more on customer relationships, additional applications emerged in areas of customer support, field support, and marketing automation. Most CRM companies today a retrying to address these four areas usually by partnering with other companies. Most of the ERP players are also expanding their solutions to include CRM. There are a number of niche players focused only on certain pieces of CRM such as e-mail management, sales force automation, technical support, marketing campaigns, among others.
“CRM is a business strategy designed to optimize profitability, revenue, and customer satisfaction” – Gartner Group
Although there are quite a few vendors providing CRM related products and services, there is still a lot of confusion around the concept of CRM. CRM is not just an application or a technology that can be thrown at the customer satisfaction problem to make it go away.
CRM, essentially, is a strategy that involves applications, processes, policies, business context, and people, to enable companies to manage and increase profitable relationships with their customers. An enterprise’s strategic customers expect top-notch treatment. They want the vendor to understand their needs. They want companies to build a strong relationship with them – on a 1- to- 1 basis.
Current CRM and E-Support Environment:
There are currently over 200 CRM software vendors and the number continues to grow. Although, there are various types of applications included in CRM suites, as described earlier, the core application within the CRM landscape that truly builds customer relationships is the customer service application. Other pieces, though useful, are focused on helping the vendor rather than the customer.
Many of these applications were initially focused on providing an environment to improve the productivity of call-centers. In addition, some of these applications integrated message queuing functionality to provide a common environment for all channels. So, whether the customer was trying to reach the call-center by making a call, via e-mail, by fax, or through the Web site, their query is prioritized and channeled through the same mechanism. Most customer service applications now provide Web-based self-service features for companies to offer their customers.
Customers can look up their basic information like billing ,order status, etcetera by logging in to the vendor’s Web site. While this solution works for a B2Cmodel, for enterprise customers with hundreds of users and hundreds of products to support, this simply doesn’t work.
Enterprise customers demand personalized support in order to access their information quickly and easily. In the era of information-glut, they want specific and relevant information. Companies are trying to manage relationships with their customers, partners, and suppliers in a personalized and automated manner. True personalization is not easy as each customer has its own needs and requirements. The issue is further complicated by the fact that
Business Benefits of E-CRM:
Implementation of an E-CRM system enables an organisation to streamline processes and provide sales, marketing and service personnel with better, more complete customer information. The result is that E-CRM allows organisations to build more profitable customer relationships and decrease operating costs.
Direct benefits of an E-CRM system include:
i. Service level improvements:
Using an integrated database to deliver consistent and improved customer responses
ii. Revenue growth:
Decreasing costs by focusing on retaining customers and using interactive service tools to sell additional products
iii. Productivity:
Consistent sales and service procedures to create efficient work processes
iv. Customer satisfaction:
Automatic customer tracking and detection will ensure enquiries are met and issues are managed. This will improve the customer’s overall experience in dealing with the organisation.
v. Automation:
E-CRM software helps automate campaigns including:
(i) Telemarketing
(ii) Telesales
(iii) Direct mail
(iv) Lead tracking and response
(v) Opportunity management
(vi) Quotes and order configuration
Across every sector and industry, effective CRM is a strategic imperative for corporate growth and survival:
a. Sales organisations can shorten the sales cycle and increase key sales-performance metrics such as revenue per sales representative, average order size and revenue per customer.
b. Marketing organisations can increase campaign response rates and marketing driven revenue while simultaneously decreasing lead generation and customer acquisition costs.
c. Customer service organisations can increase service agent productivity and customer retention while decreasing service costs, response times and request-resolution times.
Working of E-CRM:
In today’s world, customers interact with an organisation via multiple communication channels—the World Wide Web, call centres, field salespeople, dealers and partner networks. Many organisations also have multiple lines of business that interact with the same customers.
E-CRM systems enable customers to do business with the organisation the way the customer wants – any time, via any channel, in any language or currency—and to make customers feel that they are dealing with a single, unified organisation that recognises them every step of the way.
The E-CRM system does this by creating a central repository for customer records and providing a portal on each employee’s computer system allowing access to customer information by any member of the organisation at any time. Through this system, E-CRM gives you the ability to know more about customers, products and performance results using real time information across your business.
Implementation of an E-CRM System:
When approaching the development and implementation of E-CRM there are important considerations to keep in mind:
i. Define customer relationships:
Generate a list of key aspects of your customer relationships and the importance of these relationships to your business.
ii. Develop a plan:
Create a broad Relationship Management program that can be customized to smaller customer segments. A suitable software solution will help deliver this goal.
iii. Focus on customers:
The focus should be on the customer, not the technology. Any technology should have specific benefits in making customers’ lives easier by improving support, lowering their administrative costs, or giving them reasons to shift more business to your company.
iv. Save money:
Focus on aspects of your business that can contribute to the bottom line. Whether it is through cutting costs or increasing revenue, every capability you implement should have a direct measurable impact on the bottom line.
v. Service and support:
By tracking and measuring the dimensions of the relationship, organisations can identify their strengths and weaknesses in the relationship management program and continually fine tune it based on ongoing feedback from customers.
Key takeaway
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to identify, acquire, and retain customers – a business’ greatest asset. By providing the means to manage and coordinate customer interactions, CRM helps companies maximise the value of every customer interaction and in turn improve corporate performance.
- E-CRM, or Electronic Customer Relationship Management, is an integrated online sales, marketing and service strategy that is used to identify, attract and retain an organisation’s customers. It describes improved and increased communication between an organisation and its clients by creating and enhancing customer interaction through innovative technology. E-CRM software provides profiles and histories of each interaction the organisation has with its customers, making it an important tool for all small and medium businesses.
