As a marketeer you may be wondering how the benefits of CRM might apply to you. Though the many advantages of CRM seem to be largely focused on sales with important benefits such as the ability to:
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Increase productivity
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Reduce costs
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Develop stronger customer relationships
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Enhance customer satisfaction
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Improve communication
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Improve lead quality
The role of CRM as the rock upon which your sales are built doesn’t mean that it’s only sales who benefit from it. The role of CRM is universal; it lies at the heart of your organisation and is there to benefit all, especially marketing.
The Importance of CRM in Marketing
When it comes to marketing, what about CRM’s role in setting the sales ball rolling, and keeping it rolling productively?
Yes, monitoring and measuring customer behaviour to draw customers along the sales funnel to a point of commitment is vital. And yes, making sure that customers are met with the right proposition at the right time is the ideal consequence of well applied CRM. That’s all well and good. But when it comes to marketing functions specifically, where can CRM work best for you?
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46% of marketers with mature lead management processes have sales teams that follow up on more than 75% of marketing-generated leads.
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25% of marketers who adopt mature lead management processes report that sales teams contact prospects within one day.
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Only 10% of marketers report the same follow-up time without mature lead management processes.
(Source: Forrester Research)
This speaks volumes for the the important role that CRM plays in positioning and placing your prospecting.
Let’s look at a range of specific areas where CRM offers hard and fast benefits to marketeers.
Profiling and Segmentation
If you don’t know the right questions to ask, how can you ever expect to give the right answers? In other words, how can you ever hope to plan your marketing effectively without a crystal clear understanding of your customers?
CRM enables you to abstract meaning from your database and apply your marketing with insight; explicit customer information that helps you join the marketing dots with purpose and effect.
Note the difference:
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Profiling capabilities mean that you can capture detailed individual customer profile values.
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Segmentation of the database allows you to group your customers into segments based on aggregated profiles.
“Traditional segmentation focuses on identifying customer groups based on demographics and attributes such as attitude and psychological profiles. Value-based segmentation, on the other hand, looks at groups of customers in terms of the revenue they generate and the costs of establishing and maintaining relationships with them.” – Jill Griffin
Email marketing integration
As the marketing mantra goes: Right person + Right message + Right time = ROI.
It’s absolutely true. According to Jupiter Research, relevant emails drive 18 times more revenue than broadcast emails.
Integrating detailed up-to-date data from your CRM database with your email marketing tool moves you ahead of the marketing curve by preempting your customers’ next sale move.
Work from a library of email templates to drive dedicated email marketing campaigns and/or ongoing drip marketing. Calculate ROI and optimise conversion based on automatically collected metrics such as open rates, click throughs and bounces.
Little wonder that CRM driven email marketing is such a popular tool amongst marketeers with 89% saying that email was their primary channel for lead generation.
Or that 56% of marketers expect to increase their organisation’s focus in 2013 on email campaigns.
Campaign Management, ROI Management and Budget Management
A single central database means clarity and multi-channel campaign consistency.
Different verticals are facing different challenges: in telecoms, for example, high churn rates mean that campaign priorities might be to retain the most valuable customers and work to cross-sell other products. Each vertical will have different campaign objectives with different ROI and budget considerations.
Typical campaign metrics might be:
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New customers acquired
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Customer attrition rates
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Cross-sell rates
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Up-sell rates, average
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Average number of transactions
All can be tracked and analysed with lead, opportunity, sales and budget alerts set against specific campaigns. Valuable data to inform ongoing marketing strategy and improve ROI and budget management. In short – self educative cycles. Campaign heuristics in action.
Marketing Automation
Automation is integral to making your CRM complement your database. It helps you direct resources where they can have most effect – nurturing your most promising customers.
Web2lead forms and automatic lead distribution are just two ways that CRM can make your marketing faster and more efficient. Automatic code generation that captures data online and automatically inputs it into your CRM applying workflow rules to allocate leads, reduces errors and optimises marketing resources.
A powerful concept, automation that runs through your CRM and can also include:
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Behavioural tracking
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Real-time activity alerts
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Automatic lead qualification and assignment
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Automatic flagging of neglected accounts
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Tie revenue to campaigns
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On screen call scripting
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Automatic targeted and drip email generation
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Landing page generation
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Closed loop reporting
Not only does automation save time and money, it makes money too.
Companies using marketing automation and ROI metrics are much more likely to report an increase in total revenue marketing contribution (69% vs. 19%).
Manage suppliers (and supplier orders)
CRM isn’t just customer focused; advantages extend to developing closer, more insightful supplier relations too.
The Gartner Group defines Supplier Relationship Management as: “the practices needed to establish the business rules, and the understanding needed for interacting with suppliers of products and services of varied criticality to the profitability of the enterprise.”
Use CRM to:
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Track suppliers by category.
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Track product pricing and set up pricing schemes to give you best value purchase options.
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Maintain clear visibility on volumes and values.
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Identify key supplier contacts.
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Store relevant information against supplier records.
CRM/SRM helps you become a better purchaser, costs are reduced, timescales optimised and it becomes easier to attract better suppliers and retain them more profitably.
Integration with Google Adwords
Who doesn’t use Adwords? They’re one of the most powerful tools known to marketing offering fast, incisive and high impact online sales opportunities – if used wisely.
Apply CRM conversion rate optimisation techniques to reveal which keywords and components of your marketing are delivering and which need to be honed.
For example, by using Apps or APIs to integrate CRM with Adwords and tagging incoming URLs with Google Analytics campaign parameters, you can identify successful Adwords keywords as leads arrive at your web site.
Apply additional custom code to landing pages to capture detailed and revealing CRO parameters such as:
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The ad copy that triggered the visit.
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The keyword that triggered the visit.
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The domain that triggered this visit.
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The position on the page from where the visit was triggered.
Be sure to tag incoming URLs on your content as a way of identifying marketing efficacy.
In Conclusion
CRM for sales? Of course. But the deep and actionable insights that your CRM provides – real-world, real-time information that loads and primes your future sales is surely compelling enough a reason for marketeers to make CRM an A1 priority.
It’s sad to say but some CRM licenses fail to deliver, or even sit unused. But you can turn that around. Read our eGuide: How to Avoid CRM Backlash and find out how focusing on retention, customers and getting the right CRM partner will transform how you do business.