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18 Feb 2020
Uncategorized Permalink

Campaign Module in Zoho CRM and how to leverage the features and reporting

February 18, 2020

The functionality of the Zoho CRM and the features it provides to marketing your business is essential in being successful with these applications.  Within Zoho CRM there is a module called Zoho Campaigns.  The module is a little know gem in the Zoho CRM suite of applications.

Zoho Campaigns is a tool that will allow Zoho Enterprise user to send a larger number of “bulk” emails than just the regular 1,000 that you can send through the CRM interface.  Zoho Campaigns can also be used a stand-alone module.  This enables the user to do the following:

  1. Send an initial email with templates either created on your own
  2. Track your results based on the following criteria:
    1. Total Emails Sent
      1. The number of leads you loaded to email
    2. Delivered
      1. Total amount of emails that made it to the recipients
    3. Bounces
      1. Total number of emails that did not make it to the recipients
    4. Unopened
      1. Total number that were not read
    5. Unique Opens
      1. Total number of opens that were read
    6. Unique Clicks
      1. Total number of clicks based on Links and/or buttons in your email
    7. Unsubscribes
      1. This will remove the lead from the email list
    8. Complaints
      1. This will remove the lead from the email list

An additional benefit from this application is that you can send follow-up emails.  This will reduce the amount of nuisance emails you are sending to the same recipients.  It will also give your prospects that “personal” touch to people that have either clicked on your website or requested information on your product.

Additional reporting that can help is the “Opens/Clicks of recipients’ optimal open time”

This real-time report shows the following:

  1. Time emails were sent
  2. Times they were scheduled
  3. Times of Unique Opens
  4. Times of Unique Clicks

Another benefit of the Zoho Campaign module is the fact that you can plan out your marketing strategy and schedule your emails into the future as well as have drafts built and maintained to send out marketing materials via email/SMS on-the-fly.

Please keep in mind that there is an apprioval process that Zoho also helps with so that you can limit the number of rejected emails and also so that your contacts are filtered.  In the campaign setup process can have a variety of ways to pick the contacts you are looking to target.

You will also have a variety of Sync Services that can help with adding contacts without having to import manually.  The flexibility within Zoho gives you up to 50 syncs possible without any additional cost to you.  An additional way of you getting contacts into the Zoho Campaign module is through the ability to use “Sign-up” forms in your emails and websites.

Let’s not forget about the Automation section of Zoho Campaigns.  This allows you to automate what happens after you get a certain reaction or response from an email or a SMS message.  This workflow automation is almost identical to the automation you have in Zoho CRM.

Additional features that will aid in your marketing efforts in Zoho CRM are as follows:

  1. Ecommerce
  2. Autoresponders
  3. Contact Scoring
  4. Managing Topics
    1. Manage your contacts while giving them the freedom to choose what they want.
      1. Using topics, you can separate out the types of newsletters you send to your contacts.
      2. Contacts can update their email preferences by selecting the topics of their interest.
    2. Also, use this functionality for Email preference pages and Thank You Pages
  5. You can also use this application suite to do the following:
    1. A/B Testing
      1. Send two different versions of your email campaign to see which one performs better
    2. RSS
      1. Let your contacts know what’s new in your website
    3. Zoho Meeting
      1. Promote your webinars created in Zoho Meetings
    4. Zoho Webinar
      1. Setup webinars for your contacts to join so you can interact with the masses
    5. Coupons
      1. Boost your sales by generating coupons and sending it through email campaigns
    6. SurveyMonkey
      1. Measure customer satisfaction, their product needs and more with email survey campaign

All of the features that we have spoken about here, can help you to drive sales and contacts to your website.  These marketing tips and modules can help to increase both profit and the client experience of your prospects.

1st Avenue CRM is a Zoho Authorized Partner and is one of the top consulting firms in the industry. We provide this content freely and welcome your feedback. Should you need help digging deeper than this article provides or need help with your Zoho deployment, you are welcome to reach out to us at info@1stAvenueCRM.com .

To our success,

Noah Johnson
1st Avenue CRM
512.333.4422 | noah@1stAvenueCRM.com

Schedule with me

30 Dec 2019
Blog, Zoho, Zoho One Permalink

Leveraging Zoho One and Email/SMS to enhance your business

December 30, 2019

Fellow technologists, we wanted to put together a simple and easy way to show you how Zoho One can help you to market your business by leveraging the Email and SMS functionality in Zoho One.

