CRM experts know that your CRM system can play a key role in your marketing campaign.
Let’s start with the top 6 marketing tips.
1 Use a Subscription Management Page to Gather Marketing Data
Don’t just use a subscription management page to allow recipients to opt out or change their email preferences. Make the most of it. Use it to gather additional marketing data.
For example; you can use a web form to gather support requests or you can use a survey to obtain your customer’s feedback. Make the most out this opportunity to engage with the customer.
2 Do Not Just Use Email Communication To Nurture Your Program
If you’re a large company or corporation, your nurture campaign should involve both email and a personal phone call from the sales staff. You can trigger a CRM work flow from within the nurture. This will create a reminder for the sales staff to follow up with this customer on the nurtured lead.
3 Use Dynamic Content to Simplify Email Marketing Campaigns
There is no need to create tons of various email templates to send the same message to different audiences that you are targeting. Just create a single template and then take advantage of dynamic content creating a customized experience for the email recipients.
4 Manage Your Live Events by Combining CRM Systems With Marketing Tools
Take advantage of web forms to gather registrations, send out save the date emails and other reminders. You can also connect your CRM system with Eventbrite to collect the most data about the live event you are having.
5 Grow the Power of Your Automated Marketing Tools with CRM Work flows
You can evaluate the answers to a survey and then send any negative responses to the specific department or personnel in your company by using the customer work flow in CRM.
6 Use Social Media to Collect Data, Use it And Analyse It
Social media is a great way to communicate with customers, but why not use your CRM system to collect social networking data and then align it with your other marketing and sales information in a way that will help you to understand customer’s needs in a much better way. Social marketing data can offer deep insights that can aid you in your overall marketing campaigns as well as selling to your customers and learning how to serve them in a better way.
These are 6 simple things that CRM experts recommend that allow you to get the most out of your marketing by taking advantage of your CRM system to its full potential.
How to Achieve Success with Social CRM.
We live in a hyper social world and that’s also where you will find your customers sharing their opinions, offering compliments and voicing their complaints about your products/services.
Facebook and Twitter are the two most commonly used social networks but there are many others. It is difficult to separate customer relationship management from social media management; however, just having social CRM alone isn’t adequate enough.
You will need to choose a management solution that fits your company and then develop guidelines and strategies that work within the chosen solution.
Let’s look at how you can create a successful social CRM strategy.
1 You Need Access to the Right Resources
Social networks allow you an opportunity like never before to deliver great service to your customers. Though bear in mind, however your team is set-up to solve problems, it can be a frustrating experience for your customers.
Consumers are extremely impatient with hold times on the phone, but they are also becoming impatient with how social help requests are handled and response time, so keep that in mind.
2 You Need a Solid Platform to Conduct Social CRM
You want to choose a comprehensive social media management platform so that you have quality listening, top-notch engagement capabilities and the ability to monitor. Your social platform needs to seamlessly integrate with your CRM system and it should be customer centred. Off point solutions are now a thing of the past.
3 Reward Customer Loyalty
Those customers that exclusively engage with your brand via social media should be rewarded. You can create a loyalty code to help keep those customers. You can also offer a discount code for prospects to entice them to make a purchase.
If a customer leaves positive feedback, reward them for that by sending them out a personalized message with a discount offer. Send it as a promotional offer via snail mail for extra impact.
4 Identify Who Your Social Influencers are and then Engage Them
Use the social media tools available to you to identify who is responsible for driving the most conversation around your brand. Then reach out to those individuals and start to build a relationship with them. Measured Analytics is an excellent tool to use for that purpose.
5 Remember to Talk to Your Customers
If you want to build a powerful social media presence, you will need to engage your customers and visitors in two-way conversations don’t just shove information out there, no one likes to be talked at with no feedback to any queries they may wish to raise.
Implement these 5 tips to help you get the most out of your social CRM endeavours.
