What Is Salesforce And What are Its Uses

How much time and money have you spent to install your traditional CRM solution?

Even after installing your own Customer Relationship Management (CRM) solution, what is the difficulty level of its utilization?

Yes, we know that despite spending a hell lot of time and dollars on building your own CRM, you are finding it hard to use during connecting with customers and tracking their activities.

No, you aren’t to be blamed.

Rather, for decades, many companies are following the same procedure as you and are struggling with their traditional CRM software.

However, with a big surge in Cloud Computing technology, there have been many innovations in CRM software solutions that have proved productive for all types of businesses along with saving their time and money for manual installation.

One such efficient and popular CRM solution is provided by Salesforce, an American cloud-based software as a service (SaaS) company. Salesforce CRM implements cloud computing technology and helps you connect better with your partners and potential customers along with effectively tracking your customer’s activity.

Today we are going to discuss Salesforce CRM in detail, what it does and various ways to use Salesforce CRM to retain your existing loyal customers.

Let’s dive in.

What is Salesforce?

As mentioned above, Salesforce is a CRM services provider and is best known for revolutionizing the entire CRM sector through its innovative implementation of cloud computing technology. In simple words, with Salesforce CRM, you can achieve a speedy path from Idea to App which is not possible in traditional CRM solutions. Salesforce tools help you to focus on building your app instead of building the entire infrastructure and tools yourself.

What are the Unique Features of Salesforce CRM?

Salesforce CRM is popular among many people because of the following reasons:

• Fast – As compared to traditional CRM software (years to install), Salesforce CRM is quick to install (a few weeks to months).

Easy – It is easy to understand and use. You will understand it in less time and put it into use easily.
Effective – Since it is speedy and easy to use, your business productivity will increase.

• Since Salesforce uses cloud technology, you or your team can use it remotely i.e. access it from anywhere in the world provided with a good internet connection.
• Salesforce smoothly integrates with third-party applications. No matter it is Gmail, accounting software, or any other app, Salesforce is flexible which is not possible in other CRM solutions.
• Another great advantage of Salesforce is its affordability. Despite its vast variety of capacities, Salesforce is affordable to startups and small businesses too.

Salesforce Business Statistics (One of the Reasons to Choose)

• Salesforce has become popular among many companies and is known as ‘Cloud King’ by the Street’s founder Jim Cramer. It has reported fourth-quarter revenue of $4.85 billion, up 35% year-over-year, 34% in constant currency.
• Salesforce has more than 150,000 customers worldwide. The CRM industry is dominated by Salesforce with a 19.7% market share. Its competitors are Oracle (9.1%), Microsoft (6.2%), and SAP (12.1%) which rank behind Salesforce.
• Salesforce features nearly 3000 applications having more than 3 million installations. Many companies are preferring the Salesforce platform to develop their apps. Hence, there is a great demand for Salesforce developers and admins.

The various cloud services offered by the Salesforce are:

• Salesforce sales cloud
• Salesforce marketing cloud
• Salesforce community cloud
• Salesforce service cloud
• Salesforce commerce cloud
• Salesforce Analytics cloud
• Salesforce App cloud
• Salesforce IoT cloud
• Salesforce Health cloud

How Does the Salesforce CRM Works?

Since Salesforce is a SaaS company, it uses cloud-computing technology i.e. it hosts various apps and makes them available online. By hosting different cloud platforms, Salesforce helps companies to interact with various data types and provide services to their clients in several ways.

According to their official YouTube video, with the Salesforce sales cloud, companies gain capabilities to track their contacts and manage a team effectively thereby increasing sales via various opportunities. The service cloud helps companies to better connect with clients by resolving their issues.

Since Salesforce implements artificial intelligence (AI), you receive simplified workflow analytics thereby creating accurate forecasting results.

6 Innovative Ways to Use Salesforce to Accelerate Customer Retention

You have now understood what is Salesforce CRM and its unique features. Now let’s learn about the ways to use Salesforce that will help you retain your existing customers.

