How to Successfully Use a CRM for Marketing
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Experienced entrepreneurs know how important CRM marketing tools are, but what exactly are these services, how do they work, and why do you need them? In this article, we will talk about CRM marketing automation tools and the ways they help understand your target audience, increase customer retention rate, improve marketing campaigns, and bring businesses more profit. So, hop on this journey with us, and let’s discover the fascinating world of customer relationship management solutions.
What Is a Marketing CRM?
To understand how to use a customer relationship management system for marketing, first we need to figure out what a CRM is. So, a marketing CRM is a software that is designed specifically to help businesses manage and process customer data and interactions in order to enhance their marketing strategies. As a rule, a CRM marketing platform aims at building customer relationships and boosting sales.
Certainly, CRM marketing tools perform a wide variety of functions, including the following ones:
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Customer data management
This feature collects and stores all the important info about both existing and potential customers, including such information as purchase history, shopping preferences, engagement data, demographics, etc. -
Marketing automation
A CRM with marketing automation helps automate a wide variety of repetitive tasks like lead scoring, email marketing campaigns, social media posting, and more. -
Lead management
Most marketing customer relationship management tools allow to track and qualify leads, assign the leads to sales representatives, as well as nurture them through the sales funnel.
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Customer segmentation
This feature divides customers into multiple groups based on shared characteristics such as age, sex, location, shopping preferences and habits, etc., in order to deliver targeted marketing messages. -
Campaign management
Customer relationship management tools also help plan and execute a marketing campaign as well as analyze it to evaluate its effectiveness and improve the following ones as needed. -
Analytics and reporting
Last but not least, the analytics and reporting feature provides a variety of insights on your customers’ behavior, sales trends, and marketing campaign performance to help you understand what improvements need to be done to boost your sales.
It goes without saying that a marketing CRM is a truly useful tool that will help you understand who your customers are and what they need, arrange targeted marketing campaigns, improve customer relationships, and, of course, increase your profits.
CRM Automation Marketing Explained
To put it simply, CRM automation marketing is the combination of a marketing automation service and a customer relationship management tool that is aimed at optimizing customer interactions for the duration of the entire customer lifecycle. The workflow of most CRM marketing management systems is pretty similar and includes the following processes:
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Data collection and analysis
An average CRM system for marketing usually collects and stores a lot of customer data, which is important for further marketing campaigns, including demographics, engagement metrics, purchase history, shopping preferences, and more. -
Lead scoring and segmentation
Customer relationship management in marketing is focused on analyzing customer data in order to identify potential leads and dividing them into certain groups based on shared characteristics. Such division helps create targeted campaigns that cater to specific groups of people. -
Personalized campaigns
With the best marketing CRMs, automated marketing campaigns are personalized and triggered based on certain people’s shopping preferences, lifestyle, customer behavior, age, sex, location, etc. These campaigns usually center around social media ads and email marketing.
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Lead nurturing
Marketing CRMs also assist in creating personalized content and email sequences that nurture leads and carry them through the sales funnel. -
Sales enablement
A good customer relationship management tool allows qualified leads to smoothly transfer to the sales team who has all the relevant info and context. -
Customer retention
Marketing CRM systems help gain loyal customers since after the initial purchase, the automated post-purchase communication is still going, which significantly increases the chances of a customer coming back. Additionally, customer relationship management solutions allow creating loyalty programs, which has been proven to increase customer satisfaction and retention.
As you can see, there are many benefits of using CRM automation marketing, including such perks as improved lead quality, enhanced customer experience, higher ROI, better data-driven decisions, and more. So, investing in a high-quality CRM tool like Germius is surely a good idea.
What Is the Role of CRM in Marketing?
A lot of business owners believe that a CRM tool is just a means of convenience, yet in fact, it plays a rather important role in marketing. Thanks to the priceless customer data any CRM platform possesses, it helps improve all types of online marketing campaigns, including email marketing, social media campaigns, and digital ads. So, let’s talk about the use of a CRM tool for all these types of online marketing and advertising.
CRM for Email Marketing
First of all, a CRM platform enables you to launch an email marketing campaign since it provides all the required functionality for that. Apart from that, using a CRM tool is a great way to create personalized newsletters and cater to the specific needs of certain groups of customers, therefore, increasing the chances of your existing customers coming back and your potential customers making their first purchase. Plus, such systems help monitor email metrics as well as measure ROI and evaluate the effectiveness of your email campaigns to make any changes if needed. So, it’s pretty obvious that a reliable CRM platform like Germius is rather important for email marketing.
