Managing relationships through the customer lifecycle is the key to business success. Providing a robust customer experience elevates a brand above its competitors. Great products and services are part of that, but CRM marketing improves and optimizes your relationships with those users for as long as they remain your customers.
What is CRM Marketing?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) is a term that applies to the marketing strategies and supporting technologies used by organizations to improve and strengthen the relationships they have with their customers.
It extends throughout the entire customer lifecycle and is designed to enhance customer loyalty, support retention rates, and the overall value of every customer.
What are CRM Marketing Strategies?
CRM marketing strategies rely on customer data to build personalized marketing campaigns. By splitting your target audience into segments, you can better service the needs of individuals to increase retention, loyalty, and revenue.
Customers expect personalization in the era of big data, and cutting-edge technologies like artificial intelligence (AI) empower brands to deliver one-to-one marketing for the first time.
For example, companies may focus on a CRM retention strategy to engage existing customers and keep them for longer. This could be an active newsletter campaign delivering personalized offers targeted at a small number of customers based on their purchase history.
Why Do You Need a CRM Platform?
Effective CRM relies on the technology supporting it. Companies that practice CRM marketing use dedicated software to manage these relationships and track the interactions between new and existing customers.
Centralizing everything in one place and automating much of the process allows companies to provide personalized experiences for thousands with relatively small teams. Again, CRM platforms rely on unifying customer data to be as effective as possible.
Managing thousands of relationships without a dedicated CRM system would simply be impossible.
Why Use CRM Marketing?
The benefits of CRM marketing are immense. Deploying this marketing approach allows companies to extract more from customer relationships and make them last longer. Here are the reasons why relationship marketing makes sense for companies across every industry.
Better Understand Customers
CRM platforms automate the process of collecting, organizing, and analyzing data. Your marketing team can gain immediate insights into your customers’ preferences and behaviors that can be capitalized on with your next marketing campaign.
Segment Customers
Just because you’re targeting a particular audience doesn’t mean you can treat everyone like a great monolith. Everyone within that audience will react to different things, and that’s where customer segmentation comes in.
Through CRM platforms, companies can segment customers based on what makes them stand out from each other. It could be anything like purchase history, browsing history, and customer support interactions. Using a CRM platform, you can use analytics to spot trends and patterns you can act on.
Relevant Messaging at the Right Time
CRM data gives organizations the insights needed to deliver the right message in the right tone at the right time. With this granular data, companies maximize their chances of engaging their targets.
Build Customer Loyalty
Every successful company relies on a relatively small number of customers to generate most of their revenue. Building loyalty builds the foundations of future success, and relationship marketing is at the heart of that.
Delivering the right messaging and customizing the user experience makes customers feel appreciated and valued, which increases the chances of holding them for longer and winning repeat purchases.
Deliver Personalized Experiences
Consumers expect personalized experiences, and a reliable CRM infrastructure lets companies do just that. Stay ahead of the crowd in competitive markets by gaining a better understanding of individual customers and providing them with the experiences they really value.
CRM Marketing Examples
CRM strategies can be deployed in different ways, such as targeting new customers vs. existing customers. Regardless of the sort of campaign you’re running, the goal is to always strengthen the relationship between your brand and the customer you’re targeting.
Some the CRM strategies marketing teams are using today include:
- Personalized Email Campaigns – Send out personalized messages by getting into the customer data in your CRM platform and tweaking your messaging based on those insights.
- Cross–Selling/Up-Selling Campaigns – Engage in cross-selling and up-selling with in-depth analytics from your CRM platform.
- Customer Retention Efforts – Predictive analytics is the antidote to customer churn. Being proactive with retention through advanced analytics enables each customer’s lifetime value potential to be realized.
- Real–Time Marketing – Market in real-time and set triggers based on customer actions to push products and services when customers are most ready to buy.
CRM strategies improve the capabilities of brands, allowing them to gain a deeper understanding of each customer and bolster their revenues across every digital channel.