Meaning of E-CRM:
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to identify, acquire, and retain customers – a business’ greatest asset. By providing the means to manage and coordinate customer interactions, CRM helps companies maximise the value of every customer interaction and in turn improve corporate performance.
E-CRM, or Electronic Customer Relationship Management, is an integrated online sales, marketing and service strategy that is used to identify, attract and retain an organisation’s customers. It describes improved and increased communication between an organisation and its clients by creating and enhancing customer interaction through innovative technology. E-CRM software provides profiles and histories of each interaction the organisation has with its customers, making it an important tool for all small and medium businesses.
E-CRM software systems may contain a selection of the following features:
i. Customer management:
Provides access to all customer information including enquiry status and Correspondence
ii. Knowledge management:
A centralised knowledge base that handles and shares customer Information
iii. Account management:
Access to customer information and history, allowing sales teams and customer service teams to function efficiently
iii. Case management:
Captures enquiries, escalates priority cases and notifies management of unresolved issues
iv. Back-end integration:
Blends with other systems such as billing, inventory and logistics through relevant customer contact points such as websites and call centres
v. Reporting and analysis:
Report generation on customer behaviour and business criteria
Evolutions of E-CRM:
Customer Support – A Historical Perspective:
The Customer is King. This mantra, although used for a long time, has not been put into practice until recently. Forget the notion of royal treatment, customers were not even treated with dignity by most organizations.
As recently as the 1970s and 80s, the concept of customer support meant that organizations were doing a favor by answering a few questions for the customer on the phone – after putting them on hold for an hour! Standing in line to buy something was common and expected. Remember when the customers had to go to the airports to buy tickets only because the airlines kept them there? Organizations simply lost touch with the realization – that they existed because of these customers.
Evolution of Customer Relationship:
The 1990s brought two new concepts that challenged the prevailing business landscape: deregulation and the Internet. These forces brought down the barriers of entry resulting in an environment of intense competition.
Stores faced competition from on-line start-ups. Traditional bricks-and-mortar banks fought for customers with online or virtual banks. Airline tickets were increasingly purchased from the convenience of your home. The explosion in information allowed consumers to compare features, and prices across multiple providers. Products became commodities and prices could not be lowered further to ensure survival.
Customer service became the only major differentiator in many cases. Customers received what they have always deserved – respect. The customer was now truly the king. Business customers, although always treated with more respect than individual consumers, were more or less ignored in the early stages of the Internet boom.
The emphasis focused on expanding the consumer base regardless of positive cash flow, revenues, and margins. The demise of many dot-coms brought an epiphany. Companies realized that they needed to focus on their enterprise customers. The advent of e-CRM applications was the first big step toward providing better support to the strategic business customers. Although these solutions provided automated self-service to customers, they still treated all customers the same.
Furthermore, the focus of these applications is more on improving call-center productivity.
Clearly, these applications add value and help many organizations execute their CRM initiatives.
However, they are not effective in meeting the needs of an organization’s strategic enterprise customers. Each enterprise customer has its own needs and craves personalized support.
Evolution of Customer Relationship Management:
The genesis of CRM (Customer Relationship Management) lies in Sales Force Automation (SFA) tools. Companies like Siebel and Vantive (now part of PeopleSoft) took the early lead by introducing tools to help the sales personnel become more efficient in tracking their customers.
There were also a few problem-tracking tools for help desk such as Remedy. As companies focused more on customer relationships, additional applications emerged in areas of customer support, field support, and marketing automation. Most CRM companies today a retrying to address these four areas usually by partnering with other companies. Most of the ERP players are also expanding their solutions to include CRM. There are a number of niche players focused only on certain pieces of CRM such as e-mail management, sales force automation, technical support, marketing campaigns, among others.
“CRM is a business strategy designed to optimize profitability, revenue, and customer satisfaction” – Gartner Group
Although there are quite a few vendors providing CRM related products and services, there is still a lot of confusion around the concept of CRM. CRM is not just an application or a technology that can be thrown at the customer satisfaction problem to make it go away.
CRM, essentially, is a strategy that involves applications, processes, policies, business context, and people, to enable companies to manage and increase profitable relationships with their customers. An enterprise’s strategic customers expect top-notch treatment. They want the vendor to understand their needs. They want companies to build a strong relationship with them – on a 1- to- 1 basis.
Current CRM and E-Support Environment:
There are currently over 200 CRM software vendors and the number continues to grow. Although, there are various types of applications included in CRM suites, as described earlier, the core application within the CRM landscape that truly builds customer relationships is the customer service application. Other pieces, though useful, are focused on helping the vendor rather than the customer.
Many of these applications were initially focused on providing an environment to improve the productivity of call-centers. In addition, some of these applications integrated message queuing functionality to provide a common environment for all channels. So, whether the customer was trying to reach the call-center by making a call, via e-mail, by fax, or through the Web site, their query is prioritized and channeled through the same mechanism. Most customer service applications now provide Web-based self-service features for companies to offer their customers.
Customers can look up their basic information like billing ,order status, etcetera by logging in to the vendor’s Web site. While this solution works for a B2Cmodel, for enterprise customers with hundreds of users and hundreds of products to support, this simply doesn’t work.
