Category Archives: B2B

You probably have thousands upon thousands of contacts in your database. With all those contacts to keep track of, you need all the help you can get when it comes to managing your vast contact network.

But what does contact management mean for businesses, exactly?

Contact management is the process of recording contact data for individuals and businesses in your organization’s network — including suppliers, customers, leads, partners, subscribers, and more — and managing your interactions with them.

This contact data can include information such as names, email addresses, phone numbers, company names, job titles, etc. Anything you might need to actually contact that person. But it can also include information such as a person’s stage in their customer journey with you, their subscription status, interests, demographics, the list goes on.

Contact management is not as simple as keeping contact information on file. – You need to make sure all this data is properly organized so you can fully utilize it. Managing your contact data properly involves many important best practices, such as:

• Introducing company-wide standards for data entry and maintenance
• Performing regular data cleanups
• Choosing the best apps to store and manage your contact data
• Centralizing your contact data in one tool, such as your CRM
• Segmenting your data to send the most timely and relevant messages to each subset of your audience
• Optimizing the ways you collect data to make sure you only collect data that matters to you — and that collection is done according to privacy regulations
• Creating reporting workflows to make the best decisions informed by high-quality data
• Syncing your contact data two ways between all key applications

It may sound like a lot of work, but it pays off. A highly efficient contact database will not only make life much easier for you and your team, but will also empower you to provide integrated and seamless customer experiences.

Collecting and storing high-quality data is absolutely critical if you want to know your customers. Understanding their needs, interests, and history with you enables you to provide a personalized and relevant service — and personalization is the secret sauce to better customer retention and satisfaction.

So how can you implement a best-in-class contact management strategy and reap the rewards? Read on for some tips and tricks to managing contacts at your organization.

Organizing Your Contact Database

Before anything else, organizing your existing contact database is an essential first step. It’s likely that over the years you’ve gathered data that is outdated or no longer valid, as well as a lot of duplicates or data that you’re not supposed to keep due to privacy regulations such as GDPR.

This data is doing nothing but cluttering your database. So, before implementing a new and improved contact management strategy, start by carefully looking at the contacts you already have and go through the following steps:

1. Back up your data.

Your business is built on the strength of your customer data, and the last thing you need is to lose this data. In order to organize your contacts, you will need to do a lot of editing and deleting, and this means that mistakes could happen.

That’s why it’s best to back up your data before you get started. Most CRMs and contact management tools allow you to back up your data, but if yours doesn’t, try exporting this data in a CSV file and save this file to your desktop. At the very least, if the editing process goes wrong you’ll be able to go back to this file and start over.

2. Pause any active integrations or syncs you may have.

If you already have a type of integration in place to sync contact data between tools, make sure to pause this before you start cleaning up your data. This ensures that you don’t receive incoming data into your contact management tool while you’re trying to organize it.

If you don’t have an integration in place yet, hold off on implementing this until after you’ve prepared your database to make sure you get the best results from your sync — we’ll get to this point in the process later on in this guide.

3. Remove duplicates.

Your CRM or contact management tool may already have an option to find and merge duplicates. If so, use this function to remove any duplicates you may have in your database.

This works differently for each tool, so the best thing to do is to check your CRM’s knowledge base to find out how your tool detects and merges duplicates. If your software doesn’t have this option, you can also use a de-duplicator tool such as Dedupely.

4. Delete outdated or incorrect data.

This includes emails that keep bouncing back, phone numbers with invalid formats, incomplete addresses, etc. It can also be contacts you know your business doesn’t need anymore, such as contact data for unqualified leads.

If you don’t have a huge database yet, you may want to go through your contacts manually, but there are ways to do this automatically. For example, Experian Data Quality has some powerful data validation programs that allow you to verify contact data in bulk.

5. Manually scan your contacts.

Once you’ve merged your duplicates and gotten rid of invaluable data, your database will be in pretty good shape. But in order for it to be absolutely top-notch, you’ll need to go over it with a fine-tooth comb.

This step will obviously take some time, but if you implement company-wide data entry standards and make a commitment to quality data, you’ll only have to do this once.

Once your database is properly organized and your contacts all have valid, consistent, and up-to-date information attached to them, you will have a solid foundation upon which to build the best contact management strategy.