Lead email and SMS setup and usage

With Zoho CRM you have the ability to send the following:

  • Single emails to individual leads, contacts, accounts or successful deals
    • This can be done by an administrator or by an individual agent
    • The ease of Zoho allows your administrator to set up templates to be used
      • You can set them up under each module
        • Lead
        • Contact
        • Account
        • Deal
      • Each one can have different criteria
        • Example, you can have a promotional email that can be used in the Lead Module, and then have the same one setup in the Contact module. The template in the contact module you may want to include a different phone number or a price for the prospect.
      • Bulk emails to individual leads, contacts, accounts or successful deals and upgrades or promotions
      • SMS texting
        • Multiple texts at one time by using one of the following services with Zoho CRM
          • These are the two most recommended SMS services by Zoho as they are easy to use as well as less expensive than most.
            • SMS Magic
            • Twilio
          • Pricing will vary on your volume as well as features with these vendors.

With Zoho CRM you can incorporate all these marketing tools so that they can update and communicate with each other for better data integrity.  It also will help you to pinpoint your marketing efforts as well as stay compliant with all laws and federal regulations.

With single emails the process if very straightforward, all you have to do is to select the Lead by using the search function in Zoho.

Click on the magnifying glass, then type in the phone (this is usually the most unique search qualifier), this will bring the lead into the layout form you have open.

Click on the “Send Email” button as shown below:

Then Click on the “Choose Template” link

Select the template that you have made (please contact us for a tutorial on how to create templates in Zoho).

During this setup for an individual Zoho One email, your email signature will be added once you send the email.

Bulk email/SMS Setup

The process and setup for sending bulk emails and/or is more complex and more strategic.  Both processes use a feature in the lead module called filtering.  You can save your pre-defined selection criteria for ease of use.  It is always a good common practice to use filtering when trying to target market.  A great example of target marketing is you could look at all of your generated leads and their respective sales to see the states that have higher conversion rates from a Lead to a contact or deal.  You will than build a filter to select this slice of leads to send your bulk email to.

How to create a filter:

  1. Go to the LEAD Module
  2. Click on “Filter Leads By”
  3. Select “Email”
    1. Then “Is Not Empty”
      1. This will select all records with an email address
    2. Click “Apply Filter”
      1. This will then select the criteria for you to send bulk emails using the templates you created earlier
      2. Then you will be asked to save the filter. You can use this for future emails and sms texts.

There limitations to using the bulk feature outside of the Campaign Module:

  1. You can only send a total of 1,000 emails per day
  2. You can only send a maximum of 500 at a time
  3. SMS: You can only send a total of 500 SMS per day
  4. SMS: You can only send a total of 50 at a time

A few additional bits of information to help you with this process are as follows:

  • Each time that you send an email or SMS, Zoho One will leave an automatic note in the history record
  • You can also use the workflow section of Zoho One to have additional email/SMS messages sent by setting up a specific criteria

Thank you for looking into this process and please be aware of our other 2 parts in this series.  Don’t forget to sign-up for email notifications to have an alert sent to you when the new parts are available to you so that you do not miss out on this valuable information.

18 Dec 2019
Zoho, Zoho MarketingHub Permalink

Zoho CRM and MarketingHub – The essential information on how these 2 applications can help increase your ROI

December 18, 2019

Zoho MarketingHub, as an implementation partner, can help your marketing scheme generate cold leads, integrate with any dialing systems.  You can generate leads on your own or integrations with additional platforms. As an integration consultant and developer for Zone One, I would recommend using this MarketingHub platform because of the robust functionality.  

MarketingHub has an easy to use “all-in-one” interface you get the following benefits:

  1. Adding leads manually
  2. Creating “Sync” workflow as part of your integrations with Zoho CRM
  3. The ability as a developer to “Clone” your lead lists without having to re-build lists
  4. Implementation Partners can use MarketingHub to integrate with their website Signup Forms, Engagement platforms as well as web applications

MarketingHub also allows your development of a marketing strategy to follow a “Journey” of all leads.  A journey helps you to take a lead and create automated marketing actions. Developers use these marketing actions that use triggers to start a journey.  Once the lead is in the journey, it then can follow automated processes that are actions to be performed on leads that have entered the journey. These actions are like a workflow in that these actions are integrations of segments of conditions that are setup by the Zoho One developer to move the lead through the journey.

The beauty of using Zoho CRM and MarketingHub is that this product helps you to successfully manage marketing activities across multiple channels.  With the integration with Zoho One, any developer can easily track leads that have been synced in MarketingHub. You will be able to generate more leads, convert them into customers and help your business to retain these clients over time.

