You can use your CRM to analyze your base of customers and prospects in order to target your best prospects by email. GoldMine® is an excellent contact management application that allows you to filter records in this way to select exactly which prospects you wish to target. This then allows you to set up and manage an effective email marketing campaign, knowing that everyone targeted is likely to be highly responsive to your sales pitch.



Perhaps you only want to target existing customers in a particular location and not the customers in other places. It would be easy to filter the customer base and weed out only those customers in the location you want to target. Then you can send them a personalized email message with your promotional offer. You could even divide all your customers into different areas, depending on location, and send each segment its own promotional message, personalized for that area.

If you are running campaigns for television, or running adverts in newspapers, you can carefully monitor the campaigns, measuring the results of return on investment. In this way you can determine which television campaign or newspaper advert was effective and successful, and which was not.

GoldMine® software, but not ACT!® software, even provides you with the ability to read scripts directly from the CRM, which can be utilized by telemarketers in a telemarketing calls campaign. That is a powerful feature totally under your control for achieving more effective marketing.

Attributing business results to actual campaigns run is essential for any company to succeed. It is vital to know which of the marketing activities undertaken prove to be the most effective, and which marketing activities fail. This knowledge allows a company to know which campaigns to repeat, and which campaigns should be written off and put down to experience. Good CRM software such as GoldMine® lets you do this with ease.

ACT!® will let you to do basic contact management very effectively, but it probably does not have the power of the GoldMine® software, especially when it comes to automating and triggering tasks. GoldMine® will give you a global view across a network of how resources are being used with the results being achieved. With all the information being held on a single database, it is possible to view the whole picture--the sales performance as well as each of the sales team's actions, past, present and future, at a glance.

It is possible to define an entire marketing strategy by utilizing the extrapolated metrics produced by the software. Areas of strength can be highlighted and exploited. Areas of weakness can be eliminated or maximized if possible. While hitherto unidentified opportunities can be instantly exploited for greater profit. It is probably this power of good analytic reporting facilities that are the real strengths of a good CRM, for otherwise it is little more than an efficient electronic address book.