Marketing with CRM

Welcome to this discussion on what CRM can do for a business.

Today we will look at some of the ways CRM can impact marketing in a business.

Marketing is the process by which companies create customer interest in goods or services. Marketing can also be used to keep customers and generate new interests within an existing customer base.

Methods

Marketing can use various methods of getting a message across including;

amongst others. Some of these methods require the material/information to be targeted to specific people. This is one of the areas where a contact database can help.

Targeting

Ideally marketing information will be aimed specifically at the people who are most likely to be interested in the particular product or service being marketed. This could be broken down by demographic, geographical area, type of business, etc. Using information held in a contact database it is possible to filter out the people who are the best match for the required criteria and send a specifically worded message direct to them. This is much more likely to produce results than taking a ‘shotgun’ approach to who receives the message.

Tracking

Any decent CRM system will allow marketing campaigns to be tracked, including relevant communication with the recipients. This makes it easy to know who has responded and who hasn’t and which campaign or part thereof triggered the response. It should also be possible to link these responses to any subsequent sales that are achieved as a result of this.

Measurement

Using the information captured above and any other information supplied by the system (e.g. campaign costs, how much activity took place to make the sale, etc.) it should be possible to measure both the sales funnel (i.e. the probability of making a sale at any stage in the sales process) and the overall cost of sale, taking into account both the campaign costs and the amount of activity per sale.

Which is probably a whole lot more information than is available now.

Feedback

All of this information can be fed back into the CRM system to improve the reliability of the measurements coming from it  and the business to help develop the overall marketing and pricing strategy.

Profiling

Another kind of feedback is what the customer really wants from you. Ostensibly your customer is after a widget or a service which gives them value for money. Deeper investigation could prove that what the customer really wants is somewhat different. Finding out what the customer really wants is crucial to a CRM strategy. A business that can understand the customer’s requirements and fulfil them in a way that not only gives value for money but takes things a step further in resolving an issue or taking a burden from the customer will have a substantial advantage in the marketplace.

Summary

As can be seen CRM can have a significant impact on marketing, but this is only one aspect of a business. We will also show how CRM can impact other areas of the business equally significantly.