It is astounding to see several marketers using spreadsheets for managing prospects, leads, and customer data. Though spreadsheets and legacy email tools are excellent, to begin with, they tend to outgrow when a business grows its customer base and looks to expand its geographies.
On the other hand, customers today are bombed with literally all types of promotional offers and messages from literally every nook and corner. Now think for a second to how many times in a day do you get a promotional email talking about some offer or discount in your inbox also, how often you actually reply to such emails? Most importantly, how often one reads such emails?
Yes, marketing these days is a lot like a tug of war wherein brands are pushing themselves hard to woo their audiences. Everyone is out there to win customers and eventually, business. This is the reason behind the incredible content generation that the World Wide Web is witnessing these days.
Of late, there has been a steep rise in the number of marketers resorting to CRM systems to up their marketing game. Here’s why CRM and marketing go hand-in-hand:
Customer intelligence
As a marketer, are you aware of the number of customers you have in each city or town or the number of prospects lying in your sales pipeline? A marketer when fails to segregate his/her customers will only end up sending the same message to almost all the customers and prospects leading to poor open rates. In a worst-case scenario, it can incur a bad reputation to your brand.
A good CRM software will not only help you segment your customers by age, profession, industry, etc. but will also segment your prospects and customers by their interests, social media activities, purchase history and email click rates.
Marketers, when get access to this data, can personalize their marketing messages and campaigns that befit their audiences. Long story short, segmentation of your customer base will only aid a business drive its revenue, but will also improve its email marketing game.
Targeted marketing
One of the most challenging chores for a marketer is to seep through the heaps of customer data. Getting a reply from potential prospects or customers who most likely will buy from you requires a marketer to send messages that should appeal to them.
Luckily, CRM solution can help a marketer to navigate through all his/her contacts and help to target the profitable ones or the ones that are likely to make a purchase. A CRM software entails credible data pertaining to a customer’s preferences and behavior, which in turn helps the marketers to come up with sound and informed decisions that will eventually drive customer satisfaction and retention.
Contact management
The amount of customer/contact data that a marketer works with is often overwhelming. This includes those emails, activities, documents, contact details, and all things customers.
When working with a CRM software, you create a contact and then key in all the activities, emails, and documents in one particular file/folder. Now pulling the required customer data is just a click away from any place and anytime. Further, any changes or modification done to a customer profile is updated in real-time across the system. Thus, making sure that everyone stays on the same page.
Smarketing
This very nexus of CRM and marketing has led to the birth of a new term coined as ‘smarketing,’ which denotes sales and marketing. Since it is the era where most of the businesses have sales and marketing teams working together towards common goals. This is undoubtedly a huge step ahead in the modern business landscape.
Now when marketing and sales teams work as one single entity to attain a common goal, it means that they would be working with the same data. Here, the sales department would be in charge of the ROI of marketing campaigns/ efforts as well, whereas the marketing department will be in charge of the sales revenue besides their routine responsibilities.
CRM sits at the epicenter of this emerging trend (smarketing) since it would facilitate seamless and consistent communication and flow of data across these departments ensuring that everyone stays on the same page. In addition, marketing automation would mean more conversions, since automation would greatly drive sales pitch and sales reps will be armed with customer intelligence to help them reach the right customer at the right time and with the right message. Lastly, yet importantly, both the marketing as well as sales teams would enjoy transparency like never before paving way for more sales.
Takeaway
A CRM solution helps you engage with your customers and prospects in a better manner. Simply put, it helps you approach your target audience on a personal level; thus, driving click rates and customer acquisition levels significantly.
So what’s your go-to tool when it comes to marketing? Let us know in the comments below.
Author bio:
Anwar Shaikh writes about the cloud, artificial intelligence, IoT, and all things enterprise technology such as marketing CRM software and enterprise management systems. A writer at heart and Digital Marketing Manager, Anwar writes for Sage Software Solutions Pvt. Ltd., a leading provider of cost-effective CRM software to small and mid-sized businesses in India.