Category: SaaS

CRM (Customer Relationship Management) is a tool that enables businesses to organize and access customers’ data. In the past, this was done manually where businesses made paper notes to keep a record of the activities and metrics related to the company. But today, businesses have realized the importance of quality customer service, and now they need something more advanced than notes and sheets. This is where the CRM software comes into play.

Many businesses have invested in CRM software application such as Microsoft Dynamics CRM Services to unify their strategies related to customer services. CRM software has become a business necessity which is why they have taken the lead as the largest software market in the world. By the end of 2017, the global CRM software market was generating a net revenue of $39.5 billion. Its global revenue is expected to reach $80 billion by 2025.

Two important CRM software commonly used today are Salesmate and Zoho. If you are going to select a CRM software for your business, you need to compare these two and decide which is right for your business.

Zoho Vs. Salesmate

Both Zoho and Salesmate are CRM systems that assist small and large corporations to convert the lead into customers. In this post, we will compare various factors of the two software so that you can decide which one works well for you. These factors include basic features, pricing plans, support, and integrations among other things.

Ideal users of Salesmate and Zoho

The two software platforms differ from one another based on who they are ideally meant for. Salesmate CRM can be customized for a diverse range of businesses. It can meet the needs of various small and large enterprises to organize processes and gain an edge in the competitive market. The different versions and industries that Salesmate serve include:

• Real Estate CRM software: It allows you to manage contacts, automate activities, and facilitates a smooth sales process. Also, if you need a real-estate logo, the best place for buying it is DesignHill.
• CRM for construction: It helps you to stay organized and seamlessly handle your bidding process and sales deals
• CRM for lawyers: SalesmateCRM for law firms to help them maximize efficiency and increase their revenue
• SaaS CRM for startups: Helps sales reps to simplify sales processes, organize workflows, and provides a holistic view of your prospects
• Salesmate CRM for agencies: organizes and automates sales operations of media, marketing, and digital agencies
• CRM for higher education: Helps the competitive educational market to organize processes and records

While Zoho works for similar enterprises, it is mainly intended for large businesses and organizations along with small scale corporations. It is aimed for slightly matured businesses and caters to a sales force of a thousand persons and beyond.

Plans and Pricing

While the introductory Zoho CRM pricing is affordable, the cost inflates every time you are looking for advanced features. Zoho offers a free version of the software which distinguishes it from a Salesmate. However, the free version is generally a poor representation of CRM software as it misses a lot of important features. The standard version of Zoho costs around $15 while the cost goes up to $18 if you are using the professional version.

On the other hand, Salesmate offers a simple and affordable pricing plan. It costs $12 per user/month when billed annually for all the features. It also offers a free trial period of 15 days which can be activated without a credit card. Once the 15-day trial period is over, you have the option to either pick a monthly or annual billing plan.

Features comparison

Salesmate features

Salesmate offers a myriad of features and brings all your favorite apps into one CRM. It enables you to sync apps like Google Drive, Gmail, Contacts, Maps, and Calendar into one CRM. Additionally, it allows you to connect with apps like MailChimp and Shopify and provides a plethora of plugins to convert your leads. You can also set up a professional email signature and further make it appealing by the signature template creator offered by Salesmate. Other features that Salesmate CRM offers are:

Accelerated Sales

• Pipeline management
• Tracking activities
• Smart Emails

Smart Productivity

• Deal management
• Sales automation
• Data entry automation
• Contact management

Gain Visibility

• Tracking sales goals
• Sales intelligence
• Sales forecasting
• Mobile apps

Zoho features

Zoho CRM software brings all your channels together in an organized timeline. You get to see all your emails arranged in a CRM pipeline and respond to customers with ZohoSalesInbox. It also allows you to contact customers inside the CRM with the click of a button. Other Zoho features include:

Salesforce automation

• Pipeline analysis
• Real-time forecasting
• Lead generation and qualification

CRM workflow management

• Email notifications with templates
• Workflow alerts while creating and modifying records
• Instant notifications to third-party apps

Sales tracking

• 360-degree view
• Monitoring sales opportunities
• Sales pipeline and escalation process
• Import sales opportunities from third-party services

Document library

• Send documents from your CRM
• Role-based folders and sub-folders
• Quick feedback from team members to improve documents

Integrations and Apps

Both Salesmate and Zoho enjoy plenty of third-party app integrations, but the variety of apps it Salesmate offers in its standard version far exceeds its competitors. It integrates well with Gmail, Drive, Shopify, WordPress, Squarespace, to name a few.

