The business world is set to get even more competitive in the year ahead, and that's why successful marketing will be more important than ever before. Businesses of all sizes will need to get their product and their brand message before more customers if they are to survive and thrive, and this will be especially vital for small to medium sized businesses and startups. Data driven marketing solutions can give these companies a competitive edge over their rivals, especially in conjunction with smart CRM solutions. Here are three ways that Customer Relation Management can boost the effectiveness of your marketing.
1. Target More Effectively
Every company is different, and that means that their potential customers are different too, which is why their marketing strategy should be unique as well. This is the number one reason why CRM for small business can make a rapid difference to customer acquisition and retention numbers - it enables carefully focused targeting. Specialist CRM software will data crunch a large amount of customer information to find the ones who are most likely to make a purchase from you, bringing two major advantages. Firstly, you'll save lots of time sifting through data, as well as avoiding possibly erroneous decisions that the software will avoid. Secondly, the customers you contact as a result of the targeting will not only be more likely to purchase, they'll be happier to hear from you, thus improving customer satisfaction.
2. Spotting the Trends
Being on trend is important for businesses, but being ahead of the trend when it comes to customer management is even better. The key to trend spotting is in the smart segmentation of your customer data and, once again, customer relationship management can carry out this task quicker and more effectively than manual sorting. Ideally, you'll want to be able to segment, and then analyze, your data by a number of different categories - not just the basic information such as job and salary, but also personal purchasing information, email interaction data, and social media interactions. Once you've used this advanced data analysis to spot the very best targets, it's time to make contact.
3. Making Your Contact More Personal and More Effective
Marketing emails are one of the most important pieces of communication your business can send, but if they're ignored by the recipient, then they may as well not have been created. One reason that emails are quickly discarded is because they are generic and uninteresting at first glance. First impressions count in marketing communications, so your emails will perform much better if they are personalized with the recipient’s actual name. Customer Relation Management software makes this task simple, yet the results can be spectacular.
Sometimes in business it's the little things that make the biggest difference, such as addressing a customer by their name in an email, and sending emails to carefully targeted customers who want to hear from you and want to buy from you. That's why customer management and expert targeting and segmentation can make a real difference to your bottom line, and why data driven marketing is becoming ever more important and ever more effective.