Consumers are savvy, and the online attention they give you is valuable. When prospective leads spend time with your content, it’s imperative for your business to respect their time so you can make authentic connections with your ideal customers. Authentic connections come from knowing who your customers are, what they want from your business, and how to reach them online — through your website content, social media, or email marketing.
So why does authenticity matter to your audience? Endless information and product promotions bombard consumers daily, so they need to feel they’re getting true and reliable information when they make buying decisions. It’s difficult to know what products and services will deliver quality simply based on their presence online. Getting fooled by appealing websites and high-pressure sales tactics doesn't feel great for buyers, particularly when the purchase ends up being a big waste of money.
When businesses offer consistent and personalized messaging, they build a trusted connection with consumers who can confidently make buying decisions, knowing they’re interacting with a reputable company that values their business.
If you’re reading this blog, you are probably the trustworthy and reliable business more consumers need to engage with. Luckily, contact management software (like the HubSpot CRM) provides the tools to connect with each lead in a unique way.
Efficiently managing your contacts is key to maintaining strong customer relationships, and contact management software can help you do that easily. It collects and centralizes your lead data for you, which is vital for your marketing and sales processes. You can use this data to build long-term connections with your customers (this is lead nurturing) so you can keep giving them what they want.
3 Ways to Grow Sales Using Contact Management Software
It might sound surprising that less work can mean more sales, but it’s true. You can use contact management software to redefine the way your business manages and interacts with your contacts. By changing how you engage with leads, you can better allocate the time and effort of your sales and marketing departments. Remember to let authenticity be your guide.
To get started with HubSpot CRM, you can import your contacts from an existing client database. Once you’re using the HubSpot CRM tool, though, you’ll be able to collect more leads through content, track their engagement with your content, and nurture the most qualified leads to sales conversion.
1. Using Effective Content to Grow Your Lead Numbers
A CRM works best when you understand your target audience. When you know what resonates with your audience, it’s easier for you to create content offers enticing enough for new leads to gift you their contact information (not a typo; contact information is a gift). A content offer or a call to action (CTA) is when you give the lead an opportunity to access valuable information they want in exchange for their contact details and permission to contact them with more marketing products like e-newsletters and promotional emails.
Good CTAs need to be appealing in how they’re presented and in what the desired content delivers. For example, use a visually appealing CTA button that includes the type of content your offer provides and add an incentive (like how the content will relieve pain points now) and a call to action, such as “Sign up to download the e-book.
2. Tracking Engagement to Give Consumers What They Want
Once you have all the information you need about a contact, you can follow their buying journey and see how they engage with your online marketing efforts. Ultimately, if a sale is made, you can see where the decision happened (whether it was an eye-catching infographic or an informative blog post) and better understand what you need to do to attract customers (and what you can skip next time).
3. Nurturing Contacts to Generate Better Sales Leads
Instead of building connections with leads who aren't interested in your product, your sales team can focus on qualified leads. Meanwhile, your marketing team can still deliver content to less qualified leads to move them along their buying journey.
Tools like lead scoring help you classify leads so you can assign them the right resources. For example, in cases where a lead might need more nurturing, keep them on the marketing engagement track. But if they’ve reached a sale-qualified status, your sales team can take over to complete the conversion. The automated lead scoring process assigns values to each of your marketing contacts based on how they’ve engaged with you online.
Lead scores are unique to your business; HubSpot CRM allows you to set up those unique scores. Ideally, the scoring criteria come from your sales and marketing teams’ knowledge of who your customers are and how they made their purchase decisions.
Lead scoring is important in that it helps your business create authentic connections. It highlights who is ready to connect and who is still browsing so you can offer the right information at the right time to meet individual needs.
Understanding the Power of Personalized Communication
Think of loyal customers as your golden ticket: they’ll consistently turn to you to solve their problems, buy from you more than once, and share their positive experiences with their network. All these things add up to higher customer lifetime values — which is, again, that golden ticket you’re looking for. If you’re not nurturing your leads (or letting them know how important they are to you) you’re likely relying on customers with a low customer lifetime value who are less likely to convert again — let alone advocate for your business.
CRMs help you stand out with your customers because you can personalize your communication. When you use contact management software, you save your team’s time, too. Features like automation and activity tracking make personalized communications less time-consuming — they allow you to anticipate the needs of your consumers and give them the information and responses they’re looking for at every stage of their buying journey.