CRM for Social Media Marketing
Today, social media marketing is one of the most potent means of advertising, and a good CRM platform is a great tool for social media marketing. First of all, most CRM systems offer pretty detailed customer information that allows you to find the best approach to your potential clients. Understanding who your customers are and what they like will help you create appealing social media content and use targeted advertising that will eventually boost your sales. Additionally, you can qualify your potential leads based on their social media interactions as well as use social listening if possible. Just like with email marketing, your CRM platform will help you analyze and measure the effectiveness of your social media campaigns and make any changes if needed. Finally, a marketing CRM can assist you in providing personalized responses on social media. Thus, as you can see, there are a lot of reasons to use a CRM for social media marketing.
CRM for Digital Ads
Perhaps the main thing a CRM tool does for digital ads is providing a comprehensive view of your customers, their preferences, shopping habits, and demographics that will allow you to tailor your digital ad campaigns to different groups of people. In particular, a CRM platform assists in audience segmentation and helps divide your customers into various groups with shared qualities and tailor ads specifically for each group. For example, if you sell a wide variety of products that include household goods, furniture, clothing, shoes, pet accessories, and makeup, you can launch different digital ad campaigns that will target each group of potential customers. Additionally, a CRM allows you to target customers who have already shown interest in your goods/services, which significantly increases the chances of them making a purchase. Lastly, just like with the previous two marketing types, a CRM helps analyze your campaigns and see what improvements need to be made to increase the conversion rate. Therefore, a CRM platform is a pretty useful assistant in digital advertising.
How CRM Benefits Marketing Campaigns
As we have already mentioned above a CRM platform is a potent assistant that can bring your marketing campaigns to the next level. Yet, how exactly does a CRM benefit marketing campaigns? Let’s see.
Deep Customer Understanding
Understanding who your target audience is and what your potential customer needs is crucial for any type of marketing campaign. Luckily, pretty much any good CRM allows you to see detailed profiles of your customers, browse their shopping history and preferences, analyze their demographics, and use this info for your future marketing campaigns to tailor your ads to your target audience. Additionally, a CRM usually provides a customer segmentation feature that allows you to divide your customers into several groups based on shared qualities for targeted campaigns. Thus, a deeper understanding of who your customer really is can arguably be the main benefit of a CRM system for marketing campaigns.
Lead Management Optimization
As we have already mentioned above, a CRM platform is a great means to increase your ROI. In particular, CRM systems allow you to improve your lead scoring and nurturing, therefore, efficiently guiding your leads through the sales funnel and eventually bringing you more revenue. Apart from that, a CRM is also a pretty decent tool for improving your conversion rates by converting more leads into customers through effective lead management. So, the role of a CRM platform in lead management optimization is undeniable.
Enhanced Campaign Performance
A good marketing CRM platform provides comprehensive metrics about your past and ongoing marketing campaigns, which is, with no exaggeration, priceless information. You can browse your campaign performance metrics and make data-driven decisions for the upcoming marketing campaigns, which will no doubt result in higher conversion rates and more profit. Apart from that, a CRM allows you to experiment with various campaign elements to optimize the results. Finally, with a good CRM platform, you can use attribution modeling to determine the influence of different marketing channels on conversion. All in all, a reliable CRM system like Germius is essential for enhancing your marketing campaigns’ performance.
Fostering Customer Loyalty
Last but not least, a CRM platform is the best tool for fostering customer loyalty. Not only does a CRM help measure customer retention rate and create annual analytics for your business, but also creates and maintains customer retention, which is of crucial importance for most businesses. You see, attracting new customers is more expensive and challenging than working with loyal ones, which is why customer retention is so important for most companies. A CRM platform stores comprehensive info about each and every customer of yours and allows you to appeal to those clients who have made a purchase once and remained inactive ever since. You can arrange promotional email newsletters, offer special offers and discounts, and create loyalty programs by means of a CRM to increase the customer retention rate. Additionally, a CRM platform enables you to collect customer feedback that will allow you to improve and, therefore, attract more customers and increase your revenue. Therefore, a CRM is perhaps the most important tool for fostering customer loyalty.
Summary
It goes without saying that a CRM platform is a must for any type of online business, regardless of its type or size. As a matter of fact, a CRM is one of the best means to monitor your customers, analyze who they are, figure out their shopping preferences and behavior, and collect all this priceless information to use for marketing campaigns. Additionally, a CRM is a perfect marketing assistant that will no doubt help you see how your campaigns are going and what improvements need to be made. Moreover, a CRM even allows you to segment your clients into several groups based on shared qualities and tailor your campaigns specifically for each group, which eventually increases conversion. Finally, there is no better tool than a CRM to maintain customer retention and foster loyalty. So, if you still do not have a reliable CRM, do not hesitate and get Germius.
