The Digital Age is only just getting started. As more businesses and more industries emphasis a strong digital presence and increase digital communication with clients and customers, having a system in place is key to making sure none of your tribe gets left behind.
While CRMs, or customer relationship management for those blessed not to have imbibed the jargon, have been an important sales tool for over a decade now, but they haven’t been embraced across the board. Companies like Salesforce have developed products that allow brands to manage, communicate, and automate messaging and actions that serve myriad goals and functions.
For a long time, CRMs have been left in the hands of sales teams unsupervised. We’ve long been proponents that sales is marketing and marketing is sales; if those efforts are siloed, too many important things are lost, especially the personal, professional, and knowledgable voice that your brand has developed and shared with the world. What makes CRMs really valuable is their ability to measure what some might consider intangible; we can learn a lot about brand loyalty, customer habits and preferences, and the effectiveness of campaigns by analyzing the reams of data generated through CRM systems.
Lose Nothing. It’s not just about the customers, either. Brands need to understand their own tendencies, too. CRMs help teams track phone calls, emails, meetings, proposals, contacts, even jot down important notes about clients that can inform future sales or improve the brand/customer relationship.
Everyone Plays The Game. CRMs aren’t just for B2B companies. Charities often use CRMs to track donations and thank donors. Direct to consumer B2C companies also use this sort of data to create automated sales experiences, manage surveys, share promotions, and generate a CLV, or customer Lifetime Value, to learn more about who purchases what, how often, and how to replicate successful sales to more customers. No matter what industry you’re in, the right CRM can almost certainly help.
Marketing Integration. One of the important features of a CRM is the ability to integrate data from social media and email marketing campaigns. The ability to track sales or leads from organic and paid social campaigns, newsletters, and other digital outlets help to really fill in the gaps of what is working, what isn’t, and what opportunities are worth pursuing.
The key to marketing is building a relationship with a customer. At its core, the relationship between a brand and a customer is what sets it apart from competitors. It can even prompt customers to spend money on things they wouldn’t normally buy or don’t necessarily need; a great example of that behavior is the number of people buying gift cards to support local businesses that may have even temporarily closed.
For help finding the right CRM and building excellent marketing materials to support it, contact us. We’ll add you to our CRM.