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CRM: What Is It and How Can I Use It For Marketing?

Chat Marketing - 10 Min Read
customer relationship management

Written by Taran Soodan

March 3, 2021

Just about every marketing team and sales rep today has used a customer relationship management (CRM) tool at some point in their career. Having all of your customer’s data in one place is incredibly useful and prevents you from digging in multiple systems to find the information you need.

Utilizing a CRM platform for your marketing and sales efforts provides your business with a huge ROI and helps you achieve a better relationship with leads and customers. Popular CRM solutions like Salesforce, HubSpot, Pipedrive, ActiveCampaign, and others are great platforms that make it easy to manage contact data. It’s all about the customer journey and CRMs make it easier to connect with customers at scale.

Unless you’re only managing a handful of contacts, your business will benefit from implementing a CRM. If you’re not using a CRM at this point, we highly suggest you do. In this post, we’ll discuss why you need a CRM and how it benefits your business.

What is a CRM?

A CRM is a database that manages customer relationships, along with the data associated with them, including behaviors, purchases, activity, customer service history, and more. CRMs go way beyond storing contact information and act more like a record from the start of the relationship with the client to the current stage of the relationship.

The idea behind CRM technology is to dig deep into your customer base. Knowing the who, the how, the what, and the why will help you forecast their needs and be able to deliver solutions quickly through marketing automation. When the customers put first, they get the best experience which means they’ll keep coming back.

This brand loyalty leads to those important repeat customers who then tell their friends in the parking lot at school and post about it on social media. Now your customers are doing your marketing for you. Brilliant!

CRM software can take house data from various departments of your business and provide you with one place to house everything. For example,

  • Marketers use CRMs to nurture leads and turn them into qualified prospects
  • Sales reps use CRMs to find potential customers from their database, manage deals and track how close they are to closing them in real-time
  • Customer support teams use CRMs to track customer service history in one location so they don’t have to pull in data from multiple tools
  • Loyalty teams use CRMs to improve customer retention and measure customer satisfaction

There are various types of CRMs available. From CRMs for small businesses, on-premise CRMs, cloud CRMs, and more, you can easily find a CRM that’s a fit for you.

The usage of CRMs is increasing every year and here are some statistics to prove it:

Key features of a CRM system

Due to their popularity, most CRM systems these days have similar features. While some CRMs offer unique features for artificial intelligence (AI) or vendor management, most CRMs offer a base set of features to help you manage your contacts.

Contact management

At its core, a CRM is used to manage your contacts. With a CRM, you can manage customer data like their name, email, phone number, and so much more; think of it as a digital Rolodex. If you ever need to remember information about a customer, a CRM stores all their information for you.

As you interact with each contact, the CRM will be updated with their activity history. You can track things like phone calls, emails, purchase history, customer support tickets, and much more.

Reporting and analytics

CRMs often offer robust reporting tools (mainly used by marketing and sales). With a CRM, you can track reports like:

  • The number of leads generated per month
  • How many leads were qualified by sales
  • The revenue generated by your deals
  • Which contacts unsubscribed from your email campaigns

There are lots of reports available in CRMs. Once you have a sizeable number of contacts, you can segment your audience by common characteristics such as location or gender to further improve targeting for your marketing campaigns.

Marketing automation

CRMs make it easy for marketers to embrace marketing automation. With the data available from your CRM, you can automate certain aspects of marketing. For example, if a contact fills out a form to download a PDF, they can be put into a multi-step email sequence designed to educate them about your products and ultimately getting them to make a purchase.

Mobile CRM

Sales reps benefit the most from mobile apps. If you have teammates that travel, a mobile app for their CRM can help them track their deals and leads so they have an easier time tracking everything.

How CRMs generate value

To recap, a CRM system is an extremely useful tool and one that all marketers and sales reps should be using. While some CRM systems can be expensive, the ROI is worth it. Trust us, you don’t want to manage thousands of customers in a spreadsheet. If you choose not to implement a CRM system for your business, you could be left behind in the dust. The benefits are tremendous and it could be your most valuable asset.

  • Boosts sales
  • Reduces marketing expenses
  • Creates more productivity
  • Organizes data, enabling you to connect with your customers in a personalized way
  • Provides you with an inside view of the behaviors of your customers, making tailored marketing campaigns easy and effective
  • Increases internal productivity since multiple departments within a company can log activity and access customer data
  • Enables you to easily oversee and evaluate customer interaction to strengthen customer relationships, convert leads, cultivate sales, and maintain customer engagement
  • Always puts the customer first
  • Easily integrates with platforms like ManyChat for the ultimate digital customer experience

Targeting

The amount of customer information available, especially for larger companies, can be massive. CRM implementation helps you probe this information and narrow it down to the exact targets you’re aiming at. Even smaller companies can greatly benefit from CRMs.

