Whether you own a brick-and-mortar business or an online-only business, you're always looking for strategies to generate more income, raise brand awareness and streamline efficiencies to grow your business from strength to strength.
Especially in the business world, there are many misconceptions about what works and what doesn’t when it comes to improving productivity for a project. Being sold something that is worthless is a common occurrence nowadays.
However, one of the tools that we see companies vastly improving their revenue with is a CRM system. Today, we will discuss the top 5 benefits of using a CRM platform for improved customer experience and results. Carry on reading to learn more.
What is a CRM Platform?
In regards to what is a CRM platform, it is simply an effective method of compiling all your customers into a generated system and making sure that it is easy to interact with your customers/clients no matter what stage they’re at (between the onboarding process and a long-term relationship).
Gaining clients is hard enough when you’re starting out in the business world but managing relationships on top of that is a crucial component towards retaining customers for long periods and gaining new customers or clients through referrals/excellent reviews.
To build stronger relationships with your customers, it's crucial you're using the information from the conversations you have to apply a solution to help them or simply track their progress through customer data. A solid CRM provides you with the foundation to do this.
A CRM platform also aims to create an automated strategy for your data management when it comes to marketing and sales processes, often providing features that enable better alignment between the two teams like workflows, personas and lead scoring. Having all of this optimised structure in one database allows for data-driven decisions, ultimately leading to accelerated growth.
Obtaining an understanding of your target audience and ensuring that their journey through your business’ CRM process is a great experience… will typically lead to future successful relationships. If you make your CRM additionally personalised and find a strategy that improves customer/client associations on a daily basis - you won’t have to worry about personally nurturing relationships down the line.
Our Top 5 Benefits of Using a CRM Platform
Now that you understand what the goal of a CRM is and what it’s there to provide for a business looking to grow exponentially - there are some additional advantages that we believe will validate the importance of a CRM system in your company.
Here are our top 5 benefits of CRM software:
1. Retention Boost
One of the main advantages of implementing a CRM into your marketing strategy is something that we’ve already touched on briefly - customer retention. Rather than struggling to keep up with all of your customers/clients individually through direct messages - a CRM system will have them aligned to where they are on their customer journey.
Additionally, many business owners often miss meetings due to having other scheduled activities planned or they simply just forget. Nonetheless, with a slick CRM system put in place, this will not be possible.
Often, businesses focus on gaining clients rather than nurturing them. Whereas, with CRM users, you will be able to keep up with all customers frequently. Sometimes, just checking in on them makes a huge difference to a long-term relationship being formed.
2. Segmentation Improvements
If you’re beginning to see substantial growth in your business, it becomes challenging to remember where everyone is on the customer journey stage. You begin to forget who is a prospect, who has just been onboarded and who has been a long-time valued customer.
Therefore, automated segmentation lists allow you to categorise each customer/client, meaning that if they’re a cold lead or warm lead - they could potentially have their own list segmentation, for example.
Analysing your lead pool or your current customers/clients allows you to tailor specific customer information that resonates with their current situation within your business. Sales and marketing are then highly productive - rather than individually catering which will take hours out of your daily schedule.
Essentially, knowing who you’re selling to, whether they’re ready to buy now, on the fence or unlikely to close gives you an excellent indication of what your next move should be in order to onboard them successfully or where to prioritise resources for the best results.
3. Gaining an Understanding of Your Target Audience
As you trial and test CRM systems, you will quickly learn that not everyone is the same. However, there are typically certain pain points, solutions or advice that you can give to resolve what they need.
Customer relationships not only give you the chance to personalise your content marketing towards your target audience but they will also appreciate that they’re being given what they wanted in the first place.
Simply deploying non-targeted campaigns will lead to disappointing results. Yet, if you spent time assessing the reports and data being retained by the CRM functions - you will be able to apply more tailored email marketing campaigns, social media posts, advertising and many more campaigns more likely to convert.
4. Team Communication
A CRM provides a centralised view to different departments, meaning anyone can see the context to a particular contact activity, so everyone's more aligned.
By tracking your entire pipeline and every detail of your business relationships within one platform, your sales teams will be able to work more efficiently, marketers can deliver more personalised campaigns and service teams can see exactly what's happened previously for more meaningful communications.
On top of this, CRM features like task reminders, notes and planned activity mean teams can stay on top of what's happening next so there's no duplicated efforts or time wasted.
5. Overall Customer/Client Relationships
The last, but most important benefit of a CRM is creating long-lasting, meaningful customer interactions with your customers/clients. If you have a solid team with a reliable product/service and you genuinely care about your customers - your business will only be spoken about in high regard.
Referrals are a great way to inherit business and if you’re well-reviewed by the masses, expect more business to come your way!
If you're considering a CRM platform for your business, here at Fuelius we've got plenty of experience with both CRM consultancy and implementation. Contact us today to see how we can help!
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