Showing posts with label marketing management software. Show all posts
Showing posts with label marketing management software. Show all posts

May 22, 2017

8 Reasons You Need Project Management Software for Marketing

Are you excited about your project?

If you dread it, there’s every tendency that you’re still doing it manually or don’t know how to leverage the right software to its fullest potential.

Gone are the days when project management software was seen as only a web developer’s toolkit. Today, it’s rapidly gaining wide adoption from web marketers globally.

Are you still using old-school spreadsheets? Of course, spreadsheets have their specific uses, but they don't scale very well as your team and projects grow.

If you neglect project management software, you’ll encounter bottlenecks in your project—reasons to question the very essence of what you’re doing.

8 Reasons You Need Project Management Software for Marketing: eAskme
8 Reasons You Need Project Management Software for Marketing: eAskme

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Before we embraced project management in our company wholeheartedly, we couldn’t scale that much. I could send an email to one of our teammate concerning a task she should complete and after several days, I’d emailed her again: “Hi, Tracy. Have you completed the task yet?”

Then, Tracy replies: “which task?”

You get furious, “didn’t you receive my email? I sent an email to you a few days ago.” Now, Tracy checks her email but couldn’t find anything or found it in her spam folder.

How sad. This can slow your progress. However, project management software for marketing could be what you need to help you streamline your marketing and achieve significant results quickly.

So, here are 8 solid reasons why you need software for managing your projects and marketing activities at the same time:

1). Stay organized:

One of the most important reasons why you need a project management tool is to stay organized. With the right project tool, you can see, control, and monitor the progress of your marketing team's effort.

Read More : Database Marketing and CRM: Can One Survive Without the Other?

A recent survey by Software Advice shows that 46% of small business owners still use old technologies to track and organize projects. Sure, you can still use these tools; however, it’ll cost you more money and will most likely reduce your efficiency as you’ll spend more time trying to accomplish some projects with them.

8 Reasons You Need Project Management Software for Marketing : eAskme

Unlike tools like spreadsheets, you can assign a specific task to each team member—and have access to tools, files, and calendars exactly when you need them effortlessly.

2). Improved communication:

Do you use a third party tool like Slack, Asana, Ignitur, or any other premium project management software to aid your marketing team’s communication? Or do you prefer to communicate directly through email?

Yes, email communication works; after all, the majority of these software tools will send a notification to your email when a team member or client updates a particular task or campaign.


Read More :TopNotepad - Best cloud invoicing, accounting and CRM solution for freelancers and SMBs

The only downside with direct email communication is that it can be frustrating at times, and doesn’t encourage a seamless flow of information between two or more team members—which is exactly what you want to achieve.

According to IT Cortex, 57%of projects fail due to poor communication. Poor communication between you, your clients, and your team, can pose a serious threat to your project's success.
 8 Reasons You Need Project Management Software for Marketing : eAskme

A smooth communication is not optional—but rather, it should be an integral part of your company.

And the best part is that you can also communicate with your clients and reduce the number of iterations on specific tags as they can provide important information you might need at that time, which was not provided initially.

3). Complete transparency:

On one hand, a project management tool makes it possible for your clients to check the progress of their projects.

On the other hand, you get to give clients complete access to your marketing team. In turn, this can help you build a stronger relationship and trust between with your clients.


Read More : How to Develop a Successful Content Marketing Campaign

You can encourage your clients to get involved in the process if they so desire. This would eliminate worry from your clients about their projects—as they can see the progress and know you’re working.

4). Accessible resources:

A robust project management software portal allows you to upload a file once and every member of your team will have access to it from wherever they are in the world, even without downloading it—they can use it.

In fact, when you want to update the file, any member of your team can do that depending on the access level they have.

5). Team collaboration and brainstorming:

Team collaboration is an interesting feature in project management software, which makes it stand for web marketers. A report by Holmes shows that over $37 Billion are lost yearly because of employee misunderstandings and bad communication.
 8 Reasons You Need Project Management Software for Marketing : eAskme

Collaboration is one of the main features that makes project management software worth the investment, as it allows other features to work seamlessly and allows team members and clients to communicate effortlessly.

6). Flexibility:

It's true, unexpected situations do arise in the middle of a project. However, with the right project software, you can change project schedules and calendars.

Read MOre : 7 Proven Methods of Managing Remote Teams

The best part is: clients can easily see the effect on the new scheduling based on any new decision or strategy that was introduced to help accomplish the project in the best way possible.

