CRM in marketing: Enhance customer relationships today

Highlights

You’ll learn about why you need CRM:

• Cross-team alignment: Creates collaboration between your sales, marketing and customer service departments to provide never-before customer experiences
• Increased efficiency: Saves your time on mundane activities, reduces the possibility of mistakes and frees up time for better planning and decision-making
• Personalized marketing: Make recommendations specific to individual interests, creating a positive engagement
• Higher ROI: Improves resource management and campaign efficiency

Did you know that lead generation is the most critical business goal for 91% of marketers? This comes as no surprise because, without leads, your business will come to a halt. Many businesses rely on customer relationship management (CRM) for their marketing requirements. 

CRM solutions drive quality leads using lead scoring and segmentation. Integrating with marketing platforms lets you capture and track interactions from different channels. 

This synergy improves lead tracking and ensures your marketing strategies are relevant, targeted and efficient. But what does CRM marketing mean? What’s the need for CRM in marketing? What are the available features of CRM tools? Why do you need to integrate your CMS with CRM? 

What is CRM marketing?

CRM marketing helps you manage and analyze customer data and communications across the customer buying cycle. These solutions track customer communication, including email, social media or phone. Using the information collected, you know your customers' likes, dislikes and preferences. Also, you do not market unwanted products and services. As you provide personalized messages and offers, your customers feel valued and understood. 

Imagine you own an online clothing store. With a CRM, you could also determine and monitor customers' browsing and buying behaviors. The CRM collects data when customers buy summer dresses and visit your new arrival section. The software then offers special discounts on your new arrival section. Triggering a personalized email immediately after customers interact with your brand makes them feel understood and valued. 

Benefits of integrating CRM in marketing

The benefits of integrating CRM in marketing with your CMS are:

Align your sales team with your marketing and service team

Cross-team alignment is important for your business success. The alignment between your sales and marketing team streamlines all customer’s lifecycles. When this happens, teams can share internal data as a cohesive and collaborative team. In doing so, you provide a consistent and seamless end-to-end experience, helping customers remain loyal to your brand. Integrating with the service team means that you can solve customers’ complaints or handle feedback, improving customer satisfaction and retention rates.

Increases business efficiency

You will witness increased business efficiency when your CRM systems automate tasks like data entry, follow-up reminders and customer segmentation. With a CRM, you reduce human errors and improve data accuracy. This gives your marketing team more time to craft targeted campaigns, analyze market trends and enhance customer engagement. The tool ensures efficient use of resources and meets your business goals.

Ensures personalized marketing

With customer information, you adapt your marketing initiatives to meet each customer’s desire and usage pattern. For instance, a streaming service provider’s recommendation platform may work on customers' previous interactions and suggest new content. As a result, you get better customer reception of your marketing messages, which ensures a higher conversion rate. Personalized marketing allows customers to feel valued and generates lasting customer relationships.

Creates a loyal customer base

Businesses personalize their communication and marketing efforts and create stronger customer connections. This approach encourages loyalty and improves retention rates. Creating messages that align with your customer’s preferences and needs enhances satisfaction and nurtures lasting relationships, resulting in ongoing engagement and repeat purchases.

Increases ROI

Integrating CRM into marketing strategies enhances your business’s ROI, ensuring precise targeting, reducing waste and increasing campaign effectiveness. CRM tools provide insights for continuous optimization, automate routine tasks and allow your marketing teams to focus on strategic activities. As a result, you save on costs while improving resource allocation. This makes CRM essential for heightening your profitability and achieving sustainable growth.

Features of CRM tools

With the right features and functionalities, your CRM accelerates your marketing efforts, all while delivering the desired results. When searching for a CRM tool, consider the following features:

Marketing automation

Beyond sales automation, look for a CRM that automates most of your marketing activities. 

Marketing automation leads potential customers to your business while offering them coupons and other specials. These tools help you track campaigns, social media postings and email marketing, saving you valuable time. With marketing automation, you increase data accuracy and consistency by centralizing all customer information in CRM systems, which reduces manual errors. As a result, you develop more strategic marketing plans, helping you see higher conversion rates and happier customers.

Lead management

Lead management is a critical part of your CRM system. Using this feature, you identify leads and monitor their actions throughout the sales journey. CRM solutions with lead management capabilities score your leads based on their interaction level, behavior and how closely they fit your ideal customer profile (ICP). Using CRM with lead scoring and management capabilities, you enhance the ability to target high-potential prospects, increasing conversion rates and building long-term growth.

Pipeline management

Whenever you engage with your prospect, managing your sales pipeline becomes easy. A visual representation of your sales pipeline tracks how and where each lead progresses through different stages, from initial contact to final purchase. You identify challenges and opportunities to ensure efficient resource allocation within the sales department. Knowing each prospect or deal's status makes it easier to strategize, make informed decisions and ensure your customers convert.

Sales automation

Search for CRM tools that automate repetitive sales tasks based on pre-defined criteria or triggers. Set up triggers like a new customer being added to the sales pipeline or a prospect performing a desired action. Next, create an action for the trigger. You can send an onboarding email or an offer to the new customer based on their action.

