If you’re running a version of Act! that you purchased a few years ago (or more!), chances are your version has been retired. This means you’re no longer receiving key updates that help ensure your Act! database remains secure and accessible.

Now is the perfect time to upgrade to an Act! subscription. With an Act! subscription, you’ll have access to all updates and upgrades as they’re released, so you know you’re always running supported software.

But what happens if you choose not to upgrade?

The fact is, sticking with old, outdated software solutions of any kind can introduce unnecessary risks to your business — and who needs more uncertainty these days? We want to make sure customers understand the downside of relying on outdated software, which can include these top 5 risks:

1. Lack of compatibility with current business platforms

Chances are, you use a number of apps and services, like G Suite, Salesforce, Microsoft Office 365, and more. The last thing you need when you log into your accounts are compatibility issues, which can result in frustrating technology issues and worse, costly delays in accessing your customer data and business apps. When you subscribe to Act!, you always have access to the latest version of Act!, ensuring that your solution remains compatible with popular business applications and platforms including Windows®, Outlook®, Google, and more.

2. No access to critical software updates and fixes

With an Act! subscription, you always receive updates and fixes as they’re released, providing you with peace of mind that your software will continue to run without issues. This way, you can stay focused on running your business. Software should work hard for you, not the other way around.

3. Disruption to your business

Outdated, incompatible software versions are not just frustrating, they can actually disrupt your business. Imagine if you couldn’t run end-of-year sales reports, send a time-critical customer email, or complete any number of basic business tasks that you depend on every day. As a smaller business owner, you don’t have time to solve software issues or wait for a customer service rep to get you back up and running. By being on a retired version of Act!, you are at risk of losing access to your Act! database.

4. Risk of security vulnerabilities

Hackers are more frequently going after what they consider “low-hanging fruit,” i.e., smaller businesses that typically lack robust data security. They know smaller companies are easier to break into because they often leave wide security gaps due to outdated software or other vulnerabilities. With an Act! subscription, you can rest assured that security patches are continually and automatically provided, so you know that your customer data and business apps are secure.

5. Loss of access to critical customer and sales data

Data is the lifeblood of any business, and there’s never a “good” time to lose access to your customer data or sales information. And yet, outdated software can create incompatibility or security issues that leave you scrambling to reboot access to your data. An Act! subscription helps ensure business continuity by maintaining compatibility with all of your other business apps and services — which is one less thing you have to worry about.

If you’re running Act! v20 or earlier, your version of Act! has been retired. Review a full list of retired versions here.

Ready to upgrade now? Call us on 020 4538 5176 or contact your Act! Certified Consultant today!

The post The (not so) hidden risks of outdated software appeared first on Act!.

Inbound marketing strategies have changed the fate of millions of companies (for the better) all over the world, by increasing leads (often exponentially). However, not all the generated leads are useful; in addition to prospective clients, you will have many competitors filling out your forms just to get a feel of your services and will eventually make their way into your client database. Additionally, vendors who have the sole objective of selling you something can also infiltrate your customer database software and rest there without ever “becoming customers”. Overtime, if periodic cleaning of the database isn’t done, this accumulation of undesirable data can be more of a problem than at first apparent. We have made a list of steps that you should take in the attempt to make your database cleaner and more optimized:

1. Remove inactive contacts:

Implementing a CRM system is a step in the right direction but in order to maximize productivity, you have to always keep tabs on your contact database. Contacts that have been inactive for an extended period of time should be pruned, if and when sought viable. This can be done by querying the database to return inactive users for a specific period of time. Once you get a list of contacts, try to ask the following questions: “Why are these contacts no longer taking part in the marketing campaigns?” “Have they switched companies?”

After figuring out the nature of the inactivity and examining each contact’s situation, it’s up to you to make the executive decision of keeping the contact or dropping them. Here, it’s always recommended to not hopelessly follow leads that are clearly not interested because that can be very damaging for the company’s reputation.