So, you’re not tied to any rigid system.

7). Scalability:

Do you run a small agency and are afraid that when you’re agency grows you might face the challenge of scaling? Well, you don’t have to worry.

Read More : CRM Solutions that Shouldn’t be Missing from Your Structure

The truth of the matter is, a few software which I’ve used to manage my projects and that of clients, including those I’ve not personally used but have read testimonials have all it takes to help you scale.

8). Increased accountability:

Accountability is very important in ensuring the success of every project.

If every team member knows exactly the task they’re meant to accomplish and are focused on doing just that, it’ll help them to be more productive and eliminate confusion.

When something goes wrong, don’t blame anyone. Trace the problem, and know who’s responsible for it. Then, fix it.

In conclusion, use your project management software as a means to an end. Don’t rely on it to make decisions for you—you’re still in control—so, mine data with it and integrate it into your overall marketing strategy.

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March 07, 2017

Database Marketing and CRM: Can One Survive Without the Other?

This is the era of marketing automation led by multiple databases and database management systems (DBMS). Now, our arsenal for the management of the services may include means to collect and curate customer data, prospect data and ROI analysis tools. This makes it possible for retailers to create personalized offers and mailers. However, this still leaves room for confusion between the several tools involved in collection, curation and analysis of the consumer data. For example – you may find it daunting to segregate a marketing automation tool like Hub Spot from other tools like customer relationship management systems (CRMs).

Database Marketing and CRM: Can One Survive Without the Other? : eAskme
Database Marketing and CRM: Can One Survive Without the Other? : eAskme
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So how to tell the difference?

One thing that all users must remember is that the definition of each database and software is highly subjective.  It depends on the user and the intent to a great extent. Believe it or not, a CRM can be considered marketing software since marketing teams use it in mega-corps. Traditionally, CRM is a repository of information that is necessary for managing customer relationships. And marketing software is used to store and take actions towards specific leads and customer relations.

Read more : Wrike: Project Management Software for Everyone

Database marketing vs. CRM: what are their uses?

To make things clearer, let us delve into the respective purpose of the two. A CRM has more than just the basic contact information. It has the customer history, address, phone number and other data that allows the marketing automation software to perform the actions on the database. The CRM allows the prediction of customer behavior and highlights customer preference that allows the marketing software to design offers, promotions and send mailers’ to target customers only. If used smartly, a CRM can help in both inbound and outbound marketing strategies like email, SMS, paid searches and social media ads.

The marketing automation software allows its user to create workflows based on the information they are interested in. while CRMs are necessary to maintain complete customer information, the marketing automation tools allow specific actions to be taken on specific customers depending on their purchase history and subscription preferences. There are two different kinds of marketing databases –
i.    Consumer databases
ii.    Business databases

How to use each of them?

CRM has been lauded over the years for being extremely useful in tracking sales and customer support interactions. A CRM can keep track of all customer purchases and subscriptions. However, a marketing system can track a broader set of data about the target audience even before they become customers. The information is usually pooled from a variety of sources including social media websites they visit and ads they view.

Read More : Email Marketing in 2017: How to Stay Ahead

Purpose of their existence –

As we have mentioned before, the purpose of CRMs and database marketing software can overlap to some extent. In most of the cases, CRMs are used to maintain customer relationships and a marketing automation tool is used to cultivate leads. While CRMs mostly function at the bottom of a sales funnel, the marketing automation tools and marketing database usually function at the very top. Hence, these marketing tools act before the conversion actually takes place and it is primarily used by the marketing department for the same purpose.

Read More : Improve marketing strategy

Why is it so confusing to tell the difference between marketing database and CRM?

Many of the tools that are used by CRMs can also be used by marketing databases. We have seen both sales and marketing teams of a company use the same set of tools for customer management as well as customer conversion. This is the main reason whyconfusion still persists among many erudite database experts.

What are the experts saying?

Do not compare CRM to marketing database.

There is no way you can choose either one.Both of them have their respective functions or they work at different ends of the sales funnel. This is reason enough for most startups and SMBs to choose both whenever possible. You may want to choose a remote database support to cut corners, but you simply cannot do without one.The combination of CRM and marketing automation is both necessary and critical for the success of a business. That being said, it is quite apparent that you should not at all be comparing the two in an attempt to determine which is more suited for your business. You will be needing both at some point, so be prepared to invest in the best CRM and marketing database automation tool in the near future.

