To my surprise, there are still marketers out there who work with Excel lists of customer and prospects and use Outlook for mass distribution of email. Excel and Outlook are great tools, but not if you want to be efficient in your marketing efforts.
Here are three ways a CRM system can help your marketing efforts and make your day better and more efficient.
1. Segmentation
Do you know how many customers you have in each district or how many prospects you have in your sales pipeline?
If you can’t divide your customer base into segments you will probably send the same message to all and the consequence is a low opening rate, and in worst case irritation and a bad reputation. Here are some tips to build a good database:
- Data quality. The foundation for effective marketing is good data quality. Get as much information on a company as you can. Use Google and/or business directories (such as LinkedIn). The same applies for contact persons, minimum here are telephone, email and title. In addition you can add interests. Maintaining good data base quality means constant update, so this should be not only a job for marketing but for each person in your organization which have contact with a customer or prospect.
- Selections. When your data is structured it is easy to take out selections based on your target group. Let’s say your sales manager wants you to run an eMarketing campaign to prospects with title “sales manager” assigned to your sales person “Frank”. In your CRM system you can then make a selection with these criteria and within seconds have the whole list on your screen. No more Excel lists saved on your hard disk, but saved selections in a traceable and open system.
2. Project management
If you work with project management, the amount of mails, documents and activities involved in a project can be overwhelming.
- In your CRM system, you make a project and then add all documents, mails and activities to one project room. You can even add projects members. And if you book, for example, a weekly project meeting, you can add the project to the booking so that all the people concerned can go into the project and find the latest documentation and be prepared for the meeting.
- The winnings are overview, traceability and visibility for all people involved
3. Automization
With the right tools you can save a lot of time on administration, and instead use it for following-up on you marketing activities. A CRM system gives you instant access to all your customer and prospect information and with an integrated eMarketing tool you can easily manage your campaigns. Let me give an example for a workflow:
Explanation of the workflow:
Step 1 Planning
Here you set your target group and decide on the content, what is the theme of the newsletter or the campaign?
Step 2 Production
Here you add you text and images into you eMarketing tool and design the actual mailing. You may also want to create landing pages for content and make the selection.
Step 3 Follow up
Here you look at the mailing report. What links have your recipients clicked and what content do they prefer? This way you can get a good overview over what type of content interests your readers. And if you include CTA’s (call-to-action) in your mailing you can add activities in the sales responsible diary. With a fully integrated eMarketing tool you can also automatize a lot of functions such as add people who click on a certain link in your mailing to projects or selections for later action and automatically add/remove interests.
CRM has for a long time been connected to sales, but the actual abbreviation CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management, and that’s what we also do in marketing, right? My advice is to get the right tools to help you do your job more efficient:
- CRM system: Contact data available in a centralized database with functionality to make selections and targeted communication
- Integrated eMarketing tool: Design professional emails and measure the results
If you want to know more about how a CRM system can support your marketing efforts, please contact us here.