2.  Duplicate identification:

Your marketing database software is your key to ultimate success and that’s why it needs to be kept clean and efficient. To ensure this, duplicate identification and removal is absolutely necessary. As soon as a company gains a reputation, it’s virtually inevitable for duplicates to start piling up in the client database. It’s recommended to periodically run checks on the database to find and remove duplicate leads. Even with duplicates, extra care has to be taken while deleting records. Before you do, scrutinize both lead records excessively, find out which has the most data and then merge both the entries.

Most CRM software also provide with automatic duplicate deletion which comes in very handy and can save you from the troubles of doing the drill yourself.

3. Setting up alerts:

A good CRM database software allows you to set up alerts that get triggered when certain actions take place and allow you to keep everything in check. For example, instead of letting your CRM automatically delete duplicates, you can have an alert setup that prompts you whenever a duplicate is spotted. This can prove to be essential in a scenario where two leads have the same first and last names but different email addresses (among other scenarios where manual checking can help).

4. Uniformity is key:

A contact database software can’t be clean if it isn’t uniform. However, maintaining uniform is by no means a child’s play; let’s suppose that you allow your leads to type their country of residence instead of letting them choose from a drop-down, this will eventually lead to inconsistencies in results. People hailing from the United States will give you entries like “US”, “USA”, “U.S.A”, “United States of America” and “U.S” etc. which will be a sucker blow to your database’s uniformity.

This is particularly why your CRM should be able to carry out automatic cleaning of similar values; otherwise while sending out emails to all people from the US, you might end up missing a few because of dirty entries.

5. S-Marketing:

Smarketing is a term that depicts the process of aligning sales and marketing. As the marketer goes through the contacts, conversing with the sales team can help a lot in finding out:

a) Which leads are still not ready? And why aren’t they?
b) Which leads should be given the top most priority?
c) Which were the most common problems that were faced by the leads?
d) Which were the most frequently asked questions by your leads?

Answers to the aforementioned questions can aid a marketer in performing better segmentation of the leads and can also help in discovering content to promote.

6. Junk contacts are a No-No:

Your contact database will inevitably contain anonymous leads that will put in fake emails like blahblahblah@gmail.com or asadfasda@hotmail.com. These junk leads can’t be allowed to pollute the database because it’s a wastage of resources, if nothing else. A sophisticated CRM system can allow you to run a search and identify records that have bogus data, which can eventually be suspended or removed from the system.

7. Monitor email campaign results/feedback:

It’s also recommended to maintain a close eye on the process opt-outs, mutations, bounces and email results. Based on your observations and findings, clean your database after every email campaign gets dispatched.

8. Adding contacts to the “quiet” list:

There should also be a “quiet” list that should be maintained in a customer database. This can contain potential partners and possible competitors that have filled out your form. Obviously, you won’t be proactively marketing to them so they can be kept in a quiet list (to prevent them from getting emails).

It’s important however to not delete these records because they can, in the future, be used for marketing; for example, if you are organizing a conference, looking for partners or conducting a webinar.

Now that we have seen ways to keep a database clean, let’s talk about some of the tangible benefits that a clean CRM database  software can provide:

1. Cut out costs:

One of the most obvious benefit of a clean client database is that you save a lot of money. Nobody wants to pay to send emails to email addresses that don’t even exist. When you run periodic checks on your database to maintain a clean reservoir, your email lists end up being precise and better suited for delivering positive results.

2. Precise campaign stats:

If your contact database contains bogus email addresses, some of the emails you will send won’t be opened, clicked or engaged. If these contacts stay on your email list, the campaign statistics won’t paint an accurate picture of your marketing efforts. A clean database is devoid of unwanted lead records and that goes a long way in ensuring that the campaign stats are categorically correct.

3. Effective target marketing:

If a contact database software can be trusted to only have verified lead records, then it saves the marketing team from wasting precious time emailing bogus leads. Post-cleaning and segmenting inactive-active emails, you can perform target marketing more effectively.

4. Sender reputation protection:

Spam complaints, subscriber level engagement, spam traps and bounces determine how good your sender reputation is; which is an important factor of email deliverability. Maintaining a clean database will ensure that you have a clean mailing list, which will eventually ensure that your sender reputation remains protected.

