Maintaining those contacts

Small Business owners spend valuable time and money on marketing. Are the resulting leads fully utilised? Quite often enquiry details are simply jotted down on scrap paper, or saved on a phone contact list, but are eventually lost and forgotten. Online Databases and Customer Relationship Management (CRM) apps are great tools and mechanisms to maintain your potentials. Most often, these services have free tiers for small businesses.

Some advantages to managing your touch points:

• Know and understand your customers and their needs
• Show your potentials that you care about your customers, right at the start your relationships
• Draw reports and base your business decisions on facts
• Measuring your marketing Return On Investment (ROI)
• Structure your marketing efforts

Even using a simple spreadsheet can help you, but there are better free online tools for the purpose, many even allow you to add and update lead data on the go like www.zoho.com and www.hubspot.com