By Jenna McManus
As a marketing manager, you’d be hard pressed to find a day when you aren’t jumping into your CRM to develop data-informed strategies to guide growth and success within your business.
With the ability to build segments, automate communications and deliver targeted marketing efforts, a CRM becomes a single source of truth that removes data silos and embraces cross-departmental collaboration to achieve those short and long-term goals.
By aligning processes between sales, customer service and marketing, it provides a comprehensive understanding of the customer, how they interact and engage, and ultimately drive revenue. But if we are to look at CRMs and how they support marketing, we should first consider what effective marketing is.
When done right, marketing is a combination of getting the right message in front of the right audience at the right time.
Having a solid understanding of potential and existing customers’ needs allows marketers to create strategies that in turn meet those needs at pivotal moments throughout the sale lifecycle. This is where CRM comes into play.
No one knows the power of the right CRM like a marketer. And as a marketing account manager, it’s in my best interests to ensure my clients understand the benefits of a CRM and why it is a vital tool not only for the day-to-day operations of their business, but also to the success of their marketing efforts.
5 reasons you need a CRM to supercharge your marketing efforts
• A CRM creates a better sense of your targe audience by providing a centralised view of customer information, for example where they entered the sale cycle and their spending habits, which allows you to monitor and analyse behaviour.
• A CRM becomes a knowledge base with all your data points in one location to identify patterns, trends and changes to what is working and what is not across the business.
• A CRM allows you to optimise campaigns by connecting marketing channels and reporting dashboards to create a centralised view of performance.
• A CRM allows you to go deeper in building and nurturing customer relationships through personalised content. It allows tailored messages to be delivered at key moments during the sales lifecycle.
• A CRM removes bottlenecks, increases productivity, and takes the guesswork out of reporting whilst supporting cross-departmental workflow.
What industry professionals rate CRMs
Jamee Parker, Creative Director of multi-brand eCommerce retailer a-beauty – an all-Australian skincare, beauty and wellness brand – understands the importance of a CRM all too well. When asked why having the right CRM supports the success of her marketing efforts, she explained, “Having an in-depth understanding of our customer base is always at the forefront of my mind as a small business owner. We play in the beauty, wellness and lifestyle space (which is very over-saturated), so we need to be able to service our customers efficiently, provide excellent UX and be readily available to answer questions, comments and complaints. Otherwise, the customer will simply shop elsewhere.”
“Essential in my book would be scalability to accommodate growth, an intuitive, user-friendly interface to support adoption, integration capabilities, and prompt tech support to deal with any issues or questions,” she says.
Kylee further confirms the right CRM ‘helps you be laser-focused with your marketing’.
No matter how you look at it, a CRM is a win-win in developing deeper relationships with customers, supercharging marketing efforts and equipping teams with the confidence to test and refine sale strategies. But as always, know what you need to know first with data that’s centralised, accessible and broad in outreach.
To learn more about choosing and optimising the right CRM for your business, get in touch with the team at Vaxa Analytics here and Bespoken here.
