No matter if your company works in the B2C or the B2B sphere, customer satisfaction is a vital component of your success. To develop better customer relationships, brands today use technology every step of the way, but that doesn’t make those bonds less personal. If anything, innovative software and tools can help businesses connect on a much more personal level with each customer.
This is where CRM (customer relationship management) tools truly excel the most. CRM systems can help a business break down data and collaboration silos. They can help teams share essential insights when making crucial customer-related decisions. But most of all, they aren’t limited to customer support. CRM tools are designed to help the whole organisation grow and evolve.
With it, your marketing strategy can deliver better results. You can optimise your marketing spending to invest more in the tactics that your customers prefer and cut down on those that no longer work. This time, we’ll focus on the marketing side of your business and how you can put your CRM tool to work in favour of your marketing campaigns – while at the same time contributing to your entire organisation.
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Start with employee training
Your strongest asset, your people, are behind all the tools and gadgets you’re using to improve business performance. If your people aren’t satisfied or don’t have the necessary information to represent your brand properly, none of your fancy systems will actually compensate for that lack in knowledge.
What you can do is use your CRM platform as a learning tool for your employees. Your industry is changing and your brand evolving, but so is your infrastructure as well as your strategies. A CRM system is one of the most effective ways to share that know-how among teams and departments alike.
Using CRM tools to fuel education in your organisation can help you keep all your employees properly trained to handle every customer interaction and every marketing opportunity. You can create dedicated marketing modules that ensure your brand voice is consistent and your employees know how to represent your brand online and offline.
Bonus points if you share those through the cloud and let your CRM tool work in a cloud environment so that your remote staff can benefit, too!
Use CRM tools to personalise your interactions
As much as your marketing experts know about your target audience, data collection, analysis and audience segmentation is where CRM systems truly shine. This is especially prominent in large-scale businesses that interact with dozens or hundreds of potential buyers, such as online marketplaces. Personalisation through your marketing in such ever-growing environments is only possible with good CRM software.
To a great extent, the data you can pull from your CRM tool can define the direction for marketplace website development, so that both your content and design are in line with what your audience needs. Utilising the power of your CRM tool is one of the pillars of startup marketing for founders in the online marketplace sector, simply because of the wealth of information and the sheer scale of the project you’re going to tackle.
Needless to say, your CRM system will help grow your online marketplace through better digital marketing all around, meaning better visibility, awareness and reputation. Instead of presenting a mess of products, your CRM tool can help you segment your audience and offer highly customised, targeted products for each individual that visits your store.
Personalisation in marketing, at every stage of the customer journey can make or break your customer relationships. The more you leverage the right intelligence, the greater your chances are to develop long-term customer bonds.
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Automation saves the day
Efficiency in marketing boils down to enabling your teams to spend the bulk of their time on mission-critical assignments without wasting it on menial, repetitive work. For instance, why should your social media manager manually post on each network if they can save hours of their time by automating this task? Why manually send out your emails if you can personalise and send them in bulk automatically?
Any decent CRM platform has numerous automation capabilities, including email automation and alerts for your sales team to follow up on a lead. What’s more, automation through a CRM tool helps you set up streamlined workflows for every department (marketing included) and for the entire organisation.
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Keep your CRM system stable and secure
As we’ve already mentioned, CRM systems thrive when they operate within a cloud environment. The cloud lets your marketing teams collaborate in real time, brainstorm and ensure transparency as well as accountability. With CRM tools, your marketing team members will know exactly what they need to do every day and track their project/campaign progress no matter where they are.
What you need to do to protect your security and cloud stability is leverage server availability monitoring to avoid system-related issues or delays. Monitoring your cloud, your business network and your CRM system helps you keep the system running for your marketers at all times.
That means they can use your CRM tool to track reviews, social media comments, make sure they don’t delay responding to customer questions and the like. If your system is up and running, you can track customers’ digital footprints and make sense of their behaviour easily for future campaigns, too.
Building customer loyalty programs
As you begin using the data compiled in your CRM system, you can refine customer interactions at every touchpoint. Improving an isolated customer conversation might not seem like a big deal, but at scale, becoming better at communicating your brand offers and values will increase loyalty and retention.
That opens up a whole host of opportunities to develop brand advocates. Your CRM tool can enable any loyalty program you envision: the data and marketing reports will make sure you keep them customer-specific, while automation will help with implementation and tracking.
Over to you
Helping your teams collaborate more easily and breaking down data silos are both extremely valuable perks of CRM systems. As you can see, these and other CRM software uses also hold immense potential to improve your marketing strategy as a whole. The result? You can expect your customer relationships to flourish, while the frustration and stress of poor collaboration will dwindle, if not vanish.
If you already have a CRM system, how have you been using it to drive your marketing forward? We all know that these platforms are a gift that keeps on giving to marketers. The more we can learn from one another, the better we’ll use CRM systems to forge strong customer bonds and a better business presence for the long haul.
About the author:
Nikola Sekulic is a seasoned brand developer, writer, and storyteller. Over the last decade, he’s worked on various marketing, branding, and copywriting projects – crafting plans and strategies, writing creative online and offline content, and making ideas happen. When he is not working for clients around the world, he is exploring new topics and developing fresh ideas to turn into engaging stories for the online community.