Next up, an important step: choosing the best contact management software for your business.

Choosing the Best Contact Management Software

If your business already has a CRM system or contact management tool you’re happy with, you can skip this step. However, if your current application isn’t cutting it for you, you haven’t found the right tool yet, or your contacts are stored all over the place, choosing the right contact management software is potentially the most important thing you can do for proper data management.

You need to pick an app to act as your central contact database and source of truth. For solopreneurs or freelancers, a simple tool like Google Contacts or Outlook will work just fine.

However, for anything from very small businesses to large enterprises, it’s highly recommended that you pick a customer relationship management (CRM) tool as your central contact database.

CRM systems offer great features for organized contact management, including (but not limited to) storing prospect and customer data in one place, monitoring interactions with customers across multiple channels (such as phone, email, voicemails, meetings, live chat, etc.), and tracking customers’ journeys and movement through your pipelines.

How to Choose the Right CRM

There’s a multitude of CRMs out there to suit businesses of every shape and size. Here are some things to take into consideration when choosing your ideal tool:

• What is the size of your business? Some CRMs are made for businesses that want to grow, like HubSpot CRM, whilst others are a better fit for larger companies.

• How do you want to scale your business in the next few years? It’s not just about the current size of your business, but also about how you want to grow. Make sure you pick a system that scales with you and won’t become a bad fit a few years down the line as your business grows.

• What is the budget you have for a CRM? A good CRM fits nicely inside your budget and you won’t end up paying for features you don’t need.

• How does it integrate with your business’s other tools? The best SaaS stacks work together, with data flowing between all applications. That’s why it’s crucial to sync your contact data two ways between your CRM and the rest of your business tools to always have accurate and up-to-date information everywhere. Make sure your CRM can integrate with tools like your email service provider, accounting tools, VoIP provider, customer support software, and any other tools that store contact data.

• What features do you want from your CRM tool? The range of features each CRM offers can vary a lot. Think about the features your business needs, now and in the future – this may include a visual overview of your sales process, customer journey overviews, marketing automation, reporting and analytics, calendar and scheduling features, company and contact insights.

For those who are just starting out with CRMs and want to test the waters a bit, there are many tools that offer a free trial period where you can experiment with all the different features and functionalities a CRM has to offer. If you’re not sure yet exactly what kind of features your business needs, this trial period is also a great way to find out.

A golden tip for finding the best CRM tool for you is to visit software review websites such as G2 and Capterra and check out user reviews. On these websites, you can filter your choices based on market segment (small business, mid-market, enterprise, etc.), language, pricing options, and available features. That will already be a great place to start your search and for narrowing down your options.

Best CRM Providers

Some popular CRM applications in the market include:

• HubSpot CRM: This free-forever CRM is a great pick for businesses with a limited budget and that want a tool that’s extremely easy to use and deploy. There is a wide range of extra features you can access for sales, marketing, and customer service teams by adding paid Hubs to the CRM.

• Pipedrive: Pipedrive is a budget-friendly and easy-to-use CRM tool that focuses on small businesses and sales teams.

• Salesforce: Salesforce is a powerhouse tool that offers a huge range of features and a world of possibilities, but at a higher price point. It’s a good option for rapidly growing or large businesses, but might be too complex and costly for smaller businesses.

• Nimble: This is another budget-friendly solution for smaller businesses that offers great ease of use and a quick setup.

Once you implement a CRM system, it will be that much easier to manage your contacts by making your CRM the central contact database for your business and the heart of your tech stack. By having a centralized contact database, you can:

• Find key contacts and insights in one app
• Make it easy for all teams to find data, without needing to have login details and training for lots of tools they don’t need to use
• Eliminate information silos between departments

Processes for Data Entry and Contact Management

To streamline how you handle your data, it’s important to introduce company-wide standards for data entry and management.

You may want to assign one team or individual to be responsible for the quality and management of your data. They’ll need to ensure that everything that enters your database is up to code according to company policies and strategy.

For instance, they can check that all the necessary information fields are filled in when a contact record is created, that there are no duplicates before a new contact is created, that everyone else in the organization is following the rules, and that all data is entered with consistent formats.