CRM and Email Marketing
Email marketing is one of the most powerful types of marketing you have available to you, so it’s important to get it right. If currently you are not taking advantage of email marketing then you are missing out on sales. However, we understand there are limited hours in the day and too much to do and so without the right tools you might find taking on an email marketing campaign just too daunting. This is where your CRM can play a key role in your marketing campaigns.
Through your CRM software you can create custom marketing campaigns that target specific customers. The more detailed the information in your customer profile the more beneficial it is to you when it comes to lean targeting.
Email marketing using CRM is simple and easy to set up. Plus you can automate the process so it automatically sends out on specific dates. It seamlessly integrates with your CRM and allows for easy follow up as well.
If you want to grow your list, use it in conjunction with web forms. Your email marketing campaigns can be of varying styles. Such as a newsletter, and introduction to a new product, a promotion for a specific time period and many more different things. Be creative with this and you’ll reap the benefits.
You can create themes based on a particular marketing campaign. In your newsletters, you can track links that the recipient clicks and collect other valuable information that you can enter into CRM. Targeted email campaigns are the most effective, but how well you can target your market is solely dependent on how well the customer database is maintained.
In the early days of all email marketing campaigns, don’t be afraid to do a couple of small trial runs to make sure everything goes as you expect. There’s nothing worse than having a glitch that goes out to all your customers and then having to backtrack.
Today’s customer is impatient. They want the information they receive to be as concise as possible and they certainly want it to be accurate. You’ll annoy them with glitches and inaccurate information, so get it right the first time.
You can also take advantage of email reporting that can tell you about bounces, delivery, click through rates, open rates, and much more. These detailed statistics can help you to determine how successful your campaign was. The subsequent information can be used to determine ROI (return ion investment) and it can also be used to determine what changes, if any, need to be made to your marketing campaign.
CRM Marketing Needs To Align With Multiple Technologies
If you are going to create customer relationship management that is highly effective at the enterprise level you are going to need to create a database strategy that incorporates many different technologies along with integrating different business functionality such as sales, customer service and marketing.
If you really want to get the most out of your CRM technology, marketing needs to have a solid relationship with your IT Dept. or at least be directly linked, so they can monitor it.
This is not the same type of alignment that marketing would have with sales. The IT Dept. deals with installing, maintaining, and supporting technology within the organization and they make the decisions about technology.
When marketing correctly aligns with the IT Dept. they will be able to get access to the marketing systems they need to achieve their goal and get the marketing outcomes they desire.
It takes time to build this relationship with an IT Dept, so start earlier rather than later. It will be especially beneficial to you. It’s also important not to get IT involved too late in your CRM strategies. The earlier you integrate them, the better they will understand your needs and the more help they can be to you.
If you are using cloud based software you will need to have your IT Dept. involved because there are many concerns for your other data systems. Everything needs to be compatible, privacy needs to be ensured, and it must be secure. You need to your IT Depts help here!
Another excellent alignment is with your sales dept. Sales already has the data relating to current customers and in that data will be trends that can help you with your current marketing campaigns. However, in today’s world, it’s also important to reach out beyond the sales department.
For example, savvy customer relations marketers are turning to social networking and integrating that into their CRM database. Again, there’s a need for your IT Dept. and their support.
Social media offers you an incredible amount of data on potential customers, such as what they like, what they watch, what they follow, personal information, and the list goes on.
This information, when integrated with existing database information can be used to create powerful CRM marketing campaigns that are second to none.
To date, there has never been so much opportunity to easily collect so much information on customers and potential customers. The use of social media is affordable and readily available. Many marketing experts refer to it as the biggest marketing tool to ever be available.
The key is to make sure you are taking advantage of multiple technologies and venues in order to gather the information you need to build a strong and effective marketing campaign.
