It is 2023, and we have a startling statistic for you: 43% of businesses use spreadsheets to track customer data. What about the rest? A decent share of the use of CRM, we assume. However, CRM is made not just to house customer information, but to help businesses manage day-to-day activity, streamlining the working pattern. For this, CRM has several functions that most people do not use for some reason. In this article, we’ll explain what are automation, email marketing integration, and customization in CRM. Read on!
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What is CRM in Simple Words
Every business needs to manage customer data. For some, a notebook is enough, someone loves spreadsheets. Progressive business owners choose CRM — customer relationship management software.
CRM is a program that collects all the data about your leads and customers, from name, phone number, and email address, to purchase history and live chat sessions. With organized information, you can segment customers and launch targeted marketing activities.
As a result, you can get a 365° view of your customers, build stronger relationships with them, enhance customer engagement, and ultimately drive more sales and success.
However, it is known that most do not use all the functions of CRM, limiting themselves to maintaining basic client data. And three features are especially overlooked: automation, integration with email marketing, and customization.
Automation
With CRM you can create customer segments based on unique data you have. Thus you can understand your customers and be able to market to them with the right offer at the right time.
For example, let's imagine you have an online store that sells a variety of products, such as clothing, accessories, and home decor items. Using CRM data, you can create different customer segments based on factors like purchase history, browsing behavior, location, and demographic information.
One segment could be customers who frequently buy women's clothing, another segment might be customers interested in home decor items, and yet another segment could be those who have only browsed the website but never made a purchase.
Once these segments are created, you can tailor your marketing campaigns to target each group with relevant offers. For example, launch a newsletter to the women's clothing segment about the latest fashion trends and exclusive discount offers. Simultaneously, they could send a separate campaign to the home decor segment, showcasing new arrivals and seasonal items with special offers.
Integration With Email Marketing
Every lead should be nurtured with a drip campaign and hit with effective marketing emails. Thus you can ensure that your leads get onboarded correctly — their doubts are dispelled and they are ready to cooperate. CRM integration with email marketing enables the automation of email sequences while making it easy to maintain user data.
For example, you run a subscription box service offering monthly boxes in various categories, such as beauty, wellness, or gourmet food. A prospect visits your website and completes a quiz to determine their preferences and interests. The CRM system captures the new lead's contact information, quiz results, and preferred box category.
Using this information, you can create a personalized drip email campaign tailored to your lead's interests and preferences.
The first email in the series could be a welcome email that thanks the subscriber for taking the quiz and provides an overview of the available subscription plans. A few days later, the second email might reveal the contents of the upcoming box in the lead's preferred category and offer a limited-time discount for signing up.
Subsequent emails in the drip campaign can include unboxing videos from satisfied subscribers, exclusive sneak peeks into future boxes, or educational content related to the products in the boxes, all tailored to the lead's interests. These targeted and timely messages help build excitement and trust with your lead, increasing the likelihood of converting them into a paying subscriber.
Customization
To avoid the clutter of unnecessary features and keep the right things at hand, you should customize your CRM system. It involves designing your CRM with the fields and tools you need and avoiding looking at everything when you don't use many features.
For example, you are a real estate agent running your own agency and therefore have to manage property listings, client interactions, and sales processes.
To make a CRM system better suit your specific needs and streamline the workflow, you can start adding such custom fields: property type, budget range, preferred location, and number of bedrooms/bathrooms.
Next, you can customize the deal stages: initial contact, property viewing schedule, offer made, negotiation, contract signed, and closing.
To enhance your system’s functionality, you can add third-party tools, such as Google Docs.
Conclusion
Imagine, that you have a powerful offroad car that can take you anywhere. However, you use it just to go grocery shopping once a week. In a similar situation are those business owners who have implemented CRM in their business, but do not go beyond the basic functions that come down to contact management. And thus lose the opportunity to improve their customer relationships and increase sales.
Make use of automation, email marketing integration, and customization features of your CRM, and let your business skyrocket bringing you immense revenues!
Don’t know what CRM to choose? Meet our CRM application! Alongside Chat, Messaging, and Sites it's an integral part of TruVISIBILITY All-in-One Marketing Suite and thus plays a role of a center that collects all the data from other apps.
Register a freemium TruVISIBILITY account and get unlimited access to fully functional marketing software free of cost!
As your business grows, you only pay for what you use without any contract. A freemium TruVISIBILITY account allows you to:
- Create a chatbot that can conduct up to 100 conversations per month
- Launch email blasts, start drip campaign, etc with 1000 free emails sent monthly
- Send 1000 SMS texts per month
- Build 1 website including a blog
- 1 GB of storage usage
- 1 SSL certificate
- Unlimited API usage
The pricing is based on usage over the free monthly allotment. Thus it is extremely affordable for small to medium businesses. You can adjust the number of conversations your chatbots can have, the number of emails and SMS that can be sent per month, the number of websites you can deploy, and the capacity of your cloud storage. Simple and flexible!
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