If you want to succeed with your business, you need loyal customers and brand loyalty. Building customer relationships is critical, as is feedback. But you need to be able to balance what they want with giving into requests.
This is where your CRM software comes into play. It helps you to build a complete customer profile that includes their feedback. It helps you to build a relationship with your customers. Marketing involves existing customers and new lead generation. Here we’ll focus on marketing to those existing customers and how your CRM can benefit you.
Word of Mouth – Candid Conversations
In our world today, most people spend at least part of their day on technology whether it’s their computer, tablet, or smartphone. When it comes to deciding what to buy or where to buy it word of mouth has always played an important role and it still does today, just in a somewhat different format called social media.
This is also the fastest and most effective way to build trust with customers and prospects. It’s also known to give the highest ROI. This includes online reviews, recommendations, open questions and answers, feedback and more. These conversations and what you learn about your customers can be integrated into your CRM software.
Be Honest
One way that small business stands out over large businesses is that customers have an easier time talking to a real live human. That translates to a lot less of their valuable time used trying to get a response and the building of trust in their relationship with the company.
Always be honest with your customer. Even when your customer is in the wrong, you can be respectful and kind in your response.
Your CRM software helps you to see patterns that are established, such as customers that tend to complain often or who have phoned in with the same problem or complaint numerous time.
But what does that have to do with marketing.
Well, as you create marketing campaigns that target through social media, you will be asked questions about your product, and it is important that you answer these prospects in an honest manner as well. In addition, you need to be incorporating these questions and responses into your CRM database so that you can follow them through the pipeline and determine how long it is from the initial engagement until the second sale takes place. In some cases, this can be quite long.
Keep Track of Your Customers and Prospects
Every conversation with a customer needs to be recorded and their CRM customer profile upgraded. All of this information is key to creating marketing campaigns that correctly target the desired audience. When a customer first purchases the initial information is recorded in the CRM database, but that profile needs to be continuously added to and built upon for marketing to be the most effective it can be.
How to Take Advantage of CRM Marketing Strategies
In a world that revolves around software technology, marketing has quickly evolved in just a matter of a few years. Thanks to the internet, marketing has never been more accessible and more affordable than it is right now.
It allows marketers to target a specific market with a specific marketing campaign far more frequently and with a much broader reach.
However, ironically, the digital age flexibility has actually made some marketers more ineffective because potential customers become irritated by messages that are not relevant or that arrive too often, customers become confused with messages that conflict, and a failure to connect to an audience that has had too much exposure.
CRM has added a new strength to the online marketing world because marketers have those challenges addressed.
CRM is far more than just software that manages your customers contact information and call notes. Previous versions of CRM software were able to help sales people and marketers focus marketing activities because it allowed for data mining. Today’s CRM software is proactive. Rather than trying to understand the data that’s been entered, today’s CRM is able to create, correlate, and display information visually to help you identify sales opportunities and patterns.
CRM can help you identify your target audience and the product, create your target list, decide what your message will be and then distribute it, via the medium you decide to use. You could opt for delivery via website, mail out, email, phone, etc. You can automate the scheduling.
Then you can capture inquiries and replies from your marketing campaign, route them to the correct department or sales staff and track the sales progress in the pipeline. The sale is then recorded and the ROI on the campaign can be determined. You determine your budget and make an ROI forecast for your campaign.
CRM can even help you to determine when the best time is to contact your customer, what kinds of messages get the best response, what new products/services your R&D should be focusing on and even whether your customer is serious about buying or just shopping and comparing.
CRM can do all of this because it can easily be integrated with external mail services, etc. that allow you to create lists that target a specific audience and then import it into your software or in many cases the CRM has these features built in so you can create campaigns and they emails have code embedded into them that ensures the interaction that occurs between you and the person receiving the message to be captured in your CRM database. There’s no longer a need to cut and paste.
Today’s CRM is not a passive tool. It can give you a full 360-degree look at your customer. These systems can be strategic and tactical with powerful support to make decisions. Capitalize what your CRM software has to offer.
Know the Benefits of Using CRM for Marketing
CRM can really help you with your marketing, which is pretty exciting for marketers. Let’s look at just how a CRM system can help you to be more effective with your marketing and turn up the sales
1)Access to Lead Information is Readily Available
When a CRM system is working right, the sales and marketing are completely integrated. This makes the lead intelligence immediately accessible to the marketers. All of the data is easily accessible and it’s all in one place.
So whatever marketing software you are using, because it’s integrated, your sales team just adds the information in your CRM system, and they will have access to all of your information as well. However, marketers will have better lead information through CRM, because much of the lead intel is gathered in the CRM system not the marketing software.
Information can be constantly added as sales team members learn things about the customer. This will mean anyone dealing with that customer will have the ‘whole picture’ and that makes it easier to target marketing campaigns far more effectively.
- It Helps With Pipeline Prioritizing
CRM gives you full visibility of the sales pipeline and it also assists you in prioritizing who you are going to email or call first. You never have to miss an opportunity. When both the sales and marketing departments have access they can identify the fields that will be important to them and use a lead scoring system or sifting system – either will work. It give both marketers and sales staff power to make the most out of the best opportunities and to search the pipeline for leads that are at a specific stage in the buying cycle. - Sale and Marketing Align Better
CRM won’t solve your sales and marketing alignment problems but it does make it better. Each month both departments have numbers they need to meet and if both teams are working in the CRM system that is integrated with your marketing software, it becomes quick and easy to assess the progress of both teams as well as identify and problem areas. Reports can be generated for management in no time at all. In addition, if marketing is meeting their monthly goals, they can assess whether these leads are filling the pipeline.
That’s just 3 ways that you can benefit from using CRM software in your marketing campaigns. Creating a flow that is easy to access, follow and use is key to any successful campaign.
Learn how to Tips to Increase Your Social CRM Success
If you found this article helpful, please help us share it with others. Thanks!😀
Online For Free 