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Optimizing Your CRM
One of the most prevalent ways to maintain and push leads to purchasing is customer relationship management, or CRM. A customer relationship management program is a system that is crafted to monitor and track the way you interact with your customers and how your customers interact with you.
Not sure how to get started? Here is an overview of what you need to know!
What is CRM?
Before we can elaborate on how you can optimize your CRM, it is best to define and elaborate upon the basis of CRM.
One of the biggest benefits of utilizing customer relationship management software is lead generation and audience retention. By keeping tabs on how people view your company, you can more easily maintain the image you want.
However, CRM alone is not a truly effective strategy. If you want to get the most out of it, you should also invest in two other things: email marketing and automation. Not to worry, there are ways to combine it all.
What is the Difference between CRM, Email Marketing, and Automated Emails?
The functions of all three methods overlap heavily, but their differences are based on how they are utilized. They all work in conjunction, yet each does something unique.
Summarily, each piece is as follows:
● CRM is mostly used for monitoring your customers and keeping track of their interactions with you
● Email marketing campaigns are tailored towards bringing in customers, informing them of updates, and/or engaging; this is where the content messaging is important
● And marketing automation is a suite of tools aimed at automating the process. CRM is one of the tools used to automate the process
How Can You Use CRM?
Now that we have outlined the basic purpose of CRM and its essential supporting software, it is time to see how we can make the system work for us. After all, marketing software that fails to produce results is worth very little.
In general, some of the major objectives that CRM can help you achieve include:
● Increasing how much you make from your services
● Reaching a wider audience
● Building deeper and more meaningful relationships with your clients
● Showing clients how they can get the most out of your service
● Personalizing the customer experience so that your clients are ready and willing to stay by your side long-term
Plan Mindfully
As with most things in life, you will get the best results from CRM if you take a bit of time to create a plan in advance. Do not just jump straight into the data; have a goal in mind. Some examples might be:
● Come up with reasons why customer retention may be an issue: Be ready to be honest with yourself. Think objectively about the service you offer your client and its inherent value. For example, maybe many clients express that they do love the service you offer and that they think it saves them a lot of time. Unfortunately, they just struggle to track the workload. In that case, you might brainstorm ways to streamline the process for your clients so that they use your service without sacrificing too much of their own time.
● Identify and mend hiccups in your sales process: As you know by now, making a sale is a process. No two customers’ journeys are the same. That said, trends are worth zeroing in on. For example, if when reviewing your sales process, you find that many customer interactions grow tepid after that first onboarding call, you may want to consider how you can bolster communication to ensure that your customers remain engaged. If you run a marketing agency, you might make an effort to touch base with each new client by offering a list of weekly ideas.
● Address customer concerns head-on: Customer complaints will happen. It is all part of doing business. What matters is that you address any concerns promptly, thoroughly, and honestly. Even if you do not have an immediate answer to a customer’s problem, you should communicate how you plan to go about solving it.
When you are creating a strategy plan, you should focus on gaps. As outlined in the above examples, these can be anywhere from your messaging to your process, to your sales.
You should also make sure that the goal you are setting is not only clearly defined, but also achievable. As in life, in business, it is poor form to set up checkpoints you cannot possibly reach. It is also in your interest to attach a deadline to your plan, so that you can reliably measure its effectiveness.
Once you have created the strategy, be sure that you have gotten the team on board. This includes your partners and other external resources. Mixed messaging is bad in any situation, but it can be disastrous in areas as crucial as this!
Optimization is Important
When it comes to handling the data your CRM provides, the best practice is to be sure that there’s a consistent system in place. Do not let anything that does not conform to this format into the system and be sure everyone knows what the guidelines are.
Remember, your CRM is merely a tool; the important information is the data. You want to keep it organized, sterile, and streamlined.
Some of the best ways to optimize your CRM include:
● Automate what you can: Let us face it, automation makes everyone’s lives easier––not just yours but your customers’ as well. When your customers do not feel bound by outdated processes, they are much more likely to stick around long-term.
● Ensure that your data are consistent: Do the numbers add up when you review them? You want to review carefully, as even small mix-ups can make for confusing processes both externally and internally.
● Integrate your website’s tools and tracking software into the CRM: Consistent technology makes for more consistent processes across the board, which in turn leads to a smoother customer experience.
● Integrate customer support information into the CRM: When you can access customer support information from one centralized place, you will find it much easier to connect with customers.
● Compare and combine your sales and marketing data: All data matters and can tell an important story. Bring all the information together and let it tell that cohesive story.
Know What You Are Looking For
Finally, and in relation to planning, you need to know what you’re actually looking for. What do you want to change? You can do as much planning and optimization as you want, but it will not do much good if you do not understand the data that results from it and what to do about it.
The major metrics that CRM reports on are:
● Growth rates track increases in areas such as profit, sales, and email subscribers
● Upsell rates determine how often customers spend more than intended
● Time spans, such as lead velocity (time between acquisition and sale), pipeline stage length (how long for a customer to work their way to purchasing), and how long it takes for your staff to resolve issues customers may have
● Customer lifetime value (CLV) relates to projected revenue per customer
● Customer acquisition cost, or how much it cost to obtain a successful lead
● Churn rate measures how often customers leave
What To Do Next?
The brief version of all of this is that CRM is just one of a triad of useful tools you can utilize. It is best used in conjunction with personalized email marketing messages and automated processes, and should be implemented with a clear goal in mind. However, when utilized properly, it is one of the most powerful tools you can have at your disposal.
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