Feb 02, 2021
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) remains a crucial business tool, even as the market is flooded with a plethora of deceptive “bright shiny objects” which, by themselves, promise to drive all your customer engagement for you. In fact, the value of your business all but requires the use of a quality CRM, since its tools dictate just how efficient and effective your brand will be at interacting with audiences.
Which was always why businesses embraced the use of CRMs to begin with. While many companies struggle with growth, those with CRM software move fast and move to the top right quadrant in the markets where they compete with annual increases in sales, conversions, and customer retention rates.
Put simply, Customer Relationship Management is a platform with a set of (usually digital) tools and techniques that businesses use to optimize and maximize customer relations. Here are a few reasons why a great CRM will be truly irreplaceable for your brand and digital advertising.
Email, Social Media, and Messaging Integration
Research shows that the modern customer spends more time browsing online than they do at physical stores. Businesses that want full-time presence and customer view must therefore use tools that permit online presence—and CRMs do exactly that.
By being in a position to fully integrate with third-party applications, such as email and social media, businesses get the full benefits of marketing automation. Sales reps do not have to send out emails manually or communicate with clients on social media, the CRM software pick the campaign and send personalized emails on its own. For prospects and customers alike, this enhances engagement and communicates new or relevant products to new audiences with more frequency.
Scheduling and sending email blasts through a CRM is easy, and allows reps the room and time to monitor results as they come in. Automation tools also enable you to seamlessly track campaigns, streamline workflows and make the marketing system more efficient. Social media managers can use social CRM to deliver targeted offers and content, and be able to generate a comprehensive audience data.
CRMs also make it easier to send automated message reminders on upcoming offers, season greetings, changes in delivery times or events. Using the most popular form of communication helps businesses increase customer retention, reduce operating costs, gain more relevant data for targeted marketing and provide higher standards of customer service.
In truth, depending on your CRM, the benefits you get from integrating your social, messaging, and email service with a CRM are innumerable—and once you experience the ease of it you’re not likely to want to go back.
Audience Tracking
CRMs also store personalized customer information in a database for use in tailored marketing campaigns and outreach. The platforms have become so comprehensive that for almost any visitor to your site, any team member can view their past activity going back years—including any pages they visited, purchases they made, or emails they sent to you. All this data becomes incredibly useful for insights that help to further expand your audience.
This then makes it easy to send personalized greetings, reminders, or marketing emails to specific. Studies show that customers feel cared for when a company knows their names, purchasing history, or just the last thing they mentioned during a previous interaction. It elevates the quality of your customer service and customer experience, and makes them more likely to remain with your brand and even refer their friends or family.
Telephone Calls and Meetings
Integrating CRM with your phone services makes scheduling calls and video meetings almost painless. This increases the audience reach rates, which is good for business, but also increases the quality the amount of time your team will have to spend on other things. Your phone service need not be separate at all from your CRM, and the data that is shared via phone becomes part of your customer’s engagement history, stored in the system for later use.
As it turns out, happy customers are much willing to provide feedback directly through a CRM than otherwise. This is invaluable, since getting audiences to volunteer to offer helpful insight is notoriously tough. The automated tools use this information for a huge range of things, from improving customer experience to improving products and services themselves. Your team will also appreciate using the CRM for their own meetings and goals. Remote calls can be made for in-house team meetings, with automatic recording or note taking engaged that makes meetings far more useful and productive across the board.
Helpful Bots and Live Chat
Live chat is another invaluable tool for connecting with prospects, and CRMs better prepared for this functionality than other kind of platform. Chats can be set up using pure automation, they can be live with a customer rep, or they can be a combination of both—but the important part is that any inform the information from a chat, through the CRM, becomes immediately available to the team.
Your CRM will capture details automatically, email, name, phone numbers, IP location, and time of the chat. Beyond that, of course, you will get more data on preferences, insights, and other relevant info. All of this fills out your understanding of your own audience so that you can more competently project your brand narrative into the market and broaden your audience
The Takeaway
The promises of a great CRM have always tied in perfectly with TopRight’s 3S methodology: telling a clear and compelling story, using an effective strategy that reaches the right people at the right time, and employing systems that align marketing and sales with the rest of your organization. To learn more about the 3S methodology, read our ebook Transformational Marketing: Moving to the TopRight.
We’ve been so successful with it we’re shocked when other brands tell us they haven’t taken the time to integrate their own CRM into their brand. The question for you right now is: What are you waiting for?
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