Businesses are looking for better ways to distinguish themselves from the ongoing competition in the market. New products, sales process that doubles the leads, marketing led by machine learning, the possibilities are endless when it comes to innovative ways companies use to win sales. Statistics claim that a real time CRM can improve sales of any business up to 30% and boost the productivity up to 35% and improve the forecast accuracy on the go. However, there seems to be a lot of misconceptions in marketing around CRM systems.
Many people think CRM is just a technology to manage leads or a database of customer contacts. While it’s actually both, it’s more than that! When integrated with marketing automation, CRM can be much more of an integral part of your marketing strategy. Here’s how a real-time CRM improves your marketing strategy.
Obtain a 360-degree view of your customers
By their very nature, CRM systems are designed to give you a 360-degree view of your prospectus to ensure that your marketing team has access to this information in real time. From emails to order history, payment information, and call notes, these information means everything you need to have a customer first approach, no matter which salesperson your customers are interacting with. When you have a detailed view of your customers, it is easy to understand their buying patterns. A vital analysis can be gained from the CRM Customer Database like what your customers are buying often, what types of products they are interested in, at what time they prefer to buy and how they place orders. You can collect this data and establish the channels you must be selling more on.
Better customer communication with intuitive data analysis
CRM is a gold mine where you can dig for integrated data collection to understand customer behavior and identify sentiment insights. Data vital to building lasting and customized customer relationships can be obtained from CRM to draw out marketing campaigns which are effective and economically viable. These data can be further broken down based on locations, demographics, purchase patterns, disposable income etc. and through predictive analysis, the results of a specific outreach campaign can be accurately gauged which makes the marketing strategy simple and fast.
Automate your email marketing for good
Email marketing is one hard marketing technique which most companies doesn’t get right. But millions of leads and sales are generated on a daily basis using this advertising channel, but only if done right. Automating your email marketing is the best way to use it in conjunction with your CRM system to make it work for your business. Choose a CRM that comes with the functionality to automatically segment your customers, based on factors like customer type, contact status, buying history etc. and leverage the power of CRM to automate your email marketing based on the segmentation. You can segment customer bases based on buying history and find perfect opportunity to cross-sell other relevant products. You can also segment customers by sales channel which comes with its own set of costs and fee.
Achieve Measurable results
The difference between CRM supported marketing strategies and other traditional marketing campaigns are that the latter fails to give measurable and accurate results. With a CRM, it is easy to measure success rates and outcomes which can accurately support data like percentage rise in sales. CRM can also be of real help in times of crisis where you need to have an accurate and data backed real-time analysis for reasons of negligence. With a CRM integrated marketing strategy, you can perform receivable management in real time, which allows keeping track of which clients who owe you money for services and products they have received.
Enables automated Alerts
When integrating CRM with your sales and marketing strategy, you can create alerts and triggers within the CRM customer communication software. This ensures the notification goes to the right team member every time a specific action happens. For example, if you want a customer who subscribes to your newsletter to receive a touch base call a week later to see whether they are enjoying it or not, you can create automated alters to notify that team member to make the call. The automated CRM software also ensure that the information inside your CRM gets actionable. through this, you get increased lead visibility across marketing and sales which accelerates the sales cycle.
Increased customer engagement
Once you have all the elements in place you would see increased customer engagement. When you begin listening and understanding customers through the data obtained via CRM, it, in turn, leads to better engagement from your customers. Syncing your data between CRM and marketing automation helps to optimize customer insight and gain the ability to understand the actions and preferences of the customer better than ever before.
CRM integrated with marketing automation comes with tons of benefits to any business. Once you learn how to efficiently connect the CRM to your marketing strategy, it brings in a great return on investment. Though it takes some time to have functional CRM systems, once you have everything in place, an effective CRM will enhance your customer relationship and allows you to use targeted marketing strategies. Ultimately, it saves your time which you have been wasting on wrong marketing strategies and targeting the wrong set of customers. CRM marketing would be more focused and it increases your sales and maximizes profits. If you want to run a successful business, integrating CRM with marketing management is critical.