In marketing, understanding your customers is key to all those campaigns, advertising, and dollars spent toward keeping current customers happy and gaining new ones.
What if you could eliminate the guesswork and get the cold, hard data on where your customers come from, how they behave, what moves them through your company’s purchasing funnel, and more? CRM marketing software lets you do that!
Instead of creating a customer persona (or personas) based on what you think your customers are like, you can create one based on what you know they are like.
Instead of creating campaigns that you think will resonate with your customers, you can create campaigns that you know will resonate with them (ok, at least have a WAY better chance at being successful, a marketing CRM won’t make you a mind reader).
Want to learn more? Want to know the ways of marketing CRM? Read on!
A Marketing CRM is a data-driven platform that helps marketers create meaningful customer relationships and improve their marketing strategies. CRM automation marketing aims to build personalized customer experiences by leveraging customer data, including past purchases, interests, and behaviors.
Marketers are focused on reaching target customers through campaigns like email, social media, and content to move customers through the buying process.
However, knowing the best channel for reaching high-quality leads and customers can be difficult at the best of times, especially if you don’t have an organized and clear view of who your customers are and how they respond to your attempts to reach them.
A marketing CRM helps marketers understand their customers and gives them the tools to execute strategies and tactics that reach them.
For example, drip campaigns or drip marketing allow you to send various marketing messages, from email to SMS, to customers at the right time.
Drip campaigns are typically set up in your CMS, allowing you to target a specific customer segment through email or SMS messages. Pretty handy for keeping your business at the front of your customer’s mind!
And drip campaigns are just one example of what a marketing CRM can do for you and your business. There are a lot more uses that align with the marketing goal of reaching your customers, which will be explained in more detail throughout this post.
While the CRM tracks, manages, and stores customer data, marketing uses that data to create advertising, blogs, emails, SMS texts, business VoIP, and other communications to reach and convert more customers.
In today’s connected world, customers expect instant and consistent communication when they want it, and it’s up to marketers to provide it.
But if reaching customers properly means pushing relevant content their way, it’s tough to do that without a full understanding of who your customer is.
By using CRM strategies to track your customer journey through different sales funnels such as SEO and Social Media, you can gain invaluable knowledge about your customers' wants and needs.
You can then use this data to create meaningful customer personas that accurately reflect who you should target with your marketing campaigns - increasing engagement rates, building better relationships, and ultimately growing your business.
CRM automation marketing is an effective way to improve the customer experience and increase sales. It's an automated process that allows businesses to streamline their marketing, customer service, and other operational processes in one place.
With CRM automation marketing, you can create targeted campaigns, segment customers into different groups for better targeting, automate follow-up emails and messages, track customer interactions, and generate more leads.
Besides automation, marketing automation with CRM is about creating an experience for customers that will make them want to buy from you again and again. By automating processes, your business can focus on providing the best customer service and products possible without spending hours manually managing each task.
A few examples of CRM automation marketing include:
These CRM strategies allow marketers to create a custom experience for each customer without manually researching and writing content for every user. By leveraging marketing automation with CRM, marketers can stay ahead of the curve and ensure their messages resonate with their target audiences.
Now that we have discussed the whys and hows of marketing CRM software, let’s move on to the specific features and benefits of marketing CRM software.
Since there are way too many features and benefits to discuss, the ones highlighted below are the top or main features, along with their benefits, that you should be aware of when considering CRM marketing software.
Examples of Marketing CRM features and benefits:
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Feature |
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Lead management |
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Analytics |
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Accessibility |
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Content management |
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Segmentation |
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CRM shines when it comes to streamlining your marketing workflows. Here's how:
CRM task automation allows you to automate repetitive tasks, freeing up your marketing team to focus on more strategic initiatives. This can include:
CRM automation takes the manual effort out of email marketing, lead nurturing, and follow-up processes.
You can create personalized email templates with drag-and-drop builders, schedule automated email sequences based on lead behavior, and set up automated reminders for follow-up calls. This ensures timely communication and consistent messaging across all touchpoints.
By automating repetitive tasks, CRM marketing software empowers your marketing team to work smarter, not harder. This translates to:
At this point, you've moved from the basics of CRM automation marketing to more advanced techniques. Understanding the best practices for CRM campaigns is essential to getting the best results.
