Part 3: Sugar Market

This post is all about Sugar Market, a Marketing Automation platform that allows its users to take interactions with prospects and their customers to a whole new level. Focusing on what is important to marketers – increased engagement from quality leads using smarter and more precise campaigns, fewer “blanket posts” and instead replacing with highly targeted, thoughtful, and creative content to help drive revenue. 

Sugar Market is an excellent multi-channel marketing solution that really comes to life when it is integrated with SugarCRM, particularly Sugar Sell. This integration creates real-time connections between new and existing records, keeping track of the entire customer lifecycle. 

For the marketing team, they can now leverage the data inside the CRM to create highly targeted ‘lists’ or ‘segments’ of Contacts to market to. For the sales team working in CRM, they now have visibility of interactions with email campaigns, website activity and events to clearly understand intent and behaviour scoring.

What impressed me?

There were a lot of features inside Sugar Market that as a previous Marketing Manager, impressed me. I’m going to begin with the interactive dashboards – a common feature among Sugar’s products but surprisingly not something that is found on most marketing tools. Sugar’s dashboard customisation through its “dashlets” is second-to-none, a user can truly be empowered with the information they may want to analyze in real-time through either “out-of-the-box” information Sugar has pre-calculated or through the detailed reporting system found in every Sugar product. 

Dashboards or homepages that I have seen in the past have offered a somewhat useful but static dashboard, already predicting what the user would like to see first. Not all companies will be focusing their marketing efforts towards the same information and within an active marketing team, strategies will often change and attention will divert to other campaigns which is why Sugar’s presentation-ready dashboard is the perfect solution for a more intuitive visualisation of your data story. 

Secondly, I was impressed with one of the larger features within this platform – Nurture Campaigns. Lead nurturing and automation is an extremely efficient and productive way to interact with potential customers to any marketer and Sugar has clearly recognised this. Their nurture campaigns cover all the basics of tailored marketing in a straight-forward way however, what makes their campaigns superior from competitors? The information gathered on each record is not then isolated in that one system; through the CRM integration, the entire team will have access to each customer journey and by providing actionable lead intelligence particularly to your sales team, you can effectively shorten the sales cycle and win more deals. 

How will this help our new customers?

Sugar Market not only provides a curated toolset to be able to offer custom campaigns to future prospects but recognises a need to be flexible and tailored to the individual marketing user as well. New customers will certainly benefit from its advanced multi-channel marketing solutions including web monitoring, social media management, reporting, SEO audit, campaign creation and lead capture capabilities but I think we know who the real winner is here: CRM integration. 

New customers will want to see which strategies are working and which ones are not and with CRM integration, this process can be done quickly so they know where their resources are best placed in return for maximum return on investment for every penny spent. The implementation of these highly targeted campaigns will reach out to prospects and customers at the optimum time to help convert these superior customer experiences into lifelong relationships. 

I hope you’ll enjoy these insights from my onboarding at Sugabyte. Here are the links to the successive posts in this series which will uncover my thoughts on Sugar Serve, Customer Journey Plugin, Sugar Discover and more:

• Sugar Sell
• Sugar Serve
• SugarCRM SugarLive (Coming Next!)
• Sugar Discover (coming soon)
• Sugar Connect (coming soon)
• Sugar Mobile (coming soon)
• Customer Journey Plugin for Sugar (coming soon)
• Sugar Integrate (coming soon)
• Hint! (coming soon)
• LinkedIn Sales Navigator Plugin (coming soon)

The post New To Sugar Series – Sugar Market appeared first on Sugabyte.

The Campaigns module in SugarCRM was first released 9 years ago and has served its purpose as a tool to send mass email campaigns directly from the CRM. But for a while, it’s been shadowed by the immense power and ease-of-use of purpose-built Marketing Automation tools on the market.

SugarCRM has leapfrogged ahead of most of the competition by acquiring Salesfusion in 2019. Many months of development has rendered an industry leader in Marketing Automation, and now we see it in its current form: Sugar Market.

Everything in One Location

As an All-in-one Marketing Automation solution, developed for B2B Marketing. Sugar Market provides all the functionality B2B marketers require to execute, manage and report on the full spectrum of Marketing Activity. This means managing everything in one central location from Contact Forms to Nurture Campaigns, Evens and Landing Pages.

Switching between a stack of different tools with different interfaces and settings can quickly become complicated to manage. Managing various tools and strategies within one platform gives Marketers more time to focus on crafting killer campaigns!

• Contact Forms
• Landing Pages
• Event Management (Physical & Web Events)
• Social Media Post Management
• Advanced Analytics
• Nurture & Drip Campaigns

What Impact will Implementing Sugar Market have on our Organisation?

Managing everything in one tool makes it easier than ever to leverage advanced Marketing Automation features such as Web Tracking, Event Management, seamless Integration between Marketing and Sales while providing the ability to view the complete lead journey.

Below we have listed some of the typical benefits Sugar users see when implementing Sugar Market, particularly when transitioning from sending Mass Emails in the Campaigns Module.