MarketingHub does have a learning curve that developers need to be prepared for as this Zoho One application connects all of the core functionality together.  Below is how the interface for MarketingHub Dashboard shows the key data points to help you administer your progression.

This new application in the Zoho One platform truly lets you use your integrations across different channels such as email, social media, website, and SMS.  You can incorporate all of the Zoho One campaign module features to use the analytics in MarketingHub to run a more targeted marketing solution as well as integrating with well-known third-party applications such as Salesforce, G Suite, Twillio, Zendesk just to mention a few.  

Zoho One suite of integrated products help to enhance the ease-of-use that MarketingHub has developers excited about.  Three of the best Zoho applications that you will see a benefit from are: Zoho Forms, Zoho Sites and Zoho Survey. Just like in Zoho One, MarketingHub uses scores and tags in order to segment out your marketing efforts.  With this MarketingHub will allow you to have cumulative scores to help you recognize high-performing leads. This will then allow your developer to build a better mousetrap or as we say in this day and age, build a better strategy to achieve better results.

This application allows you to integrate with your websites through using API’s to send events between your website and your integrated Zoho One solutions.  The benefit(s) of this process all circle back to the ease of use of MarketingHub, the in-depth reporting of this application and to see the ROI of what your marketing efforts have done.  This process can help you to analyze what products are selling to what types of clients and to help you gauge what areas or states are seeing better marketing results.

When using MarketingHub and Zoho Campaigns together, you will be able to judge how effective your email and sms campaigns are.  Through the design of these campaigns you will be able to see what verbiage, cosmetic design and demographic data you can leverage to increase contacts as well as sales.

01 Nov 2019
Blog, Zoho, Zoho One Permalink

October 2019 Zoho Happenings and Updates!

November 1, 2019

Zoho Catalyst

Zoho launches Catalyst, a new developer platform with a focus on microservices

Sridhar Vembu does an interview

Zoho Recruit

Zoho Recruit EOL for Inbox Parsing | Resume Inbox

Zoho Desk

Zoho Desk: Cleaning up your non-migrated social portals

Zoho Inventory

Zoho Inventory gets a refreshing new facelift

Zoho CRM

Recent enhancements in Zoho CRM

Zoho Books

Zoho Books Updates

  • Plan and track your spending with Budgets
  • Increase your productivity with journal templates
  • Connect with third-party apps using Connections
  • Keep a watch on your dashboard watchlist
  • Associate projects to journals
  • Customize Template PDFs
  • iOS 13 ready Zoho Books
    • Use the system-wide dark mode.
    • Scan business cards to add contacts instantly
    • Make use of conversational Siri shortcuts
    • Perform actions quickly with contextual menus

Zoho Projects

Zoho Cliq

Zoho Orchestly

Zoho Meeting

Zoho Meeting: Gmail add-on for meetings, raise hand and allow talk feature for attendees from iOS app

Zoho Backstage

Zoho Backstage | Introducing Custom Forms: Forms as unique as your event

01 Oct 2019
Blog, Hubspot, Hubspot Marketing Hub, Salesforce, Salesforce Marketing Cloud, Uncategorized, Zoho, Zoho MarketingHub, Zoho One Permalink

Pricing Comparison: Zoho MarketingHub vs Hubspot Marketing Hub vs Salesforce Marketing Cloud

October 1, 2019

This article is a basic overview of Zoho MarketingHub pricing compared to Hubspot Marketing Hub, and SalesForce Marketing Cloud.

This should not be considered an in-depth comparison of each product, only a pricing overview.

While putting this article together some basic insights came to light. These are my conclusions, feel free to draw your own.

  • Zoho One pricing is very attractive
    • It’s main attraction comes from not only including Zoho MarketingHub Premium features but also the entire Zoho One suite of applications
    • Also the inherent integrations that comes with being apart of Zoho One. Being able to push data around with native connections is very powerful.
  • Hubspot Marketing Hub can get pricey quick when you start to add on leads.
    • The difference in edition pricing it big as well.
  • Salesforce Marketing Cloud has many editions and its hard to navigate.
    • I chose the edition that matches Hubspot and Zoho the closest.
    • Add on contacts/leads gets pricey here as well, costing the most out of all. But their packages start off with 10k leads for all levels, so you have a little bit more room to start out.
    • Feels like you’re paying a premium when you compare features

Zoho MarketingHub

Annual Pricing

STANDARD

$20
for 1000 leads billed per month

PREMIUM​

$40
for 1000 leads billed per month

ZOHO ONE​

ALL EMPLOYEE PRICING
$30
/employee/month​
billed annually

Difference between Standard and Premium?

