Zoho CRM Plus - Getting started guide for Marketing teams
A day in the life of a marketer involves diverse responsibilities. Zoho CRM Plus has all it takes for your marketing teams to reach out to your prospects with the right messages, build a strong social media presence, and get meaningful returns on your marketing spends. This guide focuses on the best practices for your marketing teams on leveraging Zoho CRM Plus to execute their day-to-day marketing activities.
SalesIQ - Connect with your website visitors instantly
Business websites play a vital role in generating leads online. Every time you have a visitor on your website, it is important that your sales reps be present to instantly connect with your visitors and answer their questions quickly. This can be a strong incentive for conversion.
SalesIQ in Zoho CRM Plus is a live chat interface that helps you connect and engage with your website visitors right from within your website, live chat with them, and track their website interests. SalesIQ helps your reps pitch relevant sales and turn site visitors into profitable leads.
To understand how this is done, let us consider the following example: Zylker Fashions, a merchandise store has embedded the SalesIQ code into their online website.
Live Chat and Zobot
Let's say Zylker gets a website visitor. SalesIQ sends a notification to your sales agent, and they can instantly connect and engage with the visitor via the live-chat window. Alternatively, the visitor can be also be attended by Zobot, a chat bot in SalesIQ that can auto-engage with visitors a soon as they land on Zylker's website.
On capturing key details of what the visitor came looking for, SalesIQ pushes the information directly to CRM, where the visitor gets added as a lead. The sales rep who gets assigned this lead will now have better customer context, such as knowing lead sources, and reading transcripts of leads' chat sessions, which will help Zylker pitch relevant deals.
Visitor tracking
In addition to engaging their website visitors, Zylker also wants to make sure that they are engaging with the right leads so they are more likely to win their deals.
SalesIQ helps Zylker meet this requirement by providing them with visitor tracking, which identifies leads based on their website interactions. Visitor tracking is facilitated by two comprehensive views—the Rings view and the List view. These views help Zylker rank their leads, enabling them to prioritize the ones most likely to convert.
Rings view
Zylker has chosen the Rings view, under the Visitors online tab in SalesIQ. In this view, Zylker can organize its visitor base around four concentric rings. This is done by defining the specific conditions for tracking their website visitors, starting with the amount of time each visitor has spent on Zylker. These conditions can be specified under the "Customize" menu.
Some of the details that can be captured and visualized with the Rings view are:
- Name or ID assigned to each visitor
- Time spent by the visitor on Zylker's website
- The country of the visitor
More on visitor tracking here.
Here's how you embed the SalesIQ code into your website:
In your Zoho CRM Plus tab, access SalesIQ.
2. Check the Add Live Chat box below the code snippet. This option is enabled by default. Uncheck the option if you just want to track your website visitors and not have the chat widget enabled on your website.
3. Paste the code snippet into the existing code in your website's source file anywhere before the </body> tag.
4. Save and publish the changes made to your website.
SalesIQ Chat is now configured and ready to use for your website.
Import visitor information directly into your CRM with webforms
In addition to SalesIQ, webforms are another effective source to link your website visitors to your CRM.
Let's consider the following scenario:
Zylker wants to analyze their website visitors. They have embedded web forms into the "Contact us" page of their website to collect basic visitor information, such as their name, email, and phone number, and what they want from their interactions with Zylker. In this way, Zylker can also retain potential leads even after they've left the website.
Every time a visitor fills in the form with their information, not only are they captured by webforms, but are also passed on to Zylker's CRM where they get added as leads under the "Leads" module. By capturing key lead details such as the lead source, specific sales queries, pricing range and so on, webforms help the sales teams to get better follow-up context for each lead, while their marketing teams can send targeted email messages to the right leads just in time.
Measure the effectiveness of your ad spends by linking Zoho CRM Plus with Google Ads
Aside from direct website visits, Google Ads is another effective channel to generate leads, however it involves a little more of a financial investment.
For our example, let's say Zylker uses Google Ads to drive potential customers to their website, and they want to know how much of their investment in Google Ads is actually converting to sales. To help solve this problem, Zylker chooses to link their Google Ads account with Zoho CRM Plus.
Let's say a visitor types in the keyword "quirky fashion" on Google and Zylker Fashions shows up on the search results. The visitor clicking on Zylker Fashions is taken to their website, where they fill in their information. This information is passed on to Zylker's CRM, where the visitor gets added as a lead. This journey from Zylker's website to CRM happens because of the integration code that the webform uses to pass on the visitor's details.
With the Google Ads data inside their CRM, Zylker can now get complete context on the lead, such as the lead source, ad group, and the ad spend in relation to the ROI. Plus, they can view and manage a set of reports on sales that were initiated through Google Ads.