Native Integration with SugarCRM

Sugar Markets deep integration with SugarCRM gives both sales reps and marketers access to detailed contact information at the touch of a button. Reps are provided with an Iframe of Marketing related lead information inside the CRM such as Lead Scores, Web Tracking History and more. Marketers are provided with a stream of information from the CRM such as when a contact changes Job Title or when an Opportunity is closed-won.

Synchronising this data between Sales and Marketing promotes collaboration and empowers reps to make more informed decisions about which deals and leads they should be spending the most time on and order of priority. While also helping marketers deliver more qualified and valuable leads to sales reps.

Give CRM Users Access to Branded Emails

Sending basic emails with the Campaigns Module can be done, but is not ideal for modern organisations who require quick access to emails, lists and campaigns. Sugar Market allows you to create branded email templates that reps can access in the CRM. This means CRM Users can easily send marketing-related emails to contacts in line with your company messaging, style and branding.

During configuration, we configure your sender and reply to emails allowing marketers to design your templates while ensuring they are delivered by the specific CRM Users email address. 

Track Leads and Contacts

With Sugar Market, you can track leads as they navigate through your landing pages and campaigns for a better understanding of their interests and intent. Anonymous leads are tracked by their IP address. This means you have a full overview of your leads footsteps prior to them providing you with their information.

As soon as a Lead gives you an email you can report on a historical perspective of their activity and understand what led them to get in contact with you in the first place.

If you are not tracking Leads you are missing out on a journey of information relating to your leads interests. By tracking leads from their first point of contact to closed-won opportunity, you’ll have a better understanding of your campaign performance and sales/marketing process in general.

Why have Sales received this Lead?

One of the most common questions sales reps ask is “Why have I received this Lead?”. Delivering this information to reps at scale can quickly become time-consuming and challenging for Marketers. Lead scoring with Sugar Market allows you to create detailed Scoring Profiles based on the value of a lead, for example, a lead that has clicked on a link in an email or visited a landing page can be automatically assigned a score accordingly showing they have performed a particular action of value.

This gives reps a full overview of why a Lead is considered qualified by Marketing – allowing reps to make more informed decisions. While strengthening the relationship between Marketing and Sales by providing a constant stream of information in real-time between the two functions.

Concluding Thoughts

Many of our customers are seeing the value in Sugar Market and have decided to make the switch from sending mass emails using the Campaigns Module to leveraging a fully-fledged Marketing Automation solution.

There are tonnes of features your organisation could be leveraging and vital information both Sales and Marketing teams could have access to making their jobs easier and helping them reach targets quicker.

For a closer look at Sugar Market click the link below to schedule a free Demo!

Book a Sugar Market Demo

The post Transitioning from Sugar’s Campaigns Module to Sugar Market: Making the Switch appeared first on Sugabyte.

I have been very impressed with Sugar Market and the long list of features provided by the solution. In this post I have compiled 5 features that caught my attention and impressed me most as a marketer during my Sugar Market advanced on-boarding training.

If you are considering Marketing Automation for your organisation and are looking for a powerful feature-full solution like Sugar Market, let’s dive in to some of the special features on offer!

Who is this post for?

• SugarCRM Users who have not yet implemented a Marketing Automation solution and strategy
• Organisations keen to implement an effective Marketing Automation Solution
• Organisations that require a more robust feature-full Marketing Automation solution (As opposed to some of the smaller solutions on the market, ie – Mail Chimp)

Dynamic Lists

What are Dynamic Lists?

Traditional email lists are what are known as ‘static lists’. Static Lists are lists of contact information that do not change and stay the same i.e. ‘A list of contacts/leads by Geographic Location, State, Industry, Job Title etc’.

Any amendments to static lists such as adding or removing contacts needs to be carried out manually.

Dynamic Lists in Sugar Market are different – Dynamic Lists are updated and amended in the background automatically as changes in your records are identified within Sugar Market or your external CRM.

Sugar Market provides Dynamic lists by continuously querying the database for changes and updating your lists accordingly.

How can Dynamic Lists help my organisation?

Dynamic Lists are a very effective feature of Advanced Marketing Automation Software like Sugar Market.

Dynamic Lists help do away with manual processes marketers face in querying, segmenting and organising lists. In turn, allowing Marketers to focus their time on strategising and optimising campaigns for best results – instead of pain staking manual data cleansing.

Sugar Market users can create a Dynamic List contacts in the database with the Job Title – ‘Marketing Manager’. This will segment all of your contacts into the list accordingly. The great thing with Dynamic lists is if any of your current contact records change to meet the criteria or future contacts meet the list criteria – those contacts will automatically be added to your Dynamic List and entered into any associated Automations.

Overall, Dynamic Lists make it simple for marketers to provide a more personalised customer experience and tailor campaigns specific to contacts meeting a specific criteria.

