Category Archives: B2B

If you work in an office, chances are that you’ve heard of Slack, or you might even be using it right now.

Slack is a cloud-based collaboration and communication tool taking the business world by storm. As of October 2019, Slack had more than 12 million daily users, and demand for the application increased exponentially during the COVID-19 pandemic.

If you’ve recently started using Slack and are just figuring out the platform — or if you’re still trying to decide if you should implement it for your business — we’ve got you covered. In this guide, we’ll be sharing the best Slack tips and tricks to get you started.

What is Slack?

In essence, Slack is a chat program that companies use to communicate internally (and sometimes externally, such as with partners). It’s widely used to simplify communication streams, but it’s much more than an instant messaging tool.

With its 1,500+ integrations, including Google Docs and Trello, Slack is also a powerful tool for sharing documents and files, managing projects, tracking team progress, and sharing important information company-wide.

With its easy-to-use interface, teams can communicate quickly and share important documents seamlessly, effectively eliminating internal emails. In fact, Slack users see a 32% reduction in internal emails.

It also records all sorts of interactions between team members. And, with its extensive search and star functions, it is possible to find any thread, photo, link, or file no matter how long ago the document was shared. That also makes Slack a very handy tool to use as an internal knowledge base. If someone on your team has a question, they can easily look it up on Slack to see if it’s already been answered.

It’s accessible via mobile, desktop application, and web app, allowing you to stay in touch with important company communication while you’re on the go on any device you have.

Plans and Pricing

Slack offers three types of plans: Standard, Plus, and Enterprise Grid.

Standard Plan

• Geared towards small and medium businesses
• Unlimited message archive
• Unlimited apps and integrations
• Group video calls for up to 15 people with screen sharing
• Guest accounts and shared channels
• 10GB storage per member

Pricing: $6.67 USD per person per month, billed annually

Plus Plan

• For larger businesses or those looking for advanced administration tools
• 99.9% guaranteed uptime SLA
• User provisioning and de-provisioning
• Corporate exports for all messages
• SAML-based single sign-on (SSO)
• Access entire message history
• 20GB storage per member
• Group video calls for up to 15 people with screen sharing

Pricing: $12.50 USD per person per month, billed annually

Enterprise Grid Plan

• Unlimited workspaces
• Support data loss prevention (DLP), e-Discovery, and offline backup providers
• Designated customer success teams
• HIPAA-compliant message and file collaboration
• Access entire message history
• Group video calls for up to 15 people with screen sharing
• 1TB storage per member
• Organization-wide search, messaging, and announcement-focused channels

Pricing: Pricing for Enterprise Grid plans is custom, and users need to contact Slack’s sales team for an estimate.

Who Needs Slack?

Many businesses suffer from software bloat, which means that the organization is using a lot of applications it probably doesn’t need.

This can affect internal communications: if there are too many communication tools and channels, it’s easy for information to get lost, or important messages to be missed. When there is no centralized communication channel, information can easily become fragmented and disorganized.

That’s where Slack comes in. It centralizes and streamlines communications across the business. Slack is obviously great for remote teams, but also for teams working physically in the same space.

There are a lot of communication tools that serve as alternatives to Slack — such as Microsoft Teams, Google Hangouts, Chanty, and RocketChat — and they each have different features that may suit different types of business.

You should consider using Slack if:

• You have multiple team members constantly sharing files
• Your primary mode of communication is email, and/or you spend hours every day sorting through company messages, and you don’t find that efficient
• You rely on teamwork but find it difficult to collaborate on projects because everyone takes different meeting notes and files don’t get distributed properly
• You want to simplify your workflows
• You want to enhance collaboration

If that sounds familiar, deploying a tool like Slack can definitely help improve collaboration and communication across the company.

The benefits of using Slack include:

• It creates streamlined team communications and transparency on the projects that people are working on.
• It improves decision-making processes.
• You can easily search and find documents and conversations — much better than rifling through your emails or several separate tools.
• It can serve as one central notification hub — you can integrate other work apps and bring notifications into Slack, so you no longer need to switch between apps to get updates.

Getting Started With Slack

Now it’s time to set up the tool, which is pretty straightforward. Go to the Slack homepage and click on ‘Get started.’

Then, enter your email address for confirmation.

After you receive the confirmation code, you can fill in your details, including your company name. You can then invite individual members of your team via email to join Slack.

Slack Channels

After you’ve created a workspace for your company, you can create different channels for each area of the business, such as #accounting, #marketing, #sales, #ops, #general, and whatever else suits your needs. You can also create fun channels, like #food, #movies, or #random.

Channels allow you to really drill down on information and be specific on where to discuss certain topics. For instance, you could have several separate channels for different areas of marketing, like #marketing-content, #marketing-seo, #marketing-growth, and so on.

Once other team members have joined Slack, you can invite them to the channels that are relevant to them. They will be alerted to activity in these channels and will receive a notification if they are personally mentioned.

In March 2020, Slack rolled out a major update that changed the way each person can organize their channels in a workspace. For example, now you can group all marketing-related channels into “Marketing,” non-work-related channels into “Fun,” and so on.

Direct Messages

You can also send direct messages to all teammates in your workspace. Direct messages are private, one-on-one messages, almost like an instant messenger. Here, you can also send documents and search the entire archive for specific messages.

Your most recent conversations will appear by default on the left-hand sidebar. If you want to start a conversation with a new person, simply click on the plus sign next to “Direct Messages” in the sidebar and type in the name of the person you want to talk to.

Slack’s new interface also makes it easy to have an overview of everyone in your company’s workspace. Simply click on “People” on the left-hand sidebar and you can search all Slack members in your workspace. Clicking on their names will give you their profile and options to call or message them.

Slack Notifications

Slack can you let you know every time there’s a message in one of your channels or when you get a direct message.

By default, channels with unread messages will appear in bold in the sidebar. You will also see a red notification badge when someone mentions your name.

You can get an alert via desktop, email, or mobile, but this is completely customizable. You can decide where, how, and if you want to get Slack notifications by clicking on your name on the top left-hand side of the application, then selecting ‘Preferences.’

There, you will be able to set your notifications preferences, including channel-specific preferences. You can also get notifications for threads you are following or have been mentioned in.

You’re also able to decide if you want sound notifications as well as which sound you would like to use. It is even possible to mute channels that you don’t need to closely follow.

If you want to focus on work and pause notifications for a while, there is a ‘Do Not Disturb’ function that places all notifications from Slack on hold. You can set it for a few minutes, hours, or even as much as a few days. Just click on ‘Pause notifications’ under your name on the top left-hand side and select your preferred time frame from the drop-down menu.

Your teammates will be able to see that you have paused notifications, though they do have the option to push urgent notifications when appropriate.

Message Reactions

On social media, you can like and react to anyone’s posts. The same logic applies to Slack.

Whenever someone posts anything on a channel or sends you a direct message, you’ll have the option to react to it with an emoji. All you have to do is hover over a message and click the ‘Add a reaction’ icon, then choose an emoji.

On mobile, tap and hold a message, then choose from your most frequently used emojis at the top of the menu. Or, to add a different reaction, tap the ‘Add a reaction’ icon.

On the ‘Mentions’ tab on the left-hand sidebar, you can also see your teammates’ reactions to your messages.

Automations and Integrations

One of the things that makes Slack such a great business tool is its range of automation and integrations. These allow you to share documents and files, manage and track projects, share important information with the right audience, and automate various workflows.

Here’s a rundown of the top automation options and integrations on Slack.

Slackbot

Slack has a multitude of automation options in its roster, including its virtual helper, Slackbot.

Slackbot helps you find answers to questions about Slack, sets tasks and reminders for yourself and teammates, adds custom automatic responses, and more. You can access Slackbot by sending it a direct message or on a channel.

A good rule of thumb for Slack is, when in doubt, ask Slackbot — you can ask it a question by sending it a direct message. You can also use it to set automatic responses to common questions, like in the example below.

To set personal reminders and tasks, just type /reminder anywhere on Slack. This works to set reminders for other teammates, too.

Workflow Builder

In October 2019, Slack introduced Workflow Builder, which is automation used to streamline tasks. This tool can be used to standardize how you collect requests from the team, report outages or glitches in real-time, share welcome messages and relevant documents with new team members, and more.