Enterprise customers demand personalized support in order to access their information quickly and easily. In the era of information-glut, they want specific and relevant information. Companies are trying to manage relationships with their customers, partners, and suppliers in a personalized and automated manner. True personalization is not easy as each customer has its own needs and requirements. The issue is further complicated by the fact that
Business Benefits of E-CRM:
Implementation of an E-CRM system enables an organisation to streamline processes and provide sales, marketing and service personnel with better, more complete customer information. The result is that E-CRM allows organisations to build more profitable customer relationships and decrease operating costs.
Direct benefits of an E-CRM system include:
i. Service level improvements:
Using an integrated database to deliver consistent and improved customer responses
ii. Revenue growth:
Decreasing costs by focusing on retaining customers and using interactive service tools to sell additional products
iii. Productivity:
Consistent sales and service procedures to create efficient work processes
iv. Customer satisfaction:
Automatic customer tracking and detection will ensure enquiries are met and issues are managed. This will improve the customer’s overall experience in dealing with the organisation.
v. Automation:
E-CRM software helps automate campaigns including:
(i) Telemarketing
(ii) Telesales
(iii) Direct mail
(iv) Lead tracking and response
(v) Opportunity management
(vi) Quotes and order configuration
Across every sector and industry, effective CRM is a strategic imperative for corporate growth and survival:
a. Sales organisations can shorten the sales cycle and increase key sales-performance metrics such as revenue per sales representative, average order size and revenue per customer.
b. Marketing organisations can increase campaign response rates and marketing driven revenue while simultaneously decreasing lead generation and customer acquisition costs.
c. Customer service organisations can increase service agent productivity and customer retention while decreasing service costs, response times and request-resolution times.
Working of E-CRM:
In today’s world, customers interact with an organisation via multiple communication channels—the World Wide Web, call centres, field salespeople, dealers and partner networks. Many organisations also have multiple lines of business that interact with the same customers.
E-CRM systems enable customers to do business with the organisation the way the customer wants – any time, via any channel, in any language or currency—and to make customers feel that they are dealing with a single, unified organisation that recognises them every step of the way.
The E-CRM system does this by creating a central repository for customer records and providing a portal on each employee’s computer system allowing access to customer information by any member of the organisation at any time. Through this system, E-CRM gives you the ability to know more about customers, products and performance results using real time information across your business.
Implementation of an E-CRM System:
When approaching the development and implementation of E-CRM there are important considerations to keep in mind:
i. Define customer relationships:
Generate a list of key aspects of your customer relationships and the importance of these relationships to your business.
ii. Develop a plan:
Create a broad Relationship Management program that can be customized to smaller customer segments. A suitable software solution will help deliver this goal.
iii. Focus on customers:
The focus should be on the customer, not the technology. Any technology should have specific benefits in making customers’ lives easier by improving support, lowering their administrative costs, or giving them reasons to shift more business to your company.
iv. Save money:
Focus on aspects of your business that can contribute to the bottom line. Whether it is through cutting costs or increasing revenue, every capability you implement should have a direct measurable impact on the bottom line.
v. Service and support:
By tracking and measuring the dimensions of the relationship, organisations can identify their strengths and weaknesses in the relationship management program and continually fine tune it based on ongoing feedback from customers.
The following is a set of technical e-CRM capabilities and applications that collectively and ideally comprise a full e-CRM solution. They are,
- Customer analytic software.
- Data mining software.
- Campaign management software
- Business simulation software.
- Real time decision engine.
Customer analytic software
Customer analytic software predicts, measures, and interprets customer behaviours, allowing companies to understand the effectiveness of e-CRM efforts across both inbound outbound channels. Most importantly, customer analytic should integrate with customer-communications software to enable companies to transform customer findings into ROI-producing initiatives.
Data mining software
Data mining software builds predictive models to identify customers most likely to perform a particular behaviour such as purchase an upgrade or churn from the company. Modeling must be tightly integrated with campaign management software to keep pace with multiple campaigns running daily or weekly.
Campaign management software
Campaign management software leverages the data warehouse to plan and execute multiple, highly targeted campaigns overtime, using triggers that respond timed events and customer behaviour. Campaign management software tests various offers against control groups, capture promotion history for each customer and prospect, and produces output for virtually any on-line or off-line customer touch point channel.
Business simulation
Business simulation used in conjunction with campaign management software optirnises offer; messaging and channel delivery prior to the execution of campaigns, and compares planned costs and ROI projections with actual results. A Real time decision engine co-ordinates and synchronises communications across disparate customer touch point systems. It contains business intelligence to determine and communicate the most appropriate message, offer, and channel delivery in real time, and support two-way dialogue with the customer.
Key takeaway
- Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a way to identify, acquire, and retain customers – a business’ greatest asset. By providing the means to manage and coordinate customer interactions, CRM helps companies maximise the value of every customer interaction and in turn improve corporate performance.
- E-CRM, or Electronic Customer Relationship Management, is an integrated online sales, marketing and service strategy that is used to identify, attract and retain an organisation’s customers. It describes improved and increased communication between an organisation and its clients by creating and enhancing customer interaction through innovative technology. E-CRM software provides profiles and histories of each interaction the organisation has with its customers, making it an important tool for all small and medium businesses.
Supply chain management is the integrated process-oriented planning and control of the flow of goods, information and money across the entire value and supply chain from the customer to the raw material supplier.
“Supply chain management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and all logistics management activities. Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third party service providers, and customers. In essence, supply chain management integrates supply and demand management within and across companies.”
Why Does Supply Chain Management Matter?
The concept of labor division is undergoing a revolution. To increase profitability, companies used to divide the various work steps between their employees. Today, global organizations divide the various tasks in the value chain amongst each other. The sub-products travel gigantic distances. Nevertheless, the companies can manufacture more quickly and more cheaply than a single company could. In this way, integrated planning can open up new markets. However, the companies become dependent on each other. These business relationships require closer cooperation and a more intensive exchange of information.
