7 Ways to Use Your CRM for Marketing

CRM's (Customer Relationship Managers) are a hot topic in business today, and the market for "CRM solutions" is rife with confusing jargon and large claims. This article explains what a CRM can do for your marketing, and provides some suggestions on how you should approach structuring your marketing so the CRM is most useful. By implementing a CRM in your business it should become an investment that produces a profit for your business however, making the transition to the new system is often where businesses fall down.

Most CRM's can be used for relationship management, operations, customer service, sales, human resources, credit controls and customer satisfaction. When using your CRM as a marketing tool it can help generate potential customers, maintain customer information, and track customer interactions which all help future marketing efforts. When you understand who your customers are and how they interact with your business you can begin to attract more of your most profitable kind of customers.

Using your CRM in the wrong way can cause your prospects and customers to feel as though they are being harassed so you must stay concerned about keeping customers happy, not just selling more products and services. Provide value to your prospects and customers. After all having a CRM is about building a relationship.

Your CRM should help bring sales and marketing together, working from the same information. Whether you are interested in CRM software or not, you can't ignore customer relationships. What would happen to the established relationships if your sales people left and joined the competition, would someone else have the information at their fingertips to start marketing to these contacts again? Would you be able to maintain the relationship between your company and the contact? CRM's are often the best way to systemise your sales and marketing so your business will run smoothly no matter what happens with your staff.

Tips to use your CRM for marketing:

1. Segment your database into special interest groups for specific marketing. For example if you had a group of people specifically interested in a particular kind of product or service you could send marketing material appropriate to them and avoid other campaigns that may just confuse the customer.

2. Track interest in mail-outs to see who is interested in what kind of product or service. This way you can follow up with further marketing material or phone calls when you know the prospect is interested and avoid wasting time and resources.

3. Track the results of all marketing material so you can see what needs tweaking or even eliminating from your marketing mix.

4. Trial a new marketing campaign with a small portion of your database and if it is successful role it out at a larger scale. You could even test two or three different options to see what works best and role out the most successful option to your entire database.

5. Control the speed in which prospects are moved through the sales funnel. If your company is really busy and can't handle much more work slow the marketing down and provide soft-offers designed to build the relationship not make a sale. When thing are quite and more sales are needed make the switch and provide sales offers to generate more work. Many CRM's include a pipeline showing what proposals are in progress and what amount of work is likely to come in.

6. Stay in contact with anyone and everyone who is willing to listen to you. For unlikely potential customers or 'cold leads' you could limit the marketing to email only so there is no cost involved. Make sure you don't spam them. Warm leads may receive email marketing and other print based material from time to time where it may be appropriate. Hot leads may receive all marketing material appropriate for them including phone call to help build that relationship.

7. Anything and everything should be recorded about your customers and prospects. It will be easy for them to remember you but not so easy for you to remember them when they call six months later now that they are ready for your product or service.

As a graphic and web designers, the great majority of my work is marketing and branding related. When our clients are successful we are successful so if you would like to discuss your marketing needs I would be happy to chat further in the comments below

 

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