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mayo 8, 2020
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Marketing Digital
To stand out in competitive and globalized markets, companies have had to implement strategies to differentiate themselves from their competitors.
Most of these strategies have been aimed at reducing costs, automating processes, building brands, and personalizing relationships with prospects and customers.
In this article, we will focus on a strategy that will help you achieve this last objective, that is, including among your competitive advantages the correct management, administration and personalization of relationships with your prospects and clients.
This competitive advantage is called CRM , whose acronym stands for Customer Relationship Management.
If you want to know more about it, we invite you to discover what CRM is, what its benefits are and why you should start allocating resources to implement it in your company.
What is CRM?
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) refers to the principles, practices and tools that an organization implements when interacting with its customers.
From an organizational perspective, this entire relationship encompasses direct interactions with customers across marketing, sales and service departments, as well as forecasting, trend analysis and prospect behavior.
The technical implementation of CRM principles, practices and guidelines is done through software or technological solutions that act as a database of users and customers. An example of this type of software is Billage. Billage's online CRM allows for a variety of organizational tools that currently provide many solutions to any type of company.
That's why you might notice the word CRM used to refer to companies and technology systems that help manage external interactions with customers.
Although in general terms, CRM is considered a business strategy that takes the customer as a fundamental part of the organization, and not the product as many companies do.
CRM integrates technological systems seeking to gather information to gain timely knowledge of customer needs. However, it is a concept linked more to strategy than to technology, and the latter is only one way to implement it more effectively.
CRM Fundamentals
CRM is based on three fundamental pillars. These are:
Technology
The CRM must be able to collect all data from the relationship or interaction with users and customers through information management systems, regardless of the channel through which it was collected, such as website, landing pages, email, social network, among others.
Such data may be:
Personal data (name, sex, age, place of residence, email, contact telephone number, among others).
Actions or behaviors on the website (logins, downloads).
Messages sent through chatbots embedded in websites, instant messaging apps, email or social networks.
Content, products and/or services of interest.
Purchase history
For CRM to be implemented successfully, structural change is often necessary. All departments in your company, not just marketing, sales and customer service, need to be geared towards meeting the needs of your users, prospects and customers as quickly as possible.
To achieve this, your company's departments must direct their internal strategies to achieve this objective, hand in hand, of course, with those that are focused on meeting their stated goals.
Human resources
The people in your company are a key resource for proper CRM appropriation.
Its importance is often overlooked, as it is believed that CRM software will be able to replace 100% of your employees' work. This is a huge myth and a very common mistake when using CRM software .
While this type of technological tool can automatically capture, organize and process data from your prospects and clients to convert it into useful information for decision-making (automated marketing), it is your collaborators who have the great challenge of verifying that this automated process is being carried out correctly and of analyzing the reports that the system produces to design strategies that optimize its use.
In fact, it is essential that you train your employees in the use of the CRM system to avoid future errors . Remember that this is only a mechanism to eliminate repetitive tasks, but not to abandon all the strategic work behind CRM as an integral process within your organization.
What are the benefits of CRM?
Below, we will classify the benefits of CRM seen, firstly, as an integral process in your organization and, secondly, as an information management system.
Benefits of CRM: Organizational Perspective
The benefits of CRM at the organizational level are:
Greater customer loyalty
CRM allows you to achieve greater customer loyalty and obtain the best business relationships with them, since it is based on the principle of the importance of identifying each customer as unique and not as part of a whole.
This allows you to have more personalized relationships with them, addressing their needs and thus providing adequate service.
Customers who receive this personalized attention tend to remain loyal to brands because they appreciate their efforts to understand their interests and purchasing needs in detail and to individualize the responses they provide.
Appropriation of a client-centric model
If your customers are the end users or consumers of your products or services, when your company strives to have as much information about them as possible at its disposal, the perspective with which you build your business model changes.
Once you start putting the customer at the center of your business, you will no longer want to design products and services that all those people you know very well do not want or are willing to consume.
In this way, you transform your company into a customer-centric model, where delighting customers with useful and valuable content, products and services becomes an important mission.
When this purpose is appreciated by your customers, they become promoters of your brand, and key players in attracting more buyers to your company.
Increase your ROI on sales
Since your sales departments have a complete view and full access to your customer data at all times, they can cross-sell and upsell at the right times using the right information.
In turn, increasing your sales means obtaining a positive return on investment (ROI), in which the investment of time and money to promote the three fundamental pillars of CRM (technology, processes and human resources) is monetarily rewarded.
Benefits of CRM system: technological perspective
The benefits of CRM at a technological level are:
Centralizing your customers' information
With a CRM system, important data about your prospects and customers is stored, classified and organized in a single place in the form of a database, even automatically.
Centralizing the collection of information with software allows you to organize the data under strategic criteria and detect if there is any repeated or inaccurate data.
It also helps minimize the time your employees spend searching for information, taiwan cp number ince all the information is in one place. It also helps different departments speak the same language.
It is important that this happens, because if your marketing and sales teams handle the same information, they avoid:
Duplicate efforts.
Missing out on buying opportunities.
Lack of key information that guarantees personalized attention or closing sales.
Integration with other digital platforms
The ability of a CRM system to automatically store information is due to its ability to integrate with other platforms or digital tools such as landing pages/pop ups with contact forms, emails, social networks, etc.
This automation means that your marketing and sales collaborators do not have to manually save this data; it is automatically stored in the software and can be consulted as many times as necessary.
In fact, automated marketing platforms like Zoho incorporate CRMs within themselves (or offer it as a separate service; in the case of Hubspot, their CRM is 100% free) so that website data is automatically hosted in the database.
For example, with a CRM integrated with an email marketing platform, leads who subscribe to your newsletter are automatically connected to a specific email sequence or workflow, in which a weekly email delivery is already scheduled.
These automatic integrations are key so that, regardless of the number of prospects and clients in your database, your collaborators can send personalized and interesting content to each of them in a personalized way.
Imagine how long it would take a single person to send more than 1000 personalized emails to 500 people. A well-organized CRM integrated with email marketing platforms can help you manage these repetitive tasks in a matter of seconds . That is the importance of CRM in any automated marketing strategy.