If having one person or team be responsible for data management isn’t feasible for your company, make sure to train all team members on where and how to correctly input and update data. A few important things to teach your team when it comes to data management include:

• In which app they should enter new data
• When and how to update contact records
• Which information fields to fill in when creating or updating a record
• How to check if a contact already exists before creating it
• How contact data flows between tools

Of course, this is different for each organization and will depend on the specific processes your company implements. It will also depend on the tools in your tech stack.

Documenting these processes is just as important, so that all new hires can quickly learn how to handle data at your business. In addition, if a person responsible for data management leaves the company, their successor can easily get up to speed by checking documentation.

By introducing company-wide protocols for data entry and management, you can significantly reduce the amount of low-quality, outdated, or duplicate data in your system — and managing your contacts will become infinitely easier.

Gathering Valuable Contact Data

By now, you have a good idea about how to organize the contact data you have — but how are you getting this data in the first place?

Optimizing the channels and tools through which you gather customer data is essential for the upkeep of your contact management strategy — otherwise, after tidying everything up, you may have an influx of bad data coming your way and messing up your databases all over again.

In order to build your database with quality data that leads to actionable insights, being systematic about how you collect data is vital. To get this right, make sure to follow these steps:

1. Analyze and optimize the channels through which you collect data.

First things first: start by making a list of all the channels you currently have in place to gather data. This may include social media, customer surveys, landing pages, website forms, sign-up forms, emails, and mobile apps, for example.

Then, look at each of them individually and think about how you can optimize them. For example, if you have a form on a landing page full of unnecessary information fields, remove these from the form, and only collect data you actually need. You might also want to standardize data formats in these forms, such as by only allowing email addresses with a valid format and phone numbers with the right amount of digits.

To make sure all this data ends up in the right place, double-check that the information collected by these channels is flowing into the right apps and that these apps, in turn, are properly connected to your CRM with the appropriate tags and labels for each contact.

Last but certainly not least, make sure that you are gathering explicit permission from everyone in full accordance with data protection laws. You’ll need to implement an opt-in that lets subscribers give explicit permission for you to store their data and send them different kinds of emails, including product updates and marketing communications. All of the major email marketing platforms — such as Mailchimp or SendGrid — offer full compliance with data protection regulations.

Not only will this help ensure that you stay compliant with the law, but it will also help you build a high-quality contact list with people who actually want to hear from you. Trust, security, and privacy should be integral to your contact management strategy from the start.

2. Offer value in exchange for data.

If you want to gather as much valuable information as possible, you need to create opportunities where your customers want to give you the data you need. One of the best ways to do this is by giving them free downloadable content in exchange for their information. This can include ebooks, white papers, checklists, templates, guides, and even offers and discounts.

This free downloadable content can be offered in a separate landing page, a website pop-up, or an email survey, for example.

3. Make sure this information goes to the right tools.

If your new subscribers go straight into your email marketing tool, syncing this tool in real-time with your CRM ensures that these new contacts appear instantly in your CRM as leads. This information will then enable you to begin a lead nurturing campaign and maximize your leads-to-customers conversions.

Also, if you’re in a business where you meet a lot of new leads in person, you’re probably likely to enter their contact details on your phone. By syncing your phone’s address book with your CRM, this new contact is instantly visible to your entire team.

Integrating Your Contact Data

Now we’ve come to the holy grail of contact management: integrating your data.

For your contact management strategy to yield the best results, the data in your different apps can’t be isolated from one another. All these apps collect contact data in different ways, so without integrating them, you can end up with lots of different databases that take a lot of time to manage separately.

By integrating them and keeping your CRM as the centralized contact database for your business, contact management gets exponentially easier. Automated contact syncing keeps all of your contacts up-to-date, accurate, and enriched between your business apps and devices.

By syncing your apps, you empower every team in your business with easy access to critical data. That way, employees will be better positioned to focus on strategic tasks and stay productive rather than spending their time on tedious and repetitive manual processes — and bad data will never stifle your progress again.

The Best Way to Keep Your Contact Databases in Sync

If you previously tried to keep your databases in sync by importing and exporting CSV files, you know how frustrating and time-consuming it is.

