Are you unfamiliar or vaguely familiar with CRM? This acronym stands for customer relationship management, and it is a crucial element of a prosperous online marketing strategy. CRM in digital marketing is the bread and butter of any campaign to promote or sell ideas, products, or services. Read on and learn about the basics of CRM and its importance!
CRM Explained
Customer relationship management is done via a combination of apps that allow the user to control and manage user interactions, client or customer databases, leads, levels of customer satisfaction, and more.
CRM is software that is used to maintain customer data records, tracks correlations between marketing and sales volumes, improve following up on leads, and connect sales team members with customers or clients.
Customer relationship management also updates the sales team about leads, client details, and it allows them to share information amongst each other. Perhaps most importantly, CRM tracks user satisfaction and allows its users to increase it organically and without much effort, which builds brand reputation, and creates a happy customer base.
The Main Reasons Why CRM Is Crucial for Digital Marketing Campaigns
Here are some of the most beneficial uses of CRM in digital marketing:
User Data Gathering
Customer relationship management tools allow you to know your audience better and gather info about them, including their first and last name, purchase dates, locations, email addresses, and other important info.
Having gathered this information, your digital marketing will be more precise and personalized, which we will discuss further in the next CRM benefit heading. Essentially, CRM will allow you to create targeted ads and interact with your audience via personalization.
Digital Marketing Campaign Personalization
After getting to know your target audience, which is the core of modern digital marketing since you don’t want to randomly advertise your products, you can personalize your campaign.
With the knowledge of preferences among your target demographics and having the purchase statistics of your potential or existing users, their age, gender, location, most frequent online activity times, etc., you will be able to perfectly advertise your company.
Broad marketing campaigns are a thing of the past because they don’t work. Personalization is key to successfully advertising your business online, and CRM will be your best friend in perfecting this aspect of your campaign.
Connecting With Your Target Audience
With knowledge comes power, and once you obtain the so-called power, you should use it. Knowing your audience will allow you to interact with them one on one, in a medium of choice, but covering multiple bases is the safest bet. What’s meant by that is whether you will connect with users via email marketing, social media ads on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, etc., or writing dedicated blogs.
All of the aforementioned digital marketing mediums are effective on their own, but if used in unison, they can almost guarantee success. Putting your company’s name out there all over the internet highly increases the chance of your products or services and course your brand becoming popular, or trending as they like to call it nowadays.
Once you gain popularity, your sales will improve, and your marketing campaign may be deemed successful, but that is not yet the end. CRM can still be useful because you need to keep your audience engaged and happy.
Improving User Satisfaction
Gathering a following is challenging, and CRM can help you achieve that with a highly personalized and engaging digital marketing campaign. However, people have short attention spans, and they care about customer service. If your service is not good enough, or you decrease the number of blog posts, emails, and targeted ads, you will likely lose that lucrative trending hashtag.
CRM allows you to track user satisfaction and maintain a detailed customer database. With a clear overview of user satisfaction, e.g., how customer service calls or messaging were resolved, what was the customers’ content, you may then improve your customer service. Improving the service involves customer representative training, building and enabling website bots to answer questions from customers automatically and without hassle, offering coupons or other promotions to your users, etc.
Improving Your Return on Investment (ROI)
Digital marketing is and should be one of the key investments of almost any business. However, no business owner likes spending company money carelessly, not even on marketing. With proper CRM utilization, you can get lead analytics, adjust the marketing campaign, and spend less money on marketing, while making it more effective!
CRM analytics are incredibly powerful, and by utilizing the previously mentioned methods and uses of CRM, you will be saving money while expanding your user base and their engagement.
Increasing User Engagement
Speaking of engagement, it is crucial to know what to do with your user’s attention once you get them. Remember, modern people have a teensy attention span of eight seconds, as confirmed by Orlando Sentinel. How do you keep a person engaged? Revert to the previous step, personalization. It’s not our goal to be repetitive, but you see that all the benefits of CRM are intertwined, and that’s why these tools are so powerful.
When you know your audience, i.e., millennial moms, you can deduct the best ways to advertise for them and engage in communication with them. They are likely reading more blogs and spending time on social media than reading promotional emails. Did you know that millennial moms have a $2.4 trillion spending power, and account for 85% of all household purchases? Many other demographics are big spenders too, you don’t have to focus on this one, but knowing the way your customers think and use the internet will be greatly beneficial for your business, and CRM will assist you in deducting that.
Improve Your Marketing With CRM
Stop wasting money and time on tools that don’t get the results. CRM in digital marketing is the most effective, centralized foundation for a successful digital campaign, that will achieve many beneficial effects at once. You will get better leads, increase engagement, personalization, improve your ROI, user satisfaction, connect with your audience, and get the best analytic data about your audience with the use of CRM.
Rick Seidl is a digital marketing specialist with a bachelor’s degree in Digital Media and Communications, based in Portland, Oregon.
With a burning passion for digital marketing, social media, small business development, and establishing its presence in a digital world, currently quenching his thirst through writing about digital marketing and business strategies for FindDigitalAgency.