Driving Success: Integrating CRM Strategies into Your Marketing Plan

Selling a message is easy as long as you know who you’re selling it to. This is the thing about marketing: you can read all the textbooks in the world, go through hundreds of case studies, and even listen to thousands of hours of expert lectures; it’s all relative and depends on your target audience.

So, instead of some innovative marketing methods and tricks, you will fare much better if you just used the old-school methods and focused on customer analysis. With that in mind, here’s how CRM (customer relationship management) strategies can enhance your marketing plan.

Customer segmentation

The biggest problem with customer relations lies in the idea that your audience is this unified group. Sure, when profiling, you can make a list of traits of an average customer, but an average customer is not a real customer.

For instance, when observing age, a 20-year-old and a 60-year-old have an average of 40 years. However, neither of the two people really have 40, and if you make a strategy that revolves around 40-year-olds, you’ll miss everyone. This is a bit of an oversimplified breakdown, but it’s the basis of what you have to do.

Now, you can’t make a strategy for each individual customer (not even the industries with the highest average order value would find this cost-effective). The best you can do is make as many groups (segments) as you can manage and try to optimize for the lowest common denominator in each group.

Also, when segmenting, it’s always better to look at the median than the average. You’ll just get better real-world outcomes. Averages are important for statistics and in-depth analysis, but on a more practical level, they’re often misleading.

With the help of CRM software, you’ll not just be able to segment and adjust your strategy for each segment; you’ll also be able to track the ROI of all your marketing efforts. In other words, CRM helps you both make plans and measure the effectiveness of these plans. 

Personalized customer campaigns

Imagine if you had magic goggles (or AR ones) that would give you a list of information about every customer who walks into your store. Here, you’ll be presented with everything you need to know about them, from their personal and demographic info all the way to the data regarding their previous interactions with your business. 

This is exactly what a CRM platform does for your business (in a digital world). 

You don’t even have to use complex analytical tools for this. With the use of small business CRM software, you can easily access all the preferences, past purchases, and on-site behavior of your customers.

The first step in this personalization of campaigns lies in segmentation (which we’ve already covered in the previous segment). Here, however, you can pick the criteria of segmentation and find a way in which this can be used for personalization.

Are you targeting customers by their:

• Purchase history
• Interests
• Engagement level
• Order value

Each of these groups can be approached in a unique way in order to generate maximum value for your enterprise. 

Moreover, you can personalize various methods of outreach. For instance, based on the information you have available, you can personalize your email campaigns for optimal efficiency. 

Lead nurturing and conversions 

Not all leads are the same. With the help of CRM, you’ll be able to track them and organize them into categories. Not only that, but you’ll also have a way of scoring and prioritizing them. This way, you’ll be able to single out those who are the most likely to convert. 

Once you’re done sorting them, you can set up an automated drip campaign. This way, you’ll gradually prepare all your leads and set them up to eventually get converted.  You see, it’s all about the customer lifecycle – they don’t have to buy right away in order for you to see them as valuable or conversion-ready.

We’ve already mentioned the customer lifecycle; well, this cycle has stages, and tracking these stages through CRM is a lot easier than handling it through guesswork. So, how do you actually see what stage they’re in? Lead interactions and engagement history are your most reliable indicators. With the help of this data, you’ll have an easier job of analyzing the effectiveness of your marketing methods.

To get the most out of this, you can use CRM to handle customer journey mapping. This will help you mold the marketing strategy around the resources and conditions you already have. 

Cross-channel marketing

As a business, you’ll communicate to your audience through so many different channels. You’ll answer their queries on social media comment sections and in DMs. You’ll receive emails and forms on your website. Even their orders and shopping carts, wishlists, and preorders are a form of communication.

While these messages come in many different forms and formats, it’s in your best interest to keep them all in one place. This is why cross-channel marketing campaigns heavily depend on CRM. With CRM, you get to centralize all the customer data quite effortlessly. 

The fact that CRM gives you a 360-degree customer view helps you figure out the best approach for each of your customers. Segmentation is just one part of this equation; targeting, especially at the right time and with the right message, is something completely different. 

It gets even more difficult since the same customer will interact with your brand through different channels. Sometimes, they’ll use different channels for different things. For instance, they might inquire via email and order via social media (or directly from the site). Sometimes, however, it’s much different than that. 

Remember, with the help of NLP (natural language processing), this communication data doesn’t even have to be structured for your platforms to analyze it.  

The best thing about this is that you also get far better accuracy when cross-selling and upselling. Since you’ll have information available about their previous purchases (even if they’re not via this channel), you’ll have a much easier job tracking everything that’s going on. 

Predictive analytics

In the past, marketers used data like website traffic, order history, and similar in order to figure out future trends. All of these methods were quite crude and seldom accurate enough. The reason behind this is that they lacked the capability of CRM, the capability to analyze customers on an individual level and compile this into a massive report.

Individual customers have their behavior patterns, and when you put enough of these customers together, you start seeing massive trends and patterns.

This can be used for campaign optimization, especially if you also include past instances into your analysis.

One of the ways to increase the profitability of the entire process is with the help of dynamic pricing. This way, you can adjust the price according to the market demand, competitor prices, and even things like customer behavior. This price adjustment is amazing because it allows you to maximize your profit without actively having to invest more money or sell more goods. 

Thanks to AI capabilities, machine learning integration with CRM systems, and quantum computing, these analytics are far more accurate and dependable than ever before. 

Customer retention strategies

Lastly, and arguably the most important part of the entire equation, are your efforts to retain customers. Why does this matter so much?

First of all, about 20% of your return customers are making 80% of your entire revenue. Second, it costs you five times less to convince someone who has already done business with you to buy again than it does to convert a new person. Second, people who are already in the stage of being customers are just one step away from becoming actual brand ambassadors. 

Retargeting is a subtle art; it’s not just about the message; it’s about hitting that sweet spot of reaching out to them regularly but without being too pushy. 

CRM is much better at tracking shopping cart abandonment. Not only that, but because it’s mostly AI-powered and has all the peculiarities regarding customer behavior patterns, it’s also more accurate at predicting the real reason behind abandonment. This can drastically improve your ability to retarget customers and retain them, as well as give you a chance to improve your method so that you’re not at risk of losing them in the future.

Also, through customer engagement tracking, you have a much easier job of noticing when their engagement starts falling off. It’s almost never a clean-cut. Usually, they start slowly losing interest or comparing you to too many of your competitors. This means that you always have some time between these first symptoms and definitive abandonment.

Understanding your customers through CRM will make marketing easy

CRM helps you gather all the customer data, but it does even more than that. It keeps it centralized and available on demand. Modern CRM tools can also analyze it and, with the help of AI and machine learning technologies, even offer some insights. In other words, they provide you with all the information you need to make your marketing campaign work. 

By Srdjan Gombar

Veteran content writer, published author, and amateur boxer. Srdjan is a Bachelor of Arts in English Language & Literature and is passionate about technology, pop culture, and self-improvement. His free time he spends reading, watching movies, and playing Super Mario Bros. with his son.