I was surprised when I understood that there are still marketers who work with Excel lists of prospects and customers and use Outlook for mass sharing of email. Excel and Outlook are great tools, but not if you want to be competent in your marketing attempts. Here are three ways of how using the CRM system for marketing can help your efforts and make your day much more efficient.
Segmentation
Do you know how many customers you have in each district or how many prospects you have in your sales flow? If you can’t divide your customer base into segments, you will probably send the same messages to all clients. The consequence is a low opening rate, and, in the worst case, irritation and a bad reputation. Using the CRM system for marketing can help to avoid that. Here are some tips for building a great database:
- Data quality. The foundation for effective CRM marketing is good data quality. Get as much info about the company as you can. Use Google and business directories (such as LinkedIn). The same engages for contact persons: phone number, email, job title, interests. Managing a good database quality means an enduring update. That’s why it shouldn’t be only a job for marketers but for each person in your organization who has contact with customers.
- Selections. When your data is structured, it’s 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 the title “sales manager” assigned to your salesperson “Frank”. In your marketing CRM system, you can make a selection with these criteria and get the whole list on your screen.
Project management
If you work with project management, the number of documents, emails, and activities involved in a project can be overwhelming. In your CRM system for marketing, you can create a project and add all documents, activities, and emails to one project room. If you have a weekly project meeting, all involved people will open the project, find the latest documents, and prepare for the meeting.
Automatization
You can save a lot of time on administration with the right tools. Using the 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 of a 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 your text and images to your 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? So you can get a good overview of what type of content interests your readers. And if you include CTA’s (call-to-action) in your mailing, you can add activities to the sales responsible diary. With a fully integrated eMarketing tool, you can also automatize lots of functions, such as adding people who clicked on links to specific projects or selections for later actions.
For a long time, CRM has been closely connected to sales, but the actual abbreviation of CRM is Customer Relationship Management, and that’s what we also do in marketing, isn’t it? My advice for you is to get the right tools to help you do your job more efficient:
- The CRM system for marketing: all contact data is available in a centralized database with functionality to make selections and targeted communication.
- Integrated eMarketing tool: design professional emails and measure the results.
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