Good customer relationship is the heart of every business. If you want to increase sales and improve ROI use the most productive business CRM software solutions. These solutions help you to:

• Acquire new customers
• Retain existing customers
• Improve business relations
• Streamline work process
• Act strategically

Here are a few productive CRM software solutions: Oncontact This affordable CRM software helps to automate sales and contact management in a seamless manner. It is ideal for mid-size and small businesses. (Oncontact provides you the opportunity to communicate with your customers, across various verticals.) Key Features of OnContact CRM:

• 360 Degree CRM View
• Over 75 Reports
• Campaign Management
• Sales and Project Milestone Tracking
• Search Tools for Data Mining
• Document Linking & Management

Sugarcrm According to a study, small businesses have increased conversion rate by 53% by automating their marketing activities with Sugarcrm.com. It enables businesses to create better customer relationships. Features of SugarCRM:

• Email Integration
• Marketing Automation
• Sales Force Automation
• Customer Support
• Social CRM

Maximizer Maximizer CRM Wealth Manager is special CRM software tailored for financial, insurance advisors and wealth managers. Features of Maximizer Wealth Manager:

• Account and contact management
• Time management
• Task management and automation
• Sales force automation
• Sales forecasting
• Email marketing

Soffront Soffront is for both small and mid-size businesses. This fully integrated software helps in marketing automation, customer communication, sales promotion, etc. Features of Soffront CRM:

• Sales Automation
• Sales Forecasting
• Quote and Proposal Management
• Marketing Automation
• Email Marketing
• Customer Service Management
• CRM Portals
• Knowledge Management

VisionFlow VisionFlow is a life cycle software. Features of VisionFlow:

• Knowledge base
• Asset Management
• Multi-channel input via email, forms, chat/xmpp, API
• Business Process Management
• Project Management
• CRM
• Document Management

Commence Commence is small business CRM software that helps businesses to manage and nurture their leads and automate marketing. It is perfect for small and mid-size businesses. Features of Commence:

• Lead Ranking & Scoring
• Pipeline Management
• Sales Management
• Marketing Campaign Management
• Customer Service/Help Desk
• Social CRM
• Account Management

PipelineDeals PipelineDeals is a sales and account management acceleration toolkit, ideal for interaction with your customers. Features of PipelineDeals:

• Custom Reporting
• Lead Tracking
• Deal Tracking
• Customer Relationship Management
• Document Storage

Batchbook.com This software solution is perfect for small businesses.  It is an easy-to-use solution with great features.

• Track and manage your customers’ previous conversations
• Task management

Modern CRM software solutions can give companies of any size a significant competitive advantage. So, use CRM software solution to generate leads and establish better relationship with your customers.

According to Wikipedia, in internet marketing, conversion optimisation, or conversion rate optimisation (CRO) is a system for increasing the percentage of visitors to a website that convert into customers, or more generally, take any desired action on a webpage. It is commonly referred to as CRO. Undoubtedly, conversion rate optimisation is one of the most important practices that every online marketer needs to use. Here are a few incredible conversion rate optimisation tools for better results: OptinMonster OptinMonster is by far the best cloud-based CRO tool for generating leads. It has many versatile features such as

• A/B split testing
• Page-level targeting
• Sidebar forms
• Floating bar
• After post & inline forms
• Full screen takeovers
• Campaign scheduling
• Drag-and-drop form builder
• Behaviour personalisation

ThriveLeads This is a popular plugin that helps to generate leads.  It has been designed to offer different types of forms and an easy-to-use drag-and-drop form builder. Features:

• Build mailing list
• A/B Testing
• Animations
• Ultra Precise Targeting
• Advanced Trigger Options
• Best-in-Business Reporting Suite
• Smart Analytics

SumoMe This is a robust suite of widget-like applications, which is designed to improve traffic and maximise content engagement. Features:

• Mobile optimised pop-ups
• Single-click integration
• Email-marketing services
• Heat maps
• Advanced configuration options

WPForms This is an effective drag and drop form builder for WordPress. It’s feature-rich and easy to use. It comes with a library of different types of form templates. Features:

• Instant Notifications
• WordPress integration
• Payment collection

Kissmetrics This is a powerful analytics and conversion platform that is built to optimise marketing efforts. Features of Kissmetrics:

• Real-time tracking
• A/B testing
• Behavioural comparison
• Funnel report

SessionCam This Customer Experience analytics software displays how users interact with your website. Features:

• Recording web sessions in real-time
• Analysing recorded activity
• Understanding funnel and form conversion
• Replaying web sessions
• Behavioural heat maps

ClickTale This is an efficient website user engagement platform that helps you to:

• Analyse
• Understand
• Improve how users interact with your website.