It can also help you streamline the way you collect forms from your team in a single Slack channel — such as travel requests — and centralize the collection of incident or bug reports.

Slack Integrations

Slack’s integrations with third-party apps are truly formidable. By clicking on the lightning bolt at the bottom left corner of your text box, you can access shortcuts to plenty of useful apps.

Here are some of the most useful integrations to use in your Slack workspace.

Google Drive

With the Google Drive integration, you can:

• Create new Google Docs, Slides, and Sheets files directly from Slack.
• Share an existing file from Google Drive with a channel or direct message.
• Search Google Drive files shared within Slack.
• Automatically grant access to the files you share with the right audience.
• Get updates in Slack on changes in Drive, like comments, access requests, and new files shared with you.
• Reply to comment notifications from within Slack and have them posted to the file,

Google Calendar

The Google Calendar integration is another handy one. It allows you to:

• Automatically create events directly in Slack using a shortcut.
• Automatically sync your calendar to your Slack status so that it shows when you’re in a meeting.
• Get a daily notification of your schedule for the day.
• Get a notification when an event is starting soon, including any relevant links to a video conference.
• Respond directly to event invitations.
• Get updates when an event’s details change.

Trello

An integration with the project management platform, Trello, is really useful for collaborating on team projects from within Slack. Its features include:

• Add new Trello cards to boards directly from Slack with the command “/trello add”
• Join Trello cards and boards, change due dates, attach conversations, and more.
• Invite @trello to a channel for automated card & board previews, including members, descriptions, and commentsn.
• Allow Slack team members to join your Trello boards with one click.

Giphy

On the fun side of things, the Giphy integration makes it possible to share a wide variety of GIFs on channels, threads, and direct messages. Simply type /giphy on a text box followed by a keyword, then choose the GIF you want:

Other Integrations

Among Slack’s other integrations, some of our other top picks include:

• Zoom — Easily start a Zoom meeting directly from Slack.
• Polly — Create surveys, polls, games, and trivia.
• Jira Server — Connect Jira Server projects to Slack channels.
• GitHub — Get updates from the development platform directly on Slack channels.
• Asana — Coordinate and manage projects on Asana from Slack.
• Stripe — Automatically post to a Slack channel when changes occur on charges, subscriptions, transfers, and more.
• DoodleBot — Create a meeting or start a poll on Slack.
• Outlook Calendar — Create events on your Outlook calendar from inside Slack.
• HeyUpdate — Analyze progress reporting for teams.
• Dropbox — Implement cloud file storage and syncing.
• Mention — Monitor your organization’s media mentions from a dedicated Slack channel.
• Screenbot — Share screenshots, annotations, screen recordings, and more.

You can view all of Slack’s integration options by clicking on “Apps” on the left-hand sidebar.

Shortcuts and Commands

If you want to save some time on Slack, mastering its shortcuts and commands is a great idea. They allow you to quickly format your text, navigate threads and channels, set your status, set reminders, and more. We’ll cover slash commands, text formatting, and general keyboard shortcuts to help you get started.

Slash commands

Slash commands act as shortcuts for specific actions in Slack. Here’s a rundown of some of the more useful commands to know:

• /dnd + length of time — Set up “Do Not Disturb” for a custom period of time.
• /remind — Set a reminder to yourself or a teammate for a specific date and time.
• /status — Set a status or clear your current status.
• /invite @user — Invite a new user to a channel.
• /leave — Leave a channel.
• /msg or /dm @user — Send a direct message to another user.
• /search — Perform a search.
• /apps — Search for apps in the Slack App Directory.
• /shortcuts — Open the keyboard shortcuts dialog.
• /feed — Manage RSS subscriptions.
• /poll — Create a new poll.
• /collapse — Collapse all files in the current channel.
• /expand — Expand all files in the current channel.

By simply typing “/” in any chat box in Slack, the application will already give you a list of some of the most used Slack commands to give you an idea of actions you could take.

Keyboard Shortcuts and Formatting

Here’s a list of some of the handiest keyboard shortcuts to know on Slack. You can find an extensive index here.

Shortcuts

• Press ⌘+Shift+M or Ctrl+Shift+M to see your recent mentions.
• Press Ctrl (or Command) + ↑ to jump to the latest message you posted on a channel.
• Press Ctrl (or Command) + J to jump to the most recent message on a channel.
• Press Alt (or Option) + ↑ or ↓ to scroll through your conversations and channels.
• Press Esc to mark all unread messages as read.

Formatting

Slack uses Markdown to format text, so that’s a good starting point to understand how formatting works there. Here are some examples:

• Entering text in between underscores will produce italicized text
• Entering text in between asterisks will produce bold text
• Entering text in between tildes (~) will produce strikethrough text
• Add > before a line to indent the line
• Add >>> before a paragraph to indent the paragraph, preserving line breaks
• Press Shift + Enter to add line breaks in a message

As an agency, there comes a point when a customer relationship management (CRM) tool becomes an essential part of your business.

A CRM is how you manage all clients in one place, keep communication across all channels transparent, and track deals from new to closed. As your agency scales, trying to do all of this in an Excel sheet becomes impossible.

Choosing the best CRM for your agency isn’t always quick and simple, but it’s considerably easier if you know what you’re looking for. For most agencies, these are the most important things to look for in a CRM:

• Collaborative features
• Great user experience and design
• Integrations with other agency tools, like time tracking apps and invoicing software

With these boxes ticked, a CRM differentiates itself from being simply great for small businesses to being great for agencies.

Whether your agency specializes in digital marketing, design, SEO, or something else entirely, here are nine of the best CRMs for you.

Best CRMs for Digital Agencies

1. HubSpot CRM

Choose for: A free CRM that’s super fast to set up.

The core CRM is free to use

HubSpot CRM’s main selling point is that it’s free. You also have access to extra features via HubSpot’s sales, marketing, and service hubs — however, these hubs are paid, so if you need to integrate them make sure to plan your budget accordingly.

HubSpot is one of the best CRMs for logging emails and phone conversations, viewing a full timeline of a lead’s journey to becoming a client, and boosting sales leads with connected inbound marketing. Additionally, it has a fantastic integrations marketplace, too.

Thousands of larger agencies use HubSpot because it’s what they support their clients in. Agency partners can choose packages starting at $400/month before onboarding costs.

2. Capsule

Choose for: One of the simplest CRMs on the market.

From $18/user/month

Capsule is a reliable choice if you need strong integrations with accounting tools like Xero, FreeAgent, and QuickBooks. It’s also one of the best CRMs for agencies and is loved for its ability to build relationships with clients, stay on top of new and pending deals, and manage projects all the way from ideation to billing.

3. Pipedrive

Choose for: A sales-focused CRM that promises more sales with less legwork.

From $15/user/month, billed annually

Pipedrive shares that its users see a 28% average increase in close rates after their first year. It’s really easy to set up custom pipelines and stages, automate workflows, and track revenue and team performance with customizable dashboards.

It only takes a minute to sync Pipedrive with your Google or Microsoft contact lists and calendars, and there are 150+ more integrations in its apps marketplace.

4. Copper

Choose for: A beautifully designed CRM that fits seamlessly with GSuite.

From $19/user/month, billed annually for up to three users

If your agency’s already big on Google Mail, Drive, and Calendar, Copper is your next best friend. From prospecting to closing deals and retaining your best clients, Copper is one of the most transparent CRMs to keep everyone on the same page.

Copper has fantastic UX and seamlessly captures and connects all project files, tasks, and calendar invites so nothing falls through the cracks.

5. Insightly

Choose for: A CRM that combines marketing, sales, and project management functionality on a single platform.

Free for two users to access the core CRM, or $29 for Insightly Plus per user/month, billed annually without Marketing

You can get started with Insightly’s core CRM for free as a team of just two users with 2,500 emails, 10GB file storage, and a 100,000 records limit included in the deal.

As the next step up, Insightly Plus ($29/user/month) includes project management with task templates as an added perk for agency teams. Insightly stands out from the competition with a greater focus on automation, data, and productivity than many other CRMs.

6. Podio

Choose for: Integrated project management for one workflow from sale to project feedback.

