What is CRM Automation?
CRM automation is the ability to automate storing, accessing, and leveraging every detail about your leads and clients in a customer relationship management software.
Names, contact info, sales behavior, purchase history, notes on past conversations and more can be at your fingertips for sales and marketing automation when you use a solid CRM software to run your business. Even better, you can use CRM data to multiply your lead generation and client conversions all while saving time to grow your company.
How Do You Benefit From Automating CRM Tasks?
With sales and marketing automation campaigns pulling info from your CRM, you can:
- Set automatic follow-ups with potential clients
- Track (and nurture) customers in your sales pipeline
- Personalize marketing campaigns
- Build long term relationships through drip campaigns and tailored offerings
- All this and more…without having to lift a finger
CRMs become extremely important as your business grows. Keeping track of lead and customer information can be tricky. If you aren’t careful you may find yourself in this pickle:
- You want to grow your business (to more than a handful of clients)
- More clients means more info to track, follow-ups to make, and invoices to run down
- Stress and chaos take hold, details fall through the cracks, quality suffers
- Clients get upset, post bad reviews, don’t pay on time or leave all-together
- Now you’re back to having a handful of customers
Just grinding away won’t help your business grow. It just builds stress and steals time away from the big picture decisions that could take your business to the next level. Keap’s sales and marketing automation platform with CRM is the tool of choice for hundreds of thousands of entrepreneurs who want to grow their business while saving over 10 hours every week!
Watch this video on Keap’s Easy Automations for a quick example:
23 Everyday Tasks to Set and Forget with CRM Automation
It’s easy to get lost in the sea of options when you have the power of robust CRM automations. To make things easier, we’ve curated this list of some of our favorites.
Before you begin, we recommend looking through the list and taking note of some strategies that could turn your CRM automations into your hardest working employee.
Sales
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New lead follow up
We mentioned that Keap users in particular save 10 hours a week. One of the biggest time-consuming tasks in any business is follow-up. A lead has shown interest, but if you don’t reach out quickly, they may move on to the competitors. With CRM automation, you can send new leads an automatic welcome email when they fill out your contact lead form.
You could also automatically invite that lead to schedule an appointment, send them your latest promos, or begin a long-term drip marketing campaign to nurture them for years to come.
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New appointment scheduling
When a new lead or client begins getting your CRM automated follow-ups, a high-converting strategy is to send them a link that lets them immediately schedule an appointment with you. You and your clients no longer have to hash things out over email, hammer out what days are available, or play phone tag. Once they have the link (which can be used on landing pages, sales and marketing emails, and social posts) they can not only confirm their appointment but cancel or reschedule when necessary.
Speaking of which...
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Reschedule existing appointments
It’s pretty likely you or your clients will need to reschedule an appointment at some point. Done manually, this is a huge source of irritation. You reach out to the other party, everyone needs to look over their calendars, and it’s a headache and a drain on sales and productivity.
A solid scheduling automation software should allow you to easily manage your appointments. For instance, Keap users can simply change appointments from their dashboard and clients can click the “Reschedule” link found at the bottom of their confirmation emails where they can choose an alternate date and time.
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Thank you message after purchase
Quickly engaging with your clients after registration or purchase can be the tipping point that creates long-term brand loyalty. When users get a quick thank you response, it not only keeps you top of mind, but it reinforces the idea that you are there for them and appreciate their business. Everyone likes to be thanked, your clients are no exception.
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Assign new contacts to owners
Got a solid team or sales, marketing, or support members? With all the moving parts that come with a successful sales and marketing lifecycle you need to be agile. If responsibility for a lead or customer shifts from one team member to another you can easily assign or reassign the owner of a contact record in Keap in just a few clicks.
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Move contacts in the pipeline
Pipeline automation provides the ability to automate key steps in your sales pipeline process. You can keep your leads moving through your sales process by configuring automation that triggers when a new lead enters or exits a stage.
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Add or remove tags in pipeline stages
Quickly tag and segment contacts to trigger CRM automations that are personalized based on client data and activity.
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Create tasks in pipeline stages
Your sales pipeline shouldn’t be a mystery. Keap’s sales pipeline management tool makes it easy to not only track clients through every stage of your sales pipeline but assign tasks to specific team members based on the client’s stage and behavior.
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Post-appointment follow up
Once a lead has engaged and scheduled an appointment, it’s time to follow-up. Through Keap’s customizable dashboard you can easily keep track of everything, and set actions like appointment reminders up to and including a last minute text message one hour before you’re set to meet.
We’re all busy, take care of your client and they’ll be with you for life.
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Lead scoring
Lead scoring allows you to target and segment the leads most likely to buy. You can use your CRM data to organize contacts into groups and build automated campaigns like the example below:
- The lead requests a free report on your website and becomes a contact
- Later, the contact registers and attends a webinar
- A week down the road, that contact takes an online assessment
- In time, the contact requests a quote or requests contact
- Contact purchases, HUZZAH!
Marketing
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Contact form follow up
When a lead fills out your contact form, immediately send them a welcome email, confirmation, or appointment invite. Don’t waste your marketing momentum.
