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CRM as a core part of your business strategy: value and benefits
7 min read
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by Alena Parfisenko
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CRM software is an integrated suite of—usually—cloud applications, such as marketing, sales, and service clouds, that collects and stores customer data. It provides a centralized platform for sales teams to manage customer interactions and prioritize activities so that no customer feels ignored, thereby boosting their customer experience (CX).
CRM software is one of the most important sales tools in sales reps’ arsenal. It is more than a contact management system. If used to its total capacity, a CRM allows sales reps to spend more time with customers and potential customers. The more time spent with customers, the more deals are closed, and the more loyal customers remain.
Have you come close to this case?
As the urge to integrate new CRMs into different marketing platforms becomes an urgent daily issue for many businesses, we decided to share the experience of our partners and what kind of milestones they have encountered. Whenever there is a discussion for a potential CRM integration into an existing marketing platform, whether it is a fashion or an architectural business, our clients indicate that they always encounter at least 1 or 2 of the following issues:
- No resources for fast integration
- The IT Department wants to refrain from installing third-party code on the company website.
- Data security is a concern, which is why the CEO or other stakeholders may object to the new integration.
- The company does not have the funds to set up the integration
- The new platform cannot guarantee that data loss or errors will not happen during the data transfer.
So does CRM have a core value for your marketing platform? And if so, what are they? The short answer is yes, and regarding the metrics and data: there are a ton of them, but we’ve highlighted the essential ones.
Why use a customer relationship management (CRM) solution?
When your data is organized and managed by a CRM platform, you have a more comprehensive understanding of your customers, leading to more aligned messaging. Many activities (both behind-the-scenes and direct interactions) can be digitized and automated, which helps you target your marketing efforts, speed sales cycles, and deliver better, more efficient customer service. Finally, with a fully integrated CRM, data silos are removed, making cross-departmental collaboration easy to present a united front to customers.
What valuable data from your CRM can you use to strengthen your marketing?
CRM stores data about consumer orders: several orders, the total amount spent, what the person bought, etc. That means it is possible to understand what product category a person is interested in and what their average bill is. Based on this data, marketers can improve personalization and build additional segments to provide consumers with more relevant content.
Customer Lifetime Value
Customer Lifetime Value determines the financial value of each of your customers. In and of itself, that’s an essential purpose. But CLV is also unique in that it can look forward, as opposed to a concept like customer profitability, which measures past activities to gain insights. You should always look into the future to determine which products you should sell, ways to optimize your business, and how you might better serve your customers. CLV can forecast future activity to improve your bottom line.
Customer lifetime value is essential because it allows you to maximize the value of every customer relationship. That means that you’re providing a better customer experience that keeps people around for longer, which can also help improve the quality of your products and services.
A fundamental aspect that impacts CLV, as a result, is a customer's actions inside your online store. For example, determine how many purchases the person has made. Is it a regular customer or not? How many regulars do you have? For loyal customers, you can hold closed sales, and for those who made only a few purchases, you can use promotions and additional discounts so that they become your regular. The lifetime value of a customer is an essential metric for every business to consider.
In short, the CLV allows you to quickly:
- Determine customer segmentation
- Measure customer loyalty
- Determine the efficacy of marketing strategies
- Judge product quality
- Increase profitability
ROI
Marketing ROI focuses on the return on investment of your marketing spend. Use this metric to determine whether your emails or the entire marketing campaign have paid off, increasing the number of customers and boosting sales revenue. You can go even further by connecting a CRM system and configuring UTM tags, and you’ll be able to track the impact of your emails and determine which ones affect your conversion. For marketers at small businesses and large enterprises alike, there are several benefits to understanding the ROI meaning in marketing, including:
- Proving efficiency in marketing spending - Knowing how to calculate marketing ROI gives you quantitative proof of how well or poorly each ad performs. It also gives you something to put in front of decision-makers and leaders who wonder what they're getting for their money.
- Distributing your ad budget wisely - When you calculate return on investment at the campaign level, you can tell which strategies you should continue to pursue. For example, if a Facebook ad performs better than an Instagram ad, you should spend more of your marketing dollars on the best one.
- Comparing how you're competing in the market - Track the return on investment of your competitors and compare it to your own. You can use public information and financial statements to determine if your marketing campaign has increased your footprint.
- Holding yourself accountable - While telling a good story can help you engage new customers or improve customer relationships, it's all about the sales revenue numbers. The marketing return on investment calculation below can help you justify every advertising dollar spent.
Customer Effort Score
As far as essential CRM metrics are concerned, the Net Promoter Score we mentioned above shows the importance of customer satisfaction. However, there is more than one way to measure this particular factor when managing customers. The Customer Effort Score is a metric that tracks customer satisfaction based on single interactions with your business. That is where the impact of customer care plays a role in terms of email responsiveness.
First Contact Resolution Rate
Synonymous with the Customer Effort Score, FCR is one of the essential CRM metrics because it targets customer satisfaction and the ability of your business to provide quality customer service. This metric speaks to the effectiveness of your company’s ability to resolve customer queries during the first contact. One of the advantages of having a one-size-fits-all CRM solution is that you can establish a customer-centric strategy that works in favor of your company while providing customers with precisely what they need. In conclusion, the higher your FCR rate is, the better it will be for your brand name in customers' eyes.
Why Collect CRM Data?
CRM data helps sales teams stay organized, optimize selling, leverage marketing automation features and customer support activities, and become terrific relationship managers. The main reasons to collect and utilize CRM data include the following:
- To stay organized: Collecting and storing CRM data makes accessing information needed to complete sales and marketing activities easy. Users can search, filter, and track information based on identity and descriptive data managed in the CRM.
- To improve interactions with contacts: Storing contextual information in a CRM, such as the lead’s industry, job title, or thoughts, behaviors, and feelings toward your business, allow you to make personalized conversations and marketing content for them. That ultimately helps build better relationships with leads and customers while getting optimal conversion rates on sales and marketing campaigns.
- For simple marketing and sales segmentation: Storing data within a CRM makes it easy to filter out lead and customer contact lists based on descriptive, qualitative, and quantitative information. This segmentation lets you easily design and deploy targeted marketing and cold-calling campaigns to desired audiences.
Wrapping Up
In the end, an integration project is a hell of a project, and many things can go wrong. It’s not very popular among engineers for several reasons. Still, it can be rewarding to see that implementation positively impacts the productivity of people sitting next to you.
So for engineers—try to understand the needs of an external system such as a CRM or an invoicing system by asking concrete questions such as: How will this product make your life easier? Have you considered competitors? Why don’t they work?
For everyone else involved—get the engineers in as early as possible, trust them when they point out red lines, and don’t opt for a cheap plan when you can see that the integration implementation will make it a lot harder in the long run.
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