In a growing business, your contacts quickly get outdated with this method, as well as increasing the likelihood of duplicating contacts across apps — not to mention that it takes a huge amount of time to do this constantly and results in a lot more frequent cleanups.

Instead of using CSV files to try to keep your contacts integrated between apps, try an automated, two-way syncing method. A tool that specializes in contact syncing can keep your contacts flowing between your databases two ways and in real-time. So, every time you change or update any contact data, that change is reflected in your other apps, too. This also applies to data that was created before the sync was set up.

This solution is also fully automated, which means that after setting it up once, the sync is kept up without you needing to do anything. As the final piece in the puzzle of your contact management strategy, syncing your tools will make sure that your contacts are kept up-to-date, accurate, and secure — and without you needing to lift a finger beyond setup.

How big is your business’s database? From the moment someone becomes interested in your product or service and long after the purchase, you’re collecting data — and it can multiply fast.

Thanks to cloud-based platforms, even small businesses have access to a broad variety of tools to gather massive amounts of information. But it’s easy to fall into a “more is better” trap when really the quality of your data is most important of all.

After all, collecting large amounts of information is less of a challenge than managing data efficiently and ensuring its quality. Then, and only then, can business owners make data-driven decisions such as how to:

• Pivot your business to match consumer demand
• Offer the best customer experiences
• Introduce new products
• Personalize marketing content
• Scale effectively
• Channel your budget

Let’s examine the two biggest obstacles of data management and how to use technology to overcome them so you can make more data-driven decisions.

Obstacles of Data Management

1. Overwhelming Amount of Data From Different Sources

According to the 2020 Blissfully Report, the average small business uses 102 different apps and a mid-market business uses an average of 137 apps.

Your marketing team needs at least one tool for lead generation, email marketing, and automation. Meanwhile, your sales team uses a CRM and your accounting team manages your finances with another piece of software. Then there are apps for smooth business operations like GSuite or Outlook, your ecommerce store, surveys platforms, and VoIP.

All these applications contain relevant customer and lead data from interactions with leads, prospects, or customers at different stages of their journey.

When you are choosing applications for your SaaS stack, you might choose an all-in-one solution to reduce complexity and connect various data sources to offer a wider scope of customer data. For instance, marketing automation software can take over your lead generation, capture, scoring, and nurturing throughout the customer journey.

Integrated systems or hubs exist for other areas of your business like sales, finance, or ecommerce. But as your business grows, you’ll likely adopt more tools on top of them to add functionality and handle additional customer touchpoints.

These tools have their own way to store data and the problem is that most of them are not really “talking to each other.” The lack of communication between apps leads to a major data management challenge for businesses of all sizes: data silos.

2. Data Silos

Cloud software has made a lot of things easier for businesses: you can work anywhere, stay up to date on every device, and not rely on hardware updates. But even when you are using cloud-based applications across your business, most of them are not natively integrated.

As a result, little fragments of customer data are isolated within these applications. When that happens, you have a data silos problem.

Data silos can be kryptonite for businesses. They make it impossible to have a 360-degree view of your customers when your data is isolated. Since each one of your teams is looking at their own particular subset of data, decisions will rarely be aligned and definitely not driven by the data that matters to everyone.

Even when there is good communication between teams, sharing quality data has its structural challenges. Many sales teams are accidentally spending time on leads that their marketing colleagues have already identified as cold.

When native integrations are not available, the best way to have the right data in the right tools is through third-party integration services.

For example, using an integration solution can help you align different departments in your business by having:

1. The right marketing leads and their qualification data in the CRM
2. The right customer attributes collected by a CRM available on a marketing tool

Integrated Data Is Essential for Data-Driven Decisions

Collecting massive amounts of data is no longer the problem. Today’s challenge is managing data efficiency and avoiding silos.

Integrated systems and synchronization solutions allow you to have the right information available in the right tool at the right time. Then, and only then, can you have a clear and complete view of your customers. This enables you to use data to illuminate the best path forward rather than making decisions based on gut feeling or past experience alone.

Additionally, data synchronization brings your teams closer together and aligns their view of the customer. Having your tools “talking to each other” can also leverage something very valuable for all businesses: time.