For all offline conversations, Zylker's marketers can view their CRM information inside their Google Ads account, and they can:
- See how clicks on their ads led to sales made in the offline world, over the phone, or via a sales rep.
- Understand which clicks drive the most profitable sales.
which they can have web forms implemented in their top marketing pages and plan their Google Ads budget wisely.
Manage your social media presence across different networks using Social
A strong social media presence is essential for any business to connect with its customers to increase awareness about the brand and ultimately boost sales. Likewise, many customers today turn to social media to share their product experiences.
Zoho CRM Plus gives you Social, a complete social media management platform for businesses to manage multiple social networks like Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, LinkedIn, and Google My Business. It allows marketers to schedule unlimited social media posts, monitor industry keywords on social media, track crucial brand metrics, and collaborate with teams to discuss marketing efforts from a single interface.
In Zylker's example, Zylker Fashions and Zylker Accessories can be considered as the brand, and both these brands are hosted in Social under a single portal, called Zylker.
- Brands represent the social channels for a single business unit. A brand gets automatically created in your Portal as soon as you connect your first social media channel to Social.
- A portal is a space that hosts all your brands inside Social. You can connect and manage your social media channels of different brands on Social.
Let's see how Zylker utilizes Social to stay on top of social media discussions.
Social monitor
Zylker Fashions eventually becomes popular. A lot of people have been mentioning Zylker on social media. To keep track of this new attention, Zylker uses the social monitor.
The social monitor is exclusively designed to help you stay alert on conversations that are potentially discussing your product, so you can seize the opportunity and pitch a sale just in time. Under the Monitor tab, Zylker has created multiple columns to follow and keep track of their page follows, @mentions, and hashtags that are relevant to their business.
Since there will now be people regularly discussing Zylker as a brand online, and Zylker can now start participating in these conversations, they can easily increase the engagement with these posts by liking, commenting, or retweeting them directly from each column.
More on Social monitor here.
Strategized publishing with SmartQ
Capturing audience behavior is the natural next step after engaging with them on social media. A good marketer uses the best insights to time your social media content to increase traction to your posts.
SmartQ in Zoho CRM Plus gives you suggestions of the best times to schedule your content, based on how your audience has engaged with you across different social networks. Not only will you be able to see the list of best engagement times for your customers across networks, but also the percentage of the top engagers that the post is likely to reach if you schedule it for that time.
Live Stream
Your brand engagement is best effective when you get real-time information on how your brand (or business) is being identified on social media channels. This includes getting to see posts where you have been mentioned, highly liked, shared, or commented on.
With Live Stream in Social, you can follow a stream of social activities to learn how your audience is interacting with your brand, right from your Social home page. Live Stream will show up once you have connected Social with all your brand's social channels. Zylker's live stream has two brands, Zylker Fashions and Zylker Accessories, displayed in separate columns.
Under these two columns, Zylker follows a stream of social activities such as likes, mentions, follows, replies, and posts to track how people are interacting with their brands. Insights on these social activities and their previous conversations with customers help Zylker get complete customer context, adding more value to their future conversations.
Connections and collaboration
Anyone who engages with Zylker automatically becomes a connection, which can be monitored under the Connections tab. Clicking on a social activity will display the number of times each connection has engaged with Zylker, and they can reach out to them instantly.
Let's say Amelia, a fashion enthusiast starts following Zylker Fashions on Twitter. Amelia will now be added as a connection, and this activity goes on Zylker's live stream. By clicking on this social activity, Live Stream can immediately determine if Amelia has previously engaged with Zylker, view her followers, and the people she follows. With Zylker's CRM information tied to Social, they can also check if Amelia has already been added as a lead or a contact. If not, she can be added as a lead directly from Live Stream.
You can also choose to follow your connections. You can then discuss your plan of action for that particular connection with your team members. This can be found under the collaboration tab.
Each social channel has its category of actions:
Facebook: Visitor Posts, Mentions, Comments, Messages, and Likes
Twitter: Mentions, Messages, Retweets, and Replies
Instagram: Comments
Effective email marketing with Campaigns
Your sales efforts convert to fruitful business only when your sales teams have a clear vision of your prospects' needs. In the process of building your brand, it is important to maintain coordination between your CRM and your email marketing.
Your Campaigns and CRM information come together to help you reach out to your leads, prospects, and customers, and to measure the outcome of your marketing efforts.
With Campaigns, you can create, send, and track email campaigns that help you build a strong customer base. With pre-made email templates, an easy-to-use drag and drop email workflow editor, automation tools, and real-time analytics, Campaigns has everything you need to grow your business with email marketing.
Let's look into some of the signature features that Campaigns has to offer to improve your marketing efforts and boost sales.
A/B test campaigns
A/B testing (also known as split testing) is a feature in Campaigns to help you test two variations of your email campaign among small groups of your customer base, with the ultimate goal of choosing the best version in terms of garnered results.