It has various features like:

• Session playbacks
• Heat maps
• A conversion funnel
• Form analytics, etc.

It may take some time; however, the overall benefits would be worth in the long run. So, achieve your conversion goals by using these advanced conversion rate optimisation tools.

According to Reliablesoft, an SEO audit is a process of evaluating the search engine friendliness of a website in a number of areas. It not only clean up your website, but also makes it stronger and much more competitive. So perform an SEO audit to compete and gain success. Study crawl stats of your website Analyse webmaster tool to see the crawling status of your website, webmaster tool offers accurate data which will help you to perform an SEO audit. Analyse Robots.txt To check the accessibility of a website, you need to analyse Robots.txt. You must check this in the file itself or use Google Webmaster Tools to see which URLs are not allowed to index. Check 404 Errors and Redirects Other common problematic areas are 404 errors as well as redirects. As far as redirects are concerned, use only 301 redirects, and avoid 302, meta refresh redirects, JavaScript-based redirects because they are not search engine friendly and may confuse search engine bots. Check XML Sitemap No SEO audit is complete without a proper examination of an XML sitemap. XML sitemap must have all the pages of your website. Any sort of sitemap error/warning should be corrected immediately and updated in the Google Webmaster Tools. Check URLs According to techwyse, URLs are classified into 2 types: Static and Dynamic -

• A static URL is one in which the content of the web page remains the same as long as the changes are not hard coded within the HTML.
• A dynamic URL is one which is a result of a search within a website driven by a database running on some script.

Check whether they (urls) are SEO friendly or dynamic. You should pay attention to:

• Total number of static urls
• Total number of dynamic URLs
• Redirection on the URLs. (301 or 302)
• Duplicate URLs

Outbound Links You must pay special attention to total number of outbound links and also limit them in order to gain advantage.  Use nofollow for outbound links or remove them from the content. Backlinks The number and quality of backlinks are very essential. So, when you are performing an SEO audit, you should check:

• Domains that are giving backlinks.
• Total number of backlinks from  reputable sites.
• Total number of Dofollow and Nofollow backlinks.
• Bad backlinks

Presence on Social Media Today, it is important than ever to check social media presence of your website because it is an indicator of a website's overall popularity. Bonus tips:

• Check spammy and low quality links.
• Remove problematic links.
• Disavow links.
• Revise website structure if it is cluttered.
• Set preferred domain.
• Submit sitemap to webmaster tools.
• Try to use HTTPS because HTTPS protects the integrity of your website (https://developers.google.com/web/fundamentals/security/encrypt-in-transit/why-https).

So, focus on these essential audit elements to make your website competitive.

WordPress is the most powerful CMS to create intuitive websites. In fact, it not only helps you to manage your website in a seamless fashion, but also is SEO friendly. Here are a few in-built features of WordPress: Permalink Structure According to codex.wordpress.org, permalinks are the permanent URLs to your individual weblog posts, as well as categories. Basically, it is a web address. However, web crawlers find it difficult to read such web addresses. Fortunately, WordPress resolves this problem by allowing you to customise your URL permalinks for each of your web pages. SEO-friendly titles Despite several arguments, “title tags” still play a prominent role in ranking. Title tags tell search engines what your web page is all about. That is why it is essential to optimise "title tags". WordPress allows you to optimise your title tags. All you need to do is to use the All-in-One-SEO-Pack plugin. (ref- http://www.wpbeginner.com/plugins/users-guide-for-all-in-one-seo-pack/) All-in-One-SEO-Pack plugin helps to create relevant title tags. Meta Descriptions According to Moz, meta descriptions are HTML attributes that provide concise explanations of the contents of web pages. No doubt, it helps you to get better ranking on SERPs. WordPress settings allow you to make changes in meta descriptions. Use Yoast SEO plugin or All in One SEO Pack to create meta descriptions. XML Sitemap In some websites platforms, it is difficult to create XML Sitemap; however, it is very easy in WordPress. WordPress allows you to create and submit an XML sitemap to search engine webmaster tools. Categories and tags Categories and tags help to create an effective website structure.  Basically, they are the table of content of your blog posts. So, make sure you use them wisely across your website. WordPress helps you to create categories, subcategories and tags so that search engines can index your website without any problem. Simple and clutter-free code If you use WordPress, you don’t have to worry about the code/coding structure because it is simple and clean, which helps search engine bots to index your site easily. However, install well-coded themes to improve the overall quality and functionality of your website. Image optimisation Of course, it cannot be overlooked because it is one of the most critical factors in achieving good rankings. You can add "titles" and "alt text" to images in WordPress. Related posts Use "related posts plugin" to add a link to related posts within your new content in order to make your website more navigable and search engine friendly. (For more details, visit - https://wordpress.org/plugins/related/) Bonus tips:

