My Favorite CRM Articles this Week

This week provided a lot of important information about CRM systems, specifically the rapid growth that the cloud computing market will experience, and that 62% of CRM will be cloud-based by 2018. Mobile and Social CRM are becoming increasingly crucial to organizations and companies need to learn to focus more on their retention rates rather than on solely acquiring new customers.

By 2018, 62% Of CRM Will Be Cloud-Based, And The Cloud Computing Market Will Reach $127.5B

From 2014 to 2018, the cloud computing market will be rapidly growing at an extremely impressive compound annual growth rate of 22.8%, reaching a whopping $127.8B by 2018 with Salesforce holding the market leadership position. Currently, cloud adoption is still in its early stages, but there are several key points that should be noted for the future, including the fact that SaaS is rapidly increasing as a percentage of total application spend.

 

8 Features You Absolutely Need In A Mobile CRM

More customers are heading towards mobile and are interacting with brands on custom apps, making Mobile CRM more important than ever. Companies are looking for ways to track their customers in-app behavior and usage, store their customers self-identified attributes, create advanced user segments and audiences, tie together mobile usage and outside app interactions, use analytics to gain further insights and improve overall strategies, and finally show changes in app behavior.

Companies need to realize that their mobile CRM software should be their main hub to store all the information that is collected about the app user, plus the users interactions across all channels, while also running strategic engagement campaigns.

HubSpot Takes Its CRM Tool Out of Beta

HubSpot, best known for their marketing tools, pulled their free CRM product that some 60,000 companies use out of beta today. The CRM tool helps sales reps avoid some of the monotonous aspects that come with data entry and interaction management, taking the data and arranging it in a chronological format. The hope is since the product is free, HubSpot will be able to penetrate companies where it previously lacked a presence and then up-sell their IT department, which has worked in the past for several other software companies.

How Dynamics CRM Can Help You Keep Customers: 3 Tips 

Landing a new customer can cost somewhere between 5-25 times more than keeping an existing one, but increasing your customer retention rate by a mere 5% can increase profits by a significant 25% to 95%. Most organizations choose to focus time and resources on chasing new customers at the expense of retention efforts. These three tips should help companies better serve customers and how Microsoft’s Dynamics CRM can help put these ideas into action.

 

7 Tips to Pave the Way to Social CRM Success

Social media changes how individuals interact on a personal level and how businesses approach their own internal CRM strategies. Social CRM enables companies to share ideas, receive feedback and build lasting, positive relationships with customers from a more personalized platform. These 7 tips should be implemented for all companies who are hoping to have a successful social CRM strategy.