Free task management, apps, and workspaces for up to five users, then $9/user/month for the Basic plan

Podio is another CRM for agencies to unify account and project management, like Insightly. It has several features designed with agencies specifically in mind and is perfect for agencies to collaborate on projects, manage accounts, and centralize communication in one place.

Podio works seamlessly with your favorite apps, including Google Drive, Excel, and major accounting tools like Freshbooks.

7. Keap

Choose for: A CRM with built-in invoices, quotes, payments, appointments, and unlimited emails.

From $49/month for 500 contacts and one user, plus $29 for each additional user

Keap, previously Infusionsoft, is one of the best all-rounder CRMs for digital agencies. On top of its brilliant core CRM functionality, Keap offers invoicing, quotes, payments, appointments, and automated workflows.

It can save you from needing an additional invoicing and payment tool, which can make up for it being more expensive than some other CRMs.

8. Hatchbuck

Choose for: A CRM-plus-more tool combining sales, marketing, and automation.

Customizable costs for agencies or from $199/month billed annually for five users on the Team plan

With the Agency Partners program, you can be sure that Hatchbuck has businesses like yours at the front of its mind. With this CRM, it’s easy to build campaigns, boost retainers, and duplicate processes across client accounts to speed up work. Chat with one of its Agency Experts to find the right package for your business.

9. Freshworks CRM

Choose for: A high-rated CRM that works great alone and in combination with other Freshworks products.

From $29 user/month, billed annually

The Freshworks product family is known for being affordable and extremely user-friendly, and Freshworks CRM is no exception.

Its CRM tool includes built-in phone and two-way email sync, AI-based lead scoring, intelligent workflow automation, and customizable visual reports and dashboards.

Google Contacts is one of the most widely used contact management tools out there. An essential part of Google’s suite of web applications, it stores and organizes contact information, both for personal and professional purposes.

If your business uses GSuite — including Gmail as the email server — you can use Google Contacts as a contact repository for your organization. It’s free to use and works well alongside Google’s other applications, so it’s a popular choice for small businesses that want a simple and budget-friendly tool for contact management.

But how can you make the most of Google Contacts to keep your business’ contact data organized and serving its best purpose? In this guide, we’ll share the best tips and tricks to mastering all that Google Contacts has to offer.

How does Google Contacts work?

Google Contacts mostly runs behind the scenes to keep your contacts on Gmail organized and updated. But it’s more than just an address book: Google Contacts has evolved to offer multiple information fields and segmentation options to organize and manage your contact data — both on your email inbox and even on your phone. Contacts are added automatically to Google Contacts from your Gmail, but you can also edit, enrich, and create new contacts manually.

Each contact record includes basic information, such as first name, surname, job title, email address, phone number, and company. You can also add notes about a contact, as well as creating labels to separate your contacts into groups.

Labels are very handy to segment contacts into groups that make sense for your business, such as ‘New lead,’ ‘Prospect,’ and ‘Customer.’ If you have personal and professional contacts in the same Google Contacts account, you can label them as such to make sure they don’t get mixed up.

If you click on ‘Show more’ in the bottom left corner, you will also have the option to add a lot more information to your contact records, such as prefix, suffix, nickname, birthday, etc. You can also create custom fields for your contacts if you feel like there’s something missing.

Organizing Your Contacts

We mentioned the labels you can add to each contact on Google Contacts. These labels will appear on the left-hand sidebar on your Google Contacts homepage, so you can easily visualize which contacts are in which group, as well as how many contacts are in each group.

In addition to visualizing labels, you can also see an overview of all contacts, frequently contacted, other contacts, and contacts that can be merged or fixed.

Contacts vs. Other Contacts

You might notice that on that left-hand sidebar, there’s an option to see ‘Contacts’ and, at the very bottom, another option for ‘Other Contacts.’ But what’s the difference between these two lists?

On Contacts, you can see the contacts you manually added, or that were added to Google Contacts via an integration or contact sync.

However, if you email someone but haven’t added them as a contact, Google Contacts automatically saves their email address in your Other Contacts group. So, next time you want to email them, their email address will automatically show on Gmail, as a sort of ‘autocomplete’ feature.

If you want to move contacts from Other Contacts to Contacts, simply select them and click the Add to contacts button just above the list. A good reason to do this would be if you want to sync your Google Contacts database to other applications because in this case only the contacts stored in Contacts will be synced.

If you don’t want every contact you email to be saved to Other Contacts, there’s a simple way to deactivate this feature: simply go to your Gmail account and click on the settings icon on the top right corner. In the Create Contacts for Auto-Complete section, select I’ll add contacts myself. Then, at the bottom, click Save Changes.

So, in a nutshell, Contacts is your real contact list, to use and edit. Other Contacts holds everyone you’ve ever contacted via Gmail so that you don’t have to remember their email addresses.

Merging Contacts

It’s not uncommon to come across duplicate contacts in Google Contacts or Gmail. This means that you may have multiple contact records belonging to the same person, but each one stores separate bits of information.

Luckily, Google Contacts has a handy option to merge and fix contacts. It will automatically detect contact records that might be duplicates and show them under the Merge and Fix option on the left-hand menu. You can then review these contact records and decide if they can be merged or updated.

For example, you may have added the same contact twice to your Google Contacts: once with their email address but no phone number, and another time with their phone number but no email address.

Both contact entries will appear if you go to the Merge and Fix option, allowing you to decide if you want to merge both entries into one. Then, just click on Merge and that’s it — your duplicates are taken care of.

The application will also let you know if there are any changes that you may need to make to your contacts. Just like the duplicates, it will detect contact details that may have suffered changes so you can review them and authorize as needed.

Undoing Changes

Made a mistake while updating your contacts? Don’t worry, Google Contacts lets you restore your contacts back to any state in the past 30 days. Simply click on the settings icon in the top right corner of the screen and click on Undo Changes. The system will then ask you to choose a time to go back to:

Contacts Directory

If your business uses GSuite, including Gmail and Google Contacts, you may see an option on the left-hand sidebar that you don’t have on your personal Google Contacts account: the directory.

When going to the directory, you may see contacts that you haven’t entered yourself. So how did they get there?

The directory is basically a list of users and email addresses in your organization’s domain. That’s how Google can auto-complete the email address of your colleagues and schedule meetings with anyone in your company, even if you’ve never emailed them before.

The system administrator controls which email addresses appear in the directory, and they can also remove contacts from it, too.

How to Integrate Google Contacts With Other Applications

Integrating Google Contacts with other tools is definitely possible — and recommended. Google Contacts already integrates seamlessly with other Google products, such as Google Calendar and Google Maps.

Aside from the Google ecosystem, it’s very easy to connect Google Contacts with other tools you’re using to store contact data. Here’s how these integrations work.

Syncing Google Contacts With Other Google Apps

On Google, you have “one account to rule them all.” This means that by creating just one account, you can use all of Google’s apps — and the information in all of them will be automatically synced. By going to your Gmail account (or to your Google Account home), you will see an icon with nine dots in the top right corner. By clicking on it, you will be able to quickly visualize all of the Google apps you have access to.

Since they are all automatically connected, there’s not much you need to do in terms of synchronizing the information on your Google apps. But here are a few examples of how you can take advantage of Google Contacts data in other apps.

Google Maps

Integrating Google Contacts and Google Maps makes it super easy to find someone’s address directly on Google Maps. If you’re going to a friend’s house but can’t remember how to get there, you can easily find their address by typing their name in the search bar on Google Maps, and their address will automatically appear.

Same thing goes if you’re going to a business meeting with a client in their office, for example. You can easily find their address on Google Maps by simply typing their name in the search bar.

Needless to say, this only works if there is a valid address attached to the contact record for that person. In addition, you need to make sure that you are logged into the same Google account both on Google Maps and Google Contacts.

Google Calendar

When setting up a meeting in Google Calendar, it’s really simple to send the invite to contacts you already have on Google Contacts. All you have to do is go to your Google Calendar and create a meeting. Then, start typing their name in the ‘Add guests’ box and your contacts will automatically appear as suggestions.

Just like the Google Maps integration, you need to make sure that you are logged into the same account both on Google Calendar and Google Contacts.

This works for people outside your organization as well as those inside your company. The only difference is that for external contacts, you need to have added their contact details yourself. For internal contacts, all of their information will already be in the directory section in Google Contacts, so you can set up meetings with anyone in your organization without needing to hunt down their email addresses.