• Include "WordPress share buttons" to increase social traffic on your website.
• Add "WordPress Ping Optimizer" to your website to stay away from ping spammers.
• Update your sites regularly.

No wonder, WordPress is all over the place.

The role of Instagram for business marketing in most industries is self-evident; from boutiques, to car dealership’s enquiries, to greeting card store. However, if you are not using it, you should, because it is the most effective form of marketing. Here are a few Instagram Management Tools: Iconosquare This tool helps to measure the performance, user-engagement, track competitors, hashtags, and much more.  With the help of Iconosquare, you can create growth charts and even share information with the followers. Benefits:

• Helps to understand and improve every important aspect of your Instagram activity.
• You can manage all your Instagram accounts.
• Helps to track comments on your posts as well as monitor content.
• You can search, collect and organise content.
• Helps to schedule and manage Instagram posts.
• You can view how your posts are performing in real–time.
• Helps to create your own customised Instagram feeds to follow different groups of users.

Cyfe This tool helps you to monitor all your marketing channels like:

• Email marketing
• SEO
• SEM
• Social media
• Web analytics

It is ideal for large enterprises and mid-size businesses. Cyfe’s dashboards can be also be customised. Features of Cyfe:

• Monitors individual departments
• Real-time reports
• Tracks multiple websites
• PDF/CSV exports
• Branded reports for clients
• Automatic email reports

Benefits:

• Helps to monitor individual departments, multiple websites using dashboard.
• You can download or schedule email reports.
• Helps to improve Instagram marketing efforts.

Websta This tool helps to understand Instagram community, engage with their followers and find potential fans. It provides you with exact insights into your posts, engagement, and relationships. Benefits:

• Helps to explore top brands, users and hastags.
• You can interact with the fans and followers.

Repost (Free) This tool allows you to share stuff/information with followers on Instagram. You can search users as well as hashtags, find out what is currently trending, etc. It is a simple yet effective tool. GramFeed (Free) This tool helps publisher and brands to curate as well as manage Instagram content. Benefits:

• Helps to manage your brand’s presence on Instagram.
• You can engage with your followers and monitor hashtags.
• Helps to search Instagram photos and videos.

Ink361 This is a unique tool, because it lets you rediscover your own uploads. Benefits:

• Helps to create custom circles to monitor content.
• You can engage with and listen to your audiences.
• Monitors statistics of your posts, use of hashtags as well as filters.

Crowdfire Use Crowdfire for publishing, social analytics and to grow your Instagram marketing. Benefits:

• Helps to analyse all your accounts.
• You can monitor and study your accounts in real-time.

So, use these smart management tools to improve your brand’s visibility across Instagram.

It is widely accepted that SEO is essential for any business operating online; businesses need to know how to carry out on-page optimisation in order to gain rankings and traffic. Just go through this article to know its importance and integral elements. Here are a few on-page optimisation elements: Google Search Console According to Google, Google Search Console is a free service that helps you monitor and maintain your site's presence in Google Search results. Google Search Console helps marketers to:

• Submit and check a sitemap.
• Check and set the crawl rate.
• View statistics when Googlebot accesses a website.
• Write and check a robots.txt file.

Key elements to consider:

• Set your preferred domain
• HTML improvements
• Links to your site
• Manual actions
• Crawl errors

Tips:

• Always add a website to your Search Console account.
• Specify your preferred domain (www or non-www).

