CRM for Marketing
Alongside their customer engagement colleagues in service and sales, marketing’s business objectives are to generate leads, optimize customer relationships, drive customer loyalty, improve retention, revenue and customer lifetime value.
The best CRM software can provide both marketing, service and sales functionality within their own operational requirements; but should also enable better collaboration and transparency between teams across the business; putting the lead, prospect and customer at the heart of the CRM strategy.
The CRM strategy should set the scene for what is needed from CRM software in order to manage the customer lifecycle for your business. So this should include the strategies, tactics, and the tools to support the execution of marketing activities.
CRM software for your marketing team
Customer relationship management software helps the marketing team to attract, build and manage relationships with your customers.
The marketing team can be supported by a CRM platform across inbound and outbound marketing regardless of physical or digital channel; in lead generation efforts, planning and executing multi-channel marketing campaigns, segmenting audiences, delivering targeted messaging at the right time, analyzing marketing spend ROI and carrying out best practice testing efficiently.
CRM marketing software has evolved from being “simply” a contact database; whilst having a centralized platform for records of your customers remains a key benefit of CRM tools, a marketing team expects more from the software in answer to the multiple channels and tactics that are used by the business to engage customers. An essential start point for reviewing CRM software is the structure and complexity of the database itself, as your marketing team will expect it to allow them to easily collect, organize, segment and analyze customer data.
Having your customer data in one place allows your business to spot trends both strategically and operationally; what is working or what needs improvement (for example, sales of a product line, a campaign creative or a new customer segment), and engagement level across all touchpoints.
The ability for marketing to classify audience types in your data for segmentation allows for more focused and personalized marketing campaigns, execution of testing best practice and for marketing automation techniques.
The importance of data in marketing CRM
Marketing automation in CRM software
Whatever the size of your business and quantity of customer data you hold, marketing automation features within a CRM has become essential. Whether it’s to meet complexity in your offering or segments, or to resolve a low level of marketing resource; automated workflows can benefit your business.
Marketing automation are processes executed automatically in response to activities and behaviors of your customers and leads. Your marketing team can set up customer journeys to keep engagement, improve conversion rates, request feedback, set reminders, up-sell and cross-sell and enrich the data you hold.
Remember to adapt your campaigns and assets according to the customer type, the reason behind the interaction and the customer journey stage.
Automated campaigns depend on your business needs but may include:
- A welcome email series for new customers to reinforce their purchase decision post-sale and offer discounts etc.
- A nurture lead campaign to keep leads warm and build qualification for sales and marketing, the triggers can come from what you set up, including website landing page visitors, a contact form sent, a live chat follow up, attendance (or non-attendance) at an event etc.
- Reminders to complete CTA; abandoned shopping carts, incomplete forms, late renewals, event or webinar registration
- Personalized offers and thank you emails sent to your most important customer segments to reward them for their loyalty to your business
- As part of your inbound marketing approach across multiple channels to build brand awareness and engagement
Your marketing team will also be able to dynamically adapt the workflow based on responses of customers, using testing to serve up the best content, timing and offer in the best channel.
Highlights on what marketing features within a CRM software review should include:
- Multi-channel marketing campaigns management including events, SMS, email, web landing pages and social media based on customer contact preferences
- Integration with sales and service activities to understand the success of lead and customer campaigns and requirements for upsell and cross-sell initiatives
- Customer segmentation including the use of personas and prebuilt segments
- Prebuilt workflows that automatically hand off sales-ready leads and drive follow-ups
- Marketing automation for personalized messaging based on triggers (e.g. transactions such as purchases, returns, payments) of customer behavior
- Configurable templates, reusable content blocks, and visual editing design tools for on-brand content for online landing pages and email marketing; these remove the need for additional coding and design costs
- Built-in A/B testing (e.g. subject lines for email marketing, content, offers and channels) with dynamic content for campaigns as part of marketing automation
- Comprehensive physical and digital event marketing and execution features; from initial planning and budget through to attendee registration, webinar broadcasts, analytics for ROI and lead generation
- GDPR compliance for best practice storage and easy access to prospect and customer data held in your business
- Prebuilt and customizable marketing dashboards for marketing execution and management to surface campaign KPI performance, track leads, identify patterns and interpret customer behavior
- Look out for Customer Journey management, including VoC data, personas, insight and analysis to expand your CRM use into a customer experience approach
How do marketing CRM features integrate with other key business areas to deliver exceptional customer experiences?
- Discover more about CRM software for your sales team
- Discover more about CRM software for your customer service team
- Discover more about CRM software for your field service team
- Discover more about how Customer Insights and CDP technology supports businesses