Benefits of Dynamic Lists

• •  Segment contacts easily and automatically
  •  Enter contacts into automations on submission
  •  Spend less time manually updating lists
  • Automatically query your data in the background
  • Spend less time manually sorting data
  • Gain better insights into your customers
  • Easily amend campaigns based on a contacts meeting a specific criteria

Effective A/B Testing

What is A/B Testing?

Effectively, ‘A/B Testing’ or ‘Split Testing’ is measuring the results of variables between ‘Campaign A’ and ‘Campaign B’ – with a view to optimising your campaign for best results.

Generally, a small pool of data is used to test variables and the winning result is identified and used for your overall campaign.

Examples of A/B Testing Variables

• • Email Subject Line
  • Sender Information
  • Email Content
  • Campaign Layouts
  • Images and Video Content
  • Calls to Action
  • Contact Form Fields

How can A/B Testing help my organisation?

The great thing about A/B Testing in Sugar Market, is the whole process is made super simple to carry out – resulting in easily optimisable campaigns, while also providing an intuitive, easy to navigate user experience.

Sugar Market uses elements such as a simple sliding toggle to set the parameters of your A/B tests and decide on the percentage split between variables in your test.

To make the whole process even simpler and more automated, when the best result is identified, Sugar Market users can trigger an automation to automatically send out the winning campaign to your target list!

Benefits of effective A/B Testing

• Test campaign effectiveness
• Better understanding what is influencing your CTR’s and Open Rates.
• Understand what works best
• Automate according to best results
• Use real-data to design and structure your campaigns

Advanced Lead Scoring 

What is Lead Scoring?

Lead scoring is a very effective way for marketers to segment and gain better insights into leads/contacts. Lead scoring uses a point system to profile contacts based on the way they interact with your website or marketing touch points and more. For example, a contact who clicks more links in an email campaign will be assigned a higher score than a contact that fails to open the email all-together – giving marketers far better insights into more qualified leads.

How can Lead Scoring help my organisation?

Not only does lead scoring with Sugar Market give marketers a better understanding of contact profiles. Lead scoring also promotes collaboration between Sales and Marketing departments.

For example, if a contact meets a certain point level in your Sales CRM, Sugar Market Users receive this information and have better prompts to follow up with appropriate communications – i.e. cross-selling/up-selling initiatives.

One thing I find impressive about Lead Scoring in Sugar Market – is that users are prompted to have an in-depth understanding of their lead scoring strategy resulting in the most effective scoring profile possible.

Sugar Market guides you through different parameters and allows you to use a range of contact and account fields in the lead as you build out your Lead Scoring Profiles. It is far less effective to create a basic lead scoring strategy without much thought or strategising behind it – 10 points to Sugar!

Another impressive feature of lead scoring in Sugar Market is the ability to generate an ‘average’ Account score. Sugar Market uses an advanced algorithm in the background, made up of a combination of contact scores related to an account – in order to result in an accurate ‘average’ account score.

To make this even more effective, users can display a list of ‘Flagged’ key accounts along with their account score as a dashlet on the Sugar Market global dashboard for an easy overview of Key Accounts!

Benefits of an effective Lead Scoring Profile

• • Profile contacts as they move through your funnel
  • Score any lead/contact field ie. ‘Number of employees, Industry’
  • Easily identify target prospects
  • Convey contact information easier, faster and in a more strategised way
  • Create a more personalised experience for customers
  • Easily trigger automations and funnels based on contact score
  • Strengthen collaboration between Sales & Marketing
  • Easily identify changes in interest/intent
  • Create ‘average’ account scores based on Account Contact profiles

Outstanding Web Tracking Capabilities!

What is Web Tracking?

Web Tracking is the process of tracking contacts/leads as they navigate through your website, campaigns and landing pages. With Sugar Market you can setup automations to alert users and tag contacts according to their interaction with your various landing pages.

For example, if a contact visits your website and spends time looking through your services, you can prompt your sales staff to follow up with more information on the services they have been looking into. This gives far better insights into your contact/lead interests and what they spend the majority of their time looking at on your website – resulting in a stronger ability to close deals and foresee your contacts/leads requirements.

With Web Tracking in Sugar Market. If a lead or contact shows interest in a particular service on your website, they can be entered into an automated drip funnel relating to their interest automatically. This saves marketers valuable time by allowing leads to determine the marketing literature they receive based on their personal interactions with your organisation.

What Makes Web Tracking with Sugar Market Different?

There are many ways Marketers can leverage Web Tracking information. Overall, effective Web Tracking can be used to assist with segmenting leads/contacts and gaging a far better understanding of how your contacts/leads interact with your various touch points. With Sugar Market the capabilities are far stronger!

One question that has popped up repeatedly during recent Sugar Market client demos is: “Can we track web visitors by their unique IP address?” – With Sugar Market you can!

This means, if a lead visits your website and fails to fill out any of their personal information ie, name & email address – you can still use their IP address to track their interactions and alert relevant staff in real time with Sugar Market.

