Strategy From Leads to Loyalty: How Customer Relationship Management Should Drive Marketing & Sales Mohamed Hamad Strategy 5 mins read Jun 17, 2024 Ever wonder how some of your favourite brands, big or small, are just killing it with their marketing? Consistent and targeted emails, an insightful blog that’s informative and fun to read. Social media that has you pausing as you scroll to check their posts. They’re probably using a good marketing CRM. Businesses are constantly looking for ways to better connect with their audience to drive engagement and growth. And these days, everyone is on so many different channels, keeping track of all your efforts can be overwhelming and frankly, exhausting. Thats where a CRM can help make sense of the customer relations and marketing madness. What is a CRM? In a nutshell, a CRM, or Customer Relationship Manager, is a system designed to manage a company’s interactions with current and potential customers. It’s a centralized hub where businesses can track customer touchpoints, including emails, phone calls, live chats, and even website engagement and online purchases. Its primary goal is to improve business relationships, enhance customer retention, and drive sales growth by making sure a business always has up-to-date information about their customers. All of the information relating to how you interact with your audience and how they interact with you can be centralized in a CRM. What can I do with a CRM? We all want to punch above our weight call, and with all the tech at our disposal these days, we can. CRM’s can give us super powers to really connect by scaling up our efforts. Marketing Automation Automations is the wizardry behind successful digital marketing. It allows you to send communication emails and notifications go to the right person at the right time. Content is published on a schedule with insights on whose engaged with it, and notifies you of important actions to take note off. You can even setup sequences and drip campaigns to engage with your audience in a structured and reliable cadence that builds trust to convert your leads to customers. Workflows If marketing automation is wizardly, workflows are the spells you cast to get things done. Workflows are the behind the scenes repetitive tasks no-one wants to do, but when done really make for a smooth operation. Updating information based on specific events and customer engagements. Cleaning up your contact information database on a regular basis, or even validate data. Send renewal reminders to clients who subscribe to your service, or just send them a birthday email to make them feel special. Done right, workflows can take a lot of your shoulders and improve the overall state of your system. Customer Support Depending on your business, having a good customer support system can be crucial to the customer experience. Everyone’s been in the situation where a support email takes days to answer, and they don’t know how to answer your question, or fumble through your case. Many CRMs come with built-in customer support features such as chatbots, helpdesks, and knowledge base, and implementing them well can make a world of difference in maintaining loyalty by understand customer issues and resolve them quickly, fostering trust and stronger relationships. Integrations Some CRM’s like HubSpot will incorporate a lot of sales, marketing and business management features, but for most, they rely on 3rd party API integrations. Integrations to productivity suites like Google WorkSpace and Microsoft 365 will connect to your email and calendar to track communications and booked meetings. But to really get a good holistic view of your customers you might need more, like tracking your invoices with connections to Quickbooks Online, or site metrics with Google Analytics. You can even connect some to your website and eCommerce platform to track sales, and automate sending discount codes to customers who abandoned their cart. Analytics and Reporting All the bells and whistles are fun and games, but its only when you get real insights from all your efforts do you really see tangible and actionable metrics. Reporting on engagement, sales & forecasts, marketing KPIs & conversions, and customer support resolutions will give you a health check report of how your business is running. What do all the touch points, automations and communications doing for your bottom line is what good analytics and reporting well tell you to make informed and data-drive decisions. Which CRM’s are good for marketing? Choosing a CRM is very subjective, and there is no one size fits all. Its a balance of your business objectives, features, price and target audience and how you want to connect and communicate with them. In saying that, here are a few that we’ve explored in the past that we think are great for different reasons. HubSpot CRM – full service suite of features that cover marketing, sales, customer support and content creation ZohoCRM – another full service suite that integrates with the entire productivity suite at Zoho SalesForce – a pioneer in sales CRM with the most customizable and scalable features. Copper CRM – a Google certified and integrated sales focused CRM for service-based businesses like agencies. ActiveCampaign – powerful marketing automations with CRM capabilities best suited for eCommerce and SAAS businesses. Final Thoughts A good CRM can be an indispensable tool for any business that takes advantage of its features and maximizes its potential. Understanding your customer journey every step of the way and acting on it with marketing automations, while gaining valuable insights, will help your business improve customer relationships, drive sales growth, and ensure long-term loyalty. Implementing a CRM can be a game-changer, especially when sales, marketing and customer success teams are synchronized in their efforts and provide a seamless customer experience. Share This Article Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email
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