Blending Marketing and Your Customer Relationship Marketing
CRM has long been used by many businesses. After all, it has significant value in the management of customers and the associated data. But the world is changing and so is the way we do business. Today’s customer is actually 57 percent into the buying cycle before they even talk to anyone from the company. Now more than ever before, when a customer reaches out, a marketer must be there through all the steps.
When the right customer relationship marketing software is used it will allow your marketers to plan and execute campaigns across a number of channels from beginning to end, and then it will allow you to measure the effectiveness of those campaigns. This can allow you to build your sales pipeline across numerous channels and to demonstrate in real time the impact of your marketing investment.
With the ability to streamline, plan and execute you can create an integrated plan to fit your budget and then track and analyse across all of your marketing channels. You’ll be able to reach your prospects through digital methods, email, social networking and more traditional means. You can collaborate processes and manage them across all your marketing team from one platform. Marketing has never been easier.
Because you can now easily design the journey of your customer or prospect, the recipient is receiving highly targeted content whether it’s a newsletter or a special offer. You can now easily create different channels to target different markets.
In addition, you can make your emails interactive so that you can record valuable information based on the actions of the recipient. This additional information helps you to even fine tune your target markets even further.
You can seamlessly build your sales pipeline and follow your prospects through that pipeline. You can boost the interest of prospects through multi-stage marketing campaigns that deliver personalized content. With CRM, you can combine your marketing and sales funnels.
Good quality customer relations marketing also allows you to keep the sales team in the loop. You can easily provide your sales team with access to the marketing calendar so they know exactly what campaigns are running and what to expect coming down the pipe.
One of the most powerful tools you’ll have available is your marketing analytics. You can now easily measure ROI and get a real time view of your campaign effectiveness. These clear views of your marketing campaigns mean you can quickly change or fine-tune any specific campaign based on its performance.
Marketing is essential to the success of your business and CRM should play an important role in today’s marketing strategies. Don’t get left out in the cold.
Are You Ready to Use Customer Relationship Marketing to it’s full Potential?
Marketing is key to the success of your company, because without new customers your business will eventually grow stagnant. The exception is if you are constantly offering new products that your existing customers will be interested in. With either scenario, your marketing is important for your success, or failure.
You can do everything you need to do manually. People have been marketing manually for decades, but the question is why would you want to when you have a powerful tool like the CRM system. You can be far more effective and it will allow you to grow your business much easier.
For many years CRM systems have cost so much that small businesses weren’t interested, but in recent years that’s changed significantly, so do yourself a favour and explore whether a customer relations marketing system would be beneficial to you.
Let us first look at when you do not need a system like this:
It does mean you have to spend money, but the real cost is more than just the fee you pay each month.
It must be correctly implemented once you have chosen the right solution for your business.
It will need to be integrated with any other software you may be using.
You will also have to hire a specialized staff or contract person to take care of the integration and train people.
You also need your sales and marketing team to be excited and buy into using customer relationship marketing as a sales solution to make it worthwhile. If your sales team is entering the information consistently and right after any sale, you will have a very strong base both for generating leads and also generating marketing campaigns. However if they aren’t interested and are not doing it correctly you will have wasted your money. This is all food for thought when you want to implement your campaigns correctly.
If your lead flow is low and you have a slow growth trajectory, you might prefer to simply use a spreadsheet at first. It isn’t fancy but it will do the job until you increase your leads and customer conversions.
Now let’s look at when you need to have a CRM system working for you:
If you are growing out of the small business phase or you are already looking to extend your business further, then you need customer relations marketing.
The earlier you can implement it the better. Many successful small companies have achieved significant growth early on with leads growing by leaps and bounds because of that consideration. With an growing business and a sales and customer inventory on the increase manually trying to track your customers and potential customers will quickly become a nightmare.
Think about it. Tracking 20 or 30 customers or leads in a database is easy. Tracking 100 becomes very time consuming and over a 100 is both slow and a waste of your valuable time (remember: time is money) you’ll be dealing with a cumbersome system that is not very effective and generating frustration for you and your clients.
