With our new Eventbrite integration for Batchbook, you can manage your invitation lists and follow up with attendees. This will help you not only pack the house, but get real value from your event by making sure you are doing the right follow up with the folks who attended.
How it Works
This is a two-way integration. You can send contacts from Batchbook, or pull them in from Eventbrite.
Export to Eventbrite
You can send any of your Batchbook lists over to an existing or new Eventbrite list. Your Batchbook lists are built on advanced search, so you can narrow down to specific segments of contacts based on things like location, the last time you communicated with them, or any of your custom fields.
See how to export to Eventbrite.
Import from Eventbrite
You can also import contacts from Eventbrite. Choose which contacts to import based on your events and whether they reserved tickets or not. This is great if you invite a lot of people to your events but only want to follow up with people who get tickets. Importing people who attend a certain event will automatically tag them with the event name, so you can quickly create a list for follow up in Batchbook.
Learn how to import from Eventbrite.
Fill ‘Er Up!
Whether you are selling tickets or hosting a free event to drive sales, you want attendees. Mine your Batchbook account to find just the right people to invite. Here are a few ideas to help you build a relevant list for your invitations:
- Build a list based on location if you are doing an in person event. Find everyone you know in the city where you are hosting and make sure they hear about it!
- Invite past attendees. If you do multiple events, like concerts, make sure you notify previous attendees. You can use tags or custom fields to keep track of who attended what event.
- Reach out to your hot leads. If you are hoping your event will drive sales, make sure your hot leads get an invite. Use custom fields in Batchbook to track the status of your contacts.
- Find people who are more likely to attend. This may be people who have purchased a certain product or who have attended an online webinar. Track this information in Batchbook so you can easily add them to your invite list.
After the Event, Follow Up
No matter what your goals are for your event, some follow up is usually in order. If someone bought a ticket and attended your show, send a thoughtful thank you note. If they attended a class, send some additional educational material and a discount for your product or service. And of course, if your event is all about generating sales, it’s the follow up that will put the money in the bank.
By importing your event attendees into Batchbook, you will be able to track all of your interactions with them. Assign To-Dos to each of the contacts if you need to make personal follow ups with them. You can also create a list of everyone who attended so you can review it to make sure no one is being forgotten about. With the right follow up, you can make sure each of your events is a smashing success!
Ready to get started? Learn more about the integration here.
We are teaming up with HootSuite to show you how you can use Batchbook and HootSuite together to build stronger social relationships.
Social media can help you build long lasting relationships with your best customers.
Listen in as we share valuable tips on how to manage the different stages of the customer relationship using social tools.
We’ll be doing a quick demo of how our Batchbook app works in HootSuite, giving you greater context during your social conversations and helping you bring social media under the same roof as all of your other customer communications.
You will also learn about 3 key stages of customer relationships and how to use social to not only find new customers, but to nurture them and keep them happy for years to come.
Plus, you’ll get to see how other people are using social tools to grow their business and maintain healthy customer relationships.
On the Webinar:
Pamela O’Hara
CEO of Batchbook
Pamela will demo the Batchbook app and lead the conversation about how to build long lasting relationships with your social contacts.
_______________________________
Mark Holder
Director of Integration Partners at HootSuite
Mark will demo HootSuite and be on hand to answer HootSuite related questions.
_______________________________
Rebecca Rescate
Founder, CitiKitty | Co-Founder, HoodiePillow
Rebecca, a two-time veteran of Shark Tank and inventor of the CitiKitty toilet training system for cats, will answer questions about how she uses social media to grow her business.
_______________________________
Stewart Marshall
Financial Storyteller
Stewart, a financial guru and storyteller who also mentors college students about startups, will talk about nurturing relationships with investors through social media.
A business website is a great place to collect contact information. When someone fills out your “contact us” form, signs up for your newsletter, or adds a comment on your blog, they are giving you important info. Are you bringing that information into your small business’s CRM software? You should be!
Don’t let the information you collect from your website sit off in a corner by itself.
With that information in your CRM, you can build context on your contacts as they move from interested lead, to avid reader of your newsletter, to loyal customer who provides great feedback on your blog. With our integrations into Formstack, MailChimp, and Disqus, you can take the information you collect on your website and put it to good use as you build your customer relationships.
Collect Contact Info from a Formstack Web Form
Formstack is a great tool for building really custom web forms. You can choose exactly which fields you want to include and then grab a little code to place the form on your website.
