S3 Blog

Another great week at S3 CRM

We have been busy refining the email marketing tool and will be rolling out new improvements today.

We are also working on some end user feedback for the project management tool and address book which should make it easier to add new users and employees at the same time.

Work is still progressing on the on-line tours, for this we would like some feedback from yourselves as to what tours you feel you will benefit from?  Let us know via this blog

I  hope you are also enjoying reading our articles and that they are of use to you, let us know if there are any specific topics you want us to address?

Hope you all have a good weekend, catch you next week

Thanks

Sarah

For anyone who doesn’t know blogging is another term for the phrase ‘web log’ which is very much like an online diary. However unlike a diary a blog can be seen by anyone as they are published on websites for other people to read. Blogs can be about anything and there is no limit to the amount of posts the owner of a blog can make each day or week. Many blogs have links within them which will direct the reader to another website which may be selling goods or services, often for the purpose of turning this visitor into a customer.

As the success of blogs is rapidly rising it is no wonder that businesses are recognising just how valuable a blog can be to promote themselves and create more customers in the process. If you are wondering what the benefits are for marketing your business with a blog here are some of them:-

1. Blogging is free – the only thing you have to spend on a blog is your time, or you could get one of your employees to run your businesses blog for you.

2. Blogging is easy – there are an abundance of blogging sites on the internet all of which are straightforward to use, the majority even have mini tutorials about how you go about setting up and running a blog.

3. You can reach a much wider audience then before – there is nothing wrong with having a great deal of presence online and the more people that read your blog the better. Research the market and see what other kind of blogs are out there.

4. Blogging is instant – you can write your blog in the morning and have it online almost instantly, so anyone who reads your blog will be able to see these updates.

5. Blogging can help you to build links with other websites and blogs – this means that your network can grow as you place more links on your blog all pointing back to your businesses website.

6. Blogs are one of the most popular forms of communication on the web and any business that has a blog is seen to be keeping up to date with technology and this is seen by consumers as a good thing.

As you can see creating and running a blog can be highly beneficial for a business as not only is it a very cheap form of advertising but it can quite easily generate more visitors to your businesses website who will hopefully spend money there.

So why not set up a blog for your business and see how many new customers it can create for you. Things might be slow to begin with but the more posts you have on your blog, the more chance there is that people surfing the web will see it and want to know more about what our business does. If for some reason your blog doesn’t do as well as you would have hoped don’t worry – you won’t have spent money to find this out.

Businesses of all sizes need an accurate way of keeping and maintaining customer records which hold details from quoting and invoicing to project planning and this is where CRM software comes in very useful. CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a way of identifying and understanding a customers needs whilst improving your relationship with that customer leading to increased profits and customer satisfaction.

There are many different CRM solutions available on the market but how do you pick which is the right one for your business? Here are the top 10 things that you should be looking out for in your CRM solution –

1. Ease of use – this is the most important aspect of any type of software, after all if you can’t use something quickly and easily it can eat away at your time, meaning precious hours are lost figuring out how to get your customer information on screen!

2. Does it fit into our business – if you are looking for a CRM solution you need to make sure that it will be easy to integrate into your business. Solutions that take too much time to set up and do not do everything you need them to are not worth it.

3. Features – features should be relevant to your business i.e. if you create invoices you should be able to do this on your software – the same goes for creating quotes.

4. Marketing tools – does your software solution offer marketing tools such as average revenue per customer? Such tools can help you identify where your custom comes from and make it easier to plan marketing campaigns from this information.

5. Financial planning – if you can see your best customers and see their pattern of re-ordering you financial projections are more accurate.

6. Accessibility – you might find that you need to access your customer data when you are not in the office, or even the country, so choose a CRM solution that will allow you access to your business information from where ever you are in the world – providing there is an internet connection.

7. Project planning tools – these are invaluable if your business has several projects open at the same time. Your CRM solution should have a way in which you can plan projects and monitor them to see that they are on target to be completed in time.

8. Staff calendars – these should be integrated into your CRM solution so you can see what your workforce is doing on one screen.

9. The ability to see your business at a glance – do you have to open up endless screens to see outstanding invoices, current projects, quotes to chase etc? Choose a CRM solution that will let you see an overview of what is happening in your business on one screen.

10. Reasonably priced – this is self explanatory, if you are paying too much for your CRM solution it is not cost effective, choose a solution that has all of the above and doesn’t cost the earth too.