This is especially useful for organisations who need to identify web visitors by a specific geographic location identifiable by their unique IP address.

Yes, we said it. With Sugar Market you can track visitors by unique IP address and setup user alerts accordingly!

Benefits of Web Visitor Tracking

• • Segment Customer by Interaction
  • Better Understand Your Leads & Contacts
  • Have a Better Overview of Lead/Contact Interest
  • Track Web Visitors by IP Address
  • Track Web Visitors by Web Pages Visited
  • Better Insights into The Customer Journey

Powerful, easy to navigate UI

Last but not least, a vital component of any valuable Marketing Automation software is a powerful, easy to navigate User Interface.

Sugar Market offers a familiar feeling UI that guides you through each high level process and advanced feature – making it easier than ever to execute effective marketing campaigns and automations.

Smaller less feature-full email marketing solutions like Mail Chimp do a great job of simplifying the digital marketing process and are extremely easy to use, however – users are unable to leverage the advanced feature set and high-level techniques found in software like Sugar Market.

How can an easy to navigate UI help my organisation?

Sugar Market combines both, a powerful feature-set with advanced Marketing Automation features such as Dynamic Lists, highly effective lead scoring and advanced A/B Testing – while also providing the full list of core Marketing Automation features such as Page Builders, Contact Forms and Email alerts.

While at the same time – providing a smooth, easy to follow user interface that makes Sugar Markets robust back end less intimidating than some of the other more complicated Marketing Automation solutions on the market today!

For marketers who have experience with smaller marketing solutions like MailChimp – getting to grips with the advanced features Sugar Market provides will be no problem at all!

Benefits of Effective User Interface

• Allow marketers to focus on strategy and results
• Easily design campaigns and Automations
• Drag & Drop page builder for landing pages, email templates and contact forms
• No compromise on advanced features
• Easy to adopt
• Familiar feeling interface

To wrap it up!

In this post we have only touched the surface and are in no way outlining the full depth of Sugar Market and the full set of features the solution provides.

We hope this has given you some useful ideas on Marketing Automation strategies that your organisation can leverage as well as a better understanding of the power of Sugar Market as an end-to-end Marketing Automation Solution.

If you have any questions regarding the capabilities of Sugar Market that we have not outlined in this post please reach out and we would be more than happy to arrange a one-to-one bespoke demonstration for you personally.

If you want to get ahead of your competition in this digital climate an effective Marketing Automation Solution like Sugar Market is absolutely vital!

The post 5 Impressive Features Of Sugar Market – (SugarCRM’s All-in-one Marketing Automation Software) appeared first on Sugabyte.

In our Christmas 2019 post, we mentioned that we were working on launching our new and improved www.sugabyte.com in January 2020. We are excited to announce we have now gone live!

Customers can expect an easier to navigate website, better information, more valuable content/resources, new solution offerings (All to be revealed) and a better insight into how the Sugabyte team deliver our expert SugarCRM services and solutions.

Improvements

• Easier Navigation
• Better Information
• Newly categorised blog
• More resources, ie ebooks, infographics etc
• More valuable content, more posts, new categories ie, sales, marketing, services based content
• More product offerings
• Get to know some of our team

Understand New Sugar Products

For customers currently using Sugar Pro and Sugar Enterprise or those who are new to Sugar all-together, we have made it easier than ever to schedule a free demo or consultation call regarding any of Sugar’s new cloud based products – Namely, Sugar Market, Sugar Sell & Sugar Serve.

Live demo showings are the most effective way of discovering the feature sets and functionality of Sugar products. During these scheduled demonstrations we focus on your specific pain points and how these can be resolved and improved upon using our solutions.

• Schedule demonstrations easily
• Schedule free consultation calls easily
• Schedule demonstrations around your availability
• Direct view of our availability for demonstrations and consultation calls

More Valuable SugarCRM Content

We keep our customers up to date with all things SugarCRM related.

Our customers benefit from regular SugarCRM News, Software Updates, How-to Guides and more – Customers subscribed to our monthly newsletter receive monthly emails compiled with valuable content and resources.

With the launch of our new website we are taking this a step further – focusing on delivering even more valuable content and resources on our website and blog.

You will find content Specific to SugarCRM’s product catalogue as well as Business Function specific content – ie, Sales related, Marketing related and Service/Support related content and resources – with a view to help customers across all functions get the most out of Sugar.

• More SugarCRM Resources – Sugar Market, Sugar Sell & Sugar Serve Ebooks, Infographics & Downloads
• More General Resources –  General Business, Marketing Automation & Service Based Resources & Downloads
• More SugarCRM How-to-guides & Tutorials

Newly Categorised Blog

We have made it easier than ever to navigate and find information through our newly categorised blog. Browse our SugarCRM News Category for all things Sugar Related or our new Resources category for free downloads, Ebooks and easier-to-read Infographic product overviews.

