Businesses can really only grow in one particular way. And that growth is driven by customer acquisition and retention. Businesses don’t have to always have to continually find new customers though. They can also effectively manage their current ones in order to gain their loyalty and repeat business. However, this is easier said than done, even though it should be the goal of any growing business. To sustain this growth, many businesses have started using software to better track and analyze their customer data. This is typically done using a CRM.
But what is a CRM? A CRM, which stands for customer relationship management software, is used to quantity and analyze the process of managing and maintaining customer relationships. The best part about a CRM is that it can be used by many different types of employees and contractors, including marketing, sales, customer success, and accounting and finance professionals. Each can draw their own insights from different types of customer data and use this data to make more informed decisions about a bunch of different business initiatives. This includes loyalty and rewards programs for marketing and customer retention, reaching out at a certain stage of the process for customer success, and following up on unpaid invoices at a particular time for accounting departments.
Why do crms fail? The success of the CRM depends on the company’s culture, size and industry. Some companies might find it beneficial to have a CRM that helps them with their marketing campaigns.
This makes the use of a CRM multi-fold for any business that is looking to grow in a sustainable way. For example, a marketing team can use a CRM to create a buyer persona that they can then create marketing initiatives around to target by reviewing past customer data and determining which types of customers have the best customer lifetime value. While this is guesswork without a CRM, a CRM allows companies to quantify their growth and understand where their efforts might give them the most value.
From a marketing perspective, a CRM can also be used to segment customers in terms of where they are coming from and what they are looking for out of your business. When these leads are warm enough, the sales department can then use the CRM to see which potential customers are ripe for outreach, and which leads are too cold to consider outreach. This is an excellent way for businesses to deliver personalization in way that is not possible without having their customer’s data at their disposal.
This segmentation can also be used to target customers in a particular way, such as using a different email sequence to better match their interests and analysis. For example, if a customer gave you their email by downloading a particular eBook, you can then have your marketing department target them using an email sequence that is relevant to that eBook. You can then track whether they have opened any of these email and whether they clicked on any of the links inside these emails to engage with additional content that is relevant to the topic of the eBook.
Overall, there are many different ways that a business can use a CRM to grow. However, the sales and marketing departments are key to finding the right types of customers, and by utilizing a CRM, they can better target and segment customers that are more likely to stick around. By being proactive and using all of the different functions and analysis features that a CRM has to offer, a business can better find the right type of customers to sustain its growth for years to come.