Another use for the Google Calendar integration is for birthdays. If you’ve added a contact’s birthday on Google Contacts, it will also automatically appear on your Google Calendar.

Integrating Google Contacts With Your Other Tools

Apart from integrations within the Google ecosystem, it’s also possible to share your contacts on Google Contacts with your other apps that store contact data or vice-versa.

You can do this either by importing and exporting CSV files or by using an integration app. Here’s how each of these methods works.

Importing and Exporting Via CSV Files

Google Contacts offers an out-of-the-box option to import and export contacts as CSV files. When you visit your Google Contacts page, you’ll see the options to import and export CSV files on the left-hand sidebar. This allows you to import a list of contacts from another app to your Google Contacts account, or to export the contacts you store on Google Contacts.

There are three CSV file methods available on Google Contacts: Google CSV files, Outlook CSV files, and vCard files.

You don’t necessarily need to import/export your entire contact database on Google Contacts — you can choose to import or export files labeled only ‘Work,’ for example, and leave the other groups out of it.

Importing and exporting your contacts in CSV files works well enough if you only need to do it once. In other words, if you need to take contacts from one app and send them to another app, an import/export of your contacts on Google Contacts will be a good solution for you.

However, if you need to continuously share contacts between several applications, using CSV files might do you more harm than good.

For instance, because some CSV files are separated by commas, addresses may be broken into different information fields when the contact is moved through a CSV file. Data such as phone numbers can also come in a lot of different formats, so you can end up with wrong or duplicate data in your apps.

But the biggest issue with CSV is that your contact data is constantly changing, and CSV files only take a temporary snapshot of your database. This snapshot can get outdated very fast, and will not keep your contacts updated in real-time. Because of this, you will probably need to constantly import and export, which can quickly get messy — not to mention that doing this manually several times per month would take up far too much of your time.

That’s because CSV is not optimized for continuous, real-time contact sharing and does not keep your contacts in sync.

However, if you do want to keep your contacts in sync in real-time, you’re probably better off syncing Google Contacts with the rest of your tech stack two ways.

Syncing Google Contacts With Your Mobile Device

If you mainly rely on your phone to check your contacts, you know how valuable it can be to have your Google Contacts data in sync with your phone contacts.

There’s an easy option to sign in to your Google account on both Android and iOS devices and sync Google contacts to your phone. Here’s how you can do that.

Google Contacts on Android

Your Google contacts sync to your Android device when you sign in, and changes to your contacts will automatically sync to keep them up to date.

If you’ve signed into multiple Google Accounts on the same device, contacts from all accounts will sync to the device — so watch out for that if you don’t want all contacts to be included in the sync.

If you want to stop Google contacts from automatically syncing contacts, go to Settings on your Android device. Tap Google, then Account Services, and then Contacts Sync. You will then see an option to Automatically sync Google contacts, which you can toggle off.

If you’ve created contacts on your Android device, they will automatically appear in your Google Contacts account in the Contacts section.

Google Contacts on iOS

Syncing Google Contacts to your iOS is also possible. Simply go to your phone’s Settings app and tap Passwords & Accounts.

Then, click on Add Account and choose Google. The system will then ask you to enter your Google username and password. Once you’ve logged in, you’ll see the Google services you can sync with your phone, which you can toggle on or off. Simply make sure ‘Contacts’ is toggled on and you’re all set.

Now you should be all set with Google Contacts. It’s an extremely useful application that makes it a breeze to manage your contacts, both on a personal and a professional level.

Human resources is the glue that holds together your most valuable asset: your team. And in 2022, HR’s greatest ally is tech. According to G2, there are over 21 types of HR software on the market, including apps for employee wellness, employee benefits, and time tracking, to name just a few.

To deliver the best HR operations, you can use tech to streamline processes, enable remote working, and automate workflows.

HR automation has been growing rapidly in recent years, with businesses investing in cloud-based SaaS systems to help them hire, manage their team, run payroll, handle employee requests, and more.

With built-in and third-party automation features, HR teams are in the best position to get more work done, enable their apps to work together, and equip their business with the systems it needs to scale.

Rather than losing the human part of human resources, HR automation frees up time for the 1-1 interactions, team oversight, and strategy meetings that matter most.

To optimize your HR operations, here are some of the best automation ideas to deliver excellent HR support and to free up more space in your schedule.

Automation Ideas for Human Resources

1. Create a standardized onboarding and training process for new hires.

Onboarding is one of the best opportunities for HR automation. HR managers can create automated workflows to deliver the key forms, documentation, and training resources that new hires need to get started in their roles.

As one way to automate this, some businesses create a dedicated onboarding bot on Slack to introduce new employees and pass over key training documents.

As with many of the HR automation ideas in this list, it all starts with understanding the key processes that you carry out. List the common steps that you take when onboarding every new employee, standardize this where possible while keeping it personalized, and look for areas to streamline or automate.

2. Automate timesheets and approval processes.

If your business requires employees to submit timesheets, this is a key area to automate first. There are countless time-tracking tools out there to help you quickly approve data in the right format and minimize the amount of time you spend chasing missing or incorrect data.

Some good examples are When I Work and Toggl, although time tracking functionality is also built into some accounting systems (like Xero) and project management tools (such as Teamwork). Look for time tracking software that has native integrations with your other key apps whenever possible — it’s a great way to save time.

3. Streamline payroll.

Payroll can be another highly time-consuming task for HR teams. With HR automation, the scope for streamlining payroll is more extensive than ever.

For instance, Gusto, the popular US-based payroll software, automates payroll, taxes, and filings. It also offers native integrations with time tracking apps, business operations tools, and expense management to help you streamline processes across your HR tech stack.

4. Use programmatic job ads to target the best candidates.

One of the biggest tech advances in HR in recent years is programmatic recruitment. Here’s a definition from PandoLogic:

Programmatic recruitment is the use of technology instead of people for buying, placing, and optimizing job ads… Programmatic recruitment makes sure your job ad is seen by the right candidates on the right sites at the right time. And it does this through the use of big data, targeted job ads, real-time bidding, and campaign optimization.

Running programmatic job ads using a tool like Joveo is a great way to automate more of your recruitment efforts and attract more ideal candidates with less time, effort, and budget.

5. Enrich candidate data.

Another valuable HR automation is to enrich candidate data. Many organizations love Workable’s People Search function, which automatically brings together multiple data sources for every candidate to give you the most comprehensive view of their skills, social footprint, and contact details.

Apps like DiscoverOrg also enable recruiters to automatically enrich their database and applicant tracking systems with data such as titles, roles, and technical responsibilities. This is a great way to identify and nurture the best candidates through your hiring pipeline.

6. Automate contracts.

Contract signing is one of the easiest areas of HR to automate. With apps like HelloSign and DocuSign, you can request the signatures you need, sign documents online, and automate follow-ups until everything is collected. These apps also make it much easier and quicker to have documents on the ready when working remotely.

7. Give instant access to the right apps.

A time-consuming part of onboarding new staff is making sure they have access to all the right apps. It gets even more problematic when user credentials for business tools change. You can solve this with a password management app like LastPass. It makes it simple to give each new hire access to exactly the right apps.

8. Track vacation days and speed up leave requests.

Tracking and approving leave doesn’t have to be a headache for your HR team. People HR and absence.io are two helpful apps for managing and approving vacation days in less time.

9. Collect performance data for decision making.

You can automatically collect data using performance management apps such as 15Five, or surveys for employee and management feedback using tools like Google Forms and Typeform.

With processes for regular feedback in place, you have the best information at your fingertips to create opportunities for internal growth, personal development, and management optimization. This can help inform promotions, recognize individuals for awards, and let you know where to place your training budget.

10. Automate submitting and approving expenses.

Don’t let expense requests clutter up your inbox. For the smoothest process, you want to have a clear and well-documented workflow that everyone in the team knows how to follow. To ensure expenses are submitted in the exact format your HR team needs, you can use spend management software like Spendesk or Concur.

11. Use one inbox for all employee requests.

A great solution for funneling employee requests from all channels (including Slack and email) into one inbox is Back. Not only can you search HR requests in one place and auto-respond to common questions, but you can also view reporting to understand where your HR team is spending the most time.

