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Your clients are the lifeblood of your organization — and understanding their needs and desires is what keeps your marketing, sales and product development teams up at night. What if there were a way to ensure that you have the most relevant information about these important individuals at your fingertips?
With a contemporary CRM (Customer Relationship Management) software platform, you are able to dig deep into the various activities of your audience across all of your business channels. You aren’t just tracking their purchases on your website and in your store, you are also able to see how these important individuals are interacting with your brand across social media, via email, text message and more. The insight that you can gain from aggregating and analyzing these interactions is nothing short of remarkable. From product development to communications, selling strategies to messaging, see how a CRM platform helps you keep your finger on the pulse of your customers. Recent studies show that having a properly-configured CRM can help boost your MarTech ROI from $2.50 all the way up to $5.60 per dollar invested in the solution.
What Type of Information is Captured in CRM Software?
It makes sense that the names and purchase histories of your customers could be captured within your business selling software, but what other tidbits of information can also be stored and analyzed? Everything from the social media accounts and websites of your B2B clients to individual marketing emails and text messages for B2C customers can all be stored within your CRM business applications. Properly configured, every time a prospect or a customer visits your website, their activity can be captured — and tracked — for later use in analyzing sales trends or providing detailed information to your customers.
Ever wondered how sites like Amazon.com and other major eRetailers are able to provide such targeted offers when you visit? Each click and search is saved and cross-referenced within complex software platforms that provide cross-selling and upselling opportunities. This helps raise awareness within the customer base (You!) of new and exciting offers that might otherwise have been overlooked in the vast online warehouse platform. While most businesses are not able to configure their CRM solutions with this level of complexity, a more measured volume of products and options can allow you to provide specific buying opportunities to your customers.
How Advanced CRM Solutions Aggregate Audience Information
It’s not unusual for a small to midsize business to have real-time access to sales information, but pulling those details together with customer engagement can be a game-changer. With more than 91% of small to midsize businesses currently utilizing a CRM, it’s vital that you invest in this technology to stay relevant with your customers. Understanding how the various inputs from your business create reactions across your customer base requires deep integrations between your various business and customer-facing applications. Whether you have a brick and mortar store or sell all of your goods and services online, these purchases are tracked through your eCommerce or Point of Sale (PoS) devices.
Bringing this information into your CRM solution allows you greater flexibility to measure the effectiveness of various marketing tactics and the customer experience, such as targeted emails that are sent promoting a specific brand or product line. Web-based promotions or direct text messages can also be routed through your CRM, creating a smoothly integrated pipeline of details that your marketing and product development teams can use in the future.
Targeting Your Message by Audience Segment
Ever wished you could send a message to individuals within a unique demographic group? With CRM software and the right user permissions and security in place, you can capture everything from age and gender to detailed personal information within your CRM. Far from being intrusive, smart companies are able to use these details to provide the most useful and relevant promotions to their audience.
For instance, when a user searches an eCommerce platform for camping equipment such as tents, they may also be interested in collapsible tables and other outdoor gear. Having additional demographic information such as birth date saved also allows you to provide specific promotions that are centered around memorable dates in the life of your customers.
Creating Promotions That Will Move Your Customers
Wouldn’t it be terrific if you could tell exactly who had purchased specific products in the past, and who might be likely to buy similar items in the future? Capturing the various purchases of your clients over the years allows you to target new promotions to them, increasing the lifetime value of these VIPs. Plus, you’re proving that your brand cares enough to be helpful by offering related products and introducing valuable new items to people who will be most interested in them.
Having detailed purchase histories and activity logs for your customers can also provide insight into purchasing patterns. This can provide you a greater ability to project future sales trends as well as the impact of new product introductions on your current product line. When you are offering your current customers and prospects the most relevant possible promotions, you are less likely to cause buyer fatigue with your advertising. This can help keep your advertising and marketing costs lower, while still growing your sales significantly over time.
Properly-Configured CRMs Help Differentiate Your Company and Drive Sales
Shifting the digital paradigm can also help drive business process transformation, uncovering and updating processes that no longer serve the organization. While CRM solutions can be a life-saver for most organizations, it’s important to note that there are complexities involved with these solutions. Some companies struggle with the technology adoption rate among staff members, who are not confident on new software platforms or resist adding the necessary details to customer interactions. If you have not properly configured your CRM solution, you could quickly find that the data you are capturing cannot be utilized in the most effective manner possible. Ensuring that you work with a trusted and reliable software integrations team is vital to gaining the true value and ROI for your CRM technology investment.
Integrating your CRM platform with your website can dramatically enhance the marketing ROI for your organization. Here’s why:
- You’ll have up-to-the-minute information about sales data to drive personalized offers and upsells
- You’ll reduce the administrative overhead required to manually move customer information between platforms
- Your team will have access to a single, unified “source of truth” for customer data
- It will be easier for your marketers to create a comprehensive profile of your various audience segments
- Sales and revenue will increase, as you provide more targeted offers that will compel site visitors to make a purchase
- Customers will appreciate the added convenience and quick response-times from your efficient team
- You’ll reduce overall customer churn by providing an exceptional user experience across all sales channels
Having the right technology tools selected and implemented is only the first step. When companies are truly successful in reaching out to their customers is when they take the time to be strategic with their technology investments, which often means working with companies that specialize in creating workable tools that are approachable for staff members, fully-configured for the unique needs of your organization and highly-functional for customers.
Implementing, customizing and maintaining a fully-integrated CRM solution can be a challenge, particularly if your IT teams are already splitting time between other projects. If you’re ready to see first-hand the value that a modern CRM can bring to your organization, contact us today for a complimentary initial consultation.