What is contact management?
- 1. Contact management basics
- 2. Contact management vs. CRM
- 3. Key features of contact management
- 4. From contact management to CRM
- 5. Contact management with Act!
- 6. Choosing contact management or CRM
- 7. Contact management FAQs
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Contact management is the process of storing and managing your business contacts. It’s the first step in creating brand loyalty—and a vital part of any targeted sales and marketing efforts.
Contact management typically includes saving address book information including the names, phone numbers, email addresses, websites, physical addresses, job titles, company names, and social media profiles of your business prospects, customers, and sales leads in a carefully organized and searchable database.
Modern cloud contact management tools align with your business needs by enabling you to access your contacts anywhere, see your interaction history, merge multiple contacts for better management, and set up automated notifications—no need to carry contact books or search through unintegrated spreadsheets. But in many cases, this is just one part of a holistic customer relationship management (CRM) system). Here, we’ll explore what contact management systems are and how they differ, so you can decide what you need for your business.
Contact management basics
At its core, contact management simply refers to storing the contact information of anyone interacting with your business. However, it has evolved into a much more sophisticated practice because consumers use multiple communication modes to contact businesses.
A modern contact management platform not only stores contact data but organizes multiple customer touchpoints under a single identity.
For example, it’s common for businesses to contact prospects on a call and then follow up through email. A contact management system ensures both come under the same prospect’s name. This helps you avoid contact duplication and track conversations across multiple communication modes.
Ultimately, a contact management system‘s key functions come down to the following.
- Storing contact information: Maintaining a database of names, phone numbers, email addresses, job titles, company names, websites, and other contact information of your prospects and customers
- Organizing information: Ensuring all the information is organized under the right names and headers
- Streamlining access: Making the information easily searchable and available across devices and platforms
We’ll talk about the exact features of a contact management system later in the article.
Contact management or customer relationship management (CRM)?
It’s easy to confuse contact management with customer relationship management (CRM) because the two are closely linked.
However, there are some stark key differences.
Contact management solutions primarily focus on storing, managing, and serving contact information. Its scope is limited to ensuring customer contact information is recorded accurately and served when you need it.
Customer relationship management (CRM) is a bigger umbrella covering contact management. It goes beyond recording contact information and focuses more on optimizing customer experience and building long-lasting customer relationships.
CRM platforms not only save information but also provide you with the tools to communicate with your prospects and customers, gauge their satisfaction, diagnose service issues, and serve the right information to solve their problems.
In other words, contact management is usually for small businesses looking for a reliable way to store business contacts. Customer relationship management is for any business looking to build lasting customer relations by understanding customer sentiment and offering the highest standards of services.
Key features of contact management software
Let’s dive deeper into the core features of a contact management system to help you understand its utility and potential business impact.
Contact information storage and searching
Contact management software stores the contact name, phone number, email address, company, designation, and other relevant information about your business prospects, leads, and customers.
Most contact management tools now offer cloud storage, which means your contacts are accessible anywhere. In addition, these cloud-based contact management platforms organize your data and make it easily searchable so you can pull out information whenever you want.
Contact segmentation
The best contact management software helps you segment your contact list using various criteria. For example, you can create segments based on location, company, last interaction, activity, and other customer behaviors.
You can also assign different tags to your contacts, making them easier to search, organize, and target in marketing campaigns.
Interaction tracking and user notes
The best contact management platforms provide you with the complete history of customer interactions with your company by consolidating data. For example, you can see the full timeline of when a customer approached your company on call, through email, or the chatbot on your website.
In addition, you can add notes to each activity under a contact to leave instructions for your agents or highlight a customer requirement.
Third-party software integration
Top-rated contact management tools integrate with all mainstream sales and marketing software. This critical feature allows you to leverage your contact database for marketing campaigns.
Analytics and reporting
Contact management tools also have reporting features that show you customer trends, contact sources, activity details, and other valuable insights you can use to make informed decisions.
Looking for a CRM solution? Learn which CRM works best for your business.
From contact management to CRM
CRM software, on the other hand, has a much broader scope.
Most CRMs are equipped with advanced contact management features. They offer functionalities like lead generation, sales management, marketing automation, landing pages, email marketing, lead scoring, analytics, and activity tracking.
Using a CRM tool is a much more strategic decision than a contact management system when it impacts all aspects of your business. Studies show that using an integrated CRM can help businesses improve sales forecasting by 42% and increase conversion rates by 300%.
Here are some of the main capabilities of a CRM system.
Advanced contact management
Beyond managing contacts, a modern CRM solution integrates your customer information with all your key sales and marketing tools in real time. This ensures your customer support, marketing, and sales teams always have the most accurate customer contact information, increasing their operational efficiency and reducing process costs.
Lead generation
You can create fully integrated lead generation campaigns with a CRM. With opt-in forms and landing pages, you can build targeted campaigns for each stage of the marketing funnel.
Marketing automation
CRM systems are also often equipped with marketing features and automation capabilities. Instead of sending the same emails to all your contacts, CRMs allow you to trigger unique campaigns based on user behavior.
For example, a CRM can automatically send re-engagement emails to users who haven’t used your product for a while. Similarly, you can set up education campaigns, helping users use your product or service to its full potential.
Sales automation
You can automate the sales process with a CRM. Using a CRM lead scoring system, you can send targeted retention campaigns to your customers. Similarly, it empowers your sales team members to establish contact with prospects at the right time.
For example, when a prospect requests a call through your website, an integrated CRM alerts the relevant sales rep. Not only does automation ensure that the sales call is made at the right time, but it also stops the lead from getting multiple calls from different reps.
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Contact management with Act!
Act! has comprehensive contact management features. But it offers so much more as a leading CRM system.
With Act! you get all the contact management features we’ve discussed. On top of that, you get advanced sales management, marketing automation, and customer management features that regular contact management tools don’t offer.
For example, Act! helps you grow your sales pipeline from scratch by providing fully integrated lead generation tools like opt-in forms and landing pages. From there, your customer data goes into Act’s contact management system where it’s organized, segmented, and made searchable by different criteria.
From there, marketing automation kicks in, sending predefined email campaigns and marketing messages to move your prospects to advanced sales funnel stages. Finally, Act’s sales follow-ups, lead scoring, and conversion features help you turn leads into customers.
It’s a complete package.
Act! is a complete sales and customer management platform that comes with fully integrated contact management features. Once you experience its capabilities, you won’t go back to a regular contact management tool.
Choosing between contact management software and a CRM system
Whether you should invest in contact management software or a CRM system depends on your business goals.
If you are only looking to manage and organize your business contacts and make them accessible to your team, any contact management platform will do the job.
However, if you want to take a step ahead with a more robust solution that not only has contact management features but also enables you to generate leads, automate marketing, and empower your salespeople, a CRM platform Is the most suitable choice.
Experience it for yourself to decide. Sign up for your free trial of Act! today.
Contact Management FAQs
A contact manager helps you organize contact information, keep track of interactions, and schedule follow-ups, making it easy to find and use details about your contacts.
No, CRM software includes contact management but also offers extra tools for managing sales, marketing, and customer service.
The best CRM software has strong contact management features, works well with other tools you use, automates tasks, and gives useful insights to help you manage customer relationships.
Contact management software helps you keep accurate information, communicate on time, and personalize your interactions based on past communications, improving your customer relationships.
Want to learn more? Check out these related resources:
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