Customers support

CRM software is known for its poor customer support. But unlike others, the Salesmate CRM prides on a massive support center. It provides tons of articles and guides that answer many common customer questions. What distinguishes Salesmate from Zoho is the availability of ‘live support’ which comes handy when you need a swift response in case of CRM software malfunction. This is the reason why Salesmate enjoys a 5-star review rating when it comes to customer support. Check Best Zoho CRM Alternatives.

The verdict

Choosing a CRM software that not only your requirements but also falls within the confines of your budget sometimes become a challenge. If you’re looking for a CRM software that is affordable and yet provides all the features that matter, we recommend Salesmate. However, if your business can afford the premium packages delivered by Zoho, you won’t be disappointed by it either.

In this new era of marketing, technology has observed outstanding advancement. Along with path-breaking progression, the world has become more automated. Right from smartphone to the crewless aircraft everyone loves to explore the leading edge technology in their daily life. Among numerous innovative trends, Artificial Intelligence (AI) has great applications in several fields. Well, a great influence we can see in the digital marketing industry. Today, a digital marketing department is able to achieve its business goals without any hassle and whole credit goes to AI.

How AI Affects Digital Marketing?

According to a report, 55% of digital marketers rely on AI for business promotion. That’s confidence! This technique offers an incredible platform to grab the attention of core customers and associate them with business for a longer time. Other than that there are many remarkable outcomes that only possible with the advanced AI strategies such as:

• Behavior Analysis

Artificial Intelligence is more about analyzing immense amounts of data and making decisions as per the findings. This predictive analytics is a fantastic method in which AI is transforming digital marketing. Now what AI performs here? It transforms analysis of this data and transforms into user-friendly information! AI is being more and more applied to unorganized data which do not have a ‘set record’ format like social media feeds, documents, audio transmissions, digital pictures and videos used to collect facial expression, creating these disparate data sources to provide insights on behavioral patterns of consumers that remain or elusive. The interesting thing is that AI can perform this task much quicker and perfection than a human ever could.

• Customized Marketing Solutions:

There is no denying the fact the social media marketing plays a vital role in the digital marketing industry. It has the power to take the profits of digital marketing techniques to the next level. So, you will be glad to know that with the use of Artificial Intelligence a digital marketer can easily improve his output by making more effectual and customer-targeted materials. To perform this task, several tools are employed to assist in using AI. The greatest benefit of involving AI is producing customized marketing solutions. Rather than having a one-size-fits-all marketing operation that tries to attract the customers, the customized solutions will directly hit your target audience. There are a few tools that quite valuable for digital marketers:

• Rocco.ai – An Artificial Intelligence-powered marketing supporter that learns the inner workings of your business and suggests the most appropriate action to take for your marketing strategies.
• Acquisio – Increase your digital marketing technique by using ML to optimize cost efficiency and enhance significant customer views
• Emarsys – Utilize AI marketing that enables machines to make decisions for you and customizes ad campaigns for every customer.

• Enhance User Experience:

User Experience is the area where Artificial Intelligence makes a remarkable impact. Let’s understand this fact with a simple example:

• As the customer plays a vital role in business, similarly, content is quite essential for a marketer. If the marketer is able to align the content marketing strategy with AI, it could be ground-breaking. This means AI can easily improve the user experience by providing customized content to the customers as per their searches, purchasing behavior and interests.
• Next, the biggest example is Chatbots. They are incredibly making the process of automating responses to core buyers’ frequently asked questions even simpler by offering them with the best approach to find the service or product they are seeking. Chatbots are programmed by AI and its capacity to answer open questions. They contain numerous benefits for the customers and enhance their experience in an effective way. They serve the customers 24×7 and able to retain the crucial data. They are easy to operate and never lose their patience.

• Make Decision Making Process Easy:

Another effective aspect of Artificial Intelligence is augmented reality. This aspect offers the customer leverage to view and feel the product before purchase. In this way, a customer can easily evaluate the entire features and other essential components of the product. This will enable them to make a fair decision. Now they can better decide whether they should invest in that product or not. This will stimulate a quicker response from the customer and in turn enhance the revenue. It means if AI enters, it can make an extensive impact by an increase in better strategies for SEO as well as digital marketing.

• Generate More Leads & Maximize The ROI

If you ask a marketer what is the most important thing for his business growth probably he would say more and more leads. But do you know what they do for this task? They implement different strategies in order to associate the core customers with business. This is because customers are the real asset of any company. If they are able to grab their attention, they can easily improve the ROI of the business. Now you will be glad to know that just as Artificial Intelligence can shift a large amount of information to make c buyer personas, it can perform the same to find your core customers.