What customer relationship management tools do is look inside the mind of a potential customer. If this person researched one of your products, you can gain that information and then target them with Chat Marketing, whether that applies to email marketing, messenger marketing, which we’ll dive into a bit, SMS marketing, social media marketing or omnichannel marketing.

Since you already know that this potential customer is interested in what you’re selling, you’re that much closer to a sale. You can then target them with social media ads and offers to close the sale. Since CRM technology stores information on habits and what your customers like and dislike, your target marketing efforts are successful.

When you can predict customer behavior, it gives you a boost over your competitors. You can then target your customer based on the trends you’re seeing to ensure messaging is on point. CRM helps to filter out specific information such as purchases, behaviors, how they responded to previous marketing outreach, and more.

Personalized content

A CRM is a great complement to an existing content delivery system you’re already using. Let’s take Messenger Marketing, for example. Messenger Marketing is the process of getting people interested in your products or services usingFacebook Messenger.

The goal is to grow your business by getting more leads and customers through personalized conversations. A Messenger Marketing strategy helps you connect with customers, provides informative content, and helps you take actions that are meaningful for your business, such as booking an appointment, downloading an app, or signing up for a service.

When you can integrate your CRM tool into a platform like ManyChat, you’re now armed with specific information about your prospective and existing customers. Content is king, however, if it doesn’t reach the right person at the right time, the crown is worthless.

How to implement a CRM

Ready to start implementing your CRM? Here’s how to get started.

Map out your sales process

Before you sign up for a CRM, we recommend mapping out your sales process. Regardless of if you’re a B2B or B2C company, knowing the steps of your customer journey are crucial to properly tracking your contacts.

Here’s a high-level overview of sales stages you can use to customize your CRM

  • Subscriber
  • Lead
  • Marketing-qualified lead
  • Sales-qualified lead
  • Closed-Won
  • Closed-Lost

Train your staff and management teams on CRM

A CRM is only useful if it’s actually being used and updated by your team. You must train your teams on using and updating the CRM to keep it up to date. Otherwise, you’ll miss out on valuable data and have to spend time following up with your employees.

Use automation for repetitive tasks

CRMs are surprisingly easy to automate. You don’t have to spend hours every week entering data or building reports. Most CRMs have automation plugins that make it easy to automate the day-to-day tasks you work on. Plus, there’s always Zapier to make it even easier to leverage automation.

Using a CRM with ManyChat has tremendous benefits

  • Helps you better optimize your marketing strategies
  • Helps to convert leads into customers
  • Helps to create repeat customers through follow up campaign strategies

How do you truly leverage a CRM to grow your business? Leverage Chat Marketing. Combining a CRM with the power of Chat Marketing is the perfect way to build brand loyalty, target the right customers, and grow your business.

With Messenger Marketing, marketers are currently seeing open rates of 80% or more, and click-through rates greater than 30%. Those are promising statistics and as a marketer, it should be a no-brainer to be using Chat Marketing paired with a CRM. In unison, these tools allow you to focus on the customer’s needs. This makes your business customer-centric and your customers will take notice and build trust. And we all know trust funnels the sales pipeline.

Here’s a great example of a real estate CRM and how stored data can be useful in qualifying and managing leads through sales automation.

Let’s say you run a real estate business and have a Messenger bot helping you qualify your leads. Some of these leads want to buy a home, while others are looking to sell their home. While in the past, you may have organized the information coming in, such as phone numbers and emails, within a Google Sheets, there’s a better, more organized way, to manage your buyer and seller leads.

While a CRM is fantastic, it may not be within your budget, so in this instance, you, the real estate company, used an app that gave you the building blocks to turn your list of leads into a fully capable CRM system to close more deals.

In the template, you have a master list of buyer and seller leads at different stages in the process. At any point in time, the summary page lets you see how many leads you have, the status of those leads, and the total dollar amount those deals are worth. Pretty cool and efficient, right?

Conclusion

Integrating your CRM with your ManyChat account is easy. Here’s a great instructional video to give you a step-by-step tutorial on how to get it done. You’ll learn how to set up a ManyChat CRM integration with the CRM Pipedrive. Although the video shows you how to integrate with Pipedrive, this process works universally with many other popular CRM software platforms. FYI, you will need a ManyChat Pro account as well as a Zapier account to achieve this integration.

Get started with a CRM system today and see how integrating it with ManyChat can boost your marketing strategy.

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The contents of this blog were independently prepared and are for informational purposes only. The opinions expressed are those of the author and do not necessarily reflect the views of ManyChat or any other party. Individual results may vary.