1. What CRM is?
Marketing and sales are all about the customers and the way companies approach them. Regardless of the business you manage, you most likely gather data about them. Starting with their e-mail addresses or simply name and surname, ending with the value of their latest purchase or personal preferences. Such data needs to be stored somewhere to be effectively operated. Of course one may stick to keeping track of information by collecting and stocking it on paper or in Excel but what if it needs to be accessible to more people or the amount of it is overwhelming? That’s when CRM can be applied.
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management. It allows managing processes in your company. First off, it provides you with a possibility to store and administer loads of data. Having a full, 360 degree customer view including data obtained from tracking the contact’s behavior or transactional information encourages to understand your customers and their needs better.
As ClickTime points out, CRM may also help you to:
CRM will help you reinforce sales department actions but marketing and customer service as well.
Based on the information stored in CRM you will easily automate processes, provide personalized content, manage sales funnes, create and run campaigns and monitor contact flow.
2. Basic features
Contact segmentation
A CRM system should allow you to segment the contacts on the basis of gathered behavioral and transactional data. That way you will be able to easily adjust actions to great masses of your leads. You can subdivide your database taking into account:
- your customers preferences to provide them with personalized recommendations,
- URLs they visited to react to their interests (if you’ve noted a visit on your pricing plan, schedule a phone call or send a detailed information via email),
- demographics to create different campaigns for different audiences
and way more. It all depends on your needs but the possibilities are unlimited!
Managing contact flow in marketing campaigns and sales funnels
With sales funnels you will be able to increase sales revenue, conversion rate. It will allow you to focus on the most valuable contacts. Moreover, it will be easier to see which parts of the sales process are to be changed or improved. You’ll identify campaigns with the worst performance, products that don’t sell and where you’re losing your potential customers.
Import and export of contacts, including contact details
To help managing the processes it is necessary to easily import and export masses of data. With a good CRM system you will be able to do that within seconds.
Analytics
To help you understand your customers even more and to take appropriate actions, CRM system should provide you with some analytics. You should have an insight to the amount of newly acquired leads and the speed of your database growth. Monitoring the flow of contacts within your employees is also a good way to measure performance and keep track of their work.
Mobility
To find a good CRM for your business consider different types from Converged to Unified and Integrated and find what works best for you. Find out more about them and learn how to choose a good CRM here.
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