Freelancers: How To Get Your Hands on Incredibly Affordable CRM Software

You've taken the big move to go freelance. It's a new and exciting world that comes with its own set of challenges.

Starting out on your own can be tough, and growing your presence can be a difficult task. You need to get organised and build a community of loyal customers in those early days. The last thing you need to be worrying about at this stage is the time and resource it will take reach out to prospects, complete those tedious administrative tasks and chase up on un-paid orders.

What you need is a CRM software that gives you everything you need to run your organisation from one place... and of course, an affordable one. There are many options out there and searching for one right for you can often be like looking for a needle in a haystack.

So we have boiled down down some of the key features you can get inside an affordable CRM system, all for just £7.99 a month.

CRM

A CRM is a basic tool that you need to build successful relationships and increase your sales revenue.

CRM - standing for Customer Relationship Management - does what it says on the tin. It is a database of your prospect and customer records that allows you to see everything on these individuals and businesses, in one place.

A CRM software helps businesses understand why and how their customers buy from them. Data from across the entire customer journey can be logged and stored against a particular contact record.

You might have heard a lot of people talk about a '360-degree customer view'. This means getting a full picture of the customer journey, from the first contact to sale, to future conversations and purchases. You can't be expected to remember every detail on your customers all the time, so a CRM is a great tool that you can use as a freelancer to get every bit of information on your customers made available to you, whenever and wherever you need it.

Email Marketing

In 2019, businesses of all sizes should be using email marketing as part of their marketing and growth plans. Email marketing works wonders across multiple stages of the customer journey.

When you are just starting out, you probably have a list of prospective clients that you want to convert to paying customers. You target these prospects with email campaigns that show off your expertise. By just sharing your latest blog post on social media, you are hoping that your target customer sees and reads it. With email marketing, you can guarantee that it will end up in their inbox.

As humans, our memory and attention spans are pretty terrible, so by sending regular communications to your contacts you are reminding them each time that email lands in their inbox that you and your brand exist. 

As a note, whatever schedule you decide to set up, keep it consistent. If you can only write enough content for an email once every couple of weeks, then stick to that. You don't want to send five emails every week, and then burn out and disappear for a month. 

Autoresponders

So it's starting to go really well and you have people signing up through your website. Depending on your line of work, your response time could be 10 minutes, or it could be a couple of days. If potential customers have to start waiting a long time to get a response, they are going to get disinterested. As you start to get busier, getting back to prospects quickly can be very time consuming, and you can't be by your computer all the time to get back to them.

That's where autoresponders work wonders for freelancers. When someone completes in a contact request form on your website, you want them to receive confirmation that you got their email and that you are looking into. Autoresponders do just that. You can put whatever message you want in there, whether it's thanking them for getting in contact, or a message to say you are on holiday (freelancers have to take time off too you know).

You can send automated messages off the back off any event you want. Maybe you are sick of emailing and calling people for payment when their invoice is overdue. Set up an autoresponder and when that date comes around, let the software do the chasing for you.

Track Your Spending

When you start out, your time and money are two of the most valuable things you have. How you spend every minute and where you spend every penny matters. You can't waste time pouring money into channels that don't give you a return.

By using link tracking software, you can monitor the performance of every single campaign you put out. Whether it's a blog post, social media update or a paid display ad, you don't want to spend time and effort investing in Twitter, for example, only to find out all of your revenue is coming from a Facebook campaign. By embedding a tracking link behind your campaigns, you can optimise your marketing to make every minute and penny count. 

Make Sure You Get Paid

As a freelancer, customers can have the tendency to think they can get away with not paying you on time. Whether you are a global corporation or a one-man band, you deserve to get paid for your work. 

Without a large finance department, it can feel like a job in itself keeping track your orders and getting payments put through. Well, that's where billing software is there to help.

A billing software can help you with multiple aspects of your order process. You can track your orders from initial approval all the way through to completion, letting you know when you are expected to get paid. 

You might not have a standard one-time product model and have a subscription or retainer offering that you need to manage on a weekly or monthly basis. Billing software handles the automatic subscriptions so you don't need to. 

Create and send invoices, protect yourself against fraud and take payments from across the globe with the help of billing software, so you don't waste time chasing orders and can focus on growing your business. 

So we know what you're thinking and no, we aren't mistaken. You really can get all of this for just £7.99 a month.

Fortifi has a special package for startups and freelancers. 

With the Fortifi Explorer plan you get all the tools we just spoke about and much more:

• A CRM
• Email marketing software
• Autoresponder software 
• Link tracking software
• Affiliate management software
• Invoicing software
• Online billing software
• Live chat software
• Knowledge base software
• Support ticket software
• Full reporting across the entire platform
• ... and tons of other features you can use to take your freelance business to the next level

You are a team of just one, but get yourself a CRM that works for you, and you'll operate like a team of many.

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