Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is your company’s process for – yep, you guessed it – managing interactions with customers and clients. A proper CRM strategy will produce valuable data which can be analyzed to improve relationships between yourself, other businesses and, ultimately, your customers. This can also be used to influence and improve your marketing strategy.
A suitable CRM strategy will not only help you manage customer relationships, but it will help you improve them across the board too. In turn, this will help bolster how valued your customers feel and help drive growth as your company’s reputation is built through word of mouth and other means.
We live in a world powered by data. Today, it is more important than ever for companies to have a highly-functional CRM strategy and use a good CRM solution which can deal with the sheer quantity of data which it harvests each day. Each time a customer interacts with you, your website, reads your emails, talks to your customer service department or buys one of your products, new and insightful data is created which can be analyzed to make further improvements to your bottom-line.
Customer Relationship Management and Marketing
Your CRM, when proper techniques are used, can massively benefit your marketing strategy too. Here’s how –
1. CRM helps retain customers
Some research has shown that a good CRM strategy can help your customer retention and retain up to 30% of past customers. By keeping your customer’s data online and analyzing it, marketers are able to retain their customers by learning about them and using the information to form personal and bespoke relationships with each and every customer and demographic.
2. Personalize your marketing emails with CRM contact fields
It’s becoming more common for companies to send out emails to their past customers which are very personal and written to the point where it is difficult to tell that it is a mass email. This can be achieved by using CRM fields within your contact forms which lets you, the content creator, write a generic email that is sent to your email list. The fields are then filled in with personal customer information.
Examples of these contact fields include name, city, the last product the customer purchased, whether they used a discount code… you get the picture.
3. Create automated alerts
It is possible for you to create custom alerts and triggers within your CRM software. These enable you to create alerts whenever an action or event happens so that it can be acted upon accordingly. If, for example, you want to know when somebody subscribes to your email newsletter so you can call them up further down the line, you can create an automated alert which does this and then notifies a member of your team who deals with customer service or relationship management.
How does this improve your marketing strategy? Well, in this instance, it helps to accelerate your sales cycle by reminding the subscriber about your business.
4. It provides genuine customer insights
When you grow accustomed to using a CRM for gathering and analyzing accurate pieces of data, you start to learn more about your customers and have a real insight to who they are as people. This helps you improve your company’s performance and growth by making commercial decisions which take the wants, needs, and concerns of your customers into account.
5. Improved customer engagement
With CRM, you should begin to see over time that your overall customer engagement has improved. This is happening because you are using your CRM data to listen to, understand and engage with your customers. Customers appreciate feeling like a brand or company cares about them, and this is reflected with increased engagement through social media channels, your website and through sales.
Improved engagement means increased conversions, more leads and customer loyalty. This helps benefit your marketing strategy because people will be eager to share your business with their friends, family, and co-workers.
Performing proper CRM using a robust CRM solution is important. It is more important today than it ever has been to understand, engage with and cater to the specific demographics within your base of customers. If you fail to do this then you will struggle to remain competitive and operate in the modern commercial climate.