And the following are some techniques to get you started:
By tailoring and optimizing email marketing strategies, businesses can target the right audience with the tailored message they need. This strategy gives companies a decisive advantage - automated emails personalized to customers' desires, likes, and interests.
Furthermore, with segmentation tools, marketers can easily break down customers into individual groups and hone in on each group's specific needs.
When you correctly identify and understand segments, you can craft tailored emails for each group. While crafting relevant emails for every customer can be time-consuming, automated emails simplify it. All you need is one quality template that you can easily customize to meet each client's needs.
Leveraging segmented personalization empowers CRM marketing teams to understand their customer's unique interests better.
By creating materials tailored to each customer’s unique needs, businesses can build more meaningful relationships through engagement that is not only relevant but also deeply personal.
Personalized content allows companies to address customers’ concerns and highlight certain benefits or features of a product or service that interest them.
That's not all. Epsilon's research uncovered that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from businesses that provide personalized recommendations based on prior purchases and interactions with the company. This research clearly illustrates the power of personalizing content for each segment.
Utilizing marketing automation with CRM can help you achieve maximum sales outcomes while ensuring all necessary tasks are done promptly and efficiently.
Automation within your CRM system offers various opportunities, such as:
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Features |
Description |
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Data Collection & Organization |
Streamlines data collection and categorization, making it easier to track marketing activities. |
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Lead Management & Segmentation |
Facilitates automated lead scoring and segmentation for more targeted, personalized campaigns. |
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Campaigns & Communications |
Enables automated emails and other communications to ensure that prospects receive the right message at the right time. |
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Analytics & Insights |
Provides detailed insights into customer behavior so you can make more informed marketing decisions. |
Findstack found that sales productivity can increase by an impressive 14.5% when companies use marketing automation with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Incorporating CRM automation into your business will undoubtedly enhance its potential!
By diving into customer data, you can uncover patterns and trends in their past that you can leverage to customize your marketing approach.
This technique involves gathering customer data from multiple sources, including surveys, purchases, website traffic data, social media activity, etc., and then analyzing it using analytics tools like segmentation or predictive analysis.
After identifying patterns and trends in customer data, you can adjust your CRM strategies to target leads better and drive higher conversion rates.
It isn’t just about sales and customer service. The data that your CRM collects about customers can help you formulate strategies that touch every aspect of marketing.
We already know that a CRM is essential to your marketing strategies and tactics, but let’s be honest: You’re here because you’re looking for ideas.
CRM marketing isn't just about email automation and lead nurturing. It can be a powerful tool to enhance your organic content marketing strategy and search engine optimization (SEO) efforts. Here's how:
Similar to search engine optimization, understanding which words and phrases your customers use in searches can help you better target your pay-per-click advertising efforts. Yes, it’s important to bid on branded keywords at the very least, but you can gain a lot of traffic in a short amount of time if you bid on the right keywords.
Like organic SEO, CRM integration with keyword tracking and measuring tools can help you strike gold with keyword bidding.
Imagine having email management software where you’ve painstakingly created segments and rules to manage your contact list. However, you still get daily emails from frustrated customers who are receiving communications they shouldn’t be (e.g. sending an English email to a French customer).
With CRM integration, your email lists can be updated automatically when customer data is added, updated, or changed (avoiding frustrated customers hitting the unsubscribe button), and you can also schedule certain communications to be sent at the right times.
You can also use A/B testing (also known as split testing) to compare two versions of a campaign with different elements to discover which performs better in terms of engagement or conversion rate.
It involves taking two versions of a page or element within a page (A and B) and sending them out simultaneously to different audiences to compare which version gets a better response.
Companies use A/B testing for everything from email subject lines or CTA buttons to website design elements such as font size and color schemes.
By measuring each element's performance against key metrics like click-through rate (CTR), time spent on page (TSP), or bounce rate (BR), companies can determine what works best for their audience and optimize future campaigns accordingly.
Psst. If you aren’t already using a social media management system to create, schedule, and publish social media posts and ads, you’re missing out.
Taking a social media management system and integrating it with a CRM just takes everything to the next level:
Social listening
Most social media management systems have a cool feature called social listening. Social listening allows you to track hashtags, keywords, and even specific social media accounts so you can have a pulse on what your customers are talking about. Social listening can be a very useful feature to help you create customer personas, marketing strategies, and understand your company’s overall reputation online.