Here are some types of employee requests to funnel into the same inbox (and organize with tags or filters) to centralize organization:

• Training and travel requests
• Internal tech support
• Payroll questions
• Complaints and feedback
• Contract questions

12. Automate performance appraisal at set intervals.

With continuous performance management software like 15Five, both your HR team and managers can streamline performance appraisals and feedback collection from employees.

This includes sending automated check-ins, 1-on-1s, and “best self-reviews” at set intervals to hear how your employees are doing.

13. Trigger notifications about eligibility for benefits.

If your organization offers benefits based on specific criteria, you can use automation to trigger notifications when the terms are met. An example could be increasing an employee’s vacation leave after they’ve been with the company for a year, or offering stock options to top-performing staff.

You can automate similar notifications to your HR team and management when it’s time for performance reviews or a salary raise for individual team members.

14. Streamline offboarding processes.

Like onboarding, creating smooth offboarding processes is one of the best ways to streamline HR operations. Although it’s important to keep this highly personalized and to talk things through 1-1 with each employee, you can also introduce some standardized data collection processes — even if these are talked through in person during the exit interview.

15. Integrate HR tools and processes.

As you automate more of your HR processes, think about how you can integrate your tech stack. This can include setting up native integrations and connecting data between apps.

Digital marketing trends are changing constantly. Each year brings new marketing strategies that need to be identified and integrated into the gameplans of large and small businesses alike, otherwise, there’s serious money left on the table.

When it comes to online search, Google is way ahead of the competition, being responsible for 94% of total organic traffic and 96% of all smartphone search traffic. This makes getting your business on the first page of Google the single most important factor for your digital marketing success.

The good news is that when it comes to Google’s search engine algorithm, it doesn’t matter if you are a large or small organization. Only those who use the techniques that have been approved by Google get to see their website on Google’s prime real estate — the first page of the search engine results page (SERP).

Let’s take a look at some simple hacks that digital marketers use to make sure their websites rank higher on SERPs and get the most from their traffic.

7 Digital Marketing Hacks

1. Optimizing Email Strategy

Email has been around for years, but it’s not going anywhere just yet. Roughly 80% of marketers have reported an increase in email engagement over the past twelve months.

Another exciting statistic for all those who are thinking of using more emails in their marketing campaigns is that email marketing has the highest return on investment for small businesses. Of course, that’s only going to be possible with a well-crafted email that has concise copy and an engaging message.

One of the most effective marketing tools is the ability to segment your email marketing strategy to match your customer base. For example, marketers constantly use the holiday season to offer incentives to their customers, like discount codes for those who left their website with an item in the shopping cart.

2. Using the AIDA Formula

AIDA stands for Attention, Interest, Desire, and Action. Here’s a description from Lucidchart to show how it can be used in marketing.

This marketing strategy has been around for a while — since 1898, to be exact. And guess what? It still works.

In fact, AIDA works extremely well on almost all marketing channels to grab the reader’s attention, create a sense of want, pull on their heartstrings, and provide them with a solution to their problem. This proven formula has been used in the past, is still being used today, and should definitely be used when marketing a small business in the year ahead.

3. Embracing Video Marketing

Video has grown into a driving force for digital marketing, and this trend doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. In fact, according to research, videos will account for nearly 82% of consumer internet traffic by 2021.

Live and branded videos are two of the most popular trends in video marketing at the moment, and people are continuing to find new and interesting ways to engage their audience with video content.

The beauty of using live video is that it’s interactive and allows the audience to be part of the conversation by calling in or leaving a comment that can be answered during the live session. It’s estimated that by 2021, live video will account for 13% of all video traffic, which makes it an excellent strategy for businesses that are constantly thinking outside of the box.

Contrary to popular belief, creating an explainer, how-to, or product description video does not cost you an arm and a leg. All you have to do is invest in a good camera and microphone, or you can even use your smartphone. Rather than spending large amounts of money on expensive editing tools, you can use apps that are powerful enough to create a professional-looking video.

To generate more search traffic for your website, remember to make it well-thought-out, contain informational content, and address a defined problem that your ideal customer is facing.

Optimizing the video on YouTube with relevant keywords will increase the chances of your video getting more views. And, pay extra attention to the video’s title — it should sound unique and engaging. For example, “Learn how to tie a bow tie” does not sound as good as “Learn how to tie the perfect bow tie.”

While there may be many videos on a similar subject matter, the idea is to make your content stand out from the rest.

4. Creating Novel Content

The content that you put out will act as currency for your marketing strategies. While creating the usual blogs and articles is good for generating traffic, simply writing content that informs your audience just won’t do. More and more businesses are learning the importance of engaging with their audience. In fact, many successful brands are already using content that engages their audience along with content that educates.

One type of content that is growing in popularity is novel content. This is the content that is put alongside the conventional content of blogs, articles, ebooks, and videos. Similar to videos, creating content that engages your audience is also possible via polls, quizzes, and contests, where the audience gets to vote or share their opinions on a particular subject. Try to keep this content relevant to your business.

Expiring content, which seems to have been inspired by the Snapchat model, is also continuing to gain popularity amongst the younger crowd. Expiring content remains on your website or social media for a certain amount of time before being removed. This creates a sense of urgency that can encourage viewers to take action. To entice your audience while using expiring content, you can include a discount code that’s displayed for a limited amount of time before being removed.

5. Recognizing the Difference Between Marketing and Branding

Those who are investing in online marketing need to understand the difference between marketing and branding. While these two terms are sometimes used interchangeably, their meanings are very different.

When it comes to the consumer, your brand is not going to be the product or service you provide, but rather the logo, website design, and the message across all platforms that you send to your customers. In other words, branding is how the audience will perceive your business.

On the other hand, digital marketing uses tactics that are designed to reinforce your branding efforts. This means that your marketing efforts should enhance your brand’s message and not have the opposite effect. However, this is where many small businesses fall flat, as they use marketing campaigns that focus more on their product or service instead of building interest and nurturing a community on social media platforms.

Blatantly promoting your product or services on social media will not help you create a community of loyal followers. In fact, it may actually have a negative impact on your brand’s overall appeal to your audience.

6. Making Good Use of Local Services Ads (LSAs)

LSAs, or local services ads, are similar to Google Ads, but are very different when it comes to their effectiveness in promoting your products or services. In short, LSAs are pay-per-lead ads that have now begun popping up at the top of Google search results. Initially released in 2017, LSAs are slowly gaining ground and rolling out to small markets as well.

Currently, LSAs seem to focus for home service providers, such as electricians, locksmiths, painters, house cleaning, and plumbers. If you provide any of these services, it’s time you used LSAs to increase your reach. However, there is little doubt that their use is going to spread to other businesses as well.

Unlike Google Ads, you don’t have to pay for clicks, but rather for leads that are relevant to your business.

Here’s how Local Services Ads work:

• You get to set a weekly budget that is based on the average amount of leads you expect to receive.
• Leads can be disputed if you think they are irrelevant or not useful. If successful, the leads are credited back to you later.
• While you might end up spending more than your average weekly budget on LSAs, the model makes it unlikely that you spend more money each month, which is going to be the average budget in a week that’s multiplied by the average amount of weeks in any given month. Setting up your LSAs is also relatively easy and does not come with a steep learning curve.

If you have patience, using LSAs could be useful in generating leads, however, if you are a startup or small business on a shoestring budget, then testing the waters of LSAs might not be for you right now.

7. Being Smart with SEO

Some people say that SEO is dead. We beg to differ. In fact, search engine optimization is more important than ever when it comes to getting your website indexed on Google. While SEO trends continue to change, one area that Google seems to be focusing on is differentiating between search and intent.

For instance, using terms such as “web design Miami” could display web design companies while “web design company in Miami” could start displaying job boards.

This means that to succeed with your SEO strategy, you need to segment queries that you want to rank for and make competitor analysis a big part of your SEO strategy.

If we’ve learned anything from the past, it’s that when it comes to online marketing, the proven methods of marketing are still around, and keeping your marketing strategy simple really does work.

Tried and tested methods of digital marketing provide small businesses with a guideline of what strategy should be used to improve your digital marketing results. But that being said, these formulas are not written in stone, which means you need to keep on tweaking your digital marketing strategy to get the best ROI.

Effective lead management is one of the core principles of any successful business. It means helping the right people become your customers and making it easy for them to buy from you again in the future.