5. Elevated conversion rates:

Obviously a bogus email address will never convert. A clean client database system will also elevate your conversion rates as it will no longer contain any bad records with bad email addresses. When emails get received and engaged by people, the conversion rates are bound to increase.

6. Increase the possibilities of maximizing revenue:

A database that contains bogus records is inevitably going to hurt your sender reputation by coming up with email lists that contain undeliverable email addresses. A company with a bad sender reputation can see its emails getting placed in the spam folder (instead of the inbox) more frequently. A clean customer database however can help in generation of perfect email lists that get excellent inbox placement and engagement which eventually leads to elevated lead conversion numbers and better revenue possibilities (via segmented targeting).

Having a sophisticated CRM system that ensures that the customer database remains clean and devoid of unwanted records at all times can be a real asset for a company. A unified, state-of-the-art system like Act! CRM can bring an end to all data management and cleansing worries as it’s the one-stop solution for contact management. Making a small initial investment will eventually (inevitably) prove to be viable in the longer run as you will save enormous amount of resources (time, money and energy) by being able to target the most deserving leads.

New to Act!? Click here to start your free 14 day trial.

The post Why and how to keep a centralized, clean customer database appeared first on Act!.

In the world of real estate, the two most important things are the market prices and your client rolodex.

Not much you can do about the former, but when it comes to managing relationships, every realtor has their own method. Some like to keep track of every interaction in their heads, while others will rely on scribbled notes and hastily typed spreadsheets.

But the savviest real estate professionals will know that nothing beats a good CRM tool.

Why use a CRM tool for Real Estate?

CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and lets you do just that: manage client relationships. In addition to contact management, you can add notes, schedule your next appointments, and much more. In short, a CRM system is a technology that manages the small details so you can keep your eye on the prize – closing more deals.

Now for the benefits, here is what you should be to accomplish with the right CRM setup:

• Improve team collaboration: by integrating data from numerous departments, you can reduce silos and foster cooperation. For instance, you could maximize teamwork between Marketing and Sales by immediately passing leads found on your website (marketing) to the best salesperson for conversion.
• Streamline your sales pipeline and improve your sales process: CRM software can help you visualize your sales pipelines, which lets you identify what works and what needs improvement.
• Boost productivity with automation: If your real estate agency needs to go through numerous repetitive tasks, you could speed things up drastically with a CRM tool that supports automated processes. For instance, you could ensure that it only takes one click to schedule follow-ups with potential buyers, send email campaigns, or assign contacts to the right realtor in seconds.
• Strengthen your customer support: A CRM platform is also great as a support tool. Since you keep all the info relating to a client in one place, it’s easier to offer personalized support that really meets their needs and makes them feel special and looked after.
• Enable flexible work setups: this is especially important for realtors who are often on the move or on-site. A good cloud CRM tool should be available 24/7 and on any device, including smartphones, tablets, and laptops. That means you could expand your workforce with remote employees, and even those who are far from your main real estate agency office will be able to access the same always up-to-date client data.
• Ensure consistent reporting: most CRM software will come with in-depth reporting features, which can help you work with accurate data. You can use these analytics to make more informed business decisions, A/B test marketing techniques, and generally get better insights into what works and what doesn’t at your real estate company.

What is the best Real Estate CRM solution?

Below are some of the most popular real estate CRM software tools, including famous names and all-in-one solutions that include listing websites.

Salesforce

Salesforce is a market leader, and also probably one of the best-known CRM providers in the world. Their solution is suitable for all kinds of businesses, including real estate companies thanks to features such as pipeline management, lead scoring, and extremely powerful reporting.

However, be aware that Salesforce is aimed at mid-market companies with deeper pockets. While their entry tier is comparable in price with Act!, the features are severely limited. You’ll need to pay at least £60 per user per month, and that doesn’t include phone support (add an extra 20% of the price per user per month) or marketing automation (starting at a prohibitive £1000 per month!). For instance, additional custom fields do come with the Enterprise tier, but at £120 per user per month, it’s still a hefty investment. And that’s not all, once set up, it can cost more to maintain than to purchase the software. Most companies need to hire a Salesforce administrator just to groom their Salesforce, for instance.

