What is Zoho CRM Marketing Automation?

The role of CRM marketing automation has moved from being a luxury item within CRMs to an imperative and is one of the key ways to increase productivity throughout your organization. Thankfully a few of the CRM’s out there designed for nonprofits have made the setup and running of automation far more user-friendly and far more powerful than it has been even in the last few years. With older CRM’s automation was a cumbersome and clunky undertaking for users and it took a lot to get even basic automation running. As such, it was underutilized and typically either not set up, or only used for a few redundant processes. This stood in juxtaposition to most corporate CRM’s whose designers focused heavily on automation and recognized it as the game-changer in efficiency gains that it really is. So now is a great time for your nonprofit to embrace using CRM automation as it will only be growing in relevance in the coming years. Another tangential benefit of automation is that it inspires planning. If you know what automation and workflows to put in place it is because you know how these fit into overall goals and outcomes for your organization, both internal (for example, tracking development team lead conversions) and external (for example, getting a campaign to its goal).

Automation is a functionality worth asking about in some detail if you are exploring a new CRM. Here are a few guiding questions:

  • Is automation easy to set up? This is definitely something you would want to see demonstrated in a demo.
  • Will automation run on social, email, chat, survey responses, and support tickets – in other words, does it apply across the system?
  • Can you visually see the flow of triggered actions? If it isn’t intuitive to you, it can create problems when executed.
  • Does automation include real-time notifications? Will staff be alerted when someone engages on any channel (email, call, chat, survey response, support ticket, social)?
  • Will your CRM suggest macros for recurring actions and workflows the system sees you repeating? Users are busy doing, and sometimes don’t realize there might be a way to automate a set of tasks; smart CRM’s will see these patterns and ask users with a prompt whether they would like to add a macro to automatically run a series of actions.

Automation is an upfront investment in set-up and mapping out of workflows and communication triggers that compliment user’s roles. But the investment is well worth it these days as it is one of the most valuable tools in helping your team keep up with its many communication channels and to free them up to focus on higher level engagements and opportunities at timely periods within a given cycle or workflow. Across your organization, automation is the key to scaling your marketing, fundraising, and other communication efforts so take the time to see what your CRM can do. Power to the user!

Step 1: Strategy

 

Step 2: Setup and Configuration Of Zoho One Products

  • Required Zoho Products
    • Zoho CRM
    • Zoho SalesIQ
  • Suggested Zoho Campaigns
    • Zoho Campaigns
    • Zoho PageSense
    • Zoho Social
    • Zoho Forms

Step 3: Setup and Configuration Of Zoho CRM Automation Tools

Zoho CRM Macro

 

Zoho CRM Workflows

 

Zoho CRM Blueprints

 

 

Webforms

I have often thought I was suffering from magical thinking in expecting that I could just put a custom designed webform on a site and have the information captured there flow seamlessly into my nonprofit CRM software without any coding required to set up the form and without any high maintenance importing. Nonprofit Vertical CRM affirmed that far from magic, this capacity should be the industry standard for nonprofit CRMs. It offers a straightforward and streamlined process to both design and setup webforms and be specific about where information flows into the CRM. So, wait, you don’t have to import a list or manually re-enter information captured on your website or a third party app? Yep, you’re awake. You can have information from fields on the form map directly back to the module of your choice creating, for example, a new lead or new volunteer in the system automatically. You can even assign and notify the owner of the new record. Just in case you weren’t feeling fancy enough, you can also set up an auto-response email template to acknowledge the person filling out the form, making a positive first touch to your constituent instantly and effortlessly. Did I mention you can use web forms with Google Sites and other third-party sites? You bet you can!

Nonprofit Vertical also allows you to customize the look of your form with an intuitive formatting menu, making the form itself stand alone in the design department and yet also be able to blend with any existing webpage design you may already have in place. The familiar drag and drop functionality used to customize modules and fields shows up again nicely here as well, meaning that designing your webform can take as little as a few minutes. You can even upload files to the form and add captcha. Once the design is done, simply point it to the hosted page URL and you are on your way to realizing the efficiency gains that webform automation workflows bring.

Step 5: Segmentation

The best person to answer the question, ‘How do I find the right people to target?’, should be you. These questions are answered by looking at who interacts with your organization and why; from there you can build targeted campaigns to make sure you are getting the right information to the right people.

It’s often easier to define segmentation when each individual is also an end user, but what about when your base is made of businesses and organizations? Here are five basic segmentation strategies to help you use your Raiser’s Edge data for more effective campaigns targeted to businesses and organizations – so make sure your are collecting this data!:

Industry: If your donors/customers/end users come from multiple industries a great strategy to make sure communications are as relevant as possible is to tailor your information so that it’s specific to their industry.
Job Title: Tailor information to specific roles or job fields within your base to make sure that you are providing information that is relevant to the requirements of their role.
Geography: though information may be relevant across all geographies, segmenting by location allows for you to evaluate the effectiveness of response rates in different regions. Often the greatest tool to grow a base is through word-of-mouth, often leading to clusters of contacts within specific regions. By tracking this data you can report on where you are doing well and where you can improve.
Donation/Purchase/Subscription Value and History: How much is that contact worth to your nonprofit, what are they using, what have they purchased, how are they interacting with you? By tracking this information you can make sure offers are tailored to what end users found valuable from your nonprofit. This is especially important if you offer a range of services/products. If they are using one service, would another related service be beneficial?
Last Contact Date: When were you last in touch? No one likes to be forgotten. It’s important to be able to quickly identify whom from your base is being neglected and then get in touch. Everyone is busy and it’s easy to forget to keep in touch, don’t let your base forget you, get in contact and keep them top of mind.
Need help getting your database ready so you can get in touch with your customer base?