In fact, if we consider the case of recruitment, there is also the influence of AI. It helps screen candidates and makes shortlists to assist the employers to recruit quicker and hassle-free. Not only this, it effectively reduces the cost of recruitment process too. Different platforms such as LinkedIn’s Sales Navigator enables users to seek employment leads and potential clients.

Final Takeaway:

The future of digital marketing is closely linked with AI. Now, most of the reputed organizations are involving this approach in business and exploring outstanding perks. Many small scale or medium scale companies are comprehensively chasing this path to get the most of its great power in the domain of digital marketing. The integration of AI doesn’t remove the human essence from marketing. In fact, it makes jobs more comfortable and saves a lot of time! Utilizing AI into your digital marketing techniques give business the insights it requires achieving goals.

Author Bio

Vincent Lambert is the co-founder and president of TactikMedia, innovative digital marketing, and web development agency. Vincent’s biggest priority is to attract quality traffic to the website, which ultimately will bring in quality leads, thanks to top-notch work in organic and paid searches. He has a solid understanding of everything relating to SEO, cost per click, remarketing, and conversion optimization.

Online life began as a fun method to interface with family and companions and has now become into a moderate, fundamental showcasing methodology for organizations and all things considered. Sadly, numerous organizations are overpowered by each of the assignments that go into dealing with various messages crosswise over numerous online networking accounts. And, they are contracting specialists to deal with it for them. On the off chance that you appreciate tweeting, sticking and sharing, at that point beginning social media handling organization may be for you. Here are some of the steps to begin.

The role of a social media consultant

After you have taken the responsibility of handling the social media channels, you have to get into the shoes of a social media consultant. To understand your roles and functions, you have to know the job of a social media manager. The SM manager has to execute numerous services catering to the needs of the clients. The services that come under their supervision are as follows:

• To create showcasing systems dependent on customer objectives.
• Web-based life account set up.
• Post designs and content in the interest of the customer.
• Remain current and offer on patterns and news applicable to the customer’s the same old thing.
• Gaining more followers.
• Network assistance to the customer’s objective market.
• Client administration for the customers.
• Creating a report to keep a track on the procedure.

You might think that it is too much work. Hence, before you end up changing your decision, take a look in the next section of this article.

A deeper analysis

Every coin has two faces. Similarly, every enterprise has both some cons as well as pros. Hence, it is essential to know all the pints. The following section will highlight the brighter and well as cloudy aspects.

Pros

Here are numerous valid justifications to consider beginning the management task.

• Getting paid to utilize online networking, if that is something you as of now appreciate doing.
• It doesn’t take many ventures or gear to begin particularly in the event that you as of now have a PC and Internet administration.
• You get to observe your business proceeding from any place of your choice. The only criterion is to have access to an internet connection.
• You can concentrate on the one or couple of online life locales you know best, rather than knowing each and every web-based life stage.
• The requirement for online networking directors keeps on developing as increasingly solo-preneurs, consultants and independent companies redistribute this undertaking.

Points to Consider

Obviously, there are a couple of points that you need to consider before beginning a web-based life the executive’s business.

• Internet-based life is a test for one individual dealing with their profile; it’s much increasingly hard to deal with a few organizations’ profiles.
• Not all organizations comprehend the intensity of internet-based life, so you may need to offer them on the advantages you can give.
• You speak to the organization, not yourself when you’re doing web-based life for other people. This implies you have to follow up for its benefit dependent on its tone and disposition.
• You have to remain alert of the changes in approaches, calculations, and different parts of every internet-based life stage with the goal that your endeavors in the interest of the customer keep on conveying results.
• Alongside a comprehension of how to draw in your customers’ intended interest group, you likewise should probably make designs to pull in them to the post in any case.
• You will probably need to put resources into devices, for example, booking administrations and eminence free designs, and illustrations altering programming.

Qualities of a social media consultant

Even though courses in online life the executives are springing up, turning into an internet-based life director requires experience more than instruction. So, there are things online networking administrators need to know past how to take a decent selfie.

1. Comprehend web-based social networking as a showcasing instrument

It is one thing to get a group of supporters to a feline traps YouTube feed, and it’s another to manufacture a following for a business. Online life promoting is not quite the same as conventional showcasing, which is the reason numerous organizations battle with it. Online life is tied in with having a fascinating, enlightening, or potentially engaging discussion with the market.