Let's say Zylker wants to plan an email campaign for their Thanksgiving sale. Ideally, Zylker's marketing teams will create an email campaign, send it, and wait for their recipients to respond to the email so they can measure the outcome. However, is it really as simple and straightforward as it sounds?
How can Zylker be sure that their email campaigns have effectively reached their audience when they can't identify which aspect of their email has been mostly focused and clicked on? What if there was another email version that could have generated better leads for their Thanksgiving sale? To get answers to these questions, Zylker chooses to test their two different versions of the same email campaign by sending them to a pair of tests groups, using the A/B test campaigns so they can identify the email campaign that is more likely to succeed.
A/B testing is basically done considering three parameters: subject line, email content, and sender details. These inputs can add great value to your email marketing strategy when implemented properly. Based on the results, Zylker can pick the winning version and have it sent to the rest of their audience.
Note: If you get inconclusive results from the test, the marketer can manually pick their preferred version and have it sent to your audience.
Email marketing automation
From welcoming your contacts to engaging them through your journey, creating a good brand impression is only possible with the right plan. Email workflows from Zoho Campaigns help you build strategies that work well for all your email marketing needs. Just pick your strategy, set up a workflow, activate it, and let email marketing automation do the rest!
Campaigns brings you a new drag-and-drop interface for creating email workflows. This allows you to add flexibility to your email marketing automation by providing you with multiple triggers, processes, and action options for use in your workflows—all through a simple drag-and-drop workflow builder.
In addition to the new drag-and-drop interface, Campaigns also has a range of pre-made email automation templates for ecommerce, user onboarding, lead nurturing, re-engagement, and customer retention.
Workflow triggers
The conditional workflows help you automate certain actions—like email notifications and task and field updates—once the specified conditions have been met. The new drag-and-drop interface opens up many more trigger options for you to use in your email workflows. Notably, your leads and contacts no longer need to be part of an already configured email list to initiate an email workflow. With the new update, you can now initiate an email workflow not just when a contact is added to a mailing list, but also say when someone fills in and submits a form, or when a customer opens your email, or when you update a field in your customer's record.
Workflow actions
The drag-and-drop interface also comes with multiple triggers that your email workflow can now respond to:
Form submissions: When customers sign up for your business via websites or promotion emails
Email actions: When customers open/read/respond to your business emails
Field updates: When you update any field on the customers' record page
You can also select the series of actions that follow a trigger. This could be sending a follow-up email for customers who made a purchase, performing beta tests on customer emails, updating certain fields in CRM, creating tasks, or pushing leads to CRM.
You can also choose how you want to end your workflows, with actions like:
Push to CRM, which pushes the lead to your CRM when the marketing team is done pursuing them.
Add to/remove from list, when you want a lead to be moved to a segmented list.
Update fields, to update specific fields in your CRM records by the end of a workflow. For example, changing your lead status to "Contacted" when you have finished pursuing a lead.
If a customer opens an email, you can trigger a workflow to push that customer as a lead into your CRM for your sales team to follow up. After being nurtured by a marketing email series, your sales teams have a great opportunity to directly reach out to these prime leads to close deals and turn them into returning customers.
Pre-defined workflow templates
Our selection of pre-defined templates has made work easier for marketers by letting them pick from a selection of pre-created email workflow templates. You can pick templates from a variety of useful categories: welcome and onboarding, lead nurture series, re-engagement, customer retention, and ecommerce. Marketers can now easily build their marketing strategy, not only reducing the time and effort spent on manually creating their workflows, but also allowing you to focus more on your customers with well-timed and personalized targeted emails.
Ecommerce workflow template
Ecommerce is one of the many all-new email workflow template options that Campaigns supports. It comes equipped with workflows designed for ecommerce-related email marketing campaigns.
With the ecommerce template, you can now connect your online store (using Zoho Commerce or Shopify) with Campaigns and maximize workflows for complex or simple ecommerce-related email marketing.
Some of the ecommerce workflow templates that Zylker has implemented for their website:
Simple abandonment: An email series of reminder messages to your customers/contacts to help them complete their purchase on Zylker website.
Advanced abandonment: An email series of activity-based reminder messages to their customers to help them complete their purchase on Zylker's website.
Purchase follow-up: Personalized follow-up emails to customers a few days after their purchase.
Here's how Zylker makes use of the pre-made ecommerce workflow templates:
Zylker Fashions is planning a holiday email marketing campaign series. They want to target different customers with different emails based on the products they've purchased in order to maximize their year-end holiday sale.
a) Zylker discovers that visitors on their online store are frequently adding items to their shopping carts, but leaving before checking out.
A customer leaving your website with an abandoned cart tells you that you're close to winning that deal. Abandoned carts are a perfect use-case to bring in the ecommerce workflow template to help Zylker turn them into profitable sales.