    • Standard Features

      • Unlimited automated emails
      • Number of visitors = 2 * lead count
      • Touchpoints
      • Complete lead management
      • Website behavior tracking
      • Website goals and events
      • Basic pre-built journey templates
      • Basic lead journeys with reports
      • Custom journey goals
      • Lead path tracing in journeys
      • Lead scoring
      • SMS marketing
      • Marketing planner
      • Survey campaigns
      • Webinar promotions
      • Event promotions
      • E-commerce marketing

    • Premium Features

      • Everything in Standard+
        • Smart pop-ups and OnSpot forms
        • Website missed goals
        • Site purchase abandonment
        • Web application tracking
        • Alias domains and IP filtering
        • Lead attribution reports
        • Custom lead tags
        • Lead stage classification
        • Advanced pre-built journey templates
        • Advanced journeys with reports
        • ROI measurement
        • Multi-product management
        • Product cross-sell and up-sell
        • URL shortening with custom domains
        • Smart links and App links
        • E-commerce journeys and workflows
        • Store abandonment notifications
        • Inbox previews
        • Email signature campaigns

         

  • Zoho One includes Premium Features plus

    • 500 leads/org
      500 leads/employee
    • Includes all Zoho One applications

 

Add-on Leads Pricing

  • 10,000 leads – $60 / month / billed annually
  • 50,000 leads – $160 / month / billed annually
  • 100,000 leads – $272 / month / billed annually

HubSpot Marketing Hub

Starter

Includes 1,000 contacts
Starts at
$50
per month

Professional

Includes 1,000 contacts
Starts at
$800
per month

Enterprise

Includes 10,000 contacts
Starts at
$3,200
per month

Difference between Starter, Professional and Enterprise?

Starter

HubSpot CRM plus:
CAPTURE & CONVERT LEADS

  • Ad management
  • Live chat
  • Conversational bots
  • Forms
  • Pop-up forms

UNDERSTAND YOUR LEADS

  • Contact website activity
  • List segmentation

ENGAGE YOUR LEADS

  • Email marketing
  • Ad retargeting

Professional

Starter plus:
AUTOMATE & PERSONALIZE YOUR MARKETING

  • Marketing automation
  • Smart content

GET FOUND ONLINE

  • Blog & content creation tools
  • SEO & content strategy
  • Social media

OPTIMIZE CONVERSION RATES

  • A/B testing
  • Landing pages
  • Calls-to-action
  • Video hosting & management

MEASURE REVENUE

  • Website traffic analytics
  • Campaign reporting
  • Attribution reporting
  • Custom reporting

Enterprise

Professional plus:
MANAGE YOUR TEAMS & BRANDS

  • Content partitioning
  • Hierarchical teams
  • Single sign-on
  • Social permissions
  • Additional domains
  • Email send frequency cap

EXTEND THE PLATFORM

  • Calculated properties
  • CMS membership

ANALYZE WITH FULL CONTROL

  • Filtered analytics view
  • Events API

Add-on Contacts Pricing

  • Starter – 1,000 contacts included. Starts at +$20/month per 1,000 additional contacts.
  • Professional – 1,000 contacts included. +$50/month per 1,000 additional contacts.
  • Enterprise – 10,000 contacts included. +$10/month per 1,000 additional contacts.

SalesForce Marketing Cloud

Pardot B2B Marketing Automation Pricing

Growth

$ 1,250
USD/month/up to 10,000 contacts

Plus

$ 2,500
USD/month/up to 10,000 contacts

Advanced

$ 4,000
USD/month/up to 10,000 contacts

Difference between Growth, Plus and Advanced?

Growth

  • Lead Generation, Qualification, and Management
  • Email Marketing and Personalization
  • Marketing and Sales Intelligence

Plus

Growth features plus:

  • Advanced Automation, Personalization, and Qualification
  • Advanced Analytics and Reporting

Advanced

Plus features plus:

  • Business Units
  • Artificial Intelligence for Marketing and Sales

Add-on Contacts Pricing

Starting at
$100
USD/10,000 contacts/month*

1st Avenue CRM is a Zoho Authorized Partner and is one of the top consulting firms in the industry. We provide this content freely and welcome your feedback. Should you need help digging deeper than this article provides or need help with your Zoho deployment, you are welcome to reach out to us at info@1stAvenueCRM.com .