Still, it could be worth it if you already use Salesforce as your primary selling tool. Just remember that integration and training can take 5-10 days (and cost up to £5K), but you will end up with a robust and reliable CRM tool.

Finally, Salesforce does have a more affordable solution for SMBs, called Salesforce Essentials. Its price aligns with that of other tools like Act!, but you do miss out on features like email marketing or call lists and hot leads.

Salesforce Pros:

• Perfect integration with other Salesforce tools
• Powerful reporting
• A mature, reliable solution

Salesforce Cons:

• Lengthy integration and staff training
• Limited custom field options
• Loads of upsells and paid add-ons
• Expensive

Zoho CRM

Another well-known name in the world of CRM is Zoho CRM, which is especially popular thanks to its free version and low-cost options. Of course, the features will be limited depending on your plan, but the customization options, built-in campaigns, and easy invoicing features can make it worthwhile for realtors.

On the downside, their email marketing can leave a lot to be desired as it doesn’t offer automation to follow up on leads based on their interactions with your team. Support is also notoriously patchy, probably because the company’s user base is so huge (with many users on the free plan).

Zoho CRM Pros:

• Free plan
• Fairly priced Enterprise plan
• Integrated invoicing feature

Zoho CRM Cons:

• No email automation
• Slow, low-quality support
• Feature gating produces forced upgrades and abrupt price increases for basic add-ons and features

HubSpot CRM

HubSpot is known for its excellent software and strong online presence. The free offer with limited features is attractive to freelancers and real estate company owners with few staff members.

On the downside, the scaling options aren’t so attractive, as you’ll need to fork out between £4000 – £9000 in onboarding fees for the Professional or Enterprise plan. These give you all the features you should expect out of the box, such as lead scoring and call lists.

HubSpot CRM Pros:

• Free plan
• Robust software
• Kanban board pipeline management

HubSpot CRM Cons:

• Expensive onboarding & plans make it cost-prohibitive for SMBs
• Too few features in the free plan

How Act! does CRM for Real Estate

Act! is designed specifically around the needs of small to medium businesses. We know and understand the challenges faced by real estate agents and independent realtors, which is why we’ve built in all the features you need to grow at an affordable price point, with no hidden costs and extra CRM integration fees.

• Powerful built-in tools: Manage customer relationships with groups and filters, opportunity tracking, lead management tools, such as call lists, and hot leads, and much more.
• Easy setup: Act! has one of the most straightforward onboarding processes and learning curves for newcomers to the world of CRM. The stunning dashboard is modern, intuitive, and fully customizable to adapt to how you want to deal with clients, former buyers, and future leads.
• Cloud-based technology: run your business 24/7 and wherever you are. The mobile app means you always stay updated with the latest customer info, so clients always feel acknowledged and supported.
• Clear, transparent pricing: we offer three plans with clear prices per user per month. You can add unlimited users and scale your real estate company with complete control over costs and ROI.
• Email marketing: send up to tens of thousands of emails per month to as many contacts as you need, and reduce your costs in other newsletter tools.
• Powerful automation: benefit from pre-built email campaigns, social sharing, and design-specific landing pages to send buyers to the listing of their dreams. You’ll get all the opportunities you need to automatically capture leads and speed up the process of turning interested prospects into homeowners!

And best of all, you can try the entire platform for free using this link!

What Act! Real Estate users say

“If I didn’t have it, I’d be lost. I wouldn’t know where to turn. My Act! as a resource is worth at least $500,000 to me.”  Hal Hanstein, president of Cardinal Realty Group, a commercial real estate company based in St. Louis, Missouri.

“I can really tailor my marketing with Act! Marketing Automation. And once the campaigns are set up, they happen automatically, so I can put more time and energy into other things.”  Jeffrey Gazlay, Broker Associate at Paul Homes, one of SouthWest Florida’s leading custom property builders.

“So all through that quarter, I was consistently handling 21 to 22 contracts. I certainly couldn’t have done what I did without my system in Act!.” Gretchen Osgood, Real Estate Agent and Principal Broker at Hawaiian Isle Real Estate.