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Newsletter sign up follow up
Boost your brand image with beautiful, modern templates that are easy to implement and help you create engaging marketing newsletters and broadcasts.
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Ask for a Google review after job is complete
About 76% of customers trust online reviews as much as recommendations from family and friends, so reviews’ power in your sales process can’t be ignored. Speaking of “can’t be ignored”, Google’s impact as the native review channel for users is effectively measured as infinity vs. a fixed number. You need to make sure that each and every happy customer is shouting their satisfaction from the digital rooftops.
Luckily for Keap users, the platform’s Google Reviews Dashboard Widget makes it easy to generate and share a custom link you can share with clients, making it easy and quick to leave a review.
Learn more about the Google Reviews Dashboard Widget.
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Congratulate customers on their birthdays
It’s your client’s birthday. Make them feel seen and valued. Calendar celebrations are a great way to stay top of mind with your contacts. If you’re leveraging your CRM effectively you’ll have client birthdays (and even anniversaries) on your calendar with automation set to let them know you’re thinking of them (and maybe offer a birthday coupon at the same time).
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Free eBook delivery
Useful info is always valuable. Ebooks and blogs are a great way to leverage content for recurring marketing. By establishing yourself as a thought leader and trusted brand, You become the industry standard for your clients.
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Event registration and follow up
Keap allows you to easily build intuitive registration forms. Once you have your user’s email addresses and name, you can automate a personalized campaign to send their registration info, additional resources (maps, logins, etc.), and reminders about the event.
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Ask for referrals
Reviews are powerful, but referrals convert on an entirely different level. Consumers trust recommendations from people they know above all else. You worked hard to get those happy customers, don’t let their goodwill go to waste. Referral marketing is a low-cost (sometimes no-cost) way to grow revenue and build trust using only your existing audience.
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Collect payments
Your time shouldn’t be spent running down every outstanding invoice, Not only can you add a “Pay Now” button right in the invoice messaging you send, but you can build automatic follow-up reminders to pay (see below).
Plus, you can stay organized by connecting your billing software with Keap’s CRM so payment activity is tied directly to your contacts.
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Reminder to pay invoice
Use Keap’s automation platform and CRM to follow-up with forthcoming and outstanding invoices through timed and action-triggered messaging.
For example:
- You send an invoice
- Then you send a reminder a couple of days before the invoice is due
- Another message on the day the due date 12 pm
- Two days after the invoice is due if the invoice is still outstanding the follow-up campaign begins.
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Follow up on failed charges
Build automations triggered by a failed purchase or declined credit card. Set up the sequence to immediately send engagement and reminder messages. End the headache of manually chasing down clients and managing subscriptions.
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Abandoned cart reminders
Whether a customer was distracted, had second thoughts or encountered technical difficulties, a simple reminder email, or even a promotional offer, may move many of these almost-purchasers to become loyal customers. If you plan to build follow-up automations, we recommend employing these proven techniques:
- Limited inventory alerts
- Limited time discount notifications
- Highlight advantages like money back guarantees or free shipping
- Include visuals and text descriptions in your follow up messaging
- Include multiple links back to the cart
- Include customer service contact information
- Never wait for longer than 24 hours
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Ask for product reviews
We already mentioned the importance of Google reviews, but it’s important you understand the WHY behind reviews. It’s not just about stars on a website.
What are the top three reasons to seek reviews?
- Building trust: Give shoppers input from an unbiased source. More high ratings also help Google trust your website more, resulting in better visibility on the search engine results.
- Increasing conversions: Products with five or more reviews have a 270 percent higher chance of being purchased than products with zero reviews.
- Low-cost content: Prominently showcasing reviews from existing customers is one of the best ways to quickly gain the attention and trust of new leads.
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Recommend related products
Think about how you really shop. You may go to the store for dish soap, but you also come home with ice cream and prosecco.
Why?
Because you were already suggestible to the notion of making a purchase. During that suggestable period, you saw other products that interested you. This is the power of timely product recommendations. The goliath Amazon even attributes 35% of its total revenue to product recommendations and cross-selling.
Payments
E-Commerce
Choosing a CRM Automation Tool
There is no shortage of client relationship management platforms on the market. What really matters is which one has the features that suit your goals. If you’re running a business and you’re ready to grow sales while saving time and reducing chaos in your day to day life, you’ll need a way to:
- Organize your leads All your lead, client information, and business communication, organized and segmented, in one place.
- Automate daily work End repetitive tasks and benefit from sales and marketing automation in a CRM with our easy and advanced automation builders.
- Always follow-up Use templates, automatic emails, and SMS messages to quickly follow up with leads.
- Close more leads Create a repeatable sales process from appointments to quotes and win more business.
- Get paid faster Create custom invoices and checkout forms from your CRM and get paid faster.
- Impress your clients Keap’s client-focused features result in happy clients who leave happy referrals
If you’d like to see what you can do with all these features in just a couple of weeks, activate your Free Trial now. Start permanently automating away repetitive tasks and time-wasters while growing your sales revenue with Keap.