• SugarCRM News – SugarCRM Software Updates
• SugarCRM – Sugar Market, Sugar Sell & Sugar Serve
• SugarCRM How-to Guides – SugarCRM BPM Workflow, SugarCRM Add-on Plugin Reviews
• Resources – General Resources, Sugar Market, Sugar Sell & Sugar Serve Resources
• Business Function Specific – Marketing Automation, Sales CRM, Service & Support
• Get to know SugarCRM – A new category providing introductory information around Sugar’s product catalogue. 

What to Expect Moving Forward?

We are still ‘plugging the holes’ on our new website.

Myself, James and the rest of the Sugabyte team are working to develop and update our website over the coming weeks – customers can expect to see continuous improvements and updates during this time.

If you experience any technical issues accessing information or scheduling product demonstrations on our new website – please reach out directly, we will be more than happy to assist you.

Please see our contact email address below.

contact@sugabyte.com

Video Content

To make it even easier for our SugarCRM customers to digest information – we have been developing our in-house video content initiative.

Customers will benefit from regular video how-to guides, tutorials and product explanations on Sugar. Making for easier on-the-go updates/information and a more hands-on approach to getting to know new products.

Sometimes it can be long-winded reading through blog posts – sifting through information. We want to make it as easy as possible for customers to keep up to date with all things Sugar related – our video content will make this possible.

More information on our video content coming soon!

• How-to video’s
• SugarCRM Video Tutorials
• SugarCRM Product Insights
• SugarCRM Workflow Videos
• Sales, Marketing & Service related video content

To Conclude

We hope you find it easier to navigate our website and benefit from the valuable content we release regularly. If you have any suggestions regarding content or resources you think our SugarCRM customers would benefit from – please reach out and let us know. We welcome your recommendations and will do all we can to provide even more beneficial resources to our SugarCRM customers.

We want to thank our customers who have been kind enough to provide us with their genuine thoughts and feedback on the service they receive from us.

As a result, with your consent, we have published your comments throughout our new website – to give future customers an idea of the level of service they can expect working with us on their CRM and Marketing Automation projects.

If you did submit a comments, keep an eye out on www.sugabyte.com where your comment may have been featured!

Contact Us

The post Sugabyte Launch New Website – Free Resources, More Valuable Content & Easier Navigation appeared first on Sugabyte.

Visitor/Web Tracking

• Track your customers footsteps while they browse your website or campaigns
• Respond in real time to customer ‘clicks’ and other behaviours
• Automatically tag customers based on their interests
• Enter customers into high-level automations based on their interactions with your website/campaigns
• Understand customer intent before your customers are aware themselves
• Do away with irritating campaigns irrelevant to your customers interests
• Better understand your customers journey

Drip-feed content

Gaining valuable insights into how your customers interact with your website/marketing campaigns leads us on to the next valuable feature of Marketing Automation – the ability to drip feed personalised content to your customers based on their interactions and interests.

For example, a customer that visits or click on links/content regarding ‘Bananas’ can be entered into an automation accordingly. This automation can be configured to tag the customer with ‘Interested in Bananas’ and drip feed marketing campaigns related to ‘Bananas’ with specific content and calls to action regarding ‘Bananas.’

Empower Staff

Marketing Automation promotes stronger cross-department collaboration. Sugar Market users leverage Sugar Sell’s CRM Sync dashboard. A dashboard design to synchronise customer data between Marketing and Sales. This level of collaboration makes for far better insights into your customers and empowers your staff with better information on which leads and customers to focus more attention on and when.

• Collaborate across departments
• Empower Sales/Marketers with valuable customer/lead insights
• Reduce time-spent on manual tasks
• Prioritise leads based on likelihood to convert

The post If You Are Considering Marketing Automation – You Are Thinking Right! appeared first on Sugabyte.

With so many new features and products being introduced to Sugars portfolio and as with any traditionally on-premise solution rolling out a new cloud infrastructure, things can get confusing. In this post we give you a brief update overview, without losing you in the technical details.

For a more detailed post on the full features of ‘The New Sugar’ check out the link below which includes a Q and A’s section. We have also sprinkled links throughout this post for readers who wish to delve deeper into each topic.

The New Sugar – Q&A

SugarCRM Cloud Licensing Options

Fundamentally, SugarCRM’s recent rebrand comes in the form of three main cloud based products. Sugar Market (Sugars all in one marketing automation product), Sugar Sell (Sugars new flagship CRM element) and Sugar Serve (Sugars purpose built customer service product).

Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve are effectively different flavours of the same core CRM, both built on the same platform as Sugar Enterprise. Both licensing options include the Sugar CRM Developer Tools, Reporting and Dashboard functionality and of course the ability to record Tasks, Activities, Calls, Meetings etc. One difference between the two licensing options is that Sugar Serve replaces Sugar Sells Opportunities module with advanced ticket management features and Sugars powerful knowledge-based Self Service Portal.

Sugars new product structure allows customers to make more informed licensing decisions based on which elements best suit the different departments that make up their business. Choosing Sugar Serve licenses for your service/support users means they will benefit from specific functionality designed to make their job quicker and easier while also retaining the core CRM elements of Sugar.