“We chose Act! for our Real Estate business because we wanted a CRM that would help us to better understand, track and qualify our prospects and clients, but without having to wade through all of the non-essential features.”  Brian Pashkoff MGA

What about Real Estate specific CRM platforms?

The good news is that on top of the most popular customer relationship management software solutions, the last few years have seen a boom in the number of industry-specific tools. Real estate is no exception, and you’ll now find dozens of decent realtor CRM tools, some of them even built on the Salesforce platform as a special integration.

Propertybase

One of those Salesforce-powered tools is Propertybase, which starts at £71 per month, including marketing automation and IDX so that you can have full integration between listings and customer management. For the website and lead generation tools, the prices do shoot up to £317 a month, but it could be worth it if you use it for mass email and save up on newsletter provider costs.

LionDesk

Next on the list is the much more affordable LionDesk, which offers two plans at £20 and £39 per month. The higher tier includes customizable fields and the innovative text2Sell feature, which lets you send messages to leads directly from their dashboard. They also offer a third plan at £79 per month, including 3rd party integration setup, priority support, and 1:1 training, amongst other additional benefits.

Unfortunately, the dashboard is a shortcoming of the web app, as it often feels a bit cluttered and hard to navigate. Maybe a future UX overhaul will make it a better option for real estate agents who want the best of all worlds.

IXACT Contact

Finally, a strong competitor to PropertyBase for the best real estate CRM system + IDX website tool for realtors is IXACT Contact. They have a great promo for new agents (US only) who have been licensed for less than a year, including free social media contact scanning and mass mailing.

You can then customize the plan based on the features you need, starting at around £26 per user per month, plus £18 per extra team member, and £26 per month to link your listings website.

Do you need a Real Estate specific CRM tool?

If you are new to the real estate industry, it can be worth looking at the real estate software mentioned above. You could benefit from getting an all-in-one offer where you create a website that integrates with your CRM solution.

Aside from the fact that these tools tend to be pricier than standard CRMs, you should also note that these platforms attempt to lock you into their own ecosystem, which could be challenging as you need to grow and adapt your business. For instance, if you end up needing certain features for your listing website or CRM, you won’t have the flexibility of migrating all your content at once.

Finding the best CRM for Real Estate: Next steps

Interested in CRMs even if you’re not a real estate broker? Maybe you’re a small business owner, but you’re not sure which solution is right for you? You can find more information in our post about CRM for small businesses. We even have a full ebook guide for you to pore over the best CRM features in your own time. You can download it from here.

Still have questions? Or ready to try Act! and all its features for your real estate business? Don’t hesitate to get in touch today, or jump straight to your free trial of the Act! today!

The post The best CRM for Real Estate appeared first on Act!.

What is a great customer experience? It’s a combination of every touch-point and interaction customers have with a brand. All these experiences during their time as a customer should be harnessed to consistently improve future experiences. The ability to capture and access customer information at the right time during customer life-cycles can have a huge impact on their long-term loyalty. Understanding how and when your customers use your product, require your services or interact with your teams allows you to anticipate their needs and spot potential opportunities. CRM facilitates the collection of this information and may be used in the following ways to improve overall customer experience.

Reduce churn

CRM makes it easy to group customers in various ways, such as those who just completed a purchase, those experiencing certain issues, long-time customers and level of engagement. This ability allows for easy identification of those who are at greatest risk to be lost due to dissatisfaction, lack of training, or other difficulties. Once recognised, they may be proactively contacted to offer content or assistance to help alleviate their challenges, increase satisfaction and retain these customers.

An example of this in action is where SaaS companies need to understand usage and adoption. Linking this back to users in your CRM allows grouping of accounts who are at risk of churn to proactively reach out to these users before you lose them. Providing Getting Started content, or Setup support at this early stage pays dividends later because user adoption is key. Accurate record keeping also allows you to analyse ROI on this activity for future efforts.