 

Segmentation 2

Market segmentation is an important way to ensure your nonprofit is keeping it’s messaging relevant to your donors by considering which subgroups there may be within your donor pool, including those who are still just prospects. For example, most donors choose to support a nonprofit because its mission reflects a set of values or interests that have a personal resonance for them. So it’s important that you respond to these first-time donors or members with messaging that focuses on welcoming them to your organization and conveying aspects of your programming that allows them to develop trust that they have matched with an organization that recognizes their values and interests. Alternatively, if you are looking at a group of long and loyal donors in whom this loyalty has already been established you might be more interested in delivering a message that reflects the difference their contributions have made through the years such as an email campaign asking for their foundational gifts to kick off a capital campaign or endowment.

Or you may want to consider segmentation based on your donors’ different levels of income and giving history. You might tailor major gift asks to those you know have a history of giving large gifts or at least the means to. On the other hand for donors who might make regular, but small donations, your ask might be to continue as a recurring donor but to increase the donation amount by $10 each time. Or perhaps you have a group of people who have come to all of your events but are not regular donors, you might target this group with an ask focused on inviting them to help procure sponsorships for an upcoming event.

The more targeted and relevant your group and message the more likely you are to get a better ROI. If your message is too broad you risk your donors feeling like they were not personally reflected as individuals with a particular relationship and interest in your organization, and they might not engage with your outreach. If on the other hand your groups are targeted with messages relevant to particular fundraising history, interests or values, you realize a higher rate of return and eliminate that tendency toward donor fatigue which blanket, summary communications can elicit.

Here are some common market segments:

  • First-time donors
  • Recurring donors
  • Small, medium and large donors
  • Lapsed Donors
  • Donors who prefer to support larger initiatives such as capital campaigns
  • Donors who prefer to give in direct support of program activities
  • Donors who have particular interests i.e. programs, technology, capital campaigns, events
  • Members who are not yet donors
  • Donors that are within a particular constituency such as board members, volunteers or committee members
  • Donors who are in particular phases of life
  • Donors in a particular region or location

Market segmentation is an important consideration in choosing and setting up your CRM in part because at the very least you will need to be able to track and isolate the subset of data needed to identify a group that should receive a particular message. To that end most CRMs allow you to track at least constituencies and attributes so all offer some support for market segments. The question is to what level?

Does your CRM have robust enough tracking and ease of search that you can quickly and clearly pull together a segmented email list and then deliver that email, social or direct mail campaign instantly and within the same system? Does it offer immediate analysis of how that campaign is being received? Can it generate automated email follow-ups and acknowledgments referencing the outbound campaign?

Nonprofit Vertical CRM takes market segmenting to the next level because of the ease and depth with which you can 1) optimally track constituents and filter them into groups based on that tracking 2) easily generate an email campaign with a particular constituent group and receive instant feedback on how that marketing effort is being received and 3) send scheduled reporting with real-time updates and analysis of each campaign to stakeholders within your team or larger organization, such as board members.

Bottom line? Market segmentation gains exponential value when it is aligned with a system that can execute campaigns with ease of use, efficiency, and automated tools. Can your CRM do that?

 

 

Step 6: Build a Sustainable Process

Consistent and timely communication with donors, prospects and other constituent groups is a requirement to keep them engaged with your nonprofit organization.  As a successful development officer know that if you’re spending too much time at your desk following up and truly stewarding donors this can be a time-consuming process.

In most cases, this leaves a nonprofit professional with two options:

  1. Spend time writing emails and handwritten letters at your desk for hours a day. This means going to the CRM and looking up the prospects name and contact information and handcrafting a simple “thank you for coffee” email by hand.  If you’re new to the organization you don’t know what to include and what others have used before (you’re left to the wolves).
  2. You skip this step and continue working with new donors hoping to close the deal upon that initial meeting. And when you look back and see that you have met with dozens of prospects and generated a number of opportunities to cultivate, you realize it’s been so long since you spoke with them you can’t remember what you spoke about or if you thanked them for the meeting.

In this situation, you need a system that can automate some of these processes or at least make them faster.

In Nonprofit Vertical Source CRM constituent follow up is simple, quick and accurate.  As you can see in the images below you can develop organization-wide or individual nonprofit professional templates that can be used to easily send personalized communications out to donors.

These templates merge in the unique information of the constituent, as well as the meeting information should you choose.  Once the appropriate template has been selected you are then allowed to enter the unique text to personalize the templated letter and move on with your day.

BTW, this functionality is also available to be used directly out of the mobile app as well!

If you’re looking to get hours or days back on your schedule, this may be the solution you’re looking for.