When you get lead management right, you can:

• Convert more prospects into customers
• Streamline operations
• Improve sales experiences

But it’s not always clear how to create an effective lead management process.

Is it about quickly responding to leads, keeping your CRM neat and tidy, or using the right tags and lists?

The short answer is that it’s about all of the above.

There are lots of moving parts, but lead management is ultimately about data management plus relationship building. One of the best ways to view your lead management strategy is through the lens of Data Lifecycle Management (DLM). DLM consists of five stages:

• Data collection
• Data storage
• Data maintenance
• Data usage
• Data cleaning

Every lead passes through the same stages with your business, so it’s important to get each one right for effective lead management.

To help you maximize lead management at every stage, here are some best practices to implement in your business.

Best Practices for Effective Lead Management

Collecting Leads

1. Adjust form fields for accurate data entry.

Lead management starts with adding new leads to your database. It’s a crucial part of the process; after all, how you collect leads determines how organized things will be further down the line.

Do your future self and colleagues a favor by collecting leads in a standardized, organized, and accurate way. This starts with adjusting form fields to collect the best data in the right structure.

2. Remember data protection regulations

One core part of the GDPR (General Data Protection Regulation) in Europe is data protection by design. This means building data security and ethical use into the foundations of your business.

Make sure every lead you add to your database has given clear consent for their data to be stored and that you only store it for the time and purpose that you define in your terms and conditions.

Storing Leads

3. Centralize all leads in your CRM.

You can’t manage your leads effectively if they’re scattered between multiple platforms or in an outdated system that’s not designed for contact management (we’re looking at you, Excel sheets).

To stay on top of all leads and not let anything fall through the cracks, choose a CRM system that helps your team to provide the best customer experiences.

4. Create secure backups.

If all of your lead data is centralized on a single platform, it’s important to conduct regular backups. One effective way to do this is with an automated sync to another cloud-based system. This can also make it easier to ensure data protection as well as your contacts’ privacy.

Maintaining Lead Data

5. Make lead management easy for sales.

A lead management process that relies on manual input isn’t efficient. It’s a recipe for human error.

To minimize errors, make lead management as intuitive as possible for your team. You can do this with:

• Automated processes
• Data entry restrictions to ensure the right format is used
• Syncing lead data from your most authoritative app

6. Enrich your data.

High-quality lead data is enriched lead data. What does this mean? It means that your sales reps aren’t just given a name and email address to work with, but rather a comprehensive and high-def view of every prospect.

This can include a lead’s industry, company size, and even goals and pain points based on previous interactions with marketing content and progressive forms. Data enrichment apps are also a handy way to include more insights on every contact record.

7. Segment your leads.

Segmentation is important for every department. It enables marketing to send the most relevant messages and advertising. Salespeople can use it to create a tailor-fit buying process. And, service teams can ensure that customers know about the most valuable features of your product or service.

With tags, labels, groups, and list memberships, you can organize your leads into the most relevant segments for your entire customer journey.

8. Sync leads between apps.

Most businesses use a lot more than one app to manage lead data. Marketers might input and update contact data on a different platform than their sales colleagues, and it’s standard to have several platforms for different purposes within a single department.

You can avoid the headaches of manual updates and contradictory data by creating an automated sync between your apps. With a tool like Operations Hub, you can ensure that everyone is always looking at the latest and most enriched lead data in every app.

9. Use lead scoring.

One of the quickest ways to make your lead management more effective is with lead scoring. This is a common feature of advanced CRMs (although often gated behind higher plans) that instantly assigns positive or negative points to a lead based on the information they give and the interactions they have with your company. This enables your sales team to instantly identify the most sales-ready leads at any moment.

Data Usage

10. Use automation for the fastest outreach.

Much of the heavy lifting of lead management can be alleviated with automation. Some of the best ways to automate lead management include lead scoring, assigning and rotating leads, and syncing lead data between apps.

11. Create insightful reporting dashboards.

By visualizing your lead data, you can understand exactly how your team is performing. For the best insights, create reports that break down performance by funnel stage so you can understand where your team is thriving or where efficiency is breaking down.

12. Nurture your leads.

Effective lead management keeps leads engaged and moving through the funnel. This is where lead nurturing comes in. You can achieve this with timely and relevant email sequences that guide each lead towards a set goal, such as requesting a sales demo or becoming a customer.

13. Automatically assign leads to the best owner.

One other handy way to use automation is with lead routing, which directs each new lead to the right salesperson or support agent based on their location, product requirements, business size, or other attributes.

Cleaning Lead Data

14. Conduct regular cleanups.

Frequent housekeeping is an essential part of managing lead data. It keeps your data fresh and reliable and without it, decaying data can quickly get unmanageable and expensive to fix.

15. Avoid duplicates.

Having duplicate contacts in your database is a real barrier to effective lead management. To avoid duplicates, focus on:

• Preventing duplicate contacts with a two-way contact sync between your apps. This doesn’t delete duplicates, but it enables you to sync the cleanest data to avoid duplicates and it intelligently merges data that might overlap.
• Fixing duplicate contacts with a built-in feature offered by your apps, or with a third-party solution. Here are some of the best tools to eradicate duplicates.

Effective lead management depends on how you collect, store, maintain, use and clean your lead data. With the help of a great CRM, solid processes for nurturing and automation, and regular housekeeping, you should be well on your way to streamlining your funnel.

Customer data is the most valuable asset in your organization. Your sales, marketing, and service teams all rely on the insights you hold about your customers to deliver the right experiences at the right time, all the way from lead generation to long-term customer retention.

Maintaining an accurate and up-to-date customer database is essential for delivering personalized interactions at scale. Without it, there’s no way for your team to remember everything they need to know about thousands of leads and customers.

But which customer data do you actually need to collect for each department, how should you store it, and what’s the correct way to use it?

Here’s our guide to customer data that will walk you through everything you need to know.

Customer Data for Different Departments

Customer Data for Marketing

Marketing is where it all begins for your customer data. You’re creating content and lead magnets that draw attention to your brand, using forms and other lead gen tools — like live chat — to convert those visitors to contacts, and nurturing those contacts to (hopefully) becoming sales-ready leads. Here’s the customer data to collect for your marketing team

1. Name, Email, Business Name

Marketing is usually the department that brings in the highest proportion of new leads, which means the pressure is on to make that information valuable for the rest of the customer lifecycle.

This starts with basic contact data that should be smoothly organized in your CRM as well as synced two ways with other key apps such as your email marketing platform. This keeps all customer information up-to-date everywhere, ready for anyone in any department to locate the latest insights.

2. Website Engagement

At the early stages of a new lead’s time with your business, it’s important to make sure your website analytics enable you to understand how they are interacting with your business and how you can best deliver the experiences they’re looking for.

If you’re an e-commerce business owner, for example, you could use website activity to recommend other similar products each person might like via email or retargeting ads on social media.

3. Segmentation Data

Information that enables you to segment a contact into the right groups and lists is one of the most valuable types of data to collect early on. This can include data such as team size, industry, and role.

Not only can this data enable the most personalized messaging and automation, but it also helps you calculate lead score.

4. Subscription Preferences

In the very first form that a lead fills out on your website, make sure there’s a clear checkbox for them to opt into marketing communications. This is a crucial part of data protection regulations, but it also enables you to send the most relevant content if you offer a range of options to subscribe to.

5. Lead Scoring

Lead qualification data such as lead scoring is one of the most impactful ways for marketers to help out their sales colleagues. With automated lead scoring in place, points are awarded for positive interactions and behavior and deducted for negative indicators. It’s the fastest way to instantly assess how likely a prospect is to buy your product, and ideally starts as soon as a visitor converts to a lead.

Examples of Lead Score Boosters:

• High engagement, such as webinar signups and content downloads
• High amount of time spent on your website
• Visiting high-value pages, such as pricing pages, demo pages, and feature pages
• Identification as decision-maker
• High-value market or industry
• Adequate budget
• Team size matches personas
• Annual revenue matches personas

Examples of Lead Score Deductors:

• Very low engagement with website pages
• Not the decision-maker
• Market or industry you struggle to serve
• Inadequate budget
• Team size doesn’t match personas
• Annual revenue doesn’t match personas

Customer Data for Sales

Salespeople create and strengthen the bridge for interested leads to become happy customers, guiding each prospect to the right product or service. Whether your team works with an account-based approach for high-value deals or a more automated strategy that’s effective at scale, customer data is crucial.