Generally, when people fill out your form, you can get the info emailed to you or see it in a spreadsheet. But with Formstack’s integration with Batchbook, you can bring that vital contact info right into your CRM. From Batchbook, you can assign tasks for follow up, add contacts to lists based on what information they provided you, and take the next steps in the relationship.
For instance, every day you can check a Batchbook list to see which new contacts requested a quote. You can then give them a call and get the ball rolling.
Import MailChimp Subscribers and See if They Are Reading Your Newsletter
MailChimp is an excellent solution for managing your email list. By placing a newsletter sign up form on your site, you can automatically pull people in to your list and start talking to them via your email.
Wouldn’t it be nice to see if a contact is on your newsletter list before making a sales call? You can do that with our integration with MailChimp. Even better, you can see which emails a contact has received, and whether those emails were opened or not.
This kind of information is helpful as you work with a contact throughout the sales and customer service process. It will also help you identify champion customers. If you see a contact who is reading every email, you can click our Champion star, which will remind you to pay special attention to them (after all, they are paying special attention to you)!
Add People Who Leave a Comment to Your CRM
If you take comments on your website, Disqus can help you manage them and make them look good. Comments are great for interaction and feedback from your customers (and they aren’t just for blogs; try adding comment boxes to your product pages).
When a customer makes a comment, you don’t want to leave it stuck on your website. With our Disqus integration, you can import people who leave a comment and then view their most recent comments across all Disqus sites. You can also save comments to your communication history, so the rest of the team can see what’s being said online.
Being able to bring commenters into your small business CRM is helpful because these people are often good at engagement. They will comment because they love something or have a question. Either way, you should be building out deeper relationships with them. You may be able to start great relationships with internet savvy influencers who comment on other blogs and may write one of their own. These are good friends to have!
Don’t let the information you collect from your website sit off in a corner by itself. Bring it all into Batchbook, where it can add context to your relationships and help you provide a better customer experience.
Some people may think it’s easy to work in a creative agency. A common perception is that it is a free-wheeling, energy drink fueled environment where you get paid for being creative. Other people think creative agencies are staffed by imaginary people. The fact is, while it is certainly fun to work on creative projects, you still have the pressure of delivering the goods to your clients.
Those clients can often be picky and fickle, with very particular tastes. Whether you are shooting video, designing a website or advertising campaign, or creating awesome t-shirts, you need to find a way to stay organized so you can give your clients what they want, and on time.
Social CRM is a tool that can help you get organized around your clients’ needs. It gives you a central location to store all of your contact data and manage the relationship. Social CRM also helps you facilitate ongoing conversations with your clients, so the information you have about them isn’t just collecting dust.
Delivering a great creative isn’t just about a light bulb moment.
Here are some of the ways you can use social CRM to keep your creative team organized and on task:
Get to know your clients
When getting to know clients, it’s all about the details. Things that they mention in that first conversation may become pretty important later on when you are ready to deliver your creative project. For instance, if your client tells you that they really hate the color orange, you may want to think twice before delivering a web design with a bright orange background.
Social CRM gives you a place to keep those details where your whole team can refer to them. With Batchbook’s custom fields, you can keep track of every piece of information that will help you deliver your project successfully.
Keep your team on task
Creativity doesn’t happen in a vacuum. You’re team works together to give the best results. But with a lot of different projects on their plates, it is easy to get distracted.
To help projects stay on task, you can keep organized with tasks and workflows in your CRM. Batchbook makes it easy to assign tasks to any team member, and with custom field sets, you can keep track of milestones for your clients’ projects.
Store past work and visuals
With creative work, you are sure to generate files and clippings for each client. By having all of your past work and designs that your clients like at easy reach, you can easily get into the zone when working on a new project.
You need to be able to tie these files to specific clients. With Batchbook, you can upload files right to a contact’s record, creating an easy to access file.
Make sure you get paid on time
After toiling over a creative project, making countless tweaks and working toward a final deliverable, you need to get paid. Staying on top of invoicing is just as important as managing project milestones.
A social CRM that is connected to your accounting software can help you get paid on time. With Batchbook’s integration with Xero, you can see which clients have outstanding invoices and how much they still owe. If a client is a little late to pay, you can easily assign a To-Do to remember to break their legs follow up with them.