Best Regards,

Noah Johnson
1st Avenue CRM
512.333.4422 | noah@1stAvenueCRM.com

Schedule with me

18 Sep 2019
Blog, Zoho, Zoho One Permalink

Zoho Updates Week of Wednesday 9/18

September 18, 2019

Zoho has released a lot of new updates over the previous week. We all know how hard it can be to find some of this information so I assembled a quick hit list for everyone of the more notable updates. Most of the big updates are around Zoho One including its UI and dashboards! Much better User Experience now! Make sure to check it out.

16 Aug 2019
Blog, Zoho, Zoho One, Zoho Partner Permalink
photo credit: Zoho @ Zoholics 2019 Austin
photo credit: Zoho @ Zoholics 2019 Austin

What it means to be a Zoho Partner

August 16, 2019

photo credit: Zoho @ Zoholics 2019 Austin

As a Zoho partner and a partner/consultant to other solutions in the channel, it’s great to reflect a little bit upon what this all really means. What does it mean to be a Zoho Consultant / Partner? I hope to answer that in this article.

Great Platform

Working with Zoho has been one of the most exciting experiences in my professional career. The Zoho platform itself is wide and expansive, it can seem at first to be a tad bit overwhelming. “How do I even begin to start to claim expertise on a platform this big?” Is a question asked a lot. The answer is one piece at a time. Each client presents a new opportunity to broaden your knowledge base and deliver something on a new level. Often looking back at other deployments knowing which would benefit from this new learned kernel of knowledge.

For most, I’d have to assume we all get exposed to Zoho CRM first. Either in your own personal deployment for a company or viewing another’s deployment, you know that Zoho is onto something. Then you start to understand the pricing model, which is attractive to say the least, and then comes the community. The Zoho community is great, expansive, and supportive. Oftentimes community members lead to long time partnerships in finding solutions.

New exciting Apps

However you get here, one thing without a doubt is great about the Zoho platform, and it’s the new apps. With the launch of Zoho One a couple of years ago now, more and more people are getting exposed to the entire Zoho suite of 40+ apps. With that comes the deeper realization that there is a lot more Zoho One can do for you and your deployment. In steps a Zoho Partner. Leaning on a Zoho Partner and their years of expertise in navigating the entire suite, becomes incredibly important.

Photo by Scott Trento

Recently Zoho launched Zoho Marketing Hub, which in short is the end all of Digital Marketing platforms. When you compare Zoho Marketing Hub to that of HubSpot, you can sure see differences. Hubspot is a very mature product that is expanding in its own right. Where Zoho Marketing Hub makes up for its lack of maturity is it’s deep integration to the rest of the Zoho One suite. Tying in forms, websites, CRM leads, vistor tracking and, email campaigns, into a true marketing hub. It’s one of the most exciting platforms Zoho has released. The possibilities for clients previously content with the basics of email campaigns, now having the quick ability to do much more. The moment clients realize what is truly at their finger tips and now included in their Zoho One package, is great. It’s a moment that makes me very happy to be a Zoho Partner.

Great new fun clients

With all of that in mind, it really comes down to the clients. The clients I’ve had the opportunity to work with so far have really been the highlight of it all. As a Zoho Partner, new clients come in all the time, each with their own new requirements. Sure some are in the same or similar verticals as each other, but no two clients are identical. I often find that clients from completely different ends of the spectrum are very similar in the way they do business.  The clients for the most part are fun and are all excited to bring a platform like Zoho into the fold. Being apart of the team and for that matter, many different teams at the same time is very rewarding.

Personal recommendations from clients

Photo by Priscilla Du Preez

With that in mind, personal recommendations from clients is the most rewarding part of being a Zoho Partner. There’s no higher compliment I can receive from a client. Not only that, the immediate report with referred clients is always nice. This typically leads to future long-term client relationships that are founded on success of previous clients.

Creating customers for life

In that same stride… creating a customer for life. This may sound corny, or even head scratching, but it is without a doubt the number one goal. Some of us might of read this in a book or just have heard this phrase passed around over the years, but it is a true guiding principal. Creating a customer that not only refers in new clients, but becomes your evangelist. There’s only one way to do this, and that’s by delivering a product that they cant help but love. Zoho provides a canvass for you to do so and that why we love it so much.

In summary, it means a lot to be a Zoho Partner and lets all hope to continue for many years to come.