Each element offers a range of specific functionality and can be interlinked depending on your requirements. We are not going to delve into too much detail about the individual product features in this post but keep your eyes peeled for more detailed information on Market, Sell and Serve as we reveal all over the coming weeks!

All three of Sugars new products are cloud based solutions and not available for on-site deployment. Users that opt for Sugars cloud offering leverage Sugars partnership with (AWS) Amazon Web Services, one of the most secure and powerful hosting environments in the world.

Benefits of Amazon Web Services (AWS)

• Global leader
• Flexibility
• Security
• Scaleability
• Ease of integration
• Continuous cloud innovation

A quick note on updates…

Sugars continuous cloud innovation means Market, Sell and Serve users can expect  regular updates. Sugar Market operates on a continuous update cycle, with releases approximately every two weeks whereas Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve operate on a quarterly release cycle (every three months).

More products?

To further increase the functionality of Sell, Market and Serve, Sugar have begun to roll out a number of tools to boost productivity, reporting and connectivity capabilities across the platform. These offerings come in the form of no touch information management, business intelligence, machine learning, intelligent insights, advanced analytics and more. These additional tools leverage innovative features from some of Sugars recent product acquisitions giving Sugar the competitive advantage against other CRM providers.

Two recent additions are Sugar Connect and Sugar Discover which you can read more about in our post below.

Sugar Connect & Sugar Discover

The end of on-premise?

Existing customers on Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise will have no forced upgrades to Sell and Serve and Sugar have made it very clear that they have no plans to bring Sugar Professional or Sugar Enterprise to End of Life, Sugar will continue to support these products and existing customers are still able to purchase additional licenses. The only change is that for new customers, Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise are available only as on-premise solutions moving forward.

Exciting things to come…

We cannot reveal too much, but Sugar have emphasised their plans to introduce a range of new features to both their on-premise and on-demand solutions, existing Sugar Professional and Sugar Enterprise users will continue to receive bug fixes and annual version updates with Version 10.0 being the next in line due for release in Spring 2020 which will include a multitude of feature enhancements over Version 9.0.

Fur any further information on SugarCRM get in touch!

We’re always happy to help…

The post SugarCRM’s New Cloud Products: In Layman’s Terms… appeared first on Sugabyte.

What is Marketing Automation?

Marketing Automation evolved from traditional email marketing techniques and focuses on using software to automate manual marketing processes (email campaigns, social media posts, ad management and more).

Automating gives marketers the power to react and respond to real-time lead/contact data based on triggers and/or conditions.

An example of this is, if a prospect clicks a link in an email campaign to read more about ‘red apples‘. Sugar Market can be configured to automatically follow-up with a string of nurturing emails relating to ‘Red Apples‘ – (read more in the lead-scoring section below).

Essentially, Marketing automation allows users to provide a more personalised customer experience resulting in more leads, better engagement, better campaign tracking and an increase in customer retention.

“Marketers who implement marketing automation increase their sales-pipeline contribution by 10%” – Forrester Research – Lead-to-Revenue Management

How can Marketing Automation help my organisation?

• Drip feed content based on conditions or triggers
• Retain and extend relationships with current customers through up-selling, cross-selling and automated content
• Less staff overheads
• Increase and accelerate sales process
• Improve marketing ROI

Sugar Market

Sugar Market offers the same ease of use, intuitive user interface and drag and drop design elements as some of the less feature-full marketing automation tools such as MailChimp and Unbounce. While also providing more advanced features like CRM integration, advanced reporting, Google Ads integration and nurture building functionality – found in more costly, adoption intensive software, such as Oracle and IBM.

Ease of Use & Scalability

Sugar Market boasts an intuitive user interface making it quicker and simpler than ever to migrate data, map fields and setup automations.

The campaign design tool is user friendly with an easy to follow setup path. Sugar Market provides a range of contact form and email templates with mobile responsive design and preview functionality ensuring your campaigns are optimised for both desktop and mobile.

Why is this important?

• User friendly
• Scale with your business
• Intuitive campaign builder means better campaigns delivered quicker
• Pre-loaded email and contact form templates

Create Customers For Life

It is far more cost effective to hold, up-sell and cross-sell to an existing customer than it is to acquire new ones. Where traditional email marketing techniques focus on customer acquisition, marketing automation offers far better customer retention capability. Personalised marketing communications strengthen the overall customer experience, Sugar Market focuses on creating customers for life, anticipating and fulfilling needs before your customers realise them.

Why is this important?

• Increase customer retention rates
• Understand customers need before they do
• Increase up-sell and cross sell rates
• Increase customer loyalty
• Increase customer recommendations

Lead Scoring

Lead scoring allows users to set scores based on how prospects interact with campaigns. For example, a point can be added to a contacts lead score every time they open an email and 5 points added for every time they click a link in an email. Once a contact reaches a specific score a trigger can be added to enter that contact into an automation based on their interaction and likelihood to convert.