A far cry from its early days on factory production lines, automation has entered into our organizations and found a place in the operations of every department — and it isn’t going anywhere.

Combined with robotics, machine learning, and artificial intelligence (AI), automation takes care of the mundane tasks we’d rather not spend time on, the work we don’t want to mess up with human error, customer interactions that require instant responses and so much more.

While automation has been evolving at lightning speed over the last few years, it doesn’t look like it’s slowing down. As we automate more business processes, we’re on the path of an interesting long-term paradox: despite a century of creating machines to do our work for us, the proportion of adults in the US with a job has consistently gone up for the past 125 years. So how is it affecting our work?

Here’s what the future of automation looks like — and how your company can start getting ahead right now.

10 Automation Trends to Watch for in 2022

1. Automating High-Quality Experiences

Right now, the low-hanging fruit for automation is boring repetitive work. Automating front-office functions is harder, but this will become more accessible in the future as automation becomes more intelligent.

More organizations will soon be using technology to automate quality customer experiences. However, this doesn’t mean that customer support roles will become obsolete any time soon. After all, 30% of customers still say that not being able to reach a human representative is the most frustrating aspect of a poor customer experience.

2. Marketing, Sales, and Success Alignment

73% of sales teams say that collaborating across departments is critical or very important to their overall sales process. Automation makes it easier for organizations to be aligned. Many CRMs can now facilitate contact handovers and data sharing as a contact moves from marketing lead, to sales lead, to customer.

3. Automation as a Vital Part of CRMs

Three-quarters of sales professionals use technology — usually a CRM — to close more deals. Despite this, today’s salespeople spend just 34% of their time selling and more time catching up with admin and data entry.

As sales and marketing teams realize the potential of automation to tackle repetitive tasks, more of the top CRM tools are developing powerful automation features. These will enable companies to automate routine tasks to speed up sales cycles, send personalized marketing messages, and proactively resolve customer service cases without lifting a finger.

4. Automation for Greater Personalization

The best customer interactions are personalized. After setting up audience segments based on certain criteria, customized messages can be automatically sent to the right people at an ideal time.

5. AI Will Become Easier to Deploy

If AI was ever more at home in sci-fi movies than our offices, that’s no longer the case. AI is increasingly a part of the business tools we know and love, from CRMs to email marketing tools.

In the future, we may not even realize we’re deploying AI — it will simply look like better customer experience, sales, or marketing.

6. Business Chatbots as Full-Time Agents

Live chat software has a 73% satisfaction rate as a way for customers to interact with businesses. Chatbots can also save businesses up to 30% in customer support costs.

While today’s businesses mostly use live chat to facilitate real-time conversations between consumers and business representatives, more companies are setting up chatbots.

With bots, companies can provide answers to frequently asked questions and even resolve issues without a team member’s involvement. Increasingly, the best chatbots serve as full-time customer support agents. The key to a bot’s success is intelligence, which still has its limitations but is improving fast.

In the future of automation, bots will become more useful, more intelligent, and may soon incorporate voice functionality.

7. AI for Automated Decision-Making

Decision-making is tiring. You need the right data at your fingertips, to look beyond your biases and get agreement from other stakeholders. AI will increasingly provide a solution to this, delivering high-quality data that can help inform the best decisions.

While some decisions can be instantly acted on with automation, many will — and should — go back to humans for consideration from an emotional and empathetic side.

8. Automating Data Collection and Reporting

Automating data management is essential to ensure data quality and integrity.

However, reporting doesn’t have to involve confusing Excel exports and hours spent manipulating data. By consolidating all of your customer data with an iPaaS solution, your tools can deliver more accurate reporting with the information at hand.

9. Automation Across a Company’s App Stack

Businesses have more tools than ever before at their fingertips. In the future of automation, more companies will have a Head of Business Systems role to oversee their huge number of tools — and this position will hold a vast capacity for impact and change.

More than ever, the SaaS tools we choose will help our businesses become more productive, profitable, and impactful. For best results, companies will connect their tools to enable automated two-way data syncing and greater accuracy.