Here’s the data that’s most important for your sales team to collect.

1. Deal Information

For each closed deal, make sure you create a clear record of all information associated with it as soon as possible. This includes data such as billing amount and frequency, which you can easily sync from your CRM with your accounting app. It also helps to make sure there’s an easily accessible copy of the latest version of the contract in your CRM.

2. Customer Lifetime Value (LTV)

Calculating a customer’s lifetime value is a really useful metric to forecast long-term revenue. You can measure this by multiplying their purchase value by purchase frequency over your average customer lifespan. With a CRM that has calculation properties, you can keep this updated automatically for your active customers.

3. Information About Decision-Makers

Your salespeople get an unmatched view of how each client’s company functions. This includes who is involved in the decision-making process.

As this same group of people will likely be involved in future onboarding sessions and upgrading discussions, make sure to store relevant information in your CRM. This helps avoid the awkward scenario of them remembering you while you look anxiously at a blank contact record, or passing the deal to a colleague who has even less background information.

4. Granular, Verified Segmentation Data

As a sales team gets to know a prospect better, it’s a great opportunity to verify their contact record. Check that their industry, company size, and other key metrics are correct, and make sure to instantly sync this data to other apps such as email marketing and automation tools that use segmentation.

5. Closed Won and Closed Lost Data

One of the most important metrics for salespeople to collect is why they successfully close a deal or not. Ask for standardized answers to store in your CRM and use this to optimize your product, messaging and targeting, and sales process.

Customer Data for Customer Service

Customer data collection doesn’t finish when a deal is closed. Throughout a customer’s time with your company, you can optimize and update their contact record to create the most accurate view of how your company can best serve them. Here’s the best customer data to collect for your service team

1. Customer Happiness Metrics

Metrics such as NPS (Net Promoter Score) and CSAT (Customer Satisfaction Score) are incredibly useful for any organization to reduce churn and optimize customer experience with a stronger product, strategy, and team. These metrics give you a snapshot of how a customer feels about your company at any point in time, and with repeated surveys at set intervals, you can monitor how that sentiment changes.

Many customer happiness metrics are extremely quick to collect. As one of the most popular examples, NPS simply asks: “On a scale of zero to ten, how likely are you to recommend our business to a friend or colleague?”

2. Support Ticket Data

An insightful way to gauge both individual and overall customer happiness is with your support ticket data. This includes general metrics such as ticket volume, topic, and time to resolution, but it’s also worth automating data properties for each customer record, such as:

• Last ticket submitted
• Number of tickets submitted

With automation in your service team, you can create instant triggers that let your team know if satisfaction scores drop below a certain threshold or a certain amount of tickets are submitted within a given timeframe. Your team can then reach out to check how the customer is doing and reduce their likelihood of churn.

3. Churn Risk

By combining metrics such as customer satisfaction and support ticket data, you can create a tailored formula for calculating churn risk. With a calculation property in your CRM, you can then automatically measure this and keep an up-to-date and intelligent view of customers that are at the highest risk of churn.

4. Customer Churn Reason

It’s unfortunate, but it happens: you can’t keep every customer forever. If a customer does have to say goodbye, try to understand and record what’s behind it in your CRM. Keep these answers standardized (such as “too expensive” or “problems with the product”) so you can easily create actionable reports instead of sifting through unstructured data.

5. Customer Happiness Reason

On the other hand, if a customer loves your company, learn why! Create a standardized set of satisfaction reasons that you can ask your customers with high NPS scores to choose from.

Collecting, maintaining, and utilizing customer data is a job you’re never finished with. But when you have relevant, accurate, and up-to-date customer data, you make everything else easier and more impactful for sales, marketing, service, and beyond.

To maintain the highest quality data in every app and enable your departments to seamlessly collaborate on insights, two-way contact data synchronization between your apps. From your CRM to your email marketing software and support platform, bring your apps together for the smoothest data-driven operations in your organization.

Some of the most commonly used apps at any business are contact management apps like Google, iCloud, and Outlook. These apps are a valuable way to keep your address book accessible on any device and synced with your email, calendar, and cloud storage.

However, when it comes to making sure they play nicely with your other business apps… it’s not always simple.

Let’s say you collect contacts in Outlook, but want to move subscribed customers into Mailchimp, and send them your weekly newsletter. To solve this in the past, you might have manually exported and imported CSV files between your apps before sending each email.

But that can be a real headache. There’s a much better solution, and it involveszero manual updates and spreadsheets: integrating your contact apps and email marketing tool with a native integration solution.

This is the most effective and straightforward way to keep your email marketing lists and contacts apps connected with your latest data. And it requires no code or advanced tech know-how.

To show you the ropes, let’s outline how to sync your data and put your Google, iCloud, and Outlook contacts to work in your email marketing app.

Search for a complete sync solution.

Some email marketing providers offernative integrations with Google Contacts, iCloud, and Outlook, but be aware of their limitations. Often it’s only a one-way sync, meaning that changes in app A are synced into app B, but not the other way around. Or, you can’t customize the sync to include the exact fields you need to map.

Instead of wrestling with CSVs and native integrations, yourbest bet is to use complete data sync to control the way your data flows between apps. After plugging in your apps, you can choose all the different ways you want them to talk to each other.

For instance, you might use Operations Hub to sync contacts labeled ‘Customers’ in Google Contacts with HubSpot or sync all your address books with your CRM to generate a complete overview for your salespeople.

How to Organize Your Lists and Sequences With Automatic Segmentation

Some people organize their contacts into completely different clouds, especially if they want to keep personal contacts and business separate. That’s totally fine and it can be a great way to keep things simple.

But if your contacts for different purposes overlap, you can also automatically segment them to keep things tidy.

You do this by organizing contacts with labels or tags in your address book, and matching these up with labels, groups, or lists in your email marketing app in your sync.

Let’s look closer at an example. I have a group of contacts in Google Contacts with the label ‘business.’ To make sure that these contacts (and only these) get synced into HubSpot, I can set up the following sync rules:

Now when I go to send a message to that group, all of the right recipients will be there. That means more time actually sending emails and less time worrying about which contacts should receive them.

How to Sync Subscription Status Between Apps

If you’re using multiple apps to contact your email marketing list, knowing who actually wants to hear from you can be a real headache. You don’t want to risk contacting people who have unsubscribed in another app, nor ignore contacts who do want to be contacted.

Your answer to this issubscription management, and it’s made possible when you connect your apps.

As you sync your contact data, you can enable each contact to travel between apps with a ‘subscribed’ or ‘unsubscribed’ tag. When the time comes to send your next email, all of the right people will be in (or out of) the list.

How to Enrich Data in Your Email Marketing App

It’s not just subscription status that you can sync between apps. You might want to sync other fields, too.

Let’s look at syncing contacts from Outlook with HubSpot, which you could use to send marketing emails. To ensure the right info is synced with each contact, you can check the field mapping to make sure everything lines up.

If a field isn’t included in the list by default, custom fields give you more freedom. As an example custom field, you could map the ‘Department’ field in Outlook with a HubSpot property for the same data. For custom fields to map correctly, they need to be compatible across both apps.

Getting the Most From Data Sync

So, that’s how to easily sync your address books in Outlook, iCloud, or Google Contacts with your email marketing app. After setting up your sync, you can rest easy and send top-converting emails knowing that your lists are in tip-top shape.

Once syncing your email marketing app with your contact address books, you can then also decide which other apps to sync — such as your CRM or customer support software. Remember, the best software stack is an integrated one.

We all know how flooded the average email inbox is today. And, while email marketing remains one of the most effective tools in the marketing toolbox, millions of emails go by unnoticed, unopened, and unread every day.

So, how can you avoid such a sad fate for your emails? And, what can you do to increase email engagement and get those coveted clicks on your CTA buttons?

Read on for ten actions that will increase your email engagement and save your emails from ending up in the trash folder.

10 Ways to Improve Email Engagement

1. Always send a welcome email.

The first email you send to a customer is usually a welcome email. The average open rate for a welcome email is 50%, which makes it much more effective than regular newsletters.

