There are a lot of great tools out there for marketers, including social media scheduling sites, email marketing systems, and simple graphic design platforms, but one thing that many of our clients overlook that could have a big impact on business is a CRM.
A CRM (Customer Relationship Management) System is exactly that – a tool to help you build your relationships with your customers. How you interact with your customers and prospective leads matters and how you record those interactions can help you better understand your audience. With a CRM, you can reach out to customers more effectively, which will improve the quality of leads and sales that you generate through your marketing efforts.
It's not just about getting new customers. It's also about keeping the ones you've got and making sure they're happy.
So, what does a CRM do? There are a variety of different CRM systems that you can use, from the most basic that just holds contacts and measures interaction with those contacts, to the all-singing-all-dancing systems which can help you at every stage of dealing with your customers.
Here are some of the ways that a CRM can benefit your business:
Make it personal
Making your marketing personal makes your customer feel valued. Just adding a name or sending an email on the customer’s birthday can help to grow your relationship with them and build their rapport with your brand.
A CRM will not only help you to manage the relationship, but it gives you the opportunity to keep track of your customers’ interests and preferences so that you can customise the content that they receive. The more you personalise a customer’s experience with you, the more likely they are to interact with your business.
Focus your attention
Some of the leads you gather will be hotter than others. Once implemented into the CRM system, you will be able to monitor the hottest of your new leads, allowing you or your sales team to focus their energy on those that are most likely to interact, buy or work with you.
Measure your success
A CRM platform can allow you to measure the impact that your marketing activity has. You can keep track of what works and what doesn't with your audience and adapt your activity based on your findings. This can save your business time and money by providing passive audience research through the activity you do and allows you to focus your attention on activity that you know is more successful.
Organise your contacts
A CRM system can help you to get your contacts under control. It’s a way for you to manage all your relationships in one place. We have worked for and with companies who rely on a variety of spreadsheets with different types of contacts on, most of which are not updated over time and become a much bigger task once left.
A CRM will keep all your contacts, both new and old, in one place. Most CRMs will give you the ability to label the type of contact or to create multiple lists for different types of stakeholders. The systems are often easy to add and edit contacts, making the lists much lower maintenance and more likely to stay updated and relevant.
Collaborate internally
We’re all so busy, it’s sometimes difficult to keep up to date with what’s going on with other colleagues, teams, or departments. A CRM can help keep everyone up to date with what’s going on, the big clients and sales, within the business and saves lengthy meetings or interrupting others to find out information about a client. Client communication, activity and information can all be found within the CRM, making it easier for different areas of the business to keep as up to date as possible.
Stay compliant
There are relatively strict rules when it comes to holding data, and without a CRM it can be quite tricky to keep track of when and where you got that contact. There are quite a few CRMs that have built-in measures to help you stay compliant, and if they don’t you can often add automations to ensure that you stick to the rules.
If you want advice about implementing a CRM, which one to choose or how it might help you as a business, book a free discovery call now.