Marketing and catering for wider audiences to increase brand awareness used to be the norm in the past. Nowadays, addressing your target market is significantly more important as they are most likely to convert to paying customers. What you want is customers that will make a purchase now, rather than in the distant future or never.
Today’s marketing focuses on the target audience in order to advertise specifically for that group. Businesses have understood they need to create advertising campaigns that make prospects feel important and powerful.
However, this can’t be done unless you truly know and understand your target audience.
Creating marketing personas and building an effective CRM strategy are both efficient tools, but they require something more than creativity and intuition. Effective marketing is based on extensive knowledge extracted from reliable data. The collection of customer data allows you to truly know your audience and target them persuasively.
Moreover, you must not only know how to collect data, but also how to interpret and implement it in order to utilise it and create great campaigns. This is where a good CRM system can make the difference.
Why collect data about your audience?
The use of collected data helps to create personal relationships with customers, which will ultimately result in customer loyalty and retention.
Collecting, organising, interpreting, and implementing customer data are key steps in the development of any successful business. An effective CRM strategy allows you to perform these actions effectively and successfully.
There are some simple steps you can take in order to build your customer relationships. Collecting data like a pro will help your marketing and will also save you time. This means you have more time and information available to grow your business.
How customer data & a CRM strategy will take your business to the next level
The most important advantage of collecting customer data is being able to create an effective CRM strategy.
But what is a CRM strategy?
CRM stands for Customer Relationship Management and refers to managing an organisation’s relationship and interactions with customers and potential customers. CRM systems allow companies to interact effectively with customers, streamline marketing processes, and improve profitability.
Other benefits of data collection and CRM strategy include:
- Increased ability of resolving customer issues;
- Tracking customer spending habits;
- Choosing the most effective marketing media;
- Generating purchase recommendations and suggestions;
- Increasing customer retention rates;
- Achieving a deeper understanding of your market;
- Improving your consumer database;
- Helping to improve your marketing strategies;
- Creating personalisation.
- Email finder or chrome extension tools such as Apollo, Hunter and ContactOut.
These tools help improve email marketing productivity with highly accurate contact information. You can find the ContactOut chrome extension tools here.
The ultimate goal for data collection and CRM software is customer acquisition and retention. This is what any motivated business owner strives for, after all.
How to organise data with a CRM system
Collecting
Collect as much data wherever you can whether it’s on the phone, in person, online. The kind of data you are interested needs to be relatable and easy to import to a CRM system. The way you collect data depends on what you want to sell to people.
Methods to collect data from customers include:
- Pop-up forms on websites;
- Asking people about their interests when signing up;
- Using cookies on your website to help track visitors, personalise landing pages, and distinguish between multiple page views and single visits;
- Using location data from customers when they download an app or check-in on social media;
- Observing social media activity;
- Free Wi-fi enabling you to see what websites people visit while shopping at your store;
- Offering free resources to people in exchange for their email address is another tried and tested method.
Organising
Simply collecting data is not enough; you will need to organise it so that it is easily accessible to look back on and use.
A good idea is to sort customers based on geography, demographics, engagement levels, etc.
Data organisation is a major part of an effective CRM strategy and allows you to target specifically to groups using the type of message that will influence them.
Learning
The next step is to be smart with your data. Find out what data means and how you can use it. Who is buying products and why?
There are a lot of questions you can ask yourself and the answers will allow you to focus on customers’ needs and wants. Learning from customer data means you will:
- Improve your marketing by understanding the behaviour of prospects that become customers;
- Improve your products or services by getting helpful product feedback;
- Find the most effective