Social CRM: why it is crucial?

Over the last one decade, social media has changed the definition of traditional CRM. Before, it was just a one way communication process. But emergence of social media and its maximum utility for CRM had made it a two-way communication channel. This evolved the concept of sCRM or Social CRM.

As per Paul Greenberg, “Social CRM is a philosophy and a business strategy, supported by a technology platform, business rules, workflow, processes and social characteristics, designed to engage the customer in a collaborative conversation in order to provide mutually beneficial value in a trusted and transparent business environment. It’s the company’s response to the customer’s ownership of the conversation.”

Why sCRM is crucial in terms of your brand perception? Because it is spontaneous…………….. If you do not engage a monitoring system or do not keep a close eye on the developments, you might loose your brand loyalty. At the same time, if you keep your customers engaged with your product/brand and you have a real-time tracking system of your brand’s performance, sCRM can create a win-win situation for you as well your customers.

sCRM is more than just engaging your customers or prospects to your product’s/brand’s microsites or Twitter/Facebook pages or building communities or blog pages. It is not only about social listening or creating a media buzz through your PR agencies. sCRM is a mix of all.

Say, you have engaged your customers through these channels. Now, the challenge is how do you monitor the activities. Is it through some enterprise listening software? Or, some third party service providers? Or self? Well, it is again a mix of all.

Now, the next challenge you might face is your customer’s identity in social media portals. Most often you face the issue of multiple identities of your customers. So, you should have a technology or a practice to integrate multiple identities (Identity Management).

sCRM is all about creating a collaborative environment, both internally and externally. The key to sCRM success is to understand the issues/challenges pertaining to your product or brand and solving them with customer engagement and interaction in a process-driven way.

E-Mail Marketing - 15 ways to take it close to your sales prospect

1. Spam filters: to avoid mails landing up at spam folders of the recipients, you should avoid using product or service promotional words such as discounts, free etc.; special characters such as $, %, #, etc. both in the subjectline as well as in the mail body.

2. Always use a targeted and clean mailing database. Recheck and update your mailing list periodically.

3. Autoresponders: use periodical autoresponder feature to target your sales prospect with high integrity.

4. Sender’s signature: always use a signature to avoid confusion about sender’s identity.

5. Link-clicks: as per studies, internet users respond well to blue/bold/underlined texts most often. You can use this logic to your link-clicks in the mail body.

6. Avoid heavy graphics to minimize the size of the E-mailers. Use only meaningful images relevant with the subject.

7. Use consistent, professional and user-friendly color codes.

8. Put the most interesting content at the top so that if your recipient is using any mail preview feature, he/she catches the most relevant part in the preview.

9. Subjectline: if your subjectline does not able to catch your recipients’ attention, he/she will immediately delete the mailer before even looking at the mail body. To grab receiver’s attention, you should specify the benefits reading the E-mailer at the subjectline.

10. For repetitive E-mail campaigns, you should send all the E-mailers at a predefined time and schedule. Before fixing that time and day, understand the receivers’ working schedule. For example: if your database contains mostly personal E-mail ids, you should send your mailers during the second half of the day; may be just before you leave office. If your database contains mostly official E-mail ids, you should avoid sending the E-mailers in the morning hours.

11. As per some research studies, E-mails that are sent during the middle of the week (Tuesdays & Wednesdays) get maximum readers’ attention.

12. Unsubscribe option: your E-mailer should always give a freedom to unsubscribe your mailers at any point of time. This should not be a hectic and tiring process; just a one-click option.

13. Disclaimer statement: any E-mailer without a disclaimer statement is regarded as unauthentic.

14. Ask for readers’ feedback: you can do so by putting a direct link to your social media pages or creating a short online form.

15. Your E-mail service provider: last but not the least; a lot more depend on your bulk E-mailing software/tool. Test and try different service providers before selecting the best one; also, check different features such as campaign report generation, user-interface, etc. before going for any paid option.

IBM Forward View Virtual Forum 2011

Bangalore - the most lovable city in India

Bangalore or Bengaluru - no doubt whatsoever you say, the taste remains same. Bangalore, the IT-BT hub of India, still remains the hot-spot for job hunters and students. Every year, many people from other parts of India, specially from North East, move to this city with a untold dream - a dream for a better livelihood, a dream for a better professional career. As per latest population-based surveys, Bangalore is the third most populous city in India.

The question that might be asked by some people are: "why national and international corporate houses still prefer Bangalore as an investment hub?" - "why Bangalore still remains a preferred destination for Indian and international students?"

Answer is very simple. There are multiple reasons, such as: A. Good climate; B. Clean city (of-course, not like 10 years back; however, this still remains as one among the less polluted cities in India); C. Very gentle, helpful and friendly local people; D. Less crime or rather no crime compared to other tier-1 cities in India. E. Supportive measures taken up by the state government for creating special economic zones and IT-BT parks. F. A mix of serene South Indian Vedic environment and a cosmopolitan lifestyle. 

But......................

The recent sms or mms havoc had created a mistrust among the people of North-East and surprisingly it spread like an epidemic. I do not want to comment on who had started this or who should be held responsible for creating such a situation. But, we must admire the the way how Karnataka Government had handled the whole situation. This is really commendable that the state Dy. CM/home minister went to the railway station to appeal people from North East not to leave the city. Even the Karnataka government had sent a special delegation to Assam to bring the people back to Bangalore who had left the city with a fear to loose their lives. No state government in the recent past had taken up such prompt steps as a part of confidence building measure between two communities. This will remain as an example for other state governments.

Today, we people from North East can proudly say that we were part of building the Bangalore the way it is now and we will contribute the same way as we did before.

Love you Bengaluru..........