What is customer relationship management (CRM)?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a technology for dealing with all your customer interactions. It requires the use of data to study and monitor information. Currently, Salesforce dominates the CRM software market with a 23.8% share.
Customer relationship management makes it easier for businesses to streamline their processes, increase profitability, and build customer loyalty.
According to Gleanster and Act-on‘s report, 99% of top performers in the B2B space use CRM to retain customers.
CRM database used by 99% of top performers in B2B
Some of the most popular CRM software are as follows.
- Zoho CRM
- Salesforce.
- Bitrix24
- Nimble
Objectives of CRM
- Optimizing sales
- Building positive customer relationships
- Better data transparency
- Setting new target markets
What are the top CRM strategies?
CRM strategies make you manage decisions and choices to align various business processes with relevant stakeholders to bring out the best results and achieve objectives as mentioned above.
Here are some of the top CRM strategies every business needs and follows:
1. Audit your complete business
Run a complete business audit. CRM audit also allows you to focus on key business concerns. The various audit parameters are as follows:
- Checking and reviewing all the business processes- internal and external.
- Understanding and analyzing your competitor’s brand footprints.
- Understanding the business by conducting a SWOT analysis. SWOT analysis considers the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats that your business could potentially face.
Your CRM audit would also bring visibility if your business has enough resources to execute various tasks such as testing, etc. Therefore, better organization of available resources.
2. Set realistic business goals for your CRM platform
Set realistic goals for your business using CRM tools.
If you set up goals like ‘Increase engagement”, ‘lower churns’, and so on, then it wouldn’t lead you anywhere.
Set up goals that are number-driven, time-bound, and measurable. For example, you can set a measurable goal such as-
-by the next quarter, customer engagement should increase by 45% as measured by our CRM software.
-Lower churns by 15% by EOM, etc.
– Increase followers on social media accounts.
Using CRM, you can achieve these goals.
For example,
Using CRM you can track your customer’s activities, requirements, or past communication with a brand. All these things will help you understand your customers better.
Once you have all the required information through CRM analytics, you can set up campaigns and build customer loyalty in the following ways:
- Monitor your customer’s time spent on your services and give them offers, freebies, etc. Also, you can send automated discount codes for repeat buyers.
- Based on the customer’s current stage in the journey, automate personalized emails using CRM.
- To have a better understanding of your products and services, ask for feedback and reviews across multiple platforms. This will further establish your brand image.
Once you’re done setting up goals, align your CRM system accordingly with it.
3. Automating ad hoc tasks
Implementing CRM in your business saves you a considerable amount of time.
There are countless ad-hoc tasks that need to be executed in any business. Be it from inserting lead data to maintaining the track record of employees.
Using CRM, you can automate all your tasks and save time by excluding the manual intervention of employees.
The time and effort saved by using the CRM tool can be used for other useful activities.
4. Boost productivity by using data assets
A CRM platform allows you to collect and monitor data from various departments of the organization such as marketing, sales, operations, customer success, and more. This data can be organized in a way that every department can access it from one dashboard.
Accessing data from one dashboard would further reduce communication gaps in the organization and maintain transparency.
5. Targeted marketing
The data assets on CRM pave a deeper way for targeted marketing. Here is what you can do to build your CRM strategy revolving around targeted marketing.
a) Personalized emails
Send your audience personalized emails. Include their name, or talk about their past interaction with your brand as this would initiate a good engagement with customers.
For emails, make sure to customize the subject lines. According to Experian, there are 26% more chances of an email being opened and read with a personalized subject line.
Here is an example of Oncrawl using the personalized email approach:
b) Segmentize your customers
Using the CRM platform, you can segment your subscribers or users based on various parameters like preferences, gender, location, past interaction, purchase history, and so on.
Once the users are segmented, reach them with the context of their preference to reap higher conversions.
c) Include the ‘unsubscribe’ tab in email marketing
Allow your customers to unsubscribe from your emails. It doesn’t necessarily mean you lost your customers, but they might not be interested in receiving any emails. So, respect their privacy.
Using the right CRM tool, you should include the unsubscribe link at the end of the email and save yourself from any further hassle like customers getting annoyed, etc.
One more thing to consider is, that by including unsubscribe links in your emails, your CRM removes unnecessary data and makes space for newer ones.
6. Data unifying and deduplication
When you think of a longer run for any business, there are countless leads and customers you may come across. And, it’s not possible to remember each and every one of them. Therefore, by making the use of right CRM software, you remove any duplicated data.
A CRM tool unifies all your user data in one single platform and removes the duplicated ones.
This small strategy would help you further by avoiding reaching out to the same people again and again. This can seriously hamper your brand reputation as a whole.
7. Campaign performance tracking
A customer relation management platform shows individual goals and targets to achieve. This would make sure that individuals are aware of their goals and work in the same mindset as others, therefore, boosting performance.
The campaign performance can be tracked by using the CRM analytics and reporting features that come by default with the software.
You can always look up to your CRM software to reflect on outputs, measure success, and find the loopholes and bottlenecks that need to be addressed. Therefore, CRM not only helps you run your business efficiently but also makes sure that you develop new ideas and techniques using the data you get from CRM.
