CRM is the trending storm that has taken over the business world. With the uprise of remote teams, there is an urge to connect and collaborate from anywhere and anytime. The companies are on the lookout for ways to build collaboration and at the same time boost productivity. In this blog, we will see what is the role of CRM in marketing campaigns
According to a survey by BuyerZone, 91% of the companies with more than 11 employees are using a CRM Software. In this blog, you will find out what is CRM and what role does it play in creating and distributing amazing marketing campaigns. And finally how do find a good CRM?
What is Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
CRM software refers to a technology that helps companies streamline the way they develop and nurture relationships with current and future customers. It defines how a business responds to its customers during their whole customer lifecycle.
It helps organizations in sales automation, monitoring sales pipeline, tracking customer interactions, managing sales and deals across various devices, email marketing, generating reports and sales forecasts etc. A CRM comes into play at every point of customer interaction such as presales marketing, delivery and after-sales customer care and engagement.
What is the role of CRM in Marketing Campaigns?
As we saw in the above section, the customer is the centre and heart of CRM. And the present-day CRM is the perfect mix of a cloud-based system and AI capabilities. But since the beginning, CRM has always aimed at knowing more about the customers. So that your business can provide maximum satisfaction to them.
As per the below graph, we can see that CRM revenue is forecasted to reach US$ 80 billion by 2025. This is huge and it shows the popularity of CRM among businesses. Now let’s see how can the marketers leverage CRM for their marketing campaigns.
#1 Helps in better segmentation and targeting of audience
CRM helps you to segment the audience based on location, financial details and historical interactions. Thus helping you to target different audiences with personalized messages. This also helps you in identifying new prospects and developing more opportunities for your business. You can easily follow up with them and stay connected by sending regular campaigns and reminders. Thus, easily converting them to customers.
#2 Helps to sync all the customer data in one place
With the help of CRM, you can keep track of all the customer activity in one place. This data is of immense value. You can use it to cross-sell and upsell to the customer based on their interests, recent browsing history, latest purchases etc.
#3 Can surprise customers with incentives and rewards
Wouldn’t your customers be overjoyed to receive a special discount offer as their birthday gift? Well, CRM helps you to do that, as all the customer data is stored in one place. So, you can delight your customers with such offers and rewards. This helps you to boost customer loyalty.
#4 Run marketing campaigns simultaneously through various channels
Gone are the days when you could depend on one marketing channel. Now customers are spread out across different channels. A few customers might try reaching out to you through your website. And a few others might interact with you through social media channels. And the customers can decide to connect with you on their preferred channel. So it is of high importance that the businesses spread their marketing campaigns across various channels rather than focussing on just one.
CRM helps you to handle marketing campaigns for various channels from one place. You can also keep track as to which campaigns were successful and which channels are worth investing in.
#5 Can send personalized messages with email marketing
With the ROI of email marketing being 38:1, this is the best way to reach out to the customers. But at the same time, when all the brands are bombarding their customers with newsletters, ads, offers etc., the need arises to attract your audience with personalized messages. Something that will grab their attention rather than ending up in the spam folder.
And to understand your customer more, you need to have data and insights as to what are the interests of the customers? You need to know what are their pain points and how can you address it in your mail communication. And that can be achieved with the immense data available in CRM.
#6 Helps to foresee future trends and allocate budgets in a cost-effective way
CRM provides detailed reporting and insights as to which campaigns worked and which didn't. You can also see the trends as to which of your products or services are best sellers. And this helps in forecasting and allocating the budget to those projects that will give more ROI.
#7 Boosts productivity of the teams
Well, the above points clearly show that all the information will be available at your team’s fingertips. They don’t have to switch from one tool to another. They can access the information anytime, anywhere. And thus this helps them to do focussed work and leads to boosting the team’s productivity.
10 Features to look out for in a Good CRM for Marketing Campaigns
You got to know the benefits of CRM for running successful marketing campaigns. Now in this section, we will see how to decide as to which CRM will be the best fit for your business and to run your marketing campaigns. Here are 10 features that you need to look out for while planning to invest in a good CRM.
Targeting and Segmentation of data
You need to have custom filters in the CRM so that you can create different filters based on deals, organizations, people etc. You can define certain rules for the filters, such as people from India who have an active deal and it is at a particular stage. This helps you to create powerful segments and thus target those audiences with personalized messages.
Visual Pipeline
A simple and visual representation of the sales process helps you to determine, what kind of marketing message needs to be created and sent out to the leads and prospects. this helps you to create highly personalised and converting marketing campaigns.
Integrations with Sales, Project Management and HR tools
If you have a CRM like TeamWave that integrates CRM, Sales and Project Management tools in one place then you can avoid switching between 4 to 5 apps. Thus helping you and your team to increase productivity even further.
Lead-form Integration
Lead Gen Forms are the best way to collect information about people who might be interested in your product or service. When it is embedded in your CRM, all the information gets stored there and you can automate your marketing process by following up with these leads based on their interests.
TeamWave has intuitive forms where all the information submitted via forms will be directly saved as a deal under organization or people or both. there are also options to customize the form as you can choose the fields of your interest, colours, fonts etc.
Customizable CRM
Different businesses have different marketing needs, and thus the CRM you choose must be customizable as per your needs. Be it changing the sales pipeline, adding custom filters or creating custom reports based on the metrics you are evaluating for.
Mobile App
Your marketing team must be able to work from any time, anywhere And thus the CRM must have a mobile app from which you can handle all basic features so that they can even work when they are on the road.
Email Marketing Integrations
When all the data is available in your CRM, then it is easier to segment it and add the contacts directly to your mail to send personalized mail to your customers. Your CRM must be able to integrate with powerful Email marketing tools like Mailchimp so that you can send out marketing campaigns with ease without leaving your CRM.
Setup and Track marketing goals
You always need to keep a track of certain milestones when running a marketing campaign. You may have to reward customers at different points of the customer journey and this is where CRM has a role to play. There might be a need to make the customers fill a feedback form once they have completed certain goals. When customers feel that they are valued, there are higher chances that they will stick around. And to track all this data, you need to have this feature in your CRM.
Collaborate with Ease
You must be easily able to collaborate with your team members, partners, and clients from the same place. Also, you should be able to control who gets to view and edit which data etc.
For instance, using TeamWave, you can easily add team members and clients to a project and also it is easy to share audio, video files, mockups and presentations among the team members in a project.
Sales Forecasting
You should be able to filter and drill down the data, analyse the current situation and able to forecast as to where are the trends going. This is a very important feature, as this helps you to determine which campaigns are working and which are not and it will help you to allocate your marketing budget in a better way. You can also get to see which products are trending and create your marketing messages around the latest trends.
CONCLUSION
This clearly shows how important CRM is for marketers to scale up their business as well as to generate more revenue. Thus, the need arises to look out for a quality CRM to boost the team’s productivity, engage in a better way with the customers and to increase your business’ revenue.
