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How Essential Is A Zoho Contact Management Strategy To You As An Inbound Marketer?

A Zoho MarTech Agency

Ever stared at the cloud and swore you saw the heavens taking shapes of things you see around you?

Well, there is a word for it – pareidolia. You might think it is a manifestation of our obsession with the things around, however, it’s a manifestation of how our brains are hardwired to process every piece of information according to known patterns and familiar shapes.

In other words, pareidolia is a fancy word for when our mind’s playing card tricks on us; but that’s not the point of this article. This article aims to help you understand just how much our minds are drawn to order. Order is simply the way to make sense of the environment around us. It’s so dire that even if it’s not actually present, we create it by ourselves to fill in the vacuum.

The question is: if our minds are naturally drawn towards order, why should you leave your contact database in chaos? Are you hoping some pattern will develop from the random data you’ve stored? That’s hardly the case, except you have an automatic customer management tool. In this article, you’ll learn what it means to have such a tool and the entire concept of contact management.
Zoho Contact Management 2

What Is A Zoho Contact Management Strategy?

A contact management strategy is essentially the formation of systematic processes to effectively file and sort your customer data to extract meaningful insights. Since we’re in the era of software development, contact management has become digitized and automated, using software programs. These software programs are tools to help you put your house in order so that when you finally decide to lay on the bed of lead nurturing, it would be neat and smooth.

If you adopt the inbound marketing strategy, an ideal customer relationship will demand a lot of personalization from you. Keeping tabs on your prospects and customers might be overwhelming. However, a well-managed contact database will help you do this effectively, as you would be able to track every phase of your contacts’ buyer’s journey. This is done by aggregating the several channels of lead engagement into a single box where you can monitor emails, chats as well as deals and proposals.

There are four core pillars of an effective contact management strategy that you should consider either while picking a tool or setting the goals you want to achieve through the strategy.

Contacts

Data Management

Lead Nurturing

Conversion

Contacts

This is a collective term for every entity you consider as a prospect, lead, or customer you’ll engage with in the process of running your business. They are the reason why you are in business and all your actions should be centered around them. They come in different forms and a good contact management strategy will compartmentalize them according to set criteria such as demographics, stage in the buyer’s journey, to mention a few.

Data Management

The Butterfly Effect is well pronounced when it comes to contact management a little piece of irrelevant data can shift the scale of your strategy. You, therefore, have to keep your database neat, ensuring you only keep data that are needed there. A good practice is to also allow your database to evolve with industry trends as well as the progress of your leads.

Lead Nurturing

Leads are delicate like water lilies. You ignore them too much, and they wither. In the same vein, too much attention can also scare them off. This is where the idea of nurturing comes from because you have to be diligent in engaging your leads with personalized messages. When your marketing and sales efforts create the impression of being heard in the mind of your leads, it’s easier to guide them further into your conversion pipeline.

Conversion

Conversion is the final lap of your contact management efforts. It’s at this stage that you clinch the prize. The success rate at this stage also helps you to whether or not you’ve been meticulous enough in nurturing your leads.

It’s okay if all these feel like a lot to handle effectively. This is where Customer Relationship Management (CRM) tools come in. Here are several ways CRM tools can come to your aid.

How Customer Relationship Management (CRM) Tools Can Make Your Life Easier As An Inbound Marketer

Increased Productivity

With the automation of your contact strategy, you can avoid doing the repetitive tasks that characterize contact management. This can include sending emails as a lead follow-up, or scheduling appointments and recurring webinars.

Improved Decision-making

A good CRM tool gives you deep insights into the data of your contacts through analytics and allows you to make informed decisions. This can be in the form of daily reports, real-time data, or contact status. These will allow you to know the performance of your campaigns.

Reduced Expenditure

The cost of lead nurturing is greatly reduced by CRM tools. In the past, you’ll need different tools and different personnel to manage emails, customer engagement, and schedules. All of these have however been put into one place where you can do everything with ease.

Improved Synergy Between Teams

As your business continues to grow, you will have to divide your staff into teams for improved productivity. Communication between members of the same team or members of different teams can be made seamless with CRM tools as each staffer is only a dashboard away (and that’s shorter than waiting for a response to an email)

Increased Customer Satisfaction

CRM tools can also automatically collect data about your contacts and upgrade them as appropriate. This ensures that you have up-to-date information about the status of leads and you can leverage this to send personalized messages.

Your choice of CRM tool goes a long way in determining your success rate as an inbound marketer because the contact management strategy is the glue that holds all your other strategies together. Thus, you need to consider all-encompassing tools like Zoho to gain access to a wide range of features and more opportunities to test and optimize.

Click this link today to learn how our team of experts can help you set up your contact management system.

Inbound Marketing Powered by Zoho MarTech

If you have experience with Zoho’s marketing software stack ( MarTech ) and understand this inbound marketing strategy foundations, you have a very powerful marketing starter pack ready to be configured and unleashed!

QuakeCinch can always help with your Zoho Marketing initiatives, just reach out to us!!