As part of the Authorized Duct Tape Marketing Coach network, I recently became more involved with a couple of tools that, when used together, provide a very robust and very affordable CRM system for small businesses and independendent professionals.

Swiftpage, the number one integrated email marketing solution for ACT! by Sage, introduces a marketing automation platform to its already robust service – giving you the tools to automatically reach out to your ACT! Contacts, Groups, Look Ups and Companies.

Regular readers here know I have a passion for technology and automating systems. I've written about small business CRM here in the past. I was critical of ACT a couple of years ago when the version at that time did not work with Office 2009. It also had some serious performance issues at that time. I'm happy to say I've been using ACT version 11 for a while now, and all of those issues appear to have been fixed.

I also used to write about Outlook with Business Contact Manager, but I eventually stopped using that product because of the lack of Activity Series and some other automation shortcomings.

So far, I am very pleased with the ACT \ Swiftpage combination. Swiftpage provides very robust campaign management and allows you to work with your ACT contact database, so you can avoid the issue of having customer data in different systems (a pet peeve of mine).

Here are a few things that Swiftpage can help you do:

On Demand Marketing - World -Class Email Marketing – Integrated into your ACT! environment gives you the ability to Create, Send and Track Email Marketing blasts.

Survey Tool – Gather valuable data from prospective or current customers and automatically build new or update your existing ACT! contacts.

Sales Force Automation -

1. Swiftpage Call List – A ranked list of your most interested contacts based on the way the interacted with your email marketing blast.
2. Send As – Allow one user to send on behalf of your entire sales team
3. Snapshot tab – Gather valuable contact profile information from the web with a single click and more.

Marketing Automation - Swiftpage Drip Marketing – Swiftpage Drip Marketing blends simple functionality, like the ability to automatically send a sequence of marketing messages to a contact that fills out a form on your website, with intelligent technology that will send different messages to contacts based on their previous actions. For example, send a postcard to those that did not open the previous email – automatically!

I'll be posting more about this great combo and how to use it to grow your business. In the meantime, I'd love to hear about your experience using these tools.