If we bear in mind that 76% of people expect a welcome email immediately after subscribing to your list, it’s clear that this email is an important one, so be sure to make the most of it.

Really Good Emails shares a great collection of welcome emails (and every other category you can think of) to inspire your strategy, including this excellent example from Postable. It delivers the discount code subscribers are waiting for, includes a beautiful graphic, and keeps things super simple.

2. Optimize your subject lines.

47% of email recipients open emails based on the subject line alone. So yes, getting the subject line right is crucial.

But what makes a good subject line?

The best way to succeed is to leverage natural human tendencies such as:

• Curiosity
• FOMO (Fear Of Missing Out)
• Humor

This is a typical FOMO subject line, where GetResponse is making it clear to its audience that they risk missing out on a whopping 40% off.

3. Don’t neglect the preheader text.

The preheader text, or preview text, is the snippet of text that follows the email subject line when a reader views your email in the inbox. It’s shown beside the subject line and sender name.

These examples from beauty marketplace, Cult Beauty, offer a preview of the brands and discounts it offers to encourage clicks:

This snippet is valuable real estate and it can even make or break your email’s performance. Studies show that brands using the preview text effectively increase their open rates by a margin of up to 30%.

4. Prioritize your CTAs.

The way you write and design your CTAs, or calls to action, has a significant impact on email engagement and click-through rates. Since readers are so used to being prompted to do this and do that, creativity is crucial to avoid being filtered out.

Experiment with everything from copy and design to placement and frequency to discover what kind of CTAs and buttons yield the best results with your particular target audience.

This message from email marketing software, Emma, keeps it short and sweet with a CTA that spurs the reader’s curiosity with the clever and straightforward copy “See how.”

5. Write casual, fun copy.

Write as you talk. Nobody appreciates large, dull, jargon-heavy chunks of texts. Make it easy, fun, and rewarding to read your emails. And, be ultra-clear about what next step you want the reader to take.

Use active, positive language and keep sentences short and concise. And, if appropriate, use humor; people like to smile.

This email copy from Uber is creative, on-brand, and to the point:

6. Leverage your transactional emails.

After welcome emails, transactional emails have among the highest open rates of all email marketing messages. And yet, they rarely contain more information than that of the actual transaction. That means an opportunity for you.

By giving your transactional emails some extra love and attention, you will wow your customers in a way that many companies miss out on.

7. Conduct A/B testing.

If you’re sending emails, you should be doing A/B testing. You can test every element of your emails, from subject lines and preview tests to copy, images, design, and CTAs.

The more you test, the better you will get to know your target audience. And the better you know your audience, the more you will be able to engage them with your emails.

8. Make sure your email is mobile responsive.

Most people open emails on their mobile device. This means that if your emails aren’t mobile responsive, a large portion of them will be going to waste.

Always make sure that your design has as good or better UX on mobile as on desktop.

9. Personalize your emails for each recipient.

Customers get frustrated with brands that fail to create personalized experiences. This is why tailoring your email marketing to the recipient is crucial.

An email that is not personalized risks doing more harm than good. In one marketing study, 82% of marketing specialists witnessed a substantial increase in opening rates when they leveraged the power of personalization.

Eventbrite sends these personalized emails with reports on how successful is users’ events have been during the past year. This type of personalized content can also be a great way to encourage social sharing and engagement within a team, multiplying the effect of your emails.

10. Segment your email marketing.

Segmenting your email list enables you to get the right message to the right buyer persona at the right time in their buyer journey. And, that is crucial for increasing conversions.

To send segmented emails that are more likely to convert, first integrate your email and marketing software with your CRM and other sources of customer data.

This gives you a 360-degree view of your contacts everywhere, including your email marketing platform. It’s then easier than ever to send highly personalized emails based on your contacts’ groups, memberships, and other properties.

Better Data Means Better Email Engagement

Email communication is one of the most effective ways that you can reach out to customers and prospects. But keeping your emailing lists up-to-date and personalizing your content can be challenging.

That’s where integration steps in: sync the contact databases across your app stack, so you’re always working with fully enriched, up-to-date, and relevant data.

With your CRM and email tool in sync, you can automatically send recent subscribers and leads to your email tool. You can also sync extra data for better segmentation of your marketing and nurturing campaigns — plus easily personalized outreach in every email.

At the same time, you can merge marketing qualified leads (MQLs) back to your CRM with updated data for sales to work with — all without overwriting existing data.

Maintaining a contact database with high data integrity is essential for any organization. You need your data to be reliable, accurate, and complete, otherwise, you risk frustrating your customers with the wrong information, being unable to deliver personalized services, and losing faith in your reporting.

One of the biggest threats to data integrity is having duplicate contacts in your database.

In many cases, duplicate contacts are caused by human error. One team member might spell a contact’s name wrong, causing it to be added twice. It can also be caused by a contact filling in a form with a different email address or phone number.

In short: duplicate contacts can be a real pain. No business wants to have to deal with them, but the good news is that you don’t have to. Here’s what you need to know to get rid of duplicate contact data for good.

The Best Apps to Remove Duplicate Contacts

Some apps offer built-in deduplication features to locate and banish pesky duplicates by merging or deleting them.

For instance, HubSpot has a handy deduplication tool that uses AI to finds duplicate contacts and companies in the CRM. Google Contacts and iCloud also have useful built-in dedupe functions. It’s always a good idea to start with your apps’ functionality and clean up your data at the source.

However, many apps don’t have built-in dedupe functions, or they’re limited in quality. For most organizations, it’s valuable to choose a dedicated app for data quality and cleansing that works across multiple apps.

To avoid wasting time, money, and energy trying to fix duplicate contacts and their repercussions across your organization, here are five of the best apps to help you fix and avoid duplicates.

1. Dedupely

For: HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive

Dedupely helps remove duplicates from three of the most popular CRM platforms: HubSpot, Salesforce, and Pipedrive. It’s a really easy platform to navigate, and offers several filters to flag possible duplicates for first name, last name, email, company, and more. It also finds duplicates by exact, fuzzy, and similar matching to detect issues that other systems would miss.

2. DemandTools from Validity

For: Microsoft Dynamics 365 and Salesforce

DemandTools is a CRM data quality suite that helps organizations optimize their data in Salesforce and Microsoft Dynamics 365 CRM.

It includes maintenance tools, cleaning tools, and discovery tools for comparing external data against the CRM and bulk email verification.

3. RingLead

For: Salesforce, Pardot, Eloqua, and Marketo

RingLead is a powerful data quality solution to cleanse data, stop dirty data at the source, enrich contact records with fresh information, and route leads to the right person at the right time.

It offers one-click integrations with Salesforce, Pardot, Eloqua, and Marketo.

4. Openrise

For: selected marketing and sales automation apps, collaboration tools, data services and infrastructure platforms

Openrise’s data orchestration platform automates key processes including data cleansing and enrichment, deduplication, lead routing, and attribution to make your campaigns more successful.

It integrates with many popular marketing and sales automation apps plus collaboration tools like G Suite, data services including Cleabit, and infrastructure platforms such as MySQL.

5. Contacts+

For: Google Contacts, iCloud, and Outlook

Struggling to manage different contacts in your Google, iCloud, and Outlook apps? Contacts+ is a helpful app that centralizes and syncs contacts between Google Contacts, iCloud, and Outlook so you always have the latest info on the app and device you’re using.

Not only is it a great way to sync your address books, but it also has sophisticated dedupe algorithms to pick up on duplicate contacts even when they’re not obvious to you or other apps.

Preventing Duplicates When Syncing Data

The tools we talked about here are amazing additions to your tech stack when it comes to managing your contact databases and keeping them organized. But another important step in contact management is syncing your contact data in two ways.

Operations Hub is a two-way contact data syncing tool that also has valuable advantages for preventing and merging duplicate contacts.

When you create a sync between your apps, say Google Contacts and HubSpot, you can choose which app has the authoritative data that should be chosen if there’s a conflict. This creates a “single source of truth” in your data: one of the benchmarks of a healthy database.

Operations Hub also defines contacts by their email address, which is a good way to avoid duplicates. And, for example, if in one app you have a contact called ‘Bill’ and another has a contact named ‘William’ — both of which are attached to the same email address — the tool will merge and enrich both contact records.