Stay in touch so you can get paid again
When you deliver your project and your client raves about it, you know you have a great chance of working with them again. By keeping in touch with your past clients, you can continue to build the relationship and get more projects to work on.
With lots of great methods of communication, from email to social media, to lunch meetings, you will want to keep track of everything in one place. Social CRM helps you keep the conversation alive with past clients so you are the first one they call when they have more work. Follow your clients on social networks, invite them to sign up for your newsletter, and create a list of past customers who you haven’t talked to in awhile so you can reach out to them.
By focusing on your client relationships, you can keep your creative agency humming along, staying on task and consistently getting new work from past clients and referrals. Good customer service goes a long way toward making your clients happy, especially when dealing with creative projects that can sometimes be judged subjectively.
Delivering a great creative isn’t just about a light bulb moment. You need to get to know your client, work together as a team to craft a perfect design, stay on task , and not the least, build the client relationship. Social CRM helps you to pull everything you need to do this into one central place. Its the tool you need to keep your creative agency organized.
Batchbook is a flexible social CRM that will help you stay creative while staying organized. Learn more.
– Light bulb moment pic via Bigstock
Freshdesk offers a refreshing approach to helpdesk software, with all of the tools you need to keep both your customers and your customer service team happy. With their new integration with Batchbook, you can pull up pertinent contact details from your CRM without ever having to leave your helpdesk software.
Here’s what you can accomplish
- Display Batchbook customer details Freshdesk Contacts and Tickets pages
- Search for Batchbook contacts by email address
- Update and add Batchbook contacts right in Freshdesk
Learn more about this nifty integration over at Freshdesk.
A customer database may not seem like the coolest thing you can be thinking about for your business. However, collecting better information about your customers, and then acting on that info, can really improve your bottom line.
1. Get More Customers Coming Back
Repeat customers are the best kind, right? Your customer database can help you get more of your customers coming back and buying again. How? By telling you important things like what they bought in the past, when they shopped, what color shoes they were wearing (okay, that might be a tad obsessive).
By looking at these details, you can craft personalized marketing campaigns to get your customers repeating. If you know they like dark chocolate, then maybe they will be interested in your newest line of specialty dark chocolate, which also happens to be on sale.
Take the details you know about your customers and use that information to connect with them again.
2. Discover Your Ideal Customer
Ideal customers are the ones you want more of. Your customer database can help you discover the customer profile that is best for your business.
Start by looking for customers who spend the most money with you. What sets them apart from other customers? Don’t forget to look at bottom line profit, and not just invoice amounts.
By keeping track of important details throughout the customer relationship, you should be able to piece together a picture of the perfect customer. Maybe your best customers are people you connect with on Facebook, or perhaps they are rabid sale shoppers. This information can help you tailor your business to better please these ideal customers.
3. Produce Happier Customers
Every business wants happy customers. Which begs the question, why do some businesses produce unhappy customers? The truth is, sometimes a business loses touch with the customer needs. A strong database can help you make sure that you are doing everything in your power to please the customer.
Your customer database shouldn’t just be a limp spreadsheet. You need to be able to use it to keep track of conversations, assign To-Dos, and stay on top of your relationships. By knowing all there is to know about your customers, your whole team can provide better service. And better customer service leads to happier customers!
4. Get the Context You Need
Context is so important. Let’s pretend you have a customer who sends an angry tweet. Before shooting off at the hip, wouldn’t you like to know what led up to this tweet? Your customer database can give you the full picture on that rogue tweeter. Maybe they have a troublesome history. Or perhaps they were once a champion of your business. Either way, you need to see these details before responding.
Good context helps with everything from making the sale to dealing with late payments and getting referrals. If you are not sharing customer context via your database, you are missing out.
5. Pass Your Customers Around
You’ve heard that it takes a village to raise a child? Well, it takes your whole business to please a customer. Your customer database should be all about collaboration. By keeping those customer details in one place (preferably in the cloud) you can hand off customers between sales and service easily. You can also handle the lifetime of the customers, even as employees come and go.
The alternative is to have each sales rep keep their own records, with another set of details in the office and maybe another set in the accounting department. That’s no good. A customer database can bring all that contact data together so that it is actually useful to the whole team. You can also pass along important customer related assignments and rest easy that they are getting accomplished.