10. RPA Helping Businesses Become More Productive

RPA, also referred to as ‘robotics’ or ‘robots,’ is defined as the automation of rules-based processes with software that utilizes the user interface and which can run on any software, including web-based applications, ERP systems, and mainframe systems. This could include opening emails and attachments, moving files and folders, or filling in forms.

Going forward, RPA is likely to become a more standard part of our workflows, whether via stand-alone tools, features of the tools we’re already using, or integrated apps.

Is automation changing work as we know it?

The short answer is yes. Between 400 million and 800 million individuals could be displaced by automation and need to find new jobs by 2030 around the world, but economic growth, rising productivity, and other forces could more than offset the losses, according to a report by McKinsey Global Institute.

The role of automation is to take care of the tasks that machines can do better than us — and at least for the near future, this doesn’t include creativity, management, or friendly 1-1 human interaction.

When we automate our business processes, we don’t have to lose the human sides of marketing, sales, service, and management — it can free up more time for them.

For best results, create an automation strategy that helps your team focus on their most important work. Choose automation tools that free up time, connect your overall tech stack, and boost productivity as well as morale.

The more billable tasks you complete, the more money your agency makes. The less time you spend on admin and non-billables, the more you can spend on valuable client work.

Productivity equals profitability. But being productive is easier said than done, especially as you scale your agency.

To help you out, here are some of our favorite productivity hacks for digital agencies to get more done in less time, whether your agency makes money from digital marketing, SEO, web design, or other skills you’ve turned into a business.

How to Make Digital Agencies More Productive

1. Delegate tasks that someone else can do better.

Many agencies start this way: you’re a lone consultant monetizing your skills, and business is good. In fact, you’re bringing in too much work to deliver yourself. You either have to turn down clients or overstretch yourself unsustainably. But eventually, you decide to distribute the workload by hiring someone else. Soon enough, you’re running a digital agency.

Being able to delegate is crucial for any business — whether it’s hiring those first few employees or knowing what to outsource later. One of the best productivity tips for agencies: if a task is time-consuming and doesn’t require your team’s skill to do it well, find someone else to do it. Platforms like Fiverr and Upwork make outsourcing easier than ever.

2. Use price elasticity to your advantage.

This isn’t a productivity tip — but it will help your agency make more money. It’s the easiest trick in the book: raising your rates.

As an early-stage business with a steady stream of happy clients, you should be raising your prices regularly — around every six months. This is because of the economic concept of price elasticity.

A can of Coca-Cola is an elastic product: if a shopkeeper increases their prices unreasonably, customers won’t buy it. They’ll get something else instead, like a can of Pepsi.

But your agency’s work is a value-driven product: it’s more inelastic. If your clients are getting value from your work, they won’t leave when you raise your prices.

That said, you should be careful when raising your rates –—and you have to be certain you are delivering the value to back it up — but your best clients will likely pay more to continue working with you. It’s generally easiest to test the water with new clients before letting your existing clients know, however.

3. Carve out focus time.

You wake up to a flurry of Slack notifications. You open your laptop and emails flood in. Then the phone starts ringing. How can you focus on the work you’re paid for with all this going on?

The answer: with focus and intentionality. Building a productive and profitable agency with clients that love you requires a ton of focus. It means sitting down at your computer, turning notifications off, and concentrating on the most important task until it’s done. No checking LinkedIn, no email checks just in case, no keeping Slack on in the background.

Serious, unglamorous, and ruthless focus is your secret weapon against the competition — and it’s what’s going to drive in more profit.

4. Know that doubling your team doesn’t double results.

When you hire more people, there’s a very real chance that your productivity will stagnate or decrease — at least to begin with. That can even apply to your profits, too.

There’s a value to staying small, as Paul Jarvis celebrates in his book Company of One: Why Staying Small Is the Next Big Thing for Business — your business is more nimble when it’s smaller. It’s usually more productive per employee as well.

If you’ve decided to scale your agency, do it with full acceptance that it will change your team’s culture and productivity; in many ways for the better, but with some losses too.

5. Identify where your results come from.

You’ve probably heard of the Pareto principle, or the 80/20 rule. It suggests that 80% of the results will come from 20% of the work.