The Difference Between Logistics and Supply Chain Management
Previously used as a synonym, supply chain management, in contrast to logistics, goes beyond the confines of a company. Both supply chain management and logistics deal with the organization of object flows along the process stages of the supply chain. Both are aimed at increasing customer benefits (effectiveness) and system-wide improvement of the cost-benefit ratio (efficiency).
Modern supply chain management goes a step further, especially in the areas of transport and warehousing within the company. SCM explicitly includes the organization and coordination of autonomous business units within a value chain it’s the analysis. This accentuates the inter-organisational aspect of logistics management. SCM takes a cross-company perspective on all business processes and connects all areas of business administration, such as purchasing, production, distribution, marketing, controlling, etc. Focused on the strategic aspects of functional areas, SCM leaves tactical questions to the individual participants.
Arizona State University demonstrates how supply chain management works by giving an example. Do not miss it!
Tasks and Objectives of Supply Chain Management
SCM ensures cross-company, process-oriented planning and control of the entire value chain. Consumers force logistics to rethink, which is why high customer expectations and short product life cycles are taken into account. Furthermore, relationships with suppliers are considered in order to optimally design and control goods deliveries, cash flows and information flows (Supplier Relationship Management).
Functions Within Supply Chain Management:
- Customer Relationship Management: Consistent focus on end customer demand to meet the increasing customer requirements and ensures a high degree of flexibility.
- Flexibility and demand-oriented production: Continuous cost reduction and resource optimization across all stages of the value chain.
- Synchronization of supply and demand: Increasing the adaptability and development capability of the supply chain.
Several sub-objectives can be derived from these long-term objectives:
- Inventory reduction along the value chain,
- Reduction of warehousing costs,
- Safeguarding the just-in-time supply,
- Acceleration of cash-to-cash cycles,
- Improvement of delivery reliability,
- Reduction of throughput times.
Supply Chain Management with Zara as an Example
How successful supply chain management works is demonstrated by Inditex, one of the largest textile companies in the world based in Arteixo (Spain), with its fashion brand Zara. There are many case studies about the success story of the Inditex model and they are worth reading. Zara's supply chain management expertise is confirmed by the benchmark of US market research firm Gartner, which provides an overview of the best supply chains in Europe.
In brief, the case is as follows:
Fashion brands are relocating their production to China. This saves costs, but complicates the management of the supply chain. Fashion trends, in particular, are short-lived. The journey of cargo in container ships halfway around the world complicates the principle of fast fashion.
Inditex, on the other hand, purchases more than half of its products from Spain, Portugal and Morocco. The costs are higher, but shorter supply chains allow them to react more quickly to trends. Zara no longer speculates on the latest fashion. Production is suspended until it is certain what the customer is actually going to buy. The goods are sold at full price and stocks remain minimal.
Motivation and Advantages of Supply Chain Management
Today, companies cannot guarantee competitiveness for their products and services on their own. The entire supply chain contributes to success. No longer are individual companies in competition, but entire supply chains. With the promise of a long-term win-win situation for each individual participant, companies can be persuaded to become part of a supply chain. Tip: The Guide for the successful integration of companies in supply chains provides valuable support!
Unsolved Supply Chain Management Problems Can Lead to Disadvantages
The rapid development in information technology has made all of this progress possible. Nevertheless, there are numerous problems along the supply chain that make successful implementation of supply chain management difficult in practice.
- Mutually exclusive goals: The companies involved in the supply chain can pursue different, sometimes mutually exclusive goals.
- Distribution of costs, risks and profits: A further hurdle is the fair distribution of cost and financing burdens or risks and the distribution of value-added shares.
- Lack of transparency of the processes: The different competence levels of the partners and the fear of the exploitation of knowledge causes a lack of transparency of the processes between the actors.
- Lack of uniform key figures: Agreement with the partner companies on internal, uniform key figures and technical transfer standards.
- Increasing dependency: Companies need to work more closely together and exchange information more intensively.
- Legal issues: What do contracts look like between partners exchanging sensitive internal company data and how are violations of the agreement punished?
- Building relationships based on partnership: How do you organize trust without being dependent on a handful of employees who maintain these relationships? Management concepts for building and maintaining such relationships are required.
Sustainability through Sustainable Supply Chain Management
Sustainability - a principle of resource consumption in which the preservation of essential properties, stability and the natural regenerative capacity of a system take top priority - is becoming a worldwide trend. The SSCM is guided by this approach. Driven by the demands of stakeholders such as the end consumer, the criteria of ecology, economy and society are derived. It is important for companies that strive to achieve the future-oriented mindset of the SSCM to pay equal attention to the three dimensions of sustainability. In contrast to conventional supply chain management, both the origin of the products and their use and disposal after sale are important. If your SSCM does not correspond to the practical situation in German companies, there are 5 approaches for sustainable intralogistics to keep in mind.
7 Prerequisites for a More Successful SCM
For companies, SCM entails a change of processes and culture. Its objective is to optimize processes, increase performance characteristics, reduce costs and increase customer satisfaction. In order to be successful in supply chain management, you must meet these seven requirements:
1. Interdisciplinary Cooperation
Process networking requires comprehensive cooperation. This awareness is necessary to build up the necessary know-how.
Our recommendations:
- Make yourself aware that SCM does not end at the company premises.
- Know and understand the process chain and its relationships.
- Focus on joint solutions instead of self-optimization.
