Today’s media landscape is immense and variable. The great explosion of the internet age has been in content and communication channels. Business doesn’t just communicate with customers over channels they control. Users want to find your brand wherever they are the most comfortable looking for it. If that’s Twitter, YouTube, or your website, you’d better be sure you’re there by using multichannel communications.
That communication paradigm goes both ways, however. It’s not just customers communicating through multiple channels. Today, brands are connecting with prospects over every channel they can access. If walkie-talkies were a common means of communication, I’m sure I’d be writing a blog post about selling to clients effectively without static interfering in your walkie-talkie sales pitch.
What is Multichannel Marketing?
When we talk about multichannel marketing and communication, we’re talking about the following primary communication channels:
- Telephone
- Live Chat
- Webform
- Self-help portals
- Video chats
- Social media (Twitter and Facebook, at minimum)
Of course, there are far more channels than what we’ve listed here. However, this will cover all but the most unusual prospects. It’s better to focus deeply on a smaller number of primary channels than to spread your brand too thin across too many channels.
Why Connect Comms to Your CRM?
It’s no accident that the most productive CRMs are the most comprehensive. If you can keep 100% of client information in your CRM, that means your customer-facing staff never needs to dig through records or hunt through other apps to find what they need to know. If you’ve ever waited on hold, you know how tedious it can be spinning your thumbs while some tech waits for their computer to answer a question. With a comprehensive CRM, everything is at your fingertips.
To create a comprehensive CRM, it needs to be the hub for all information. That means that everything your team does passes through the CRM at some point in its lifecycle. Emails, chat messages, packages, previous orders, likes, and dislikes: we’re talking about everything you do, attached to the prospect’s CRM record for easy access.
An integrated CRM also improves associate productivity. When you can take calls and write emails directly from your CRM, it means you don’t have to change apps. Sure, that only takes a second, but the time spent to reorient yourself in another application and hunt down what you need does pile up. In fact, the mental cost of task switching, and the attendant loss of focus can reduce your probability by as much as 40 percent.
Integrating Comms with Zoho CRM
The first step in effective multichannel marketing is integrating your communications with Zoho. You’ll need to connect your client communication channels through Zoho CRM’s Setup page.
Zoho CRM can integrate with hundreds of different specific vendors in those categories. If you’re willing to do a little setup, you can find a way to connect just about anything to Zoho CRMs APIs with Zapier.
Once all your communication methods are ingested into Zoho CRM, you can view and monitor client relationships from one simple hub. No matter how your clients want to get in touch with you, you’ll hear them, capturing the conversation for later review.
With your communications connected to Zoho CRM, you can also take advantage of baked-in analytical tools, message templates, and keyword monitoring.
Additional Resources
To learn more about Zoho CRM visit our resource page to see all our CRM content in one spot!