Zylker's marketing teams decide to trigger a simple abandonment email series workflow that offers perks like free delivery and discount codes to customers who haven't completed checkout.
b) The marketing team of Zylker now wants to target customers who have purchased Halloween products and initiate a follow-up email workflow.
Customers making a purchase in a specific product category (Halloween products in this case), could trigger a workflow to send a targeted follow-up email.
With the new drag-and-drop workflows, the Zylker marketing teams can also set up a trigger for a reminder email series to send to contacts who haven't opened the first email.
c) Zylker's marketing teams can also set up a re-engagement series workflow for rekindling the interest of unresponsive contacts.
Aside from the pre-made email workflow templates, you can also create custom templates catering to your business needs.
Here's a checklist for creating custom email workflow templates in Campaigns:
1. Define a trigger to pull your contacts into the flow
2. Merge different process components and define a series of actions
3. Conclude the path using end-of-workflow elements
More about workflow automation here.
Create online surveys and questionnaires using Survey
The main purpose of market research is learning what your customers want. You can use this information to retain and gather new customers. Using surveys to collect this information can give valuable insights into areas such as target markets, product feedback, customer responsiveness, buying habits, and brand awareness (to name just a few). With Survey in Zoho CRM Plus, you can create customized surveys to help you start gathering customer feedback right away.
Here are the different components associated with the Survey module, along with instructions on how you can go about creating a survey:
Survey builder
The survey builder is an easy-to-use drag-and-drop survey tool which you can access by clicking on the "Create a new survey" option under "All surveys". There are multiple pre-made survey categories you can choose from, such as customer satisfaction surveys, marketing surveys, events surveys, business surveys, and so on.
The survey builder comes with twenty-five different question types such as checkbox, image fields, star rating, slider scale, ranking, and NPS for you to choose from. You can either custom create your surveys using these question fields, or simply use our pre-made survey templates. Each template includes related questions that you can pick from and add to your survey form. You can also make your surveys more appealing by choosing from a range of colors and themes from the survey builder. Survey also lets you save your own customized themes with your organization's branding and logos.
In addition to creating surveys, the survey builder also comes with advanced options such as:
Scoring: To learn more about your audience and their thoughts with scored responses.
Translate: Translate your survey into multiple languages.
Invite Reviewer: Invite your customers to review and leave comments on your survey.
Transfer survey: Transfer the reports from the survey to the marketing teams.
Share survey: Improve the quality of your surveys by sharing them with different teams.
Share survey report: Create custom reports that can be distributed among your teams and limit their access based on roles.
Custom variables: By adding custom variables to your surveys, you can include known information about your respondents without having to ask them for it.
Buying responses: To help you decide your target audience, you can use this option to buy responses from your desired demographics.
Measure the effective of your marketing spends with Analytics
Understanding marketing analytics allows marketers to be more efficient at their jobs and minimize their company's marketing spending.
As we know, Zoho CRM Plus can bring together all three of your customer-facing departments—sales, marketing, and support. Data from these departments can be blended inside the Analytics module and used to create custom tables, reports, charts and dashboards to present data.
With Analytics in Zoho CRM Plus, you can visually analyze your marketing data and effectively track your key marketing metrics to plan your annual marketing agenda. You can also blend data from other marketing apps like Google Analytics, Google Ads, and Mailchimp to quickly spot trends based on website traffic, open and conversion rates, and more.
Now let's look at how you can use Analytics and create dashboards across various marketing modules to get the best insights of your marketing investments and ROI. These dashboards can be built from either pre-built dashboard templates or created from scratch.
Campaigns
The Zoho Analytics connector for Campaigns allows you to create dashboards with entities listing the top performing campaigns of the month, top geo-locations where campaigns have been well received, and more.
Social
Social data blended with Analytics helps you with insights on your social media activities with metrics like audience growth, post engagement and performance, reach, and impressions.
Survey
The Survey Advanced Analytics integration powered by Analytics enables you, as an analyst, to proactively manage, measure, and derive analytical insights from your surveys. With Zoho Analytics, you can parse your survey responses, derive key metrics, and transform them into actionable insights with the power of analytics.
With the Survey dashboard, you will have entities that display the most highly used question types for surveys, trends on survey creation, density graphs on survey responses, top performing surveys, surveys with the most number of respondents, and comparison graphs on survey type vs the time taken by respondents to complete the survey.
Master dashboard across services
In addition to individual app-based analytics, Analytics in Zoho CRM Plus is empowered with a component that can actually run dashboards across multiple marketing apps, such as Campaigns, Social, Surveys and more. This power blending enables you to collect critical business metrics across multiple data sources, and have them presented in any one of the 300+ pre-built templates that can also be customized to target your key performance metrics.
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