When your business is increasing and you’re generating more sales it’s time to get your CRM setup and running, otherwise, you’ll have a large part of your labour force focusing on maintaining a spreadsheet rather than focussing on their real tasks like marketing or selling.
Get your CRM system up and running today and begin to enjoy the many benefits including the ability to create effective marketing campaigns.
How to Build a Strong Customer Relations Marketing Database for Your Marketing.
CRM marketing is a powerful tool that many marketers are still overlooking today, yet it can make you more efficient and increase your marketing efforts.
If someone asked you how many customers you had in your region, could you tell them? If you were asked how many sales prospects, you had, would you know?
Using this system it is important to divide your customer data base into segments or regions, because if you don’t when you send out that email message, everyone is going to get it and at best it will result in a low response and worse it will annoy customers and have them drop off your mailing list.
So how does one build a strong database that will improve your marketing results?
1 Watch Your Data Quality.
At the base of your marketing, being effective is the need for access to good quality data. You need to get as much information on a company or person as you can. You can use Google or LinkedIn to find out more about a person. There are other business directories that can also be helpful.
The minimum information you should have is their address, telephone number, email and title. You can also add their interests from the other information you find. Add that to your CRM database.
2 Maintain a Good Database
In order to maintain a good database you need to be updating it regularly. This should not just be the job of the marketing department but it should also involve other departments that access the information. They will also have opportunities to update information.
For example, a customer phones in with a complaint and they contact the customer service rep a new phone number, the new information needs to be added at that stage. Good logs are how good solid databases are built.
3 Have the Ability to Select
When you have created structured data, it is easy for you to choose based on your target group. You can select one or more groups for your marketing campaign to target based on the data.
For example, maybe you want to run an email campaign that targets those people with the title ‘account manager’ and who are assigned to the salesperson Joey.
You will access your CRM software and select with this criteria. It will take no time at all for the list to appear on the screen. There’s no need for Excel or large complicated processes.
If your staff understand the importance of filling in as many relevant fields as possible, you will create a powerful database full of customer information and your marketing campaigns will become stronger and more powerful.
Let Your Inbound Marketing Plan Define the CRM You Choose
Customer relations marketing products aren’t new; they’ve actually been around for longer than the internet was used as a business tool. The first CRM software was called ACT and it dates back to 1987.
Fast forward to now.
Client Marketing products have many additional features that have been added including a number of features borrowed from automated marketing products. Some of these technologies overlap, while others compete.
Senior management is constantly baulking at the idea of having to buy both CRM software and marketing software, so rather than asking for both why not let your inbound marketing plan define what you look for in a CRM option.
Inbound marketing is all about the use of search technologies combined with content marketing to nurture the best prospects and attract them to what you have to offer. For some companies this is a complete change in their selling approach.
So has the time has come to reinvent your sales process. Finally, your sales process can be prospects that are broken down based on their areas of interest and other information they volunteer.
As you nurture this relationship, their content path will constantly provide you with more information discretely and on a real time basis. You can now spend less time prospecting and more time closing sales.
As you rebuild the way you take care of sales you may discover that Lead Relationship management can be much more valuable in achieving your goals than Customer Relationship management, so when you go to buy CRM software you should choose a system that emphasizes this.
Because rather than focusing on tracking purchases and the communication that follows after, you want to be able to focus on their interaction on your social media sites and websites and the situational and attitudinal information that they provide in exchange for the relevant content you provide.
Once you know what direction you are headed you can find customer relation marketing software that will fit nicely within your marketing automation needs and the need for multiple software packages can go by the wayside.
You might be surprised to learn that you will not have to spend a fortune to get marketing functionality. Of course, it will depend on exactly what you need. There are a number of providers so make sure you do your homework in-depth.
By knowing what it is you need and how you visualize it integrating with the sales database, you’ll not only choose the best CRM software, you’ll simplify the process and make access to data from leads and customers readily available.
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