1. Use Integrations to Collect Customer Details in One Place

A streamlined integration is very necessary to get marketing, sales, and customer service in the same place. Integrations create transparent data funnel via which these 3 departments can view every move of your customer. For example, if your marketing team is using AeroLeads, your sales team uses Zendesk, and your customer service team uses Salesforce, AeroLeads can be integrated with Zendesk and Salesforce. This helps all 3 teams understand your customers better and interact with them efficiently. This improves customer service experience. Positive customer service reviews not only retain your customers but also attracts new customers. This is one of the effective ways to use Salesforce.

2. Use Customer Details to Personalize

While serving your customers via Salesforces, you’ve probably collected their many details which are integrated into Salesforce. Since every customer wants to feel special, you can use these details and establish a personalized connection with them. For example, if you own an e-commerce website, you can use your customer’s search history to suggest some buying suggestions for him. You also have details about which particular brand your customer is always looking for. Thus by using gold mine of such details, you can send personalized emails to your customer about the products that may interest him. This is one of the best ways to use Salesforce.

3. Salesforce Integration with Your Customer Service Platform

Recent research revealed that 52% of consumers have changed their providers citing poor customer service reasons. Strong customer service is necessary to retain loyal customers, however, this marketing strategy is always underrated by many companies. Strong customer service refers to not only sending them offers after-sales, but also understanding the customer’s complaints seriously and solve them on priority. To perform this task efficiently, integrate Salesforce with your customer service system. With this, your customer service team can overview all customer interactions, know their transaction history, and solve their issues immediately. This is one of the recommended ways to use Salesforce to retain customers.

4. Track Your Customer’s Activities

If your customer is not purchased or downloaded anything from your website for more than 7 months, you’re probably losing your customer. With Salesforce, you can track your customer interactions by searching about their last activity on your website. The best thing is you can automate this process for a weekly or monthly basis. Once you understand their previous transactions, you can send personalized emails mentioning some offers on their favorite products that may motivate them to purchase again. In Salesforce, you can obtain a report about those customers whose last transaction was 6 months ago. This is one of the best ways to use Salesforce for customer retention.

5. Reach Out to Your Inactive Subscribers

Many companies miss this wonderful opportunity. When companies identify their inactive subscribers in email lists, they often eliminate those names thinking that since they’re no longer engaging, there will no open and click rates via them.

However, according to MailChimp, inactive subscribers are 26% more likely to respond to your mails and make a follow-up purchase than non-subscribers. This means your inactive subscriber is still your valuable customers. With the Salesforce Enterprise account, you can send 500 emails at one time. If you want to send more emails and reach your inactive subscribers too, integrate Salesforce with MailChimp, an email marketing tool. MailChimp helps you segment your inactive subscribers and re-send them emails about offers and discounts on your products/services. This is one of the most efficient ways to use Salesforce and retain loyal customers.

6. Use Salesforce to Send Personalized SMS

Text messages have an opening rate of 90%. With Salesforce Open SMS Pro, you can speedily reach people in bulk, that too in real-time. After integrating your data, filter your customers, and use an open SMS pro app to deliver timely text messages to your customers. Many organizations from Europe, Africa, and Australia use Open SMS Pro and send nearly 3 million messages per month. They have reported an increase in ROI. Sending SMS via Salesforce is one of the powerful ways to use Salesforce.

Final Thoughts

You have now learned about Salesforce and ways to use Salesforce to improve customer retention. Your customers are your valuable assets. Customer retention is very important as they are the face of your brand. However, make sure that once your customer purchases your product, give him some rest time and avoid bombarding his inbox with your discounts and offers. Salesforce is a very powerful CRM software in today’s tech-savvy marketing world and it is highly recommended to achieve your customer relationship management goals.

Have you used Salesforce CRM? What is your experience? Please let us know via the comment box now.