I’ve already recommended BenchmarkONE to other small businesses. The ease of use is a big reason why we love it. It’s one of the easiest to use sales and marketing tools I’ve seen.
I am President and CEO of Bluestrata EHR, a cloud-based electronic health records system built for long-term care facilities, based in Saint Louis, Missouri. I wear many hats in my role, from sales and marketing to finance and business development.
I have a long history of experience implementing and using enterprise CRM systems, like Salesforce, and know how costly and time-intensive it can be to implement enterprise systems.
Bluestrata began as a strictly Salesforce shop, but we wanted to pivot a bit and focus on inbound marketing – engaging our audience with deep, rich content and driving those customers back to us through our website, email or phone. So, I began exploring options for integrating sales and marketing tools with Salesforce.
The integrations we looked at involved bolting on big clunky tools to Salesforce. We found this to be both complex and cost prohibitive. It didn’t makes sense to add a couple thousand dollars a month in software expenses for features we wouldn’t use.
We needed a better solution for building automated, rather than ad hoc campaigns, which was what our team was doing. We wanted to streamline the whole sales and marketing process.
Through trial and error, we found nothing we really liked, until someone connected us to BenchmarkONE.
Today we’re still using Salesforce – it houses our historical data and remains an important part of our process on the sales side. On the marketing side, we’re using BenchmarkONE’s email marketing tools. The value that BenchmarkONE brings, just from email and digital marketing standpoint alone, is above and beyond what we pay for it, even apart from the fact that BenchmarkONE has a built-in CRM.
With BenchmarkONE, we’ve harmonized our marketing efforts to both prospects and customers. We can target our campaigns to different segments, staying top of mind with potential clients while communicating with current clients.
BenchmarkONE is our client communication tool. So if we have a scheduled outage for maintenance, a software update, or an education session targeted toward our users, we can easily notify them.
We have a nice-sized database in Salesforce, however the majority of those contacts are inactive. With BenchmarkONE, we can add a new group of contacts, easily weed out any duplicates, and add our inactive contacts to BenchmarkONE campaigns.
Since we started using BenchmarkONE, we’ve seen a steady increase in opens and click-throughs.
We began 2017 with a 19% open rate, and click-throughs at 5.5%. By the end of year, we quadrupled the number of emails sent, saw 1% increase in opens and 3% increase in click-throughs. We also saw a decrease in bounce rate from 4.25% to .5%, with virtually no unsubscribes throughout the year.
BenchmarkONE has allowed us to get the right message to the right place at the right time for the right people. We’ve been able to find those pain points in the marketplace and leverage those into engagement with prospects and suspects.
BenchmarkONE’s online forms have been super beneficial as well. Our marketing department can easily spin up a form on our WordPress site and capture new prospects.
Between forms and campaigns, we can easily manage webinars by quickly creating a registration form, and building webinar awareness through a campaign.
We love the point system in BenchmarkONE for gauging a prospect’s level of attentiveness. It’s so easy and straightforward. The most engaged customers get handed to the sales team. We don’t waste any time with prospects who aren’t a good fit. Instead, our time is spent following up with potential customers.
BenchmarkONE offers extreme value for a small business. Implementation and onboarding are a completely built-out process, while the pricing is straightforward and allows you to access all of the tools you need to grow.
BlueStrata EHR is a Software as a Service (SaaS) model EHR software platform developed for the Long Term Care industry that integrates clinical, financial and point of care services. Through its unique design, BlueStrata EHR is the most comprehensive clinical and billing system in the industry.