- Make your contribution to optimization.
- Minimize the risk in the entire chain and not only your own risks.
- Adapt the SCM process to changing circumstances.
2. Open Exchange of Information
Aim for an open exchange of information with all companies involved in the supply chain. Confirm unrealistic plans: The intelligent and the qualified are successful, not the stronger one.
Our recommendations:
- Talk openly about the strengths and weaknesses of your technical processes.
- Admit internal risks to your business partners.
- Report changes openly and at short notice.
- Position your business partner so that his or her strengths can help you.
- Use the opportunities to motivate your business partner with your honesty.
3. Fast Responsiveness
The ability to react more quickly to changes represents qualified process networking.
Our recommendations:
- Create opportunities to illustrate the required changes, e.g. a change in customer needs.
- Adjust customer and material purchase orders to current material replacement times so that the planning horizon corresponds to the supply documents.
- Identify the need for action by projecting the actual status within the process chain using key figures.
- Motivate your employees to embrace this rapid responsiveness.
- Prevent any delay to avoid lasting damage to the process chain.
- Pay attention to quality despite this speed.
4. Short Process Times
The relation between the production times and the process times in the upstream processes serves as an indicator for the reaction speed. While the production times amount to a few hours or days, the operative process times in upstream processes may take several days. Put these times into question.
Our recommendations:
- Measure the process times away from production.
- Determine how long it takes for a customer to be provided with a reliable order confirmation.
- Capture all process times and develop a concept to shorten them.
- A lengthy process time is often caused by the quality of the work tools, the lack of transparency and the lack of process speed. The key to success is an ERP system.
International Survey
5. Powerful ERP System
The prerequisite for the required speed and dynamism within the supply chain is a qualified ERP system. The manual execution of standard processes is a thing of the past. We recommend to examine the suitability of the ERP system carefully. Establish a sustainable performance profile with IT systems to reduce complexity in logistics.
Suitable ERP systems support your employees in the following areas:
- Automated production planning processes,
- Intelligent review processes in order management,
- Notification of employees in charge if action is required,
- Automated dunning processes,
- Automated import of parts lists,
- Support tools for quotation calculations.
6. Holistic Logistics
The integration of information, material and process logistics is not a simple task. Adjust these processes to fit into the chain and do not underestimate the impact of disturbed chain links.
Our recommendations:
- Are you familiar with batch sizes, framework agreements and customer purchase commitments?
- Avoid delays in communicating changes.
- Reduce risks by using comprehensive logistics systems.
- Facilitate fast action by establishing time-saving IT connections between the participants in the supply chain.
- Increase the chance for your own adaptation by acting quickly without causing damage.
- Safeguard the success of supply chain management by integrating all areas concerned: Production planning, customers, suppliers, purchasing, sales and production.
7. Clear and Binding Rules
A qualified supply chain can only be created if clear process rules and responsibilities are established. A discreet omission of these guidelines poses a typical vulnerability. Define clear rules and follow them.
We recommend the adoption of the following rules:
- Processes including process times,
- Responsibilities,
- Requirements within the supply chain,
- Harmonized key figures for internal and external evaluation,
- Escalation mechanisms that ensure successful conflict management.
Corona Crisis
Hard Times for the Mechanical Engineering Industry
Supply Chain Management Software and Systems
Software solutions for the value chain are required. Companies are aiming for higher investments in software and technology in their supply chain. At the same time, the focus is shifting from pure cost reduction and resource optimization in the process chain to the needs of customers. In view of the constantly changing industry environment, choosing the right software is crucial. What are your long-term objectives? The guide to software for the manufacturing industry is intended to help manufacturers find the best system. The guide discusses five key areas relevant to any successful manufacturing operation, including supply chain management software systems.
Identifying Limits — Even in Supply Chain Management
Due to lower transport costs, the shipping costs per volume or mass unit is often no longer a factor in planning.
Just-in-time systems cause two major problems in practice:
- Overloaded docks and loading ramps due to CEP services and small-scale deliveries
- Vulnerable structures (traffic jams, strikes, ...) due to long and frequent transport operations
Telematics systems alleviate the symptoms, but do not eliminate the cause. Clear guidelines put pressure on suppliers to cooperate and minimize risk by introducing additional criteria when planning the value chain. No matter how sophisticated supply chain management may be, lack of communication between customer and supplier and inadequate specifications can lead to major losses in the market or for the customer.
External influences can also show the limits of good supply chain management. This has been clearly shown by the latest developments around the corona crisis. After the rapid spread of the coronavirus led to a shutdown almost worldwide and stopped production in all industries, global supply chains were also put into question. The fact that the shutdown took place at different times in different countries meant that the delivery of goods was sometimes delayed by months, so that supply bottlenecks were one of the core problems during the crisis. This problem led to the realization that maintaining a local supply chain management can be an advantage.
What Is Supply Chain Management (SCM)?
Supply chain management is the management of the flow of goods and services and includes all processes that transform raw materials into final products. It involves the active streamlining of a business's supply-side activities to maximize customer value and gain a competitive advantage in the marketplace.
SCM represents an effort by suppliers to develop and implement supply chains that are as efficient and economical as possible. Supply chains cover everything from production to product development to the information systems needed to direct these undertakings.
How Supply Chain Management Works
Typically, SCM attempts to centrally control or link the production, shipment, and distribution of a product. By managing the supply chain, companies are able to cut excess costs and deliver products to the consumer faster. This is done by keeping tighter control of internal inventories, internal production, distribution, sales, and the inventories of company vendors.
