What does CRM mean in marketing?

What Does CRM Mean in Marketing? 

Customer relationship management (CRM) is customer retention, customer experience, customer insights, and understanding customer behavior.

CRM software provides the tools needed to grow your business by gaining insight into customer needs and wants, improving customer service, increasing sales opportunities, and more. In addition, CRM systems help you organize all of your customer data in one place so you can see it all at once.

But what exactly is CRM?

“Every day, businesses have hundreds of conversations with customers and prospects. Phone conversations. Email conversations. Text conversations, letters, and more. Where do these conversations live? What are the expected outcomes of those conversations? A CRM collects, organizes, and replaces scattered sticky notes on computer monitors, hard to find emails in multiple inboxes, poorly organized files in cabinets, desks, and car seats making all of them easy to find in one place.” - Steve Brown (The Golden Toilet)

What does a CRM System do?

CRM is a tool used for your sales automation. It is designed to manage relationships with your existing customers or prospects - both inside (sales) and outside (sales). To do this effectively, the system must capture detailed information about each customer interaction to provide personalized experiences and predictive analytics that will allow for targeted marketing efforts. 

This ultimately leads to loyalty, improved customer experience, and increased customer satisfaction. The ultimate goal of customer relationship management is to increase customer profitability by understanding customer behaviors and their unique needs to provide relevant offers at the right time.

Benefits of Customer Relationship Management

Standard Benefits:

• CRM helps you understand customer needs, wants, desires, and even frustrations.
• Speeds up the sales process by offering accurate information about your customers and prospects

Emotional Benefits:

• Increase customer satisfaction by understanding their unique needs.
• Improve customer experience with targeted marketing efforts.
  
  

Types of Customer Relationship Management Systems

There are many systems used in managing customer relationships. One type is a CRM system that has been engineered for one company. It works as an internal database to provide personalization and cross-selling techniques. Another type is the CRM system which works for many companies. SCM providers or data aggregators commonly provide these systems, and they often work with other applications, like corporate ERP.

Three types of customer relationship management systems include:

• On-premise CRM System

An On-premise CRM system is a data management system that is installed on your company's own servers. This type of system typically offers more customization options and is an excellent choice for companies with physical locations in multiple countries or territories.  It is most practical for organizations with a dedicated IT support team to handle network security, backup, and maintenance. The biggest benefit of having this type of CRM system is the complete control over data costs and infrastructure budgeting. A disadvantage is that this type of CRM requires significant IT resources to maintain, troubleshoot, and integrate all customer data feeds.

• Cloud-based CRM System

A cloud-based system is accessed via the internet from any location with internet connectivity, including remote offices, home offices, airports, hotels, restaurants, etc. These systems are usually hosted by a third party on their servers and offer an easy installation process without expensive hardware or complex integration projects. One disadvantage is depending on a third party to keep your data and software up-to-date and secure.

• Hybrid CRM System

A hybrid system offers the flexibility of both an on-premise and cloud-based solution. The data is stored locally but accessible from any internet connection. This allows for quick access as well as the opportunity to synchronize your data across multiple locations.

How Can CRM Be Used in Marketing and Sales? 

CRM systems are software that tracks customer interactions and behaviors. CRM works to distinguish key customers from those who aren't profitable so customer service representatives can focus on serving valuable clients more efficiently.

The marketing department makes use of your leads generated through advertising, online content, and direct outreach programs. The sales team's tasks include calling outbound prospects, meeting in person, and following up through email or phone.

The marketing department creates, develops, and executes marketing campaigns to increase product awareness, while the sales team focuses on building customer relationships as leads come into the system. CRM helps your business close deals by supporting a streamlined workflow through better information sharing between marketing, sales, and customer service departments.

CRM Software to Consider for Your Business

1. Salesforce

Great customer service is the backbone of every successful business, but you have to track that information to help you make effective decisions. By investing in a CRM system, you can track customer service efforts, recognize which customers make purchases, and identify top sales representatives. In addition, if you have an online business, Salesforce comes with tools that allow users to manage new leads and customers through the company website.

- The Salesforce ARP program for the high volume of sales leads

- The ability to focus on what matters most with the help of insights like lead scoring and forecasting

- Wide integration capabilities across multiple data sources, from contact management to email marketing tools to customer support solutions.