2. Information about the subtleties of the different stages

There is nobody estimate fits-all with regards to posting via web-based networking media. Every stage has its principles and techniques for best-promoting practices. How a business advances on Instagram ought to be not the same as how it showcases on LinkedIn, because every stage is boundlessly extraordinary.

3. The capacity to create techniques that meet the customer’s objectives

Powerful online life showcasing requires defining objectives and afterward building up an arrangement. Online networking chiefs likewise need to enable customers to comprehend internet-based life and how it functions, and work with them to create objectives that best fit web-based life. For instance, look into recommends that a couple of offers are made through online life. In any case, online networking is compelling at structure dependability and trust, so commitment and the rundown building would be preferable objectives over deals.

4. Have the capacity to catch the customer’s voice

If the customer is fun and idiosyncratic, internet-based life posts ought to mirror that. It is important to understand not just the needs of the customers, but also the preferences. Remember your social media accounts reflect a part of your personality and taste. People or followers tend to associate you with a specific attribute. And, they start expecting posts and content of that same altitude.

5. Capacity to deal with a few web-based social networking stages for some customers

There are a large group of instruments, for example, Hootsuite to help oversee stages, yet association and an arrangement are pivotal to guaranteeing each customer gets their online life needs to be met.

Hopefully, this article gives you a brief idea of the responsibilities of a Social media consultant. All the best for this new venture!

Identity theft or impersonation is a crime but it is very common these days. And the alarming part is that not many people are aware of the concept of identity theft. Viruses attacking an individual’s laptop or desktop was a primary threat to people in the past. Many telecommunication companies introduced measures like antivirus services as part of their Internet packages to protect consumers from any threat. For example, AT&T offers this feature.

Identity theft is something that individuals themselves have to protect themselves against. Here’s your guide to identity theft.

What is Identity Theft?

Identity theft is also referred to as identity fraud. It is a practice where a person uses another person’s identity or his personal information without permission. This information includes the following:

• Name
• Driver’s license
• Social Security number

The criminals would then make use of this information to commit fraud. The nature of the theft is not restricted to one type only. Many different types of identity theft can occur. Because criminals are always in search of new ways to exploit others.

How is Your Identity Stolen?

It is not something that you would know about unless it happens to you. This is a rather scary part. Because the victim does not realize unless it is too late. In fact, in most of cases, you won’t know until you review your credit card history or the like. Which is even more dangerous because the maximum damage occurs by the time you realize about the theft. One thing that you should know is that there are various forms by which the data is stolen. Some of the common types of breaches include:

• Mail theft
• Wi-Fi hacking
• Phishing and spam attacks
• Malware activity
• Dark web marketplaces
• Data Breaches
• ATM skimmers

Protection against Identity Theft

Here are all the ways by which you can protect yourself against identity theft:

Use of Passwords

You should be very careful about your use of passwords. Make sure that you protect all your digital devices using a password. Many people do not feel that it is necessary to ‘password protect’ their devices. While there are some people who think that it is a hassle, others just believe that there is no need to have a password. Well, seems like they are wrong to think that way.

There are also people (the absolute geniuses) who will use one password across all platforms. I mean the hackers don’t have to do much to exploit their information. It is always a good (read: best) idea to have a combination of passwords. You should have a different password for Facebook, Snapchat and Instagram, for example. Note it down somewhere if the information is a lot for you to remember.

Stay Away from Shady Websites

Many crimes take place when you visit a shady website. You should always be very careful about the type of website that you are visiting. In case you are not familiar with what a shady or a skeptical website looks like, let me guide you. Identity thieves usually try to fool you into thinking that a certain website or an email is from your bank, for example. That is a very common trick.

Apart from that, they can even use website links that look similar to your credit card company etc. You need to act alert. In case, you feel that a certain website is not what you think it is, you should report it. Also, do not type your password or your username on any unfamiliar login screen.

Do Not Give Out Your Personal Information

Fraudsters have this common routine of calling various customers and pretending to be a representative from their bank or credit card company. They ask for personal details when they make such calls. You just need to remember one thing. You should never give your personal information to anyone over the phone. Avoid doing so. You never know who is on the other side. And the truth is that no legitimate company will ever call you to ask for your personal information. So no matter how genuine it may sound, do not share your personal information with anyone over the phone.

Conclusion

You have to play safe at all times. Be very careful. In case, you are not sure if the Internet service you have subscribed to offers protection against malware or not, then call the helpline. AT&T Customer service number or whatever the company is in your case is always working for such queries. So do not hesitate when in doubt.