Consumers will ignore generic messages. But they’ll pay attention to businesses that put effort into marketing. Go for content — like personalized email campaigns — that speaks to your leads’ specific interests. Or, promote targeted offers that show consumers you know what they want and that there are perks for their interaction efforts. To establish an even better reputation with your customers, provide tailored customer service interactions.
5 Quick Tips to Start Using HubSpot CRM Features for Tailored Customer Engagement
Contact management software offers many ways for your business to outperform the competition. Here are five ways you can use the HubSpot CRM to reach your sales goals, with simple instructions to help you get started finding and using these options.
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Customer segmentation allows you to categorize your audience based on various criteria, such as purchase history, demographics, or behaviour patterns. If this is your goal, the Lists tool in HubSpot is your new best friend: it can help you take small snapshots of segments of your entire CRM. Each segment is unique, and you can then use the snapshots to create highly relevant content or offers that are most effective for engaging and converting leads in each segment. Specifically, you’ll want to use these niche lists to guide where and with what content you send newsletters or conversion-focused emails, create workflows to update contact records, and inform what personas you create — the possibilities are endless.
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Email tracking provides insights into how customers interact with your communications. When you know which emails are opened and which links are clicked, you can refine your content strategies to align with customer interests.
And, more good news is that it’s easy to track email interaction through both your contacts and your email tools. You can look at your contacts individually to see when they interacted with you and what content made them engage with you. Simply choose the contact from the contact list, and you have all the information you need to continue to nurture leads authentically. You can make the right next move, whether that means offering more helpful information so they can do more research or sending a follow-up email to close a deal.
You can track customer engagement using email marketing data, too. You can find email-specific interactions for each email you send. All you have to do is select the email you want information from and view performance from that screen. Knowing how well an email has resonated with leads helps you design future emails using the successful element of past sends.
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Automation in customer relationship management means maintaining consistent and timely communication without manual input. The HubSpot CRM automation capabilities make tasks like follow-up emails, appointment scheduling, and customer feedback requests straightforward to create and track, which maintains authentic connections to your customers. These tools use workflows, sequences, and chatflows to make your sales tasks much easier to complete. Your ability to close deals increases because automation helps you to not drop the ball on important interactions and gives your consumers fast access to the information they need to make a buying decision.
For quick reference, here’s what these three automation tools do: Workflows help you offer the right content at the right time based on consumer activity triggers. Once a contact has met trigger criteria –such as downloading an e-book– they’ll be sent the content that addresses their needs. Sequences let you send targeted, timed emails to nurture contacts over time. Chatflows let customers start live conversations with you.
Automation tools are powerful, but don't worry; there is plenty of help available to help you learn to use HubSpot automation to build more authentic consumer connections.
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Analytics that provide information like customer engagement levels, conversion rates, and overall satisfaction help your marketing and sales teams change their strategies as needed. In HubSpot, shareable reports and dashboards make it easy for both the sales and marketing teams to see and understand your successes and missteps — quality information you can act on as needed.
You have two go-to options to find the analytics you need. Use the Reporting feature to get a broad view of performance overall (ready-made and customizable reports will show you exactly the information you need with a few clicks). For content-specific reporting, like blog post engagement, you can choose a published post and select the performance tab from the details of that specific post.
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Feedback from real customers lets you know when you’ve succeeded or failed at an interaction. When you can access accurate customer responses, you can make sure negative experiences are recognized and resolved, and you can reward positive comments and reviews to boost customer retention and foster loyalty to your brand.
Surveys are a great way to get the feedback you’re looking for. In HubSpot, you can design surveys based on the feedback you’re seeking. Then, you can add surveys as pop-ups on your landing pages or create a feedback-based email marketing campaign. You can collect and analyze the responses by clicking the specific survey name.
Setting Up Contact Management Software Takes Time…
…but the uptick in customer interaction, sales, and long-term consumer loyalty makes it well worth the effort. We understand if you’re a bit overwhelmed thinking about using your HubSpot CRM. It takes time and practice to use the HubSpot CRM tools effectively for your business. We’ve been using them for a long time, and we know there is plenty to learn! Check out the Tangible Words HubSpot Help Centre and HubSpot User Group for more help with HubSpot.
A HubSpot expert can help you exponentially increase sales growth using your HubSpot CRM. Join the HubSpot Boot Camp.
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