Marketing and Your CRM
A customer relationship management (CRM) system has the ability to make a business more streamlined and customer-oriented through target market identification, task management and conversion progress tracking. A well designed CRM system is a competitive tool for companies and professionals. Consider the following 5 elements.
Identify and Target Your Market
Many businesses fail to properly identify and target the best prospects for their products or services. One of the first things a CRM system will do is help you to collect the data about your customer’s demographics. By collecting this information, you will be better able to understand who your customers are, what motivates them and be able to create solutions to meet your customer’s unique needs.
As you identify your prospects, you will be able to segment them by various characteristics. Segmenting your customers allows you to create customized content and marketing strategies, based on key variables, such as a customer’s specific interests, preferred method of communications and where leads are in the conversion process.
Planning and Developing Marketing Efforts
Once you are able to identify your market segment you will be able to better plan your marketing efforts. Sage CRM has a marketing campaign module which will allow you to track your marketing campaigns, automate many of the touch points, and gauge the effectiveness of your marketing strategy through easy reporting dashboards. By monitoring how your targets are responding to your marketing efforts will make it easier for you to modify your marketing strategies.
Tracking and Analytics
When you monitor how people interact and respond to your marketing efforts you will not only be able to modify your marketing strategies better but you will also improve your customer’s experience. A good CRM system should have robust reporting and analytics tools. These tools will allow you to cross-reference where your current efforts are more positively impacting your customers, which will lead to a higher conversion rate.
Connecting Departments
Marketing is not the only department that will be involved in a marketing campaign. A CRM system used by all departments will be able to connect the dots within a company. The people in the trenches will know key details about the customer and what they have received during the campaign. A CRM system will make it easier for a company to collect and store the information and collateral from the campaign, providing employees the opportunity to see what the customer receives. As you can see, a well-designed CRM system has many advantages. It provides better organizational focus, improved sales and marketing coordination and the ability to more personally target customers. This will ultimately lead to better customer relationships.
Written by Mary Greenlee, a Solutions Advisor and CRM expert for DSD Business Systems.