Reduce advertising spend, VIdegree Cloud based CRM improves marketing

Sitting alert at his office, Wang Maoshi of Idou Coffee says, “I wish I had used VIdegree earlier; in a year and a half since we started we’ve raised our monthly sales from just over to 4,000 to over 430,000 units.” Despite this great improvement, Wang knows that constant vigilance is needed to not lose customers.

“Operating on the Internet strong customer loyalty and word of mouth are imperative because we cannot interact with our customers face-to-face.” When developing his business plan, Wang knew that he needed a comprehensive system to interact with his customers and partners to help achieving his goals: becoming an Online platform for coffee sales, to sell on China’s Taobao site, and to introduce a wide variety of products to the Mainland market.

Wang decided that the way to inspire customer loyalty was to instate a membership program. “The best way we found (to reach customers) was to directly leave them messages. I wish I knew of VIdegree earlier” to move forward his plans.

In East Asia, where Yahoo remains king, Wang realized early the challenges in reaching a wider customer base. “We can’t afford to advertise on huge portal sites, so we prefer to reward our existing customers.” This strategy has paid dividends as satisfied customers started to buy exclusively from Idou and refer their friends to do the same.

Originally, Wang and his team did not have a good medium to reach their potential and existing customers. Electronic Direct Mail (EDM) was deemed too resource intensive and impractical to implement as the Idou team had neither the experience nor budget to bring in a traditional CRM system, which can cost many thousands of dollars, even for small businesses.

This need eventually led Wang to VIdegree, a full-featured CRM that is lightweight, easy to set-up, economical, and portable. “After using VIdegree to send EDM and text messages, we were so surprised to discover that our orders increased the very next day.” Idou uses the system to effectively manage their customers, for example all VIPs receive special discount codes before holidays, promoting seasonally relevant products, increasing repeat purchases.

Important, also, is that VIdegree’s simple operation means that users do not have to be advanced computer users in order to utilize EDM templates or set up scheduled mailings. “We were so surprised to discover that our orders increased the very next day after sending EDM and text messages through VIdegree.”