Benefits: Search Console helps you to monitor your website’s traffic, ranking, and much more. XML Sitemap/HTML Sitemap According to Wikipedia, a Sitemap is an XML file that lists URLs for a site. It allows webmasters to include additional information about each URL: when it was last updated, how often it changes, and how important it is in relation to other URLs in the site. This allows search engines to crawl the site more intelligently. Benefits to using an xml sitemap:

• Lists all URLs.
• Gives special instructions to search engines.

Nofollow Add rel=“nofollow” to any links that you do not want search engines to follow. According to Google, "Nofollow" provides a way for webmasters to tell search engines "Don't follow links on this page" or "Don't follow this specific link." You can add it to any sponsored content/untrusted content or commercial articles with links out to vendors/service providers. Google Analytics Google Analytics is a free service that helps you to track and report website traffic. It allows you to review online campaigns by tracking landing page quality and goals. Goals might include:

• Sales
• Lead generation
• Viewing a specific page
• Downloading a particular file.

It is a great tool that enables you to measure a website's:

• Transactions
• Revenue
• Commerce-related metrics.

Benefits:

• Easy to set and understand.
• Powerful customised reports.
• Easy to connect with Webmaster Tool data.
• Effective real-time reporting.
• Helps to review historical data.

Response codes Response codes, such as 400, 403, 404, etc. should be identified and fixed immediately before they affect your site’s ranking. If you see multiple 404 errors, fix them. Also make sure that 301s redirection is used for all redirects, rather than 302 or 307 redirects.  (According to webconfs, a 301 redirect is the most efficient and search engine friendly method for webpage redirection.) So, are you ready to do whatever it takes to make your website visible? Yes, combine these on-page strategies with your current tactics to create your own landmark.

The ultimate role of any online business is to improve the conversion rate of their landing pages. Of course, it is quite difficult to achieve high conversion rate; however, with the help of proven techniques, it can be achieved. Let’s understand what is a Landing Page? According to unbounce, a landing page is any web page that a visitor can arrive at or “land” on. Types of Landing Pages:

• Click through Landing Pages - Click through landing pages have the goal of persuading the visitor to click through to another page.
• Lead Generation Landing Pages - Lead generation landing pages are used to collect user data, such as a name and email address.

Let’s understand what is a Conversion Rate? According to Wikipedia, The conversion rate is the proportion of visitors to a website who take action to go beyond a casual content view or website visit, as a result of subtle or direct requests from marketers, advertisers, and content creators. Here are a few significant steps to improve conversion rates: Provide strong reasons to your buyers Most business owners experience high bounce rate because they fail to communicate about benefits, features and value of their products and services. So, provide complete details about your products and services in order to improve the conversion rate. Include customers’ feedbacks To gain trust and confidence of buyers, you need to make a better use of customers’ feedbacks and testimonials. Integrate them into your landing pages. Safety Ensure that customers’ financial and personal information remains undisclosed and protected.   Make their transaction encrypted. For that, obtain HTTPs as well as security certificates from agencies/ third parties. Font style and size It is the most overlooked factor.  Some marketers use big font size, while others use small. Strike a right balance for the maximum yields. Load time Load time can make or break your business. In fact, it can lower your overall conversion rate. So, if you find that your website is slow, contact your hosting provider as well as optimise images and website code. Include social media buttons Internet marketing experts recommend social media buttons on websites because they help people to share your landing page and make it visible across the social media channels. Make your landing pages responsive Today’s shoppers are more demanding than ever before, they want everything on their mobile devices, hence, choose a responsive design. Add video to your landing page By 2017, video will account for 69% of all consumer internet traffic. Hence, add a high-quality and short video to your landing page and improve its conversion rate. Tips:

• Create short videos.
• Never choose an autoplay option.
• Focus on the placement of video.
• Try to keep your landing page videos short.
• Use Gifs, if video integration is not possible.
• Measure user’s engagement.

Don’t forget to test your strategies At regular intervals, test and measure your SEO, online marketing and PPC strategies. For that, use A/B testing. According to optimizely, A/B testing (also known as split testing or bucket testing) is a method of comparing two versions of a webpage or app against each other to determine which one performs better. Results of A/B Testing:

• Reduced bounce rates
• Increased conversion rates
• Higher conversion value
• More sales

Benefits of A/B Testing:

• Improves content performance
• Lowers risk

So, worry no more and follow the above mentioned steps to improve the conversion rate of landing pages.