In your digital agency, it might mean that 80% of your profits come from 20% of your projects. 80% of your hassles and headaches can come from 20% of your clients. 80% of your work will probably happen in 20% of your day.

To make your digital agency more productive, drill into that 20% — the projects, clients, and time where the results come from, and on the flip side, where the problems surface. Recalibrate your business to make space for more of what works.

6. Choose tools that speed up invoicing and payments.

The end of the month rolls around, you’ve done lots of work, your clients are happy, and everything should be well in the world. But you’ve got to send your invoices out.

Getting paid is easier said than done. Sending out invoices can be one of the most time-consuming parts of your agency’s workload, especially if you don’t have good billing software on your side.

Find tools that track your time and your billables so you know exactly what to charge. The best platforms should make it easy to create an invoice with the right info per client, including address, currency, and payment details.

Some of the best invoicing and accounting tools for digital agencies are:

• Quickbooks Online: The most respected financial software on the market, although it can be overly complex for small agencies that want to keep things simple. Time tracking is available from $40/mo in the Essentials plan.
• Freshbooks: Optimized for freelancers and very small businesses, Freshbooks can be a good fit for smaller agencies, too. It offers built-in time tracking functionality and integrations with payroll providers.
• Xero: At the sweet spot between complex and simple, Xero is beautiful to use and a powerful addition to digital agencies.

7. When you’re in a position to turn down bad clients, do it.

As a digital agency, it can feel like you’re not meant to turn down work. That’s a total myth. The most productive and profitable agencies say no to work that isn’t for them. It can take a while for your agency to be in a position where you can afford to say no, but when you’re less desperate for clients, you should. Look out for:

• Bad fit clients you know you’ll struggle to service well
• Clients that are a nightmare to work with — you’ve either worked with them before, or you can see the tell-tale signs
• Clients that refuse to pay your usual rates and insist on discounts

8. Sync your contact data across apps.

As time goes on, your agency’s data on past, present, and future clients can quickly become unruly — and you have enough to do without having to sift through that.

To help get things under control, set up two-way syncs between your apps to make your data play nicely across all of your agency’s tools, including your CRM, helpdesk, accounting tool, and email marketing system.

Whether you’re a small entrepreneur or work for a large enterprise, email marketing is probably one of the most important communication tools that you’re leveraging at the moment.

Email marketing involves the
art of relationship building and the art of sales. If social media is a valuable vehicle to collect prospects, email communication is the channel that allows you to connect and bond with your prospects, leads, and customers.

Regardless of your business type, your ultimate goal is to improve your sales performance and grow your brand’s reputation at the same time.

For that reason, you should take a very careful approach in the relationship-building process. Take a look at these nine rules for creating high-converting emails to boost your email marketing game and improve your conversions.

9 Rules for High-Converting Emails

1. Know your audience.

Knowing your audience is the first and foremost step to take when building email lists. If you don’t know who you’re addressing, you’ll end up creating generic and unremarkable emails. Your messages will get lost among the noise, and you will lose a valuable opportunity to talk to your audience directly and grab their attention.

In order to create more effective emails, thoroughly research your target audience and find out more about their mindset, interests, needs, preferences, problems, perspectives, principles, and so on. Think of “what makes a person” and find out as much as you can about your specific future buyers. That way, your messages will be more targeted and personalized to your ideal audience.

2. Include one clear and concise CTA per email.

There’s no point in sending a person in two different directions in the same email, so one of the simplest rules to follow is to stick to one CTA per email. That doesn’t mean just one link — it means only one strong call to action backed by a hyperlink, e.g. “Check it out here…” or “Read it here…” or “Claim discount.”

3. Segment your list.

Segmentation makes room for personalized messages, which in turn involve a higher degree of relevance and value for the user. So, after building profiles for your target audience, you’ll need to create personalized groups according to what you consider to be relevant categories. You can segment your audience according to age, geographical location, pain points, interests, etc.

4. Create truly attractive subject lines.

Email subject lines act as baits: if the bait is not appealing enough, the fish will never come. Therefore, you should always do your best to create truly attractive email headlines.

Use impactful words, invoke emotions and be clear. Be creative and think outside of the box. Improved opening rates are just one subject line away.