2. Oracle

Oracle CRM Cloud is a comprehensive customer relationship management system that will help you manage and automate many aspects of your business. It's easy to use and will give you a single view of all your contacts across different channels, such as email, phone, chat, and social media. You can even manage orders, projects, and cases through this cloud-based solution.

Oracle CRM also includes features that help you create better customer interactions. These features include:

• Email marketing using templates
• A/B testing for email campaigns
• Webforms that collect customer data online
• Sales forecasting
• System integration with other Oracle products
• Social Media Connector 

3. Microsoft Dynamics CRM

Microsoft Dynamics CRM is a customer relationship management software solution that connects sales, marketing, and customer service. The CRM is engineered to help companies drive business growth by making smarter decisions faster. It focuses on customer retention, delivering your personalized offers to customers, and understanding their buying behaviors.

Microsoft Dynamics CRM offers many benefits, including:

• Enhanced customer engagement through personalized messaging
• A unified view of your customer interactions across conversations
• Salesforce automation for proactive contact campaigns
• Tools that enable account managers to work with your  prospects and customers in a centralized location
• Easy system integration with other Microsoft applications like Office 365 and Skype for Business.
  
  

Uses of CRM Software

Here’s how you can make use of CRM software for your business: 

1. Your brand can use customer relationship management software to gain insight into customer behavior and optimize business resources accordingly. For example, customer relationship management software can help your brand create customer profiles, track customer history, analyze customer buying habits, and more. This data is invaluable for customer service teams who can resolve your customer issues and provide better customer support.
2. CRM also provides the tools needed to interact with your  customers promptly, leading to increased customer satisfaction and customer loyalty. As customer needs are met, the customer relationship is strengthened. As a result, they are more likely to remain loyal to a brand that provided them with an excellent customer experience and responsive customer support when needed.
3. It allows you to capture crucial customer information that would otherwise be lost in siloed data systems without visibility into customer interactions across departments. By creating customer profiles, customer history, and customer journey maps, your brand can begin to understand customer behavior more closely, e.g., customer preferences for communication (email vs. phone), customer service preferences, customer complaints or queries, and more, which all contributes towards the creation of improved business processes that are designed to drive customer retention.
4. CRM systems also provide the tools to engage with your  customers personally by leveraging customer insight data such as location, demographics, and more. This helps your brand deliver relevant offers and marketing campaigns at the right time based on your customer's needs.
5. Customer Relationship Management software should be installed within your business departments, including sales, customer service, marketing, and more. It will give you full visibility across all customer interactions so that you can gain a 360-degree view of the customer - allowing your business to respond faster and better understand what is required to deliver an improved customer experience.
6. CRM systems are now available as either on-premise or cloud-based solutions, depending on your business needs. Cloud-based CRM solutions are also known as SaaS (Software as a Service) solutions. You can access the software from any device and easily share information with your colleagues, partners, or third-party systems.
7. Today's leading CRM systems no longer only focus on customer relationship management but are now multi-functional, which means they provide features and tools to support key business processes such as marketing, sales, customer service, and project management. You can also add third-party apps to your system, e.g., accounting software, social media monitoring tools, or HR applications so that you can gain real-time insights into the customer journey from initial contact all the way through to customer retention.
   
   

A Quick Checklist for Getting Started With Customer Relationship Management today!

To use CRM, you'll need:

• Adequate customer information;
• CRM software for customer relationship management;
• Data in each department that the sales and marketing teams can import into your CRM database;
• A business plan or process that you want to improve with CRM; and
• A customer base to be able to engage with on the CRM platform.

Customer relationships are a complex process that involves human behavior and cognition. As customer needs are met, the customer relationship is strengthened. They are more likely to remain loyal to a brand that provided them with an excellent customer experience and responsive customer support when needed.   CRM systems can provide invaluable insight into your customers by leveraging data from all of their interactions for you to gain a 360-degree view of who they are so you can better understand what's required to deliver an improved experience. If you're currently struggling with managing your customer relationships without success, it may be time for you to invest in CRM software or services for your business or organization. You'll not only get access to powerful tools but also have access to resources and experts who can help you set up and configure your CRM platform so that it works for your business.

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