Earlier in our blog post on the advantages of business automation with CRM, we have introduced three main reasons why businesses need a CRM solution. The article mainly focuses on the benefits for salespersons, but sales isn’t the only team that can improve its operations through a CRM.
Let’s see how CRM systems support marketing teams and help them execute successful campaigns, measure their effectiveness, and personalize marketing messages.
1. Have a 360-Degree View of the Customer
In the era of advanced information technologies, the most valuable resource for businesses is data. However, merely the possession of data won’t give you an advantage; you should know how to use it wisely for your marketing and sales campaigns to generate more leads, move them through the sales process, and close the deals.
In this sense, CRM systems play an irreplaceable role for marketers and salespeople. By using CRM systems for marketing purposes, you’ll be able to view all the data about the customer in one place - who the customer is, how he/she found your company, what product he/she is interested in, etc. By having this information at hand, you can tailor your marketing campaigns to the customer’s needs and help her/him progress from awareness to the decision-making stage, and even identify cross- and up-selling opportunities.
2. Measure the Effectiveness of Marketing Campaigns
As shown in the previous paragraph, CRMs for marketing help your team plan and execute data-driven marketing campaigns. However, this isn’t all. CRM system helps marketing teams measure the effectiveness of these campaigns. For example, the software can monitor who opened the email, clicked a link, unsubscribed from your mailing list, etc. By combining the results of all separate campaigns, the CRM software for marketing can show metrics like overall clicks, generated leads, expected revenue, etc.
3. Smart Segmentation Based on Customer Behavior
The third way how CRM systems support marketing is the ability to smartly segment the customer base according to different criteria. For example, you can design and implement marketing campaigns targeted at customers in a specific geographic location, who have a particular job title, or operate in a certain industry.
Besides this traditional approach to segmentation, the best CRM systems for marketing also allows grouping prospects according to their behavior. For this, marketers use a particular “lead scoring” system - assigning certain amounts of points to prospects for specific actions or behavior. For example:
All customers that open your marketing mailers get 3 points
Each time a prospect visits your website receives 4 points
Each time a prospect downloads a document from your website receives 5 points.
Then, the system calculates total points for each lead or customer, which helps salespersons and marketing specialists identify hot and cold contacts and take respective actions.
4. Create and Send Personalized Content
As mentioned previously, CRM systems give a 360-view of the customer. This information may be used to personalize your marketing mailers. No more “Dear Valued Customer,” “Dear Partner,” or “Hello Friend.” Today, CRM tools for marketing allow addressing your customers or prospects’ by their names. You can even impress them by including a salutation, the company name they work at, or their job title. Equipped with these details, you can individualize all your marketing messages, which will lead to an improved response rate by your customers and even increased revenue.
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