SCM is based on the idea that nearly every product that comes to market results from the efforts of various organizations that make up a supply chain. Although supply chains have existed for ages, most companies have only recently paid attention to them as a value-add to their operations.
In SCM, the supply chain manager coordinates the logistics of all aspects of the supply chain which consists of five parts:
- The plan or strategy
- The source (of raw materials or services)
- Manufacturing (focused on productivity and efficiency)
- Delivery and logistics
- The return system (for defective or unwanted products)
The supply chain manager tries to minimize shortages and keep costs down. The job is not only about logistics and purchasing inventory. According to Salary.com, supply chain managers, “make recommendations to improve productivity, quality, and efficiency of operations.”
Improvements in productivity and efficiency go straight to the bottom line of a company and have a real and lasting impact. Good supply chain management keeps companies out of the headlines and away from expensive recalls and lawsuits.
A supply chain is the connected network of individuals, organizations, resources, activities, and technologies involved in the manufacture and sale of a product or service. A supply chain starts with the delivery of raw materials from a supplier to a manufacturer and ends with the delivery of the finished product or service to the end consumer.
SCM oversees each touchpoint of a company's product or service, from initial creation to the final sale. With so many places along the supply chain that can add value through efficiencies or lose value through increased expenses, proper SCM can increase revenues, decrease costs, and impact a company's bottom line.
- Supply chain management (SCM) is the centralized management of the flow of goods and services and includes all processes that transform raw materials into final products.
- By managing the supply chain, companies are able to cut excess costs and deliver products to the consumer faster.
- Good supply chain management keeps companies out of the headlines and away from expensive recalls and lawsuits.
Understanding the importance of SCM to its business, Walgreens Boots Alliance Inc. placed focused effort on transforming its supply chain in 2016. The company operates one of the largest pharmacy chains in the United States and needs to efficiently manage and revise its supply chain so it stays ahead of the changing trends and continues to add value to its bottom line.
As of July 5, 2016, Walgreens has invested in the technology portion of its supply chain. It implemented a forward-looking SCM that synthesizes relevant data and uses analytics to forecast customer purchase behavior, and then it works its way back up the supply chain to meet that expected demand.
For example, the company can anticipate flu patterns, which allow it to accurately forecast needed inventory for over-the-counter flu remedies, creating an efficient supply chain with little waste. Using this SCM, the company can reduce excess inventory and all of the inventories' associated costs, such as the cost of warehousing and transportation.
What is supply chain management?
Supply chain management is the practice of coordinating the various activities necessary to produce and deliver goods and services to a business’s customers. Depending on the business in question, this could involve activities such as monitoring the manufacturing of a product, shipping the product by air, sea, or land; ensuring that it meets quality standards, and delivering the product to customers.
Why is supply chain management important?
Supply chain management is important because it can help achieve several business objectives. For instance, controlling manufacturing processes can improve product quality, reducing the risk of recalls and lawsuits while helping to build a strong consumer brand. At the same time, controls over shipping procedures can improve customer service by avoiding costly shortages or periods of inventory oversupply. Overall, supply chain management provides several opportunities for companies to improve their profit margins, and is especially important for companies with large and international operations.
What are the five elements of supply chain management?
Supply chain management is often described as having five key elements: planning, sourcing of raw materials, manufacturing, delivery, and returns. The planning phase refers to developing an overall strategy for the supply chain, while the other four elements specialize in the key requirements for executing on that plan. Companies must develop expertise in all five elements in order to have an efficient supply chain and avoid expensive bottlenecks.
Key takeaway
- Supply chain management is the integrated process-oriented planning and control of the flow of goods, information and money across the entire value and supply chain from the customer to the raw material supplier.
- “Supply chain management encompasses the planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing and procurement, conversion, and all logistics management activities. Importantly, it also includes coordination and collaboration with channel partners, which can be suppliers, intermediaries, third party service providers, and customers. In essence, supply chain management integrates supply and demand management within and across companies.”
What is E-Supply chain management (E-SCM)?
E-Supply chain management is practiced in manufacturing industries. E-SCM involves using internet to carry out value added activities so that the products produced by the manufacturer meets customers’ and result in good return on investment.
E-SCM is the effective utilization of internet and business processes that help in delivering goods, services and information from the supplier to the consumer in an organized and efficient way.
Players of E-Supply Chain Management
ESCM chain consists of the following players — manufacturer, logistics companies, distributors, suppliers, retailers and customers. E-Supply Chain Management concentrates on the coordination between the various players in the chain. Coordination is very essential for the success of the organization. E-SCM focuses on reducing the inventory cost.
SCM flows can be divided into three main activities
- Product flow,
- Information flow and
- Financial flow.
1. Product Flow: The product flow includes the movement of goods from a supplier to a customer, and also any goods returned by customers.
2. Information flow: The information flow involves transmitting orders and updating the status of delivery.
3. Financial flow: The financial flow consists of credit terms, payment schedules, consignment and title ownership arrangements.
Issues dealt by Supply Chain Management
Supply chain management deals with three issues:
1. Coordinating all the order processing activities that originate at the customer level, such as the process of order generation, order acceptance, entry into order processing system, prioritization, production, and material forecast.
2. Material related activities such as scheduling, production, distribution, fulfillment and delivery and
3. Financial activities such as invoicing, billing, fund transfer and accounting.
SCM involves counter checks of materials, information and finances as they move in a process from supplier to manufacturer to wholesaler to retailer to consumer. It involves coordinating and integrating these flows both within and among companies.
