What is CRM Marketing and What are the Benefits?
Find out everything you need about CRM marketing and how it can benefit your small business.
As a small business owner, it’s pertinent you understand your customers. After all, the more you know your customers, the more you can accommodate them. And, of course, the more you accommodate them, the more likely they are to purchase from your business.
This doesn’t happen overnight, though. A lot goes into catering to your customers, as you must learn about their preferences, understand their pain points, track their behaviors, and engage with them along the way, all while building trust and forming relationships.
This process of overseeing customer interactions is known as customer relationship management (CRM), and there are CRM systems that help consolidate customer data in one convenient place. The more you learn about CRM systems the better.
These CRM systems are powerful databases that oversee all aspects of customer interactions, gathering, tracking, organizing, and analyzing customer data. While these programs cover everything from sales to customer service and everything in between, in this guide, we’ll focus on CRM marketing.
So, what is CRM marketing, and how can it help your small business? Follow along to find out.
What is CRM Marketing, and What are the Benefits?
CRM marketing incorporates your CRM insights into your marketing strategies to help reach potential customers and retain current customers. Therefore, CRM marketing software is a platform that uses customer data to inform and implement marketing campaigns.
Understanding the Importance of CRM Data
To better understand what CRM marketing entails, let’s take a step back and review how customer data can help shape your marketing efforts.
For one, collecting and organizing data can help you build buyer personas and customer profiles. A CRM lets you gather information and similarities between your loyal customers but also uses those attributes to help you pinpoint potential customers.
For instance, if your CRM software determines that most of your customers are 30-something college graduates with high-earning salaries and an interest in health and wellness, you can use this information to market to like-minded individuals who align with those demographics. Because this can open up new opportunities for targeting your customers, it makes your CRM platform an excellent lead-generation tool, too. Check out this article for the tips for business lead generation.
CRM software can also give you a temperature check on how well you interact with your customers. How are your customers responding to your forms of communication? Are they opening your messages and following your CTAs? Or are they ignoring your surveys and deleting your emails? Looking at your metrics can help you make adjustments and pivot your outreach efforts to achieve your customer engagement goals.
CRM Marketing Software
Now, a CRM marketing platform includes channels to communicate with your customers via avenues like email, SMS texts, digital ads, and much more. Examples of CRM marketing software include programs like HubSpot and Mailchimp.
These CRM databases can do everything from storing customer contact information and delivering personalized messages to tracking engagement and analyzing metrics, all in one convenient place. CRM software merges sales and marketing tools, providing you with all the information you need to engage with your customers, from first contact to closing the deal.
CRM marketing software can also:
- Segment your audience
- Automate workflows, like sending a reminder when a customer abandons their shopping cart
- Implement A/B testing
- Employ drip marketing campaigns
- Customize templates
- Schedule outreach
- Deliver analytics
All these functions help you better manage your pipeline and understand your target audience, leading to more conversions, higher retention rates, and happier customers. Learn more about the best CRMs for small businesses.
CRM Marketing in Action
With a better understanding of CRM marketing databases and software, let’s consider what integrating a CRM system with an SMS marketing platform might look like in terms of a marketing campaign.
If you’re using an SMS platform like EZ Texting, it syncs with your CRM software, seamlessly merging all your data and automating contact management. From here, you can see all your contacts, create groups, and segment them based on additional information, such as their demographics, interests, location, and preferences. For a more informed marketing approach, you’ll want to reference your buyer personas and ideal customer profiles to further target your audience and begin crafting a marketing campaign.
So, how can this guide your SMS marketing efforts?:
Let’s say your small business sells ski and snowboard gear, and you’ve just heard a huge blizzard is expected to hit the Midwest next week. Of course, you want your customers to be all geared up ahead of the fresh powder, so you might send an SMS to your customers in Michigan, Wisconsin, Illinois, and all the neighboring states expected to receive snowfall.
Thanks to your CRM tools, you can portion out those specific customers based on their region and location and text them an SMS message that might say, “(Snowbird Gear) Fresh pow-pow is headed your way! Are you geared up to hit the slopes? Use our promo code BLIZZARD to receive 10% off your next gear purchase with us!”
Alternatively, maybe you want to show your loyal ski and snowboard customers some love to help your customer retention rates. In this case, you could use your CRM software to segment your customers based on those who are frequent buyers.
Once you’ve rounded up those who have purchased from you before, send them personalized SMS texts with a special discount to encourage them to make another purchase. For example, “(Snowbird Gear) Josh, we’ve missed you! Ski season is right around the corner, so enjoy some discounted gear. Enter the promo code SKI25 to receive 25% off your next purchase.”
After implementing some SMS marketing campaigns like the ones above, you can use your CRM software to help assess your strategy. Do a deep dive into the analytics to determine your efforts' success and pinpoint what you could do differently in the future.
The Bottom Line
Integrating your marketing platforms with your CRM software gives you a holistic view of your customer interactions, which can help you make more informed and insightful marketing decisions, boosting customer engagement and conversion rates.
Learn More About EZ Texting
While you’ll want to use a variety of marketing channels to interact with your customers, SMS texting certainly belongs at the top of your list. With a platform like EZ Texting, you can grow your customer base, build strong relationships with your customers, improve customer retention, and so much more. Contact us today to find out how an SMS solution can benefit your small business.
