This week Insightly hosted their Q1 Product update call. They shared exciting news about some great new features that will be coming up in the next few weeks.
If you have the Enterprise Edition, these features will be available for you:
Support for Products and Services catalog. Who needs this feature? Manufacturers will certainly benefit from using the product catalog feature. If you have different services, tit will also be great for you.
Pricebooks. This will help you to manage the complexities of bulk pricing or discounts for your partners as well as making it easier to update the prices of your products and services all at once.
Quotes. Yes, you will be able to send quotes from Insightly.
Custom validation rules. This one can help you and your team with data consistency.
Calculated field. I have been looking for this new feature for a while! I know a couple of clients who would benefit from this one. The question is, would they be interested in upgrading to the Enterprise version?
If you have the Professional Edition, you will enjoy:
Mapping visualization tool. I know our customers will love seeing their contacts in a map! You can also create a map to see all your open opportunities. One of my clients, who works with import and export, will love this feature!
Table cards. You can add a table card to view data in your dashboard.
They also shared their customer love improvements, which are available to all Insightly clients.
My favorite new feature: now you can add a new organization record when you are creating a new opportunity. How many times did you try to create a new opportunity and then realized you had to create another organization first? Now, with only a couple more clicks you can add your organization right as you are creating your new opportunity. I want to make sure you don’t miss this new feature! See the screenshot below, just so you know what you look for in your app (note: the quality of the screen shot is not the best, because I had to capture it from the video they posted, since this feature is not available yet).
Now you can create a document right from your Insightly record. How? You can generate a mailing label from the contact record, for instance. You can even use it with your opportunity record to generate a proposal!
Would you like to add an image to your records without it being an attachment? The new Image custom field will come in handy. You can add a picture of the business card to your contact record, or an image of a diagram to your project record.
What is up next for Insightly?
The new feature in their product roadmap that I am most excited about is a visual map of your contact relationships. I can’t wait to see this one!
In this call they also announced that Insightly is working on a new Email Marketing product that will be released later this year.
They want to help small business owners avoid the headache of having to sync data with the Marketing Automation tool.
Their goal is to have a tool that is built in to the same platform that allows small business owners to send rich emails including drip campaigns with branch logic. It might also include sms messages as well.
Are you excited? I am! I am looking forward to seeing their new product.
Many small businesses think of CRM as interchangeable with email marketing programs like MailChimp or Constant Contact. After all, they house your contacts and keep you in touch with your leads and existing clients. Same thing, right?
Well, no, because that’s just a small sliver of what a CRM system can do for your business.
As great as an email marketing system is, it has definite limitations. A well-integrated CRM, however, is limitless in what it can accomplish.
The main reason many businesses confuse the two is a lack of awareness of what a CRM is really capable of and how it can help businesses with all their marketing efforts.
With that in mind, let’s take a look at three key considerations about CRM and email marketing systems to understand how they are different, and how using them together can contribute to the success of your business.
CRM is your database. Email Marketing just houses your contact information.
The very definition of CRM is contact management. CRM treats contacts as whole people, not just email addresses. Email marketing simply houses how to contact them so you can send them quick campaigns. It tracks how many and who opened your emails and clicked on the links from each campaign, but it doesn’t capture any other information about them or your relationship with them..
A CRM, on the other hand, is your ultimate sales pipeline. It will not only help you maintain a clean database of your contacts, emails and other key information but it will also give you room to customize so you have a complete picture of who you are doing business with.
CRM provides the full picture on business health. Email marketing doesn’t.
CRMs are built to track a multitude of data points, including:
Sales Revenue
Leads
Opportunity Pipeline
Contacts
Companies
Activity tracking
Separately, these data points are valuable because they provide you with the information you need to run marketing campaigns, including email. Combined, they can transform your business by providing valuable and accurate insights on its separate parts as well as the whole.
Using this information, you can improve operations, create targeted marketing campaigns and ensure that your customers and clients experience personalized service from your business. Your CRM will be a data powerhouse, and if you use it to its potential you’ll get maximum results and return on investment.
CRM and Email Marketing make a powerful combination!
Nowhere does it say that CRMs and email marketing cannot get along. Indeed, they can. In fact, they’re better together! But selecting the wisest CRM for you that also integrates with email marketing requires a fair bit of research.
Several available CRM options are able to streamline email marketing integration efforts with their own software. Infusionsoft and The Mission Suite are two of them.
You knew in your bones you could make it on your own as a consultant or subcontractor. You were tired of using your skills as someone else’s employee, so you decided to start your own business.
Now you have mixed feelings. You’re relieved, because now you are your own boss. But perhaps you are also overwhelmed. You might have scared yourself, thinking: How do I get started? How am I going to do this? Help! (more…)
You’re probably reading a lot about how the cloud and software automation continue to make businesses run more efficiently. What you maybe didn’t know is that there are a lot of cloud systems that provide automation for small businesses. These two together add a lot of value to small business owners who use customer relationship management (CRM) platforms. CRMs have become some of the most useful tools for customer communication, data organization, and business automation.
As a small business owner you probably have heard about sales marketing automation. But what is it? And is this something that applies to your business?