Extranet, intranet, Internet are used in e-supply chain. Extranet helps to connect the participating companies. It may be the supplier or the customer. A customer can check the order status. Likewise, a supplier can collect data about inventory to know about the replenishment of the inventory.
With the help of internet, a company can advertise about the product and accept online orders. With the help of intranet, an organization can maintain communication within the boundaries of the company. It is said that the ultimate goal of any effective SCM is to reduce inventory.
E-supply chain enables to link the supplier with the customer by exchanging information instantaneously. The organization has sufficient inventory when required. There will not be any shortage or surplus of inventory. Shortage of inventory brings down the reputation of the firm. Likewise, excess inventory blocks the funds of the firm unnecessarily.
Advantages of e-supply chain management
Companies implementing E-SCM can enjoy the following advantages:
1. It improves efficiency
2. It reduces inventory
3. It reduces cost
4. It helps to take competitive advantage over competitors.
5. It increases ability to implement just-in-time delivery, increases on-time deliveries, which enhances customer satisfaction.
6. It reduces cycle time, increases revenue, by providing improved customer service.
7. It improves order fulfillment, order management, decision making, forecasting, demand planning, and warehouse/distribution activities.
8. It reduces paperwork, administrative overheads, inventory build-up, and the number of hands that handle goods on their way to the end-user i.e., the customer.
Key takeaway
- E-Supply chain management is practiced in manufacturing industries. E-SCM involves using internet to carry out value added activities so that the products produced by the manufacturer meets customers’ and result in good return on investment.
Simple bread and butter with which we eat each day, actually gets to us through several processes. In this instance, bread begins its journey with the farmer who sows the seeds and sells the wheat to the businessman, who in turn sells it to the baker who bakes the bread. This is a description of supply chain management in a nutshell. In other words, supply chain management is a network of those businesses that are interconnected with each other in either the manufacturing of products, or delivering services, that are required by consumers.
It is very important for businesses to ensure two things for their supply chain to be effective, one is the supply chain should be cost effective and second it should deliver the results on time. We began with the description of supply chain management of bread. It is a very simple one. There are many complicated supply chain management processes that differ with the size of the business as well as the complexity of the chain and the number of products involved at each step. Thus, supply chain management begins at the origin of the product or service, and ends at the delivery and consumption of the same by the end user.
There are a million things which we use or consume in our everyday lives, and supply chain management weaves through it all, creating a harmonious and efficient environment. Any break in this chain can actually result in disruption of the system with a domino like effect. Supply chain management is made up of a few components that are very important as well as critical to the system. We shall discuss each of the components in brief.
This is one of the most important stages. Before the beginning of the entire supply chain, it is essential to finalise the strategies and put them into place. Checking the demand for the product or service, checking the viability, costing, profit, and manpower etc., are vital. Without a proper plan or strategy in place, it will be well-nigh impossible for the business to achieve effective and long term benefits. Therefore, enough time has to be devoted to this phase. Only after the finalisation of the plans and consideration of all pros and cons, can one proceed further. Every business needs a plan or blueprint or a roadmap based on which the strategies are made. Planning helps to identify the demand and supply trends in the market and this, in turn, helps to create a successful supply chain management system.
The world today is dominated by a continuous flow of information. In order to be successful, it is essential that a business stays abreast with all the latest information about the various aspects of its production. The market trends of supply and demand for a particular product can be best understood if the information is properly and timely disseminated through the many levels of the business. Information is crucial in a knowledge-based world economy, and ignorance about any aspect of business may actually spell doom for the prospects of the business.
Suppliers play a very crucial role in supply chain management systems. Products and services sold to the end user are created with the help of different sets of raw materials. It is therefore necessary that suitable quality raw materials are procured at cost effective rates. If a supplier is unable to supply on time, and within the stipulated budget, the business is bound to suffer losses and gain a negative reputation.
It is crucial that a company procures good quality resources so it can create good quality products and maintain its reputation in the market. This necessitates a strong role for suppliers in the supply chain management system.
For a highly effective supply chain management system it is essential that an inventory is kept and thoroughly maintained. An inventory means the ready list of items, raw materials and other essentials required for the product or service. This list has to be regularly updated to demarcate available stock and required stock. Inventory management is critical to the function of supply chain management, because without proper inventory management the production, as well as sale of the product, is not possible. Businesses have now started to pay more attention to this component simply because of its impact on the supply chain.
Production is one among the most important aspects of this system. It is only possible when all the other components of the supply chain are in tandem with each other. For the process of production to start it is essential that proper planning and supply of goods, as well as the inventory, are well maintained. The production of goods is followed by testing, packaging and the final preparation for delivery of the finished product.
Any business, that wants to survive as well as flourish, needs a location which is profitable for the business. Take for example, a carbonated drink factory is set up in an area where water supply is scarce. Water is a basic necessity of such business. The lack of water could hamper the production as well as affect the goodwill of the company. A business cannot survive if it has to share an already scarce raw material with the community. Hence, a suitable location, which is well connected, and very close to the source of essential resources for production is vital to a business’ prosperity. The requirement and availability of manpower must also be considered while setting up a business unit.
Transportation is vital in terms of carrying raw materials to the manufacturing unit and delivering the final product to the market. At each stage, timely transportation of goods is mandatory to sustain a smooth business process. Any business which pays attention to this component, and takes good care of it, will benefit from the production and transportation of its goods on time.
It is essential that a company works towards a safe and secure transportation process. Be it in-house or a third-party vendor, the transportation management system must ensure zero damage and minimal loss in transit. A well-managed logistics system along with flawless invoicing are the two pillars of secure transportation.
