Sophisticated customer relationship management software provides your business with a number of benefits, including valuable data collection and an integrated email marketing platform. When it comes to understanding your customers better, CRM makes it easy.
Not only does the system store and update all client contact details, it also tracks when they have used your business, every interaction they’ve had with you, and what products and services they like best.
Because of this, a CRM like Act! CRM is the ultimate tool for focusing your key messages and personalising your marketing so that you can build long-lasting relationships with your customers.
Here’s how it’s done:
Insight and segmentation
In this day and age, customers are bombarded with marketing messages.
Google’s former CEO, Eric Schmidt, has claimed that more content is currently being created in just 48 hours than all of the content ever created before 2003. That’s an awful lot of marketing messages, though it’s not at all surprising. Not when every business has a blog, every business has social media and every business uses email marketing to drive a message home.
But think about this for a second. If you were being completely honest, how many marketing emails do you actually read? Our guess would be not that many, not unless they incorporate your personal interests. That’s where a CRM like Act! CRM or Salesforce comes in.
CRM works to gather vital information on customer interests and goals to help marketers stay ahead of the game. With such valuable data on demand, you can be proactive in your messaging, instead of being reactive. Better still, CRM segments all its data, not just by the likes of jobs, gender, age and industry, but by recent activities, interaction, products purchased, emails opened and personal likes and dislikes. So, it’s safe to say that it gets to know your customers pretty well!
Thanks to this, you will be able to focus each and every one of your key messages towards individual customers, which in the long term can help to build loyal relationships and keep your customers coming back.
Pinpointing customer bugbears
In a similar strain, a CRM system like Salesforce can help to solve any customer issues. If there’s something a customer doesn’t like about your business, it will show up on the system.
You’ll have access to everything from email marketing results to recent interactions. With that you can analyse where any problems occurred and why they occurred, which will then enable you to tailor your messages to address and solve the issue, making you instantly more valuable to the customer.
Analysing buying patterns
To ensure your sales pitch is always spot on, a CRM r=product like Sage CRM can help you examine the buying patterns of your customers.
For example, if your retail business sells beauty products and you know a customer bought a moisturiser three months ago, you’ll know from previous purchases and buying patterns that they’ll soon be ready for a new one. Before they go elsewhere to pick one up, you could send them an email about the product they previously bought to allow your business to be fresh in their mind when they’re ready to buy again.
Knowing what products your customers like and the times they tend to buy them will help focus your messaging so you don’t make the wrong sales pitch and miss out on the right one.
In addition to this, analysing your customers’ buying patterns can also give insight into which customers bring in the most revenue. Taking care of the high-value customers is absolutely essential if you want to grow your business, so it’s good to know who they are and what they buy in order to keep them keen.
Focused targeting
It’s important to remember that with key messages, one size doesn’t fit all.
Once you know what your customers like and don’t like, it’s much easier to personalise the messages you put out to them.
Personal touches in marketing can make a world of difference, and CRM can give your business the power to make them happen. With the data CRM provides (interests, favourite colours, favourite sports, etc.) you will be able to segment the database into groups and angle your messages and designs to meet your customers’ individual tastes.
In return, this will help to re-engage those customers, increase response rates and push those customers through the funnel.
Nurturing relationships
Once your customers have made it through the funnel, it’s important to engage them regularly in order to keep them coming back.
CRM software allows you to nurture customer relationships by keeping track of how best to connect with them. It will tell you how your customer likes to be contacted (email, phone call, social media or physical mailers) and how they’ve used your company in the past.
The more familiar you are to your customers, the more you can focus your messaging to re-engage them and give them what they want.
Repeat
CRM really is a golden ticket to success, as it will literally show you where you’ve failed with a campaign and where you’ve scored a win.
Knowing what works and what doesn’t is valuable to a company. You need to know these metrics in order to shape and sculpt your messages to the best they can be.
Once you know what messages work, stick to them!
Recycling the formula for new audiences and new contacts will save you time, money and energy in the long run. Who wouldn’t want that?
Not only does CRM help you better engage with your customers and prospects, it can also help to increase your conversion rate and reduce your overall marketing costs. Most importantly, with the right key messages forged from insightful data, you’ll be able to nurture those all-important customer relationships to continuously improve and grow your business