Lead scoring allows marketers to better understand which leads are more likely to convert – at scale. In turn, strengthening collaboration between sales and marketing by ensuring sales reps prioritise the highest scoring/most likely prospects to convert.

Feature Overview

• Score leads at scale
• Score leads based on likelihood to convert
• Better understand your prospects/customers
• Strengthen collaboration between departments

CRM Synchronisation

Sugar Markets CRM Synchronisation dashboard gives users leveraging Sugar Market and Sugar Sell the ability to capture information at critical points in the customer journey, while giving marketers the necessary tools to identify the most qualified prospects to target their marketing efforts towards.

Feature overview

• Align marketing and sales effortlessly
• In-depth user dashboard
• Share lead information between teams
• Track potential customer errors or issues
• Complete and current prospect/lead data

Google Ads Integration

Sugar Market integrates with Google Ads, this allows marketers to quickly create and launch Google Ad campaigns without leaving the Sugar Market platform. This aids in eliminating the need for 3rd party marketing agencies and offers an intuitive familiar Google Ad building experience while ensuring everything is stored in one central location.

Feature Overview

• Leverage machine learning for automated campaign optimisation and bidding
• Integrate with Google Page Builder for insights into click and conversion performance
• Eliminate the need for in-house expertise or third party agencies

Exclusive to SugarCRM users?

Sugar Market is an advanced, stand alone cloud based marketing automation solution. Sugar Market provides further advantage through integration with CRM and is not exclusively available to SugarCRM users. Sugar Market offers native integration to seven leading CRM’s with real-time syncing; Sugar Sell, Professional and Enterprise, Sage CRM, InforCRM, Microsoft Dynamics, Netsuite, Bullhorn and Salesforce. 

Sugar Market users leverage Sugars Amazon Web Service (AWS) partnership. The cloud partnership between SugarCRM and Amazon aid in the swift delivery of new functions, leveraging a market leader in cloud hosting, providing users a secure, scalable solution aligning security and performance seamlessly.

Key Points:

• All features included/no restrictions
• Embedded reporting module
• Intuitive user interface
• Unlimited custom fields for advanced segmentation
• Native integration to seven leading CRM’s with real-time syncing
• CRM Synchronisation
• Support enterprise requirements, auto-scaling servers, international data centres
• Unlimited free support
• In-house marketing expertise

In Conclusion

With Sugar Market costs are clear and upfront. All advanced marketing automation features are included as well as unlimited support as standard. Customers who choose to leverage Sugar Sell and Sugar Serve along with Sugar Market get a complete customer view at a fraction of the cost of any other high-level marketing automation solution.

We hope you have a better understanding of Sugar Market and the benefits of automating your marketing processes. No matter where you are in your marketing journey, the best way to realise your challenges and pain points is with a free consultation call with one of our expert consultants. We ensure you get the most out of your Marketing Automation project through our requirements workshops, analysing your business processes and goals – resulting in the most effective Marketing Automation solution possible, benefiting your whole organisation.

The post Sugar Market Explained: SugarCRMs’ all-in-one marketing automation software appeared first on Sugabyte.

You may have a CRM and no marketing automation platform or you have an integrated solution but are unhappy with it. In order to make informed decisions on your tech stack, such as if you should adopt or switch platforms or not, it’s essential to understand your requirements and needs out of a solution. That extends to understanding how important it is for a native integration between your marketing automation platform and CRM.

WHY DO SOLUTIONS ON THE MARKET BOAST SEAMLESS INTEGRATION?

Because a seamless integration between your CRM and your marketing automation platform is crucial to

1. Sales and Marketing alignment,
2. More efficient connection with leads and prospects throughout the buyer’s journey
3. The success of your technology adoptions, and
4. Getting the most out of your investment—including ROI.

THIS SIMPLIFIED GUIDE WILL HELP YOU UNDERSTAND:

1. The difference between CRM and Marketing Automation
2. Why a seamless integration is important
3. What to expect from a seamless integration
4. The value you gain from integration

DOWNLOAD HERE

The post Ebook Download – CRM & Marketing Automation Integration Simplified appeared first on Sugabyte.

DOWNLOAD PDF HERE

What can SalesFusion do?

Salesfusion has a two-way integration with SugarCRM which when used together allows sales and service areas to become more productive by having the ability to take action on current customer insights to increase customer care and satisfaction as well enable businesses to create customers for life all of which will consequently increase revenue all via an easy to manage platform.

Salesfusion includes all features and functions that marketers need in order to create and manage campaigns, such as email & nurture marketing, lead scoring & management, website tracking & analytics, landing pages & forms, social media management, CRM integration as well as the ability to analyze data via reports that can be displayed in marketing dashboards that show the tracking and/or life cycle of the lead from creation to conversion.

Email & Nurture Marketing

Salesfusion offers the ability to send traditional bulk emails to marketing lists as well as creating and sending emails via nurture campaigns dependant upon the business requirements.

