Sage CRM enables connecting online with customers

Marketing guru Seth Godin often speaks about how we’re living in a connection economy thanks to the web, allowing us to connect to each other in ways that were difficult or impossible to do before its existence.
From a business perspective, the potential of this connection economy is huge of course, as it allows us to build relationships with our customers on much deeper levels than ever before.
Even without the web, technology has enabled powerful dynamic connections within organizational infrastructures that have improved efficiencies, processes, and productivity for businesses through integration systems like ERP. However, innovation, along with adaptation to consumer needs, is always at the core of growth, sustainability, and value for consumers and businesses alike. This is a concept well practiced by the team at Sage.
Throughout our partnership with Sage, we’ve noticed them constantly improving their services and products to anticipate and fulfil their customers’ needs.  This is true for one of their most innovative products, Sage CRM (Customer Relationship Management).  CRM, defined by Wikipedia is “a model for managing a company’s interactions with current and future customers” and “involves using technology to organize, automate, and synchronize sales, marketing, customer service, and technical support”. There’s no doubt then, that a business’ customer database is one of its most valuable assets and resources.
A CRM is a much needed tool for any business of any size for not only understanding its customers, but for keeping track of all the past, present and potential interactions and touch points. 
However, now imagine, being able to integrate all that existing information in your database, with additional, real time information, updates and connections! No worries if your imagination isn’t feeling up to this task, because it’s a reality with Sage CRM! Sage CRM has integrated social media functionality into the application to help businesses optimize their connections and engage with their customers and prospects at a whole new level.
Sage CRM enables connecting online with customers through its social media functionality that provides integration with LinkedIn, the largest professional social media network, with a worldwide membership of 200+ million professionals around the world, as well as Twitter, one of the ten most visited websites on the Internet, with a membership of over 500 million, and a service that’s been described as “the SMS of the Internet”

The Features
With the social media integration, Sage CRM users get instant and additional information about customers, based on their LinkedIn and Twitter profiles. This information can lead to not just deeper and instant networking opportunities, but more importantly, can also provide detailed insights into the preferred activities, interests, thought processes, needs, and frustrations of your clients and prospects. This gives your business the opportunity to really make an impact by providing value through meeting and exceeding those needs and expectations.

Another useful feature is the ability to deliver relevant and powerful, yet summarized content, like industry updates, news headlines, blog posts, videos, etc, to prospects and existing customers, in the form of RSS feeds that they can opt-in to based on their own specific roles, functions, and interests. For example, a hotel can create an RSS feed of news headlines, updates, special offers, or information on corporate travel for its corporate clients, and a separate feed for similar information on leisure travel for their leisure clients.
In addition, users can also add the RSS feeds from their own Twitter accounts to see and respond to tweets from within Sage CRM.

Email Marketing
At the heart of any connection efforts in the world of web, is email. The Drip email-marketing feature within Sage CRM makes it simple to create email campaigns with a few clicks, and prebuilt templates. You also get real-time analytics to evaluate the impact of your campaign and maximize ROI, by understanding who opened the email, clicked on the links and which emails bounced or were unsent. Using this data, targeted groups can then be created from the results for further follow-up and/or future e-marketing campaigns.  There’s no easier or more effective way to generate leads for your business!
It’s understandable that it can often be overwhelming to deal with all the different connection points now available to us online. And that’s exactly the reason it makes sense to have the online world be integrated with your business world, where you’re already spending most of your workday. Why go out of your CRM to find out what your customer is engaging in online, when you can have those online interactions integrated from within your CRM.
If you’re curious to learn more, or see a product demo of the Sage CRM in action, contact us via phone or email, or you can find and connect with us online on LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter to keep on top of all that is happening in Sage CRM & Sage ERP.