If You're Not Using a CRM System for Your Small Business, You're Wasting Time and Money A customer relationship management system like Keap automates tedious but important sales and marketing tasks so you can focus on growing your business.
By Entrepreneur Deals Edited by Jason Fell
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If you run a business that sells anything—whether it's home appliances, web design, hand-knit sweaters, pool cleaning, books, dance lessons, you name it—one of the most important things you have to do is generate leads, convert them into actual customers, and then keep them coming back for more. However, when you're busy with all the other things your business requires, the last thing you need to be doing is manually entering customer information into a database, manually sending followup emails to leads and clients, manually recording customers sales and interactions, manually creating invoices, or manually booking appointments.
Luckily, we have technology to make all that easier. With a robust all-in-one CRM platform like Keap, you can automate all sorts of essential data management, sales, and marketing tasks, so you can grow your business without having to waste precious time on tedious data entry.
What is CRM?
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Customer relationship management, or CRM, is a system that businesses use to manage contacts, foster relationships with customers or potential customers, engage in successful marketing, and track leads through the sales pipeline.
The idea behind CRM has its origins in the 1970s and 1980s, when companies first started conducting surveys, collecting customer data, and analyzing it to help improve sales. By the early 1990s, software companies began developing dedicated CRM applications that automated the collection and sorting of customer data, as well as a number of other tasks. These applications became more advanced as technology improved. But because they required a lot of in-house computing power, they were only available to larger, more established businesses .
Luckily, today those technological limitations no longer exist. Instead of buying copies of a program and installing it on an office full of computers, we buy subscriptions to powerful cloud-based apps that can run on a single laptop, tablet, or smartphone from anywhere. As a result, now even small businesses and startups can afford cutting edge CRM tools that can kickstart exponential growth.
Today's CRM platforms can do more than anyone had ever dreamed. And that brings us to Keap.
Keap CRM, sales, and marketing automation.
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The Keap platform was designed to automate customer relationship management, sales, and marketing, so you can get more done in less time.
With Keap, you can automatically add and update contacts, and automatically record every communication and interaction so you know exactly where customers or potential customers are in the sales pipeline. You can also see customer details and easily call up a history of all meetings, payment, quotes, conversations, and emails. Plus contact segmentation lets you apply tags to contacts so you can sort customers and create custom demographics.
Keap also lets you automate sales and marketing communications so nothing slips through the cracks. By using Keap's simple "when/then" templates, you can generate automatic responses when someone sends an email, fills out a form, or schedules an appointment. You can also create more complicated sequences of automatic email messages that get sent based on time triggers or client interactions.
Need an easy way to create web forms or landing pages and generate automatic quotes and invoices? Looking for online appointment scheduling? Want to create an email marketing campaign to nurture new leads or drive clients to specific promotions, products, or services? Keap can do it all. They send over a billion marketing emails a month with a 20-percent open rate and 13-percent click rate, both of which surpass industry standards. Keap also integrates with other business tools, like social media marketing apps, so everything stays connected. And it comes with a phone line and SMS messaging, so you can connect with clients via text, too.
Go ahead, take a test drive.
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Keap offers three different plans at three different price points. And right now, all three are 50-percent off for the first three months. And if you want, you can even try before you buy, because Keap offers a free 14-day trial.