Another example is tracking customer engagement. Are customers still actively using your product? Are they routinely being contacted by your company to ensure ongoing satisfaction? And, are they responsive to calls, surveys and other touch-points? A customer who is disengaged is much less likely to continue as a customer. In fact, a study by Vendasta shows that 70% of disengaged users churned while 90% of engaged users were retained. The data in your CRM helps identify disengaged customers, enabling proactive efforts to reengage and retain them. If your company is going to continue to grow, this is critical since it’s difficult to increase a customer base when there’s a consistently high turnover rate.

Develop Deeper Customer Relationships

Customers want personalisation in their interactions with companies. This is key to excellent customer experiences. Be sure your teams aren’t only documenting relevant business information in your CRM. They should include personal details too. This further humanises prospects and customers for your staff. All the background data, interaction information, and sentiments collected in your CRM platform, make it easier to personalise every customer touch-point. Whether they call in by phone, send an email, initiate a chat session or more, your employees are able to see purchase history, browsing history, full name, address, previous complaints, and more. This often means that the customer doesn’t need to reiterate historical information or contact information. This leads to the desired more effortless and frictionless experience. Plus, company personnel are able to call the customer by name and spell it correctly in written interactions. When data is complete, you may even know the customer’s birthday and be able to send them greetings on their special day. Other personalisation options include enquiring about a holiday they recently took as well as about an ill family member or pet. People like these little extras and it helps deepen the customer relationship while increasing loyalty.

Continuous improvement and prioritisation

Listen to what your customers are telling you, directly or indirectly. Every recorded interaction tells you something about your customer. How you group and manage this data allows you to improve your customer experience. Feedback about your product or service can be learned through various sources. Recorded support interactions and chat transcripts reveal product issues. They also frequently help identify topics that need to be added to the company online knowledge base or FAQs.  And information recorded during the complaint process or gathered in post-sales surveys, for example, can be used to drive other process or product improvements. Plus, don’t forget to listen to your customers on social networks too. This is where they are most likely to speak openly about their feelings around your product or service. Social CRM helps you gather and act on these valuable insights as well. This data can help quantify, in pounds and pence, what each interaction costs to prioritise your resulting action items.

Fortunately it’s possible to integrate all these data sources into your CRM, adding this information on individual customer records. This makes it more useful and meaningful while facilitating the manipulation of the data to gain insights and translate them into tasks for continuous improvement.

Plan and Track Marketing Efforts

Recording sales history allows you to intelligently target your marketing efforts. When using an integrated marketing automation platform, the effectiveness of each campaign can be recorded directly into your CRM. Which ads are receiving the best results? Are there places online, or in print, where you might reach more of your audience? Are you speaking their language? Are you offering the types of content that they most desire? All this information drives your callout lists, improves your sales history and allows you to continuously fine-tune customer personas, all the while improving marketing ROI.

Collecting information about your customers with every interaction such as buying habits, Support requirements, product / service feedback and level of engagement is a common practice. CRM software is the ideal place to group this data. This provides a more holistic view of customer relationships and engagement levels making it easy to further tailor customer communications.  What you do with this information is what turns a customer interaction into a great customer experience. Notifying them of new product offerings or add-ons based on their previous interests or making them aware of specials on consumable products they’ve purchased before are a win-win. These actions improve the bottom line while improving customer experience. The more you leverage the information gathered in your CRM, the higher the quality and results of your marketing efforts.

We gather information every time we interact with our customers. Be sure to record what your customers are telling you. Then use this information to reduce churn, improve customer relationships and loyalty, improve products and services and grow your customer base through a greater understanding of them. Your ROI for each marketing campaign will also continuously improve. Spotting trends and recognising dissatisfaction triggers early allows you the opportunity to turn a potentially bad customer experience into a good one. Deeper knowledge around customer characteristics help you to understand what the customer actually wants. The ability to view customer feedback in one place makes it easier to identify and prioritise areas of improvement. And integrated marketing automation makes CRM drive greater and consistently improving campaign results. A CRM like Act! will help you manage this information and analyse what your customers are telling you through dynamic grouping and other insights.

The post How to improve Customer Experience with CRM appeared first on Act!.