Reporting and analytics

CRM systems with reporting and analytics features help you make informed business decisions. This feature acts as your data compass, providing insights about your customer profile, identifying high-ticket customers and reducing churn rates. Furthermore, you can convert the information into actionable strategies, delivering exceptional customer support and experience. Many advanced CRMs include forecasting features based on your metrics, which helps you plan for the future. 

Email integration

Connecting your CRM with your business email is an important feature to look for. This allows you to manage your business emails directly from your CRM. You ensure that every sales email is received and addressed promptly, increasing the chances of generating more revenue. Such a feature keeps your sales reps organized and productive. They can even use the CRM to integrate their calendar and engage your prospects and customers. Also, many CRM tools come in-built with email templates, allowing your marketing representatives to spend less time creating content. 

Data security and privacy

Prefer a cloud-based CRM that provides data security standards and complies with privacy laws like CCPA. Security is essential as it stores your customer’s information and sensitive data. Such a feature makes you less vulnerable to cyberattacks and potential data breaches.

Integration with third-party tools

Connecting CRM systems with other tools helps you create a solid marketing strategy. You can keep information flowing by linking CRM platforms with familiar apps like email marketing services, e-commerce platforms and social media tools. This setup helps marketers analyze data from different places, offering a complete view of how customers interact and behave. Integration enables automated workflows, triggering targeted campaigns based on what customers do across various platforms.

CRM strategies for effective marketing

These CRM strategies help you with effective marketing:

Segmentation and targeting

Connecting CRM systems with other tools helps you create a solid marketing strategy. You can keep information flowing by linking CRM platforms with apps like email marketing services, data analytics and social media tools. This setup helps marketers analyze data from different places, offering a complete view of how customers interact and behave. Integration enables automated workflows, triggering targeted campaigns based on what customers do across various platforms.

Personalization of communication

Use your CRM system to send personalized content and offers. This can range from addressing customers by their names in emails to developing specific product recommendations based on their purchase history. Personalization enhances your customer relationship because your customers feel valued and understood.

Lifecycle marketing

Develop initiatives that will engage your customers at every stage of the buying process. You create and design unique campaigns for each customer journey phase using CRM tools. As a result, you share relevant information and build long-term customer relationships.

Automated follow-ups

Implement your CRM solutions to capture customer data. From this data, you can deduce the areas that need improvement. Knowing your customers' thoughts helps you modify your marketing techniques to suit their needs and improve their experiences.

Analyzing customer feedback

Use your CRM tools to collect and analyze customer feedback and identify trends and areas for improvement. Understanding your customers' needs and pain points helps you change your marketing strategies and enhance their experiences and satisfaction.

Continuous optimization

Another approach is to check your CRM data and analytics and ensure they focus on what is successful, removing strategies or campaigns that are not delivering the desired results. Continuous optimization ensures an up-to-date marketing process, which eventually attracts more customers. 

Importance of integrating your CMS with your CRM

Integrating your headless content management system (CMS) with your CRM system increases your marketing and customer engagement strategies. Connecting these two systems helps you share customer information and content between different platforms, creating personalized, localized and consistent customer experiences. 

This integration makes your content more relevant and enhances customer satisfaction and loyalty. It removes redundancies and reduces errors, optimizing your workflows. The partnership between your headless CMS like Contentstack and CRM helps you develop strategic, data-driven content plans that align with your specific marketing objectives.

Case study: How did Contentstack improve Miami Heat's efficiency and fan engagement?

The Miami Heat transitioned from SDL Tridion to Contentstack headless CMS to address issues of cost, scalability and complexity. This move improved their content management, increased internal adoption by over 30% and halved developer costs and time. The personalization features of Contentstack increased fan engagement and sales, making the ROI higher during the specific targeted campaigns that provided about 100% open rate on the app. The new system offered insights into fan preferences to make sound decisions and deliver excellent experiences.

After using Contentstack, Edson Crevecoeur, Vice President of Business Intelligence and Strategy Miami Heat, said:

“Being able to customize a message to just certain segments of the population is key. It is not just the fans engaging with content, but it is everyone in our organization tracking and further improving that engagement. This allows us to derive concrete value from the data we have about our fans.”

Read the complete case study here. 

FAQs

What is a CRM in marketing?

CRM in marketing uses CRM systems to manage and analyze customer interactions and data throughout the lifecycle to enhance marketing strategies.

What is CRM with an example?

A CRM system manages your customer relationships and interactions. For example, CRM software can capture, analyze and store details about customer emails and social media activities and use them to create personalized customer communication and responses.

Why is CRM important in marketing?

CRM is important because it provides useful customer information, offers personalized customer relations and improves marketing performance.

What are the benefits of CRM?

The benefits of CRM are improved customer insights, personalized marketing campaigns, increased efficiency, enhanced customer loyalty and better collaboration between marketing and sales teams.

Learn more

Whether you’re a multinational company or an e-commerce platform, tracking customer data is important for your business success. You need a CRM that understands your customer requirements. This helps you deliver more thoughtful and relevant experiences. With a CRM in place, you ensure profitable relationships that allow your company to meet customer requirements. 
To understand how Contentstack can help you with your CRM efforts, talk to us.