Read More : GetResponse – TheIdeal Online Marketing Platform for the Businesses

How to engage your CRM and database marketing to improve customer relationship management?
There are three main target areas that can improve customer relationship management: Strategic consulting, Database design and Analysis services.

Strategic consulting

This is a part of your CRM. When the sales team uses a group of tools to collect all usable data about customers; it becomes a part of your company’s strategic consulting. The same tools can also be used by your DBA servicesteam(s) for data analysis, management, assessment and acquisition in the latter steps of this process. This usually helps in the creation of marketing files and models that enable list acquisition and brokerage.

Read more : Master Steps to Use Content Marketing For Businesses With Low Traffic

Database design

Data about your prospective and current customers need to be organized and curated, only then can marketing tools act on it to creating marketing and sales models. Groups of file developers are usually entrusted with the task of creating a data repository to create a seamless connectivity to a client’s marketing programs. They are also responsible for creating customer files, business goals and business retention.

Analysis and reporting

Lastly, the CRM and marketing groups analyze the available and organized data through cluster profiles, geo analysis and mapping to map customer behavior. The group also provides analysis reports based on the results from all CRM campaigns. In most companies, there are two separate teams who perform the tasks of CRM analysis and marketing database analysis, but we have seen companies work impeccably with just one team mastering both the sections.

Read More : Key to a Successful Mobile Marketing Campaign

The real difference between CRM and database marketing is not the kind of data that is stored; it is the purpose of the data that is curated in each database. The difference mainly stems from the kind of attention paid to the analysis of the data in each of these databases.

Author Bio:

Sujain Thomas is a website developer and design reviewer who has worked in close proximity with quite a few well-known dba services all across the country. She recommends the use of remote database support if you want to save money on your database marketing techniques.
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February 06, 2017

Wrike: Project Management Software for Everyone

Are you running a business or handling a team of professionals? If yes, then you may be struggling with communicating via email, finding important files, and staying productive. That is where you need an easy project management software. Using software for project management helps you easily and effectively communicate with your clients and team. It also helps to keep things aligned and on track. When people are looking at project management tools online, I always like to recommend Wrike to help them manage their team.

Wrike: Project Management Software for Everyone : eAskme
Wrike: Project Management Software for Everyone : eAskme
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What is Wrike?

Wrike is the best and most recommended workflow management software. It is an advanced tool which makes you work smarter and more effectively. It helps you to assign jobs, keep track of team performance, and complete the projects on time. With the help of Wrike, you can easily set up different tasks and assign them to your team members. You can not only plan and organize the projects but also improve communication and track the performance.

Top businesses like PayPal, Purestorage, Hootsuite, and Umpqua Bank  are also using this tool.
Wrike for every team:

Wrike suits every teams’ wants and needs. Wrike offers solutions creative teams, project management teams, product development teams and can even work as a marketing management software for marketing teams.

Wrike: Project Management Software for Everyone : eAskme

How Wrike helps you to organize and complete projects on time:

Wrike helps you create, plan, collaborate, report, customize, integrate, and support your teammates so you can complete your tasks effectively. It’s also a project scheduling software that allows you to track the performance and work done by your team.

Streamline your team efforts:

The most common issue which companies face is that when work passes from one team to another, sometimes they go off track or don`t know what to do next. Gantt chart software can help with this, but is often not flexible enough to be an all-in-one solution. Wrike helps you to connect your team in real time so they can easily understand what to do and when. If your team needs more information about the project then they can also check the previous work done on the same project. The free project management app allows you to track your projects on the go.

Time Tracking makes it the best project management tool:

Having trouble tracking the work and performance of your team? Wrike`s time tracking feature is really effective. It allows you to check how much work has been done and how much is still pending.
5 plans for 5 types of teams:

Wrike service offers 5 different types of plans for the businesses according to size of team and the features you require.

Free: For small teams. Up to 5 members.
Professional: For complete project planning and collaboration, Price $9.80/user/month. Up to 15 users.
Business: Extensive work management with complete customization and reporting. Price $24.80/user/month. From 5 to 200 users.
Marketers: Tailored solution. Price $34.60/user/month. Unlimited users.
Enterprise: Comprehensive solution. Ask for Price. Unlimited users
Wrike: Project Management Software for Everyone : eAskme

 Except the Free plan, all other plans also includes free Trial of Proofing & Approval.

Now, you should see how Wrike is for everyone. For a small team of 5 users free plan is the way to go, but if you need more extensive support and want more members on your team to use the tool, then try out a different plan.
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