Many in marketing and sales industry are familiar with the word CRM; however, few understand what is CRM marketing, as customer relationship management is often illustrated as a sales tool.
CRM as we know generally helps to track the outreach of your sales team, provide in-depth information about each prospective and current customer, and help your sales representative plan out strategies to close the deals.
However, CRM marketing is a newer breed of technology, which is developed to facilitate relationship-building activities for the marketing team, and often at a much larger scale, permitting both B2B and B2C organizations to plan and track interactions with their customers.
With the ability to track customer interactions across multiple channels and customize marketing plans according to those data, multichannel CRMs marketing (also known as Social CRM or SCRM) are essential for building a real 1:1 customer relationships at scale.
Therefore, the answer to the question what is CRM marketing lies in the process by which marketing managers can track customer’s interests, record their behavior, watch the customer’s interaction to the campaigns to ensure campaigns and marketing messages are meeting their needs in the best possible ways.
However, since every customer’s interest and behaviors are different, using personalization in campaigns leads to increase the conversion rates and encourage happy customers to stick to your brand.
CRM Marketing is most needed today as nowadays consumers are bombarded with all sorts of offers and messages that springs out of every corner of the business world.
Everyone is marketing these days.
Have you ever noticed how many times you receive promotional emails every single day, from a brand that you signed-up for? And more importantly, how frequently do you actually read them?
So consequentially, it has never been as difficult as it is now, for marketers to win customers, as everyone is on social media and everyone, as said before, is marketing their brands.
The rate of content generation is simply incredible these days. According to a report published by Science Daily, it has been suggested that more than 90% of all the data that is found on the internet now has been generating in these last few years.
Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google has been quoted as saying that more content is created now in 48 hours than it was ever produced between the advent of internet technology up until 2003.
Since everyone now has a blog so, all can comment and share their ideas. According to WordPress, every minute WordPress users alone posts 347 blogs in their platform.
So, this mind-blowing acceleration of information affects the way we go about marketing in this digital world.
Bid Goodbye to One-Size-Fits-All Approach
With the spread of social media channels as a natural outcome of the rapid boom of modern technology, customers have become tech-savvy, discerning, and increasingly fussy. Modern customers are well aware of what they want, have wider choices and so they cannot be fed with just anything. Instead, modern buyers want personalization and demand ways of engaging with their desired products and services.
Hence, the good old method of targeting everyone with one message does not work anymore. According to a survey done by Gartner, it has been found that 78% of online consumers get irritated with the website and promotional email contents, ads and offers when they have nothing to do with their interests.
There have also been many instances when customers got so frustrated with irrelevant contents, that they were also willing to leave the site forever.
So what do all these mean for marketers today?
This means- RELEVANCE.
Now, that we need to discuss what is CRM marketing, we must understand the rise of highly individualized content marketing approach, which is primarily driven by data and technology, and it only a CRM system that can aid marketers to stay on the top of this game.
Hence, let us take a look how customer relationship software can help the marketers to improve their activities and create better marketing campaigns.
Focused Targeting
One of the toughest tasks for marketers is to look through all the customer data. In order to receive a response from potential customers and find out what they are most likely to buy, marketers must send messages that appeal exactly to them.
CRM software helps marketers to sift through thousands of contacts and find out the potential customers who will be interested in buying the products. It aids in targeting potential customers. As CRM contains several information on the customer behavior and buying preferences it allows the marketers to take informed actions, which results in improving prospect awareness and customer satisfaction.
Segmentation
It is a clichéd saying that those who can predict, instead of reacting, win. This is very much true for marketers as to sell online marketers need to observe common buying trends before offering anything to the customers.
Today marketers not only need to segment their customers only by industry, job, or age, but they also need to be aware of such factors like the customer’s recent activities, their purchase history, their personal likes and dislikes, emails opened and replied, social media activities and others.
Hence, the sharper and focused is the potential customer’s profile; greater are the chances and opportunities for personalized marketing messages, which can bring sales for the organization.
So segmenting customer profile and email subscriber’s database with the help of a CRM system, not only aids in growing revenue but also improves the metrics in email marketing.
Personalized Contents
Once you have segmented the CRM database into meaningful groups and know whom to target, it is the time that you must individualize your marketing messages.
Mass marketing is outdated today. Today’s CRM allows markets to address their potential and existing customers by their name. You can even impress your customers by knowing what industry they work for, which will consequentially help you to tailor your email campaign messages according to their likings and needs.
Therefore, CRM marketing can shape the entire communication strategy in such a way that it can suit a particular customer or a group of customers who have one or more than one things in common.
Personalization of content helps in improving response rate, creates a stronger brand perception, and increase revenue.
Knowing what is CRM marketing, hence helps online marketers to focus more on the customers rather than on products.
Recycling The Process
Using CRM software marketers can analyze whether their campaigns were successful and they yielded any results. For once, you can find which content performed best; you can recycle the content and that email campaign’s template for converting new contacts and customers.
Hence, instead of starting from the scratch when you remarket your ideas, taking out all opinions and guesswork, you can curb your leads to marketing costs but focus on resending campaigns that performed the best.
Hence, marketing CRMs are more than the just inert database and market automation tools, because marketing CRMs helps in putting everything together for a truly personalized marketing effort. ConvergeHub’s founder and CEO Shampa Bagchi, speaking of CRM technology, sums it all up like this:
It’s been about propelling at the speed of mobile, digesting information and humanizing the data for the marketing team, building up the scale, and developing a product that conforms to the requirements of the marketer in this ever-connected digital world.
If you want to know more about how a CRM system can support your marketing efforts, please write to us in the comments below.
