CRM software is an indispensable part of the modern business tech stack. By combining features from different kinds of business apps, CRM software enables you to coordinate all your digital activities from one convenient location.
This also allows for the implementation of more complex marketing strategies. Gone are the days where you had to juggle several spreadsheets just to run a small-scale email campaign. With CRM software, you can create and manage long-term marketing projects with just a few clicks, provided you know what you’re doing.
If you don’t feel like you belong to the latter category but are interested in learning more, you’ve come to the right place. In the rest of this article, we will cover all the ways in which CRM software can help you devise more effective marketing strategies.
CRM Software Can Help You Create a Better Marketing Strategy
1. Performance-based Objectives
The success or failure of every marketing strategy can be traced back to its objectives. If you don’t clearly define your marketing objective, you will have difficulties with selecting methods, tracking progress, and measuring outcomes. Fortunately, CRM software offers a way out of this predicament. CRM systems allow you to set performance-based objectives for each marketing campaign. You can specify which key performance indicators (KPIs) you want to use as objectives, and the time-frame for completing them. And once your campaign is underway, you will receive notifications about the status of each objective.
2. Marketing Workflow Automation
A marketing strategy is a broad guideline on what you need to do in order to achieve certain business goals. But once you start implementing a strategy, you will quickly discover that there are a myriad of small tasks you need to accomplish along the way. These tasks are tedious but necessary, which makes them a chore to perform, unless you use a CRM system. CRM software allows you to automate marketing workflows, making your strategy easier to implement. With CRM software, you will spend less time dwelling on the details of each campaign, and more on finding creative strategies to entice customers to buy.
3. Advanced Audience Segmentation
In the past, businesses often used a one-size-fits-all approach when designing marketing campaigns. Everyone would get exposed to the same message, even though only a small percentage of people were actually likely to respond. Today, marketing strategies have to be carefully tailored for each segment of your target audience in order to be effective. CRM software allows you to accomplish this without having to hire a team of data analysts. Thanks to CRM tools, you can segment your prospects, leads, as well as existing customers into segments based on their demographic data (age, sex, geographic location, etc.), interaction history (previous purchases, social media activity), or custom categories you designed yourself.
4. Omni-channel Marketing
In addition to optimizing conventional marketing strategies, CRM software also allows you to implement strategies that were usually reserved for large business enterprises. Omni-channel marketing is an example of one such strategy. At its core, omni-channel marketing is a strategy where your engage with customers through all available marketing channels, including email, social media, websites, apps, phone, etc. In order to be successful at omni-channel marketing, you have to coordinate your marketing efforts across these different channels, which is something you can only do with the help of CRM software. CRM software allows you to manage each marketing channel from a single user interface, so you can approach customers from all sides at once.
5. Long-term Customer Nurture
CRM software can help expand the reach of your marketing strategy. But it can also help you engage and connect with customers on a deeper level through long-term nurturing. And since it is always cheaper to maintain existing customers than it is to acquire new ones, this kind of CRM-based strategy is instrumental for achieving a high ROI. CRM software can help you keep track of each individual customer as they interact with your business. You can use this capability to send marketing content at the most opportune moments for developing your relationship towards conversion.
6. Sales-marketing Alignment
Some marketing strategies only became viable thanks CRM software. An example of one such strategy is sales-marketing alignment. This simply refers to the practice of exchanging data between marketing and sales departments in order to enrich the strategies of each. CRM software supports this kind of data exchange out of the box, and it also provides a slew of other features that help with sales-marketing alignment such as chat support, a project management dashboard, and more. Aligning sales and marketing is a relatively new strategy, but businesses are already using it to achieve impressive results. And it would completely impossible without CRM software.
7. Personalized Customer Service
Customer service is the dominant marketing paradigm today. The idea is to make the needs and wants of the customer the focal point of all your marketing efforts. If customers want free content, you give them free content, if they want round-the-clock chat support, you provide that as well, and so on. Personalized customer service is an evolution of this concept, and CRM software is what makes it possible in the first place. With CRM software, you can determine what each of your customers wants, and then can deliver it with a personalized thank-you note.
8. Up-selling and Cross-selling
CRM software is the key for increasing customer lifetime value (CLV) through up-selling and cross selling. Both of these strategies rely on getting customers to buy additional or supplementary items (think Amazon’s ‘frequently bought together’ section). CRM software will enable you to use these strategies by keeping track of your customers are buying, and then predicting what other items they might be interested in. You can even set up your CRM system to automatically send personalized product recommendations with the appropriate CTA to customers via email.
Conclusion
CRM tools represent the next step in the evolution of business software. They allow you to enhance your existing marketing strategies, and they make it possible to use new ones if you choose to do so. CRM software is also a tech investment with one of the highest ROI. There are CRM systems available at every price point, including free. Give CRM software a try, and take your marketing strategy to the next level.
See also: What are some social media marketing strategies?