A customer database isn’t just a boring thing that only big companies should worry about. Every business should have an active database full of context on their hot leads and customers. It is the hub where everyone goes for important customer details and it will improve your business by helping you provide a better experience for each and every customer.
– Cardboard box image courtesy of BigStock
We have a new FreshBooks integration for Batchbook that will help you keep your contacts up to date between your CRM and accounting software. FreshBooks was one of the more popular integrations in Batchbook Classic, so we are super pumped to announce it for the new Batchbook!
We’ve teamed up with Zapier to bring you this new integration. This means you can customize the integration to your needs. You can:
- Create a new client in FreshBooks for every new contact you add in Batchbook
- Create a new contact in Batchbook for every new client you add in FreshBooks
- Create a new contact in Batchbook for every new invoice you add in FreshBooks
- Use filters to create contacts only when certain criteria are met, like invoice amount over a certain number
Zapier integrations are really easy to set up, so all it takes is you deciding which way you want to send your contacts. Do you want every new Batchbook contact added to FreshBooks so you can have the correct data already there when you are ready to invoice? Or do you prefer to add contacts to Batchbook after you add them to your FreshBooks contacts list? It’s up to you.
All you need for this integration is a Batchbook and FreshBooks account and a free Zapier account. If you sign up through Batchbook, you will get 5 free integrations as well as 200 tasks per month. You can learn more about the nifty new integration and set up your Zapier account here.
A question that we often receive on the support team is “How do I track my deals in Batchbook?” It’s a great question, and the short answer is you can track your deals in a Custom Field Set. The really great thing with tracking your deals in a Custom Field Set is you have the flexibility to customize that set with the fields you want!
We realized the tricky part of that seemed to be creating the Set in the first place. So we’re happy to announce that new accounts will come equipped with a default Custom Field Set named “Deals”. You can add that Set to any of your records by selecting it from the drop down in the Custom Data widget. Let’s take a look at the included fields, and how all of this works.
The Default Deals Custom Field Set
Deal name and Deal Description are both text fields, which means you can type whatever you’d like in there.
Who is this Deal with is a URL type field. If you are tracking your deals at the company level, you may want to include the link to the actual contact the Deal is with.
The Status field is pretty important for tracking where a contact is at in your sales process, or pipeline. By default, the Status field is a multiple choice field with three options:
If you’d like to add additional fields to these statuses, you may! Just edit the field, and press the green plus icon to get a new option.
NOTE: You can’t edit an option name once it has been saved. If you want to change “Pending” to say, “In Progress” – just delete the option for Pending and create a new option named “In Progress”.
Assigned To fields will give you a drop down menu of all the users on your account. NOTE: When importing into an Assigned To field, you’ll need to import the user’s email address they log in with, not their name.
The Amount field is a currency field, so you can enter the value of your deal. NOTE: When importing into a currency field, leave out your currency symbols. We’ll add them in for you.
Start Date and Expected Close Date are there for you to track a few different things. For example, you can create a list of “New Deals” by using data saved in the start date. You can compare the two dates to see how long it takes to close a deal. You can also use the Expected Close Date for forecasting purposes (read below for tips on how to do that).
Customize to Your Heart’s Delight
The best part of using Custom Fields to track Deals is you can use the “Deals” Set however you’d like! Change the order of the fields and add new ones according to your needs. If you decided to venture out and start a business on your own then maybe you’ll want to nix the “Assigned To” field – and that’s okay. You aren’t restricted to capture only the data we thought would be important to you. You have the flexibility to customize your account to fit your company’s needs.
Use Lists to Stay on Top of Deals
Tracking all of your Deals is vital, but equally as important is having the ability to search for particular deals. For example, I mentioned above you may want the ability to do some forecasting. This can be done by first conducting a search, then saving the results to a list. By using the “Expected Close Date”, you’ll be able to know what Deals are expected to close in the next [however-far-into-the-future-you'd-like]. For this example, let’s just use 30 days.
First, you’ll need to create a search to find all contacts where the “Deals – Expected Close Date” is “before”, “30 days from now”. Before 30 days from now is another way of saying in the next 30 days. A benefit of building your search with this natural language instead of a hard date is your search will update automatically for you. If a Deal is expected to close 31 days from now, it won’t show up as a result until tomorrow.
Here is what that search looks like, and for more information on creating searches and lists, you can watch our quick video tutorial, or check out our knowledge base for more information.