Among the various components that create a strong supply chain is the facility for the return of faulty/malfunctioning goods, along with a highly responsive consumer grievance redress unit.
No one is infallible. Even a machine may malfunction once in a million times if not more. As a part of a strong business process, one may expect the return of goods under various circumstances. Even the best quality control processes may have unavoidable momentary lapses. In the case of such lapses, inevitably followed by consumer complaints, a business must, instinctively, recall the product/s and issue an apology. This not only creates a good customer bonding, but also maintains goodwill in the long run.
The eight components discussed here are interdependent and ensure a smooth supply chain management system. It ensures the success and reputation of a business. A business must focus on all these components in order to create a flawless supply chain.
Businesses that have a strong supply chain management system in place always put great emphasis on all the components listed, and also ensure that management, as well as the teams at various levels, play by the rules. Profit is the bottom line and to make sure that the business achieves it, it is essential that the supply chain does not have any gaps. Any snag should be dealt with immediately and the weak links repaired or removed.
Demand and supply are two of the most important aspects of a business. For any business to be successful, trends, with respect to demand and supply, need to be studied carefully while implementing an effective plan of execution. A supply chain management system is required not just for the timely manufacture of goods; it is also a very critical system for ensuring that consumer requirements are met effectively.
Key takeaway
- Simple bread and butter with which we eat each day, actually gets to us through several processes. In this instance, bread begins its journey with the farmer who sows the seeds and sells the wheat to the businessman, who in turn sells it to the baker who bakes the bread. This is a description of supply chain management in a nutshell. In other words, supply chain management is a network of those businesses that are interconnected with each other in either the manufacturing of products, or delivering services, that are required by consumers.
- It is very important for businesses to ensure two things for their supply chain to be effective, one is the supply chain should be cost effective and second it should deliver the results on time. We began with the description of supply chain management of bread. It is a very simple one. There are many complicated supply chain management processes that differ with the size of the business as well as the complexity of the chain and the number of products involved at each step. Thus, supply chain management begins at the origin of the product or service, and ends at the delivery and consumption of the same by the end user.
- There are a million things which we use or consume in our everyday lives, and supply chain management weaves through it all, creating a harmonious and efficient environment. Any break in this chain can actually result in disruption of the system with a domino like effect. Supply chain management is made up of a few components that are very important as well as critical to the system.
Logistics is defined as “handling an operation that involves providing labour and materials to be supplied as needed”. E-logistics is defined to be “the mechanism of automating logistics processes and providing an integrated, end-to-end fulfilment and supply chain management services to the players of logistics processes. Those logistics processes that are automated by e-logistics provide supply chain visibility and can be part of existing e-Commerce or Workflow systems in an enterprise”. (Watson Research Center, 2007).
In a typical E-logistics process, three components come into play: Request for Quotes (RFQ), Shipping and Tracking. The Logistics intercommunicate with the business process manager in an e-commerce server. It is the role of the business service manager to invoke the RFQ (request for Quote) process. After getting the response, the purchase order is updated, after which the shipping process is invoked by the business process manager. Once the products are shipped for the specified destination, the tracking number is then provided to the customer. This tracking number is mapped to the PO number in an e-commerce system. This facilitates easy tracking of shipments for the customers. This is the essential interaction of a business process manager and e-logistics.
Supply Chain Management (SCM) is the process of planning, implementing, and controlling the operations of the supply chain as efficiently as possible. A retail supply chain may pose a few challenges like “linking the consumer in the supply chain planning process, managing product life cycles, promotional planning, planning for seasonal products, determining cost-effective supply channels, forecasting (CPFR) and scheduling in a volatile economic environment and many more”. (Wipro Technologies, 2007).
The process of Supply Chain Management includes the movement and storage of all raw materials, current inventory, and the finished commodities from point-of-origin to point-of-consumption. The Supply Chain Management process embraces all related aspects including planning and management of all activities involved in sourcing, procurement, conversion, and logistics management activities. It also involves effective integration of supply and demand management, both within and between companies.
The process of Supply Chain Management is all-inclusive, comprehensive, complex and needs to address issues like:
Distribution Strategy: Centralized versus decentralized, direct shipment, Cross docking, pull or push strategies, third party logistics; Distribution Network Configuration: Supplier location, number of suppliers, production facilities, distribution centres, warehouses and customers; Inventory Management; Cash-Flow and streamlined information process i.e. integration of systems and processes through the supply chain which includes information like demand signals, forecasts, inventory and transportation etc to be shared. (Wikipedia, 2007).
In order to stay within the league of competitors and successfully compete in the global market, it is important for the organizations that they rely on “effective” supply chains and networks.
In simple words, distribution can be described as a commercial activity of transporting and selling goods from a producer to a consumer. A distributor actually serves as a middle man between the manufacturer and retailer. Today, a distribution channel may constitute one or all of the following:
• Direct selling, via email or internet.
• An agent who sells on behalf of the producer
• A distributor (or wholesaler)who sells to the retailer
• A retailer who sells goods to its customers
Distribution in effect is an important aspect of marketing. The other aspects include product management, pricing and information.
Key takeaway
- Logistics is defined as “handling an operation that involves providing labour and materials to be supplied as needed”. E-logistics is defined to be “the mechanism of automating logistics processes and providing an integrated, end-to-end fulfilment and supply chain management services to the players of logistics processes. Those logistics processes that are automated by e-logistics provide supply chain visibility and can be part of existing e-Commerce or Workflow systems in an enterprise”.
Reference Books
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