Email recipients can be segmented based on criteria defined via marketing lists, this can range from criteria based on lead scores that the prospect has earnt by interacting with emails/website/forms etc to criteria based on prospect data.
Marketing lists in Salesfusion are dynamic and so as the prospect is updated they will drop in and out of marketing lists and therefore enter/exit the relevant campaigns as required. This function eliminates the tiresome task of manually importing lists for each email campaign.

Nurture marketing helps prospects move through the funnel more efficiently than with traditional email marketing. The nurture campaign builder in Salesfusion has an easy to build visual designer that allows automated emails to be set up based on different rules. This allows prospects to receive relevant information that speaks to their specific criteria such as industry or actions.

Digital Marketing Management (Landing Pages & Forms)

Salesfusion can be used to create and manage businesses digital marketing in one place. Digital marketing includes emails, landing pages, web forms, online events, surveys and microsites, all created and managed inside of Salesfusion.
Users can easily build landing pages, email templates and forms via the building tools in Salesfusion and either using pre-made templates or the intuitive drag-and-drop functions. This easy to use builder allows marketers to launch more campaigns and thus generate more leads to pass onto sales users.

Lead Scoring & Management

The seamless integration between Sugar and Salesfusion allows real-time marketing information to update Sugar via alerts or creating Task records based on the interaction/activity/lead score in Salesfusion to help determine when a prospect turns into a hot lead, therefore, allowing the sales team to follow up with leads at the most opportune moments.

Not all leads are created equal, lead scoring allows you to score leads based on actions that are defined as valuable to your business. Based on this score, marketing and sales can gauge how ready the lead is to purchase the product and based on this lead score certain marketing information can be sent or an alert can be sent to Sugar for Sales users to follow up with.

Website Tracking & Analytics

Provides valuable information regarding visitors that have visited your site and measure their engagement with it. Built-in website tracking gives visibility into what pages prospects enter your site on and which content pieces drive further interaction. This web activity is then visible in CRM to ensure sales users can see an overview of the interests of the lead.

Event Management

Salesfusion provides an event management tool that allows the creation, management and tracking of all marketing events both online and offline. Online management is built in with Cisco WebEx and GoToWebinar integrations, users are able to sync registration data with CRM, deploy automated nurture campaigns and manage multi-session events all using on platform.

Social Media Management

Social media is becoming an increasingly important channel for distributing content and building an online presence. Salesfusion offers practical methods for incorporating a social strategy into campaigns with the ability to both schedule and publish posts across social platforms.

Interactive Dashboards and Reporting

Reports in Salesfusion can be built based on data gathered from campaigns, forms, lead scores etc dependant upon the businesses requirements. The easy to use drag and drop features allow any users to be able to create intuitive reports, not just data analysts. Reports can be presented by a chart, for this, there are multiple chart options such as bar, line, pie, maps and funnel reports to ensure the data is easy to view in the most preferred view. The report can also show the results in a row and column format to provide further information.

Reports can be shared with other users to be viewed or collaborated on. Reports can be scheduled to be sent to other members in your organisation to keep them informed about certain data.

Reports can then be displayed on marketing dashboards to allow users an easy to view an overview of relevant and informative data. With chart-based reports in dashboards, there is the ability to drill further into elements of the chart to gain deeper insights.

Would you like a personalised demonstration of Salesfusion?

Please use the scheduler tool below to book in your time slot.

The post SugarCRM acquires Salesfusion Marketing Automation appeared first on Sugabyte.

1. Don’t hide the unsubscribe link 
   If people want to unsubscribe then let them and don’t make it difficult for them to do so. If it is difficult to unsubscribe then they are likely to mark emails as SPAM which is worse than just unsubscribing. Having the unsubscribe button/link in clear view isn’t only easier for the recipient but it’s also the Law.
2. Don’t force people to log in to unsubscribe
   This is often time-consuming and irritating to the recipient, especially if they have to remember their login credentials or reset their password to do so. If the unsubscribe process is too complex then recipients are again likely to mark the email as SPAM.
3. Offer a chance to ‘Opt-Down’ rather than ‘Opt-Out’
   Allow people to control what type of emails they receive from you. By giving recipients this option they may be more inclined to reduce the number of emails received to only emails that are relevant to them. This will reduce the number of emails that you can send to that individual but you will not have lost them as an email subscriber.
4. Offer social media links when unsubscribing
   Individuals may be wanting to reduce the number of emails piling up in their inbox but that doesn’t necessarily mean they are not interested in what your business has to offer. A good way to ensure that they still stay up to date is to offer social media links on the unsubscribe confirmation page, you may lose a subscriber but gain a follower.
5. Include a comment box when people are unsubscribing
   If you include a free textarea box on the unsubscribe page you are giving recipients a chance to enter information about why they are unsubscribing which may be useful to your business but by not forcing them to enter this information the process is still quick and easy.

To learn more about Act-Ons’ top tips for sending emails download their eBook using the below link.

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