After you press the green search button, you’ll see an option to “Show Results”. This will switch the view from your search criteria to the contacts that match that criteria. You’ll also then see the option to save your search as a list. You will then be able to view it from your lists tab and stay on top of your deals that are projected to close soon!
If you have any questions about how to capture your Deals using Custom Fields, please let us know by emailing us at help@batchblue.com, or leave a comment below!
I am joining the Batchbook team in opening up conversations about the challenges of raising a family in today’s workplace. Here is my story.
For me, the lines between work and life have always been a little blurry. My dad and mom run a small family business, and growing up it was run out of the garage. As kids, we sometimes pitched in, stapling brochures together (using the bed as our workspace), unloading tractor trailers in our driveway, and packaging orders in our the garage (which became a maze of boxes). My dad worked hard, but at the same time he was around. My mom helped him out, and as we grew up we had different people, usually friends, working at the house, using the bathroom, and sharing lunches at the kitchen table.
My dad in a garage full of boxes.
The business was part of our lives. It was truly a family business. As my brother, sister, and I grew up we would work odd jobs at the business. And when it was time for me to get my first real job, I ended up driving a delivery van for my dad.
I always enjoyed business, and wanted to grow up to be an entrepreneur. I credit this to my parents, who were hard working but always had time for us as kids. I had the benefit of growing up in a very loving family who stuck together. The joys and travails of the business probably had something to do with this.
I got my education in small business working for my dad for years. I did everything from sweeping out the warehouse (yes, we eventually moved out of the garage), to doing deliveries, to sales, to office management, bookkeeping, and marketing. Only in a family business could I get this kind of education. My older brother also made his career in the business, primarily in sales. For years we worked hard side by side and played hard together too. A Thanksgiving conversation was often about business. And while it got stressful at times, we always remembered we were a family first.
During this time of working in the family business, I met and married my beautiful wife and started my own family. Having flexibility in my work schedule made juggling those early years of marriage and kids a little easier. And some days, when I needed to get away from both the stresses of being a parent and the stresses of helping to run a small business, the three of us, my dad, my brother and I, would skip part of the day at work and hit the golf course.
It was a good gig, working with people you love. But it was stressful too. Running a small business that is trying to grow always is. And there came a time when I realized my heart wasn’t in this particular type of business. It was time to move on. It was hard, leaving behind the job that I had worked on and off since I was 9 years old. But I lucked out with my new job.
At Batchbook, I work from home, much like my father did before me. I have a small office upstairs. My wife is homeschooling our children, so as a family we are pretty much always together. For some, this wouldn’t work. But both my wife and I came from strong families that were all about sticking together through thick and thin.
My kids know not to bother me when I am working, for the most part. But they are young. Just this morning my youngest, who is one and half, pushed my office door open and greeted me with his winning smile and patented squeak. It was at that moment that I realized just how lucky I am. Sure, I work hard and have to meet deadlines, and sometimes the stress levels catch up to me. But when I get up and walk away from my desk, I get to see my family, I get to give a hug or sneak in a quick wrestling match.
My son built a Lego tower to the ceiling in my office.
While working from home isn’t for everyone, I am excited to see more and more businesses embracing it. There are hurdles to get over, but if you have good communication channels, it works. I have co-workers, just like anybody who works at an office. We have small talk and build friendships. We just don’t see each other that often. The two main people I work with live in Connecticut and Florida, while I live in New York. Batchbook is headquartered in Rhode Island. What we do lets us work from home, and we are lucky.
If anything, being able to work from home inspires me to work harder. I know why I am working, and I know how lucky I am to have the flexibility to enjoy fun moments from my kid’s lives. Hopefully, someday, my kids will look back and think about how lucky they were to have me at home when they were young, just like I realize how lucky I was to have my parents close by.
Our friends over at Mad Mimi have just launched a new integration with Batchbook, and it’s pretty sweet! For those of you not familiar with Mad Mimi, they are an email marketing provider that focuses on simple and beautiful emails.
The integration works by pulling Batchbook contacts into Mad Mimi, where you can select which contacts you want to send your email campaign to.
You can filter your Batchbook contacts in Mad Mimi by:
All of these fields are fully searchable in Mad Mimi, so you can email just the right contacts.
You can get all of the details about this new integration over at Mad Mimi.
And be sure to check out our integrations directory to see all of the cool tools you can hook up with Batchbook.
