Customer Relations Software

Marketing 
Marketing Activities 
Customer Relations Software

Customer Relations Software

Imagine: a client calls with a query and you can bring up their contact details, notes, history, and a record of their correspondence all in one place. You can also contact that client, and others who have a similar profile, with specific marketing campaigns via email, Facebook, Twitter and other social media sites. You can bring up your calendar and to do lists, and link tasks to clients or groups of clients. You can add forms to your website so that interested people can request a newsletter and be added to your contact database. You may even be able to see the invoices you’ve generated for contacts and their payment status.  

Welcome to Customer Relationship Management (CRM).

As the name suggests, CRM software is used by businesses to manage relationships and interactions with their customers.

It’s not just used by ’big’ businesses. Small practices can also benefit. The right CRM software can cut down on paperwork, simplify your practice and increase efficiency by reducing the amount of time you’d usually spend switching between different programmes to extract information. It can also make contacting groups of clients by email much easier.

Key areas of CRM software 

  1. Contact management – keeping details of all your contacts such as clients and colleagues in one place, including copies of emails, faxes and other correspondence you’ve sent them. You can also keep track of appointments and meetings.
  2. Sales and marketing – tracking your sales and the associated paperwork, using reporting functions to identify marketing opportunities and monitoring how effective your advertising campaigns are.
  3. Account management – seeing all your orders in one place, generating invoices, tracking payments and their related correspondence. Some of the more simple packages do not include this, but it’s usefulness depends on how complex your finances are.

When your client information is consolidated into one place, you will save time and reduce errors (which can arise when you’re using a number of programmes to manage different bits of information). 

Sales and marketing

For therapists who are keen to grow and expand their business, the sales and marketing aspect of CRM software is an excellent and essential feature. CRM software provides you with a complete picture of your existing contacts so you can identify and target individuals with the greatest potential for future sales. Instead of doing random mass mailings, you can specifically select contacts in your target market – for example, sending a newsletter about phobias to all clients who have previously had, or expressed an interest in, that treatment.

Reporting

CRM tools allow you to generate a full range of reports with their automated analytics and reporting systems. This means that you can track the success of your marketing campaigns, generate meaningful reports to help you analyse your results and optimise future business opportunities based on your past experiences. This will save you time and money on redundant marketing campaigns, make others more cost-effective as you won’t be spending money targeting unsuitable clients. 

Social media integration

Many CRM packages now also offer full social media integration, so you can import external contacts (such as people who are your company’s Facebook friends) and use social media to give your company visibility and a strong position in the marketplace. From within the software, you can track things like Facebook and Twitter comments, so if a client asks a question you can respond without delay. You can also post your latest news and special offers in just a couple of clicks of the mouse!

 

What do we use at the Private Practice Hub?

We use InTouch CRM, a simple yet extremely useful and affordable piece of software. It’s ideal for managing our contacts and getting in touch with them via email. 

 

Read our reviews of CRM software

You can read our reviews of key CRM software packages here. We hope you find them useful! You can also download our useful comparison spreadsheet here.