5. Offer free value.

One of the most effective ways to attract your audience and build relationships is to offer free value via your emails. Free value can be provided in many forms, but it is mostly given through amazing information without asking for something in return. Your emails should provide educational, inspirational, motivational, and informative content free of charge.

6. Leverage the basics of psychology.

Psychology is very important in email marketing, and using some of its tricks in your email marketing can improve your conversion rates, such as:

• Color psychology
• Subconscious understanding
• FOMO (fear of missing out)
• Pictures and videos that spark intense emotions

7. Be relevant and concise.

Keep it short, and be relevant and concise. Communicating concepts and solutions in a simple, catchy way means that your message will get through to your readers faster and more easily.

8. Offer exclusive offers and discounts.

Discounts, exclusive offers, and exclusive content are great treats to give your customers through email marketing. If your customers already signaled their interest in your company by subscribing to your newsletter, give them offers and discounts as the next step to further engage them and encourage sales.

9. Test, optimize, and scale.

Test, test, test. An email marketing campaign is complex and involves several factors, which means that A/B testing is essential to figure out what works best with your customers and what results in the most conversions. If you notice any blockages in your campaign, testing will help you determine what could be the issue and allow you to fix it. If you notice positive results, focus on scaling the campaign.

There was a time when gathering data was a hard task. Later on, it was a challenge to integrate data, and then it seemed almost impossible to keep it clean. Nowadays, all these things are not only possible but necessary.

Data is a key factor in every aspect of a business, from sales, marketing, and customer service to product design, finances, and so much more. Processed data becomes information, the most valuable commodity for any company.

This means that in order to make informed, data-driven decisions, you need to have high-quality data to power your business. That’s why maintaining data quality is so important.

Ensuring data quality means that your databases are accurate, secure, and consistent throughout the data lifecycle stages. Clean, high-quality data translates into efficiency, transparency, and consistency throughout a business.

The Intelligent Use of High-Quality Data

Perhaps one of the most common motivations to ensure data quality is personalization. According to research, 85% of organizations globally experienced more timely and personalized customer communications as a result of improving their data quality. At the same time, 75% of organizations believe that inaccurate data is undermining their ability to provide a good customer experience.

Data quality can determine operational efficiency, customer satisfaction, and informed marketing decisions. 52% of organizations maintain high-quality data to increase efficiency and improve cost savings. A company that invests in the maintenance of its database will see direct benefits, such as:

• Lower Costs in Email Marketing: Reducing the number of emails sent to inactive users and invalid email addresses can increase opening rates, deliverability, and decrease costs on email marketing platforms.

• Cross-Selling: When there’s detailed information about a customers’ pain points, purchasing behaviors, and preferences, this data can open doors for sales departments to offer an additional product or service to an existing customer.

• Accountancy Savings: Having up-to-date customer information makes the billing process and credit control more accurate and efficient.

• Personalized Products and Services: Data integrity provides a faithful approach to the customer. If used correctly, data can provide invaluable insights for companies to understand customers, including what they expect from your products and services.

Companies with quality data and advanced analytics capabilities have gained a significant lead over their competitors in the last few years. According to Bain & Company, these companies are twice as likely to be in the top quartile of financial performance in their industries. They also make and execute decisions faster.

How to Maintain a High-Quality Database

Organizations all over the world are increasingly relying on SaaS solutions to manage their data and increase its quality, recognizing that data and analytics will provide a key source of opportunity in the coming years. The most urgent services that these organizations need for their data management are:

• Removing Duplicates: Normally, data comes from multiple sources such as web forms, emails, and marketing leads. Additionally, in certain cases, contacts are being created by different departments or several agents in the same department. These factors increase the possibility of having duplicated contacts, which means that emailing services can become inefficient and generate unnecessary costs. In addition, the information in your CRM or help desk can get confusing or inaccurate.

• Minimizing Human Error: Human error is one of the most common ways to lose information. A bad phone number, a spelling error, or typo can even make you lose a potential customer. You can minimize the chances of human error by automating essential data management tasks.

• Real-time Data Updates: Staying on top of data updates is never easy. Automatically updating data across SaaS tools means that all teams get the latest, most accurate data in their tools without the need for manual updates or imports and exports.

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.