Over the last couple of years, CRM (customer relationship management) has gone a long way from being a novel strategy for enticing the client base to an absolute requirement that makes it one of the essentials of the present-day business world. Speaking in cold numbers, the overall usage rose from 56% in 2020 to 74% in 2021 and the adoption is still on the rise for 2022.
Of course, being one of the biggest competitors in the digital world, Google had to stake a claim at this booming market and roll out its own take on the centralized CRM software suite.
So, how does this platform hold on, what are some of its key takeaways and what are the things you should know before subscribing to the service? Let us try to find out together.
What Is Gmail CRM?
Gmail CRM (also known as Google CRM) is a CRM application that integrates into your Gmail inbox and expands its functionality with a set of powerful CRM features. At its most basic level, Gmail CRM is a tool that gives your employees a centralized platform for monitoring and nurturing contacts with its clients, valuable insights about those clients, and a centralized platform that facilitates cooperation with other teams.
Some of the key benefits associated with the platform are intuitive design, forgiving learning curve, well- designed productivity tools like Google Drive and G Suite), self-updating data, and excellent collaboration possibilities.
The Core Features Of Gmail CRM
One of the key reasons behind the popularity of the Gmail CRM lies in its set of simple and yet very powerful features like:
● Collecting data about the customers
● Collecting data about the potential customers
● Segmenting your customers
● Tracking marketing activities
● Tracking conversation metrics
Beyond these core functionalities, Gmail also sets up the foundation for the following set of expanded functionalities.
Automation
The CRM is a process that relies on extensive sets of data and seemingly endless contact lists which takes a lot of time and effort and leaves too much room for human error. Gmail CRM solves this issue by offering a set of very powerful automation features that allows your team members to minimize the level of mundane tasks they need to go through and frees them up more time to focus on clients and leads.
Integration
Gmail CRM, like any other platform, features numerous deficiencies. Fortunately, these problems can be solved by the integration feature that allows you to install the third-party plugins and expand the set of features. For instance, Gmail doesn't have the capability of easily sharing multiple contacts. Fortunately, you can install shared contacts for Gmail CRM extension and fix this issue with only a couple of clicks.
Lead Management
One of the greatest advantages of Gmail CRM is that it offers a very intuitive way of monitoring leads and visualizing them as a part of the sales pipeline. The platform structures your sales cycles, outlines different pipeline stages, and makes very clear which actions need to be taken from that point on. As a result, you are able to identify eventual bottlenecks and easily monitor the efficiency of your team.
Template Building
Essentially, Gmail template builder is a feature that allows you to easily create and edit templates and add them to the emails making the CRM outreach much easier. Although this feature could benefit from the ability to add custom variables to the emails, you still get quite a lot of functionality and this feature could be added in some of the future Gmail CRM iterations.
Gmail CRM Use-Case Examples
Now that we've checked the most important functionalities of Google CRM, let us finally take a look at a couple of use case scenarios to get an idea of how this suite can benefit your company in a more tangible manner:
● Marketing – One of the greatest advantages of Gmail CRM is that it allows your marketing team to perform its duties and run campaigns across multiple channels without ever leaving the inbox. Since the suite features excellent automation features, the users are able to simply set the triggers and let the platform do the sending on its own.
● Pipeline Management – Efficient pipeline management takes a lot of patience and effort. Gmail CRM makes this task much simpler by offering various alerts, layers, and notifications that put the prospects in a certain motion. Because of these prompts, the marketing teams are able to focus on conversations and engagement.
● Data Entry – Data entry is one of the most time-consuming and tiresome chores in the entire marketing sector. Gmail CRM effectively takes the problem off the table by pulling the info from the Gmail database and allowing you to simply import the information across a variety of other suites.
CRM Conclusion
Taking everything we said above into consideration we can only summarize that Gmail CRM is a very solid and streamlined platform that brings a couple of essential CRM functionalities directly to your email inbox allowing you to run numerous marketing errands from this singular place.
Granted, the market is stacked with other CRM options that offer more robust sets of features and advanced marketing tools. What Gmail CRM, however, has working for it is a stunning simplicity which is more than enough for a large majority of users.