Gone are the days when sales were merely limited to securing a transaction, maintaining relationships with clients and pushing prospects to close deals. Today, buyers don’t want to be interrupted and pushed into a corner. It is the age of technology, and people want to take their own sweet time exercising their buying power.
Research conducted by Google shows that customers are more likely to buy from a brand when they are emotionally connected to it. In today’s age, this shouldn’t be surprising at all.
When it comes to brand loyalty and customer’s trust, inbound marketing can help you achieve your goals. It helps to nurture leads at every stage of the sales funnel. But if you’re still using Excel lists of customers and prospects for this purpose, then you’re really missing out. Excel may be a great tool, but if you want to see a drastic improvement in your marketing efforts, then you need more.
This is when a sales CRM system can be really useful to boost your marketing endeavors. A customer relationship management or CRM tool is a technology that allows businesses to organize, automate and synchronize their customer interactions. Research by Gartner predicts that soon CRM will outgrow a market of more than $36 billion. The original goal of this technology is to improve customer relationship. It can also be used to enhancethe performance of your marketing team. When a CRM integrates with your marketing strategies and campaigns, you will notice that both sales and marketing align together. These will bring more results.
Below we present to you4 ways in which you can use a CRM platform to supplement the efforts of your marketing department:
1- Focused customer targeting
It is not possible for marketers to sieve through the data of thousands of customers and filter them according to their likes and dislikes. But thanks to the latest CRM tools like Salesmate, marketers can sift existing customers with a single click. CRM software is a goldmine of data such as that of customer behavior and preferences. This information can help marketers send focused messages to a certain target market so that customers can see what they want. It is a great way to increase prospect awareness and improve customer satisfaction.
2- Segmentation
There is a popular phrase that those who are able to predict, rather than react, always win. These words are particularly true for marketers as they need to be able to predict the market trends before designing a marketing campaign.
A CRM tool can help marketers segment their customers according to industry, jobs, age or any other category. Marketers can access customer likes, dislikes, purchase history, emails opened and recent social media activity. By analyzing all this data, theycan send more personalized messages and win the hearts of their customers. Segmenting your clients will not only increase loyalty but will also improve your marketing efforts such as email marketing. To learn more about segmentation in CRM, read this blogpostby Toolbox.
3- Automation
They say time is money for all the right reasons. Why spend hours doing a job manually, when automation can make life easier. CRM can automate a lot of things. This involves triggering a re-engagement campaign to boost a low lead score or launching a new onboarding drip series. As you get more clients on board, it becomes impossible to do all this manually. A CRM can help you through the lead nurturing process so that you can increase your ROI and close more deals successfully.
4- Success tracking
Lastly, having a CRM integrated with your marketing department allows you to keep track of your marketing success rate. You can see reports of which contacts opened their emails, whether they visited your website, events they are interested in, etc.
These metrics are crucialforimproving your future marketing campaigns. As marketers, it is important to understand the relationship between sales and marketing. And a CRM acts as an insightful bridge between both.
Remember, personal touches can make all the difference to execute a successful marketing strategy. Wells Fargo, one of the ‘big four’ banks in the United States, paid high emphasis on their clients. They made every effort go above and beyond when it came toconnecting with their customers. The marketing team of Wells Fargo used a CRM platform, to link to their customers and each concern was quickly resolved. As a result, they saw a drastic increase in ROI and their conversion rates broke all previous records. The lesson to be learned is that CRM is a powerful marketing tool, one that all businesses should be putting into play.
Conclusion:
In today’s technologically driven market, you have to engage with your prospects and customers on a personal level. Predict your customers’ likes and dislikes and surprise them with deals they are interested in. All this (and so much more) is possible with a CRM platform. A CRM tool helps you convert a one way street of marketing messages into a two-way dialogue between the customers and the marketers.
All in all, a CRM software is a must have. This is because it not only helps you to boost your marketing efforts but also provides you with meaningful insights after each marketing campaign.
Are you using CRM software to create customized marketing campaigns? If yes, share some success stories with us:
Author Bio:
About Michelle Joe: Michelle Joe is a blogger by choice. She loves to discover the world around her.She likes to share her discoveries, experiences, and express herself through her blogs. You can find heron twitter: @michellejoe524