When marketing and sales work together on a growth strategy to create personalized buying experiences for specific customer accounts, that’s account-based marketing.
Your CRM is the main tool for account-based marketing because it holds all the information you need about the specific account you want to target. Now you can examine that customer more closely and create a personalized experience that will resonate with them. See how having everything in one place makes such a difference?
Here are some quick strategies for account-based marketing:
Personalized email campaigns
Let’s say you have customers in the construction industry that you haven’t marketed to in a while. Since your CRM has already segmented those customers into a category based on industry, why not send them a personalized email campaign to spark interest in your company?
Follow specific social media accounts
Do you see your customers interacting with a specific social media account? If so, it might be a good idea to follow that account and note what terminology and jargon they use, what topics they talk about, and who interacts with them.
Word of mouth is great for marketing, so it’s no surprise that companies use referral programs to entice their existing customers to recommend products and services to their friends and family. Referral programs are a winning marketing strategy that top eCommerce companies use all the time to gain new customers.
Referral programs can work in a variety of different ways, from giving existing customers coupons or discount codes that they can forward to friends and family through email or social media. You’ve probably received an email or DM from a friend with a good discount for a product or service and decided to buy based on that referral.
Here’s an example of an effective referral program from MeUndies:
As you can see, they’ve made their referral program straightforward to use. What most likely happens here is that someone enters their email address, and the CRM automatically triggers a referral email to be sent, which the customer can then forward to whomever they want.
With a CRM’s automation and ability to segment customers, you can set up a referral program that works for your business and sit back and watch as the number of new customers grows.
Whether an event is in-person or virtual, the ability to gather data related to it is crucial for effective marketing. Not all CRMs have robust event marketing tools built-in, but thankfully, event software integrations are available most of the time.
With a CRM behind the scenes of your event marketing, you can gather valuable data like registration numbers (even if people register from different sources), attendee information, website clicks, and more.
Conversational marketing is meant to encourage dialogue with customers quickly so that questions can be answered, issues can be solved, and anything preventing them from moving forward in the sales funnel can be eliminated.
Chatbots on websites are one example of conversational marketing. 45% of businesses use chatbots on their website, with that number growing daily. The idea with chatbots is to facilitate real conversations with customers to create a personalized and effective experience for them so an issue can be solved as quickly as possible, whenever the customer needs it—even if they need support outside of customer service hours.
Business SMS or business text messaging allows you to gain more touchpoints with customers or leads, thus increasing the chance of a sale.
Similar to email marketing, your CRM can automate messages to be sent to specific customers at specific times to keep them interested and engaged. For example, you could send a discount code to a customer when they pass your business’s brick-and-mortar location. You can also create and save templates that can be personalized for each customer.
Some CRMs even allow for automated text responses, so when a customer messages with a specific sentence or keyword, an automated response is triggered. Automated responses are useful for booking and confirming appointments, confirming receipt of a package, and more. They can save your customer support and sales teams time while still moving customers through the sales or support process.
Beyond streamlining marketing workflows, CRM systems offer a wealth of functionalities that can enhance your overall customer relationship strategy. Here are a few examples of how CRM marketing can be leveraged to build stronger relationships:
Gathering customer feedback is crucial for understanding their needs and improving your offerings. CRM automation can simplify this process:
CRM systems can automate basic customer support tasks, freeing up your team to handle complex issues:
Customers expect a seamless experience across all touchpoints. CRM marketing helps you deliver omnichannel service:
CRM marketing can enhance your social media strategy:
We all want to understand our customers better. This not only helps you help them, but it also increases your sales. After all, a company's reputation helps with brand recognition and positively impacts the company’s bottom line.
Marketing CRMs give you many tools and insights into your customers and prospects to enhance your understanding of how they move through the purchasing process, what support they need, and more.
A marketing CRM can help you with every aspect of your marketing, from content marketing to events to paid advertising.
In short, a marketing CRM gives you a bird' s-eye view of your customers, allowing you to tailor your marketing efforts to reach them more effectively. Book a demo with Ringy today to see how we can help you do exactly that.