E-commerce search engine marketing is one of the best ways to improve your website’s ranking and bring the expected traffic. All you need to do is to optimise your e-commerce site in a proper way. Keyword research Keyword research is the cornerstone of any website, whether it is an e-commerce store or a normal service based website. In other words, keywords can make or break your business, so choose the right set of keywords. Some people still believe that using too many keywords will help them to rank better.  In fact, there are certain   criteria to pick the right set of keywords, such as:

• Relevant
• High volume
• Low competition

Tips:

• Follow well tried keyword research process (https://ahrefs.com/blog/keyword-research/).
• Remove unnecessary keywords.
• Study your business, competitors as well as industry.

Create a sitemap If you want to help your users and search engines to read/scan/index your website efficiently, create a sitemap. Now, what is a sitemap? According to Wikipedia, a site map (or sitemap) is a list of pages of a web site accessible to crawlers or users. It can be either a document in any form used as a planning tool for Web design, or a Web page that lists the pages on a website, typically organised in hierarchical fashion. But why use a sitemap? Creating sitemaps has multiple benefits, such as:

• Ease of navigation  (https://www.sitemaps.org/)
• Better visibility
• Guides or informs search engines about any changes on your site.
• Faster indexing.
• Helps to classify a website

How to generate a sitemap? With the help of these proven tools, you can easily generate a sitemap:

• Slickplan
• Dynomapper
• Screaming Frog XML Sitemap Generator
• PowerMapper

Where to submit a sitemap? Once you have generated your site’s sitemap, you will need to upload, check, as well as validate it. You need to submit it  to Google Webmaster Tools. Tips:

• Always generate and submit your sitemap. (https://www.semrush.com/blog/10-awesome-visual-proven-sitemap-generator-tools/)
• Use gzip to compress your Sitemaps.
• All URLs listed in the Sitemap must reside on the same host as the Sitemap.
• Periodically check and update your sitemap for better results.

Optimise images It is a well established fact that high-quality images speak  louder than words. However, you should use "alt tag attribute" to optimise it. Now, the question arises, why create an alt tag? According to Google, it provides Google with useful information about the subject matter of the image. We use this information to help determine the best image to return for a user's query. (For more details, visit - https://support.google.com/webmasters/answer/114016?hl=en) Tips:

• Avoid keyword stuffing.
• Be precise in alt text for products.
• Mention the topic in alt tag.

Use Breadcrumbs (Breadcrumbs are a useful navigational feature of a website) According to Wikipedia, Breadcrumbs or breadcrumbs trail is a graphical control element used as a navigational aid in user interfaces. It allows users to keep track of their locations within programs, documents, or websites. Types of Breadcrumbs:

• Location Breadcrumbs
• Path Breadcrumbs
• Attribute or Keyword Breadcrumbs

Advantages of using Breadcrumbs on a website:

• Help users to understand the layout of a website.
• Make navigation easy and simple.
•  Allow users to scan through your website and to view  content efficiently.
•  Easy to implement and improve the overall architecture of a website.

If used properly, all the above mentioned elements will help you to boost your business.

In today’s competitive business environment businesses need to manage their resources to streamline their operations and gain significant advantages. However, there are a few smart business tools to keep them ahead. These tools help a business to:

• Stay up-to-date
• Find solutions to potential roadblocks
• Simplify complex tasks
• Ensure business continuity
• Strengthen relations
• Improve marketing strategy

Here are a few smart business tools: Zarget This is a great conversion rate optimisation software solution with extraordinary features. It helps you to test multiple variations of a website and choose the best one. Features of Zarget:

• A/B testing via Google Chrome plugin
• Live heatmaps for interactive elements
• One-click website optimiser
• Self-service visual editor
• Split URL testing
• Traffic and conversion tracking

Tableau Software This is a remarkable self-service analytics application that allows you to explore data. This application uses a patented technology to translate mouse clicks into database queries and to show the results through graphic visualisations. Features of Tableau Software:

• Creates "no-code" data queries
• Translates queries to visualisations
• Toggle view and drag-and-drop
• Imports all ranges and sizes of data
• List of native data connectors
• Creates interactive dashboards
• Automatic updates
• Highlights and filters data

