Using CRM for your marketing

3 min read

What is CRM for marketing?

CRM is an acronym for customer relationship management. In general, the term CRM describes all measures taken by a company to improve and thereby ideally maximise customer relationships. However, a software solution that supports a company's CRM activities is often simply referred to as a CRM. In marketing, a CRM system is used to improve customer experiences, enhance the relationship between a business and its customers, and therefore make the business more profitable. 

How does a CRM system support your marketing efforts?

There are many ways in which a CRM system can support you in your marketing. The main thing good CRM marketing software should do is collect and store all of your customer interaction data in one place, making it easy to access and share across your teams and staff. This data is then used to benefit your customers and your business. After all, a customer that is given information tailored to their needs and interests will be happier than a customer who is given the same generic sermons as everyone else. 

More people are buying products and services online than ever before. In fact, over a quarter of the world’s population regularly make online purchases - that’s more than 1 in 4. As a result, there is more being asked of people working in digital marketing than ever before. A CRM will alleviate some of this pressure by automating certain processes and tasks for you, such as inputting data, running chatbots, and managing calendars. This not only helps your employees to be more productive but helps customer interactions run more smoothly and uniformly, enhancing customer experiences. 

Using a CRM system to personalise messages

Segmentation and personalisation is vital for keeping your customers engaged. A CRM system will gather data and help sales teams to categorise customers based on their activity and preferences. Communications can then be tailored to ensure that customers feel as though their interactions with you feel personal and specific. This is key to encouraging loyalty and converting leads, and can sometimes come down to something as simple as sending the right message at the right time.

Using a CRM system for email marketing

Managing your contacts and sending tailored correspondence is easier with a CRM system than it is to do manually. Customers at different buying stages will need different CTAs to entice them, and potentially different tones of email altogether. CRM data will allow you to keep your emails personalised and email templates can be created for your sales teams to help speed up the process, which will help to grow trust between you and your customers.

Your CRM system can also help you monitor open rates on your emails, giving you further insight into what aspects of your email campaigns are successful and what aspects need tweaking. It will also help you avoid the human errors that lead to breaching GDPR and spam regulations, which can sometimes result in fines. 

Using a CRM system for better tracking

A CRM can keep track of your customer’s entire journey, from how they find you to how they complete their transaction, and all of the steps they take along the way. During different stages of their journey they may come under different customer classifications, and every time you interact with them this classification may change - a CRM will manage this for you, letting you know the logical next step in your business-customer relationship. 

It should also track how your business interacts with and uses the system and the data it collects. This can help to highlight areas in which you could improve efficiency and insights you may be missing out on, which in turn helps overall productivity and ROI. Similar to how a customer will feel encouraged through helpful interactions, your employees will feel encouraged by knowing when their efforts are successful, or where they could be spending their time more wisely. 

See how Apteco Orbit can support you

All the information stored in a CRM is not helpful though if no insights are generated from them. Apteco Orbit helps you to visualise all the data stored within your CRM, segment your customers according to their interests and preferences and bring data from different sources together. The insights generated from this allow you to create compelling campaigns.

Learn more about Apteco Orbit here, and book yourself a demo or free trial.