Pulseway This platform enables you to view and control all your Windows, Linux and Mac servers as well as workstations in real-time. Features of Pulseway:

• Monitors and Manages IT Systems
• Application Monitoring and Management
• Remote Desktop (Remote Access)
• Active Directory
• System Centre Operations Manager
• Internet Information Services
• Windows Server Backup

PagerDuty This SaaS alerting and incident tracking system helps engineers to resolve critical errors in IT systems. It can be integrated with all IT infrastructure monitoring tools -- such as Splunk, New Relic, etc. Features of PagerDuty:

• Monitoring Aggregation
• Easy Setup
• Effective Alerting
• Mobile Incident Management
• On-Call Scheduling
• Auto-Escalation
• International Reach

Tracker This customer service and support management software is designed to streamline your workflows, automate business processes and much more. Features of Tracker:

• PhaseWare Self-Service Center
• PhaseWare Event Engine
• Tracker Mail Checker
• Tracker Screen Designer
• Flexible service delivery
• Incident management

Workfront Workfront is enterprise work management software. Features of Workfront:

• Process improvement and management
• Collaboration tools
• Collaborative workspace
• Help desk tracking
• Timesheet management
• Real time data and planning tools

It doesn’t matter if you’re a project manager with years of experience or a beginner. Use these advanced business tools for better return on investment (ROI).

• Wondering how to use smart online marketing techniques to retain consumers?

Discover how to use online marketing strategies to retain customer: Educate your customers It is always better to educate customers rather than forcing them to buy any product or service. For that, you need to create:

• Videos
• Documents
• Manuals
• Case studies
• Articles
• Blogs
• E-books
• Tutorials
• Learning tools

Tips:

• Use research tools to create tutorials.
• Write and share "how to" articles.
• Use the power of storytelling.
• Create animated characters.
• Create and share explainer videos.

Personalise your messages This is particularly effective, if you are selling your products online and using email marketing to communicate. Tips:

• Use cookies.
• Provide complete information in your email messages.

Host Contest Online contest is one of the best ways to educate and attract customers. They will not only participate in the contest, but also become your loyal customers. Tips:

• Set your goals.
• Announce fabulous gifts and discount offers.
• Encourage fans to participate.
• Start referral programs.

Use CRM tools If you are not using CRM tools, you are missing a huge opportunity. These software programs are designed to generate leads, and improve marketing automation process. Tips:

• Use Salesforce Sales Cloud, Marketing 360, Zendesk, Configio, SalesforceIQ, etc.
• Engage customers everywhere.
• Use mobile applications to stay connected with your customers.

Use Social proof According to wikipedia, social proof, also known as informational social influence, is a psychological phenomenon where people assume the actions of others in an attempt to reflect correct behaviour for a given situation. Hence, use social proof as an online marketing technique to increases conversions. Tips:

• Integrate reviews and testimonials into your website.
• Include photos of your customers. (Research shows that pictures (along with text) increase the credibility of the statement.
• Use social sharing buttons.

Benefits:

• Improves business reputation.
• Attracts customers.

Reward Program There are a great number of ways to retain customers, and reward program is one of them. It is not only effective, but also wins the trust and confidence of users. Tips:

• Understand the requirements of users.
• Appreciate and reward your customers.
• Improve the shopping experience of customers.

Benefits:

• Improves sales.
• Boosts business reputation.
• Makes customer happy.

Send interesting newsletters If you want to make your users interested in your products and services, create an interesting, helpful and inspiring newsletter. It will help you to generate leads and improve customers’ loyalty. Tips:

• Write high-quality and research based content.
• Use high-resolution images.
• Adopt a user-centric approach.
• Use call-to-actions.

Start blogging Blogging is the main component of the strategy for at least 45% of marketers. So, start blogging. Tips:

• Identify buyer’s personas before creating content.
• Use powerful tools like Qeryz, SurveyMonkey, BuzzSumo, etc.
• Create compelling headings.
• Keep an eye on current trends.
• Promote your blogs (Facebook posts hit 75% of their impressions within 2.5 hours, and 75% of engagement within five hours.)
• Share only relevant and high-quality information.
• Create a community.
• Allow readers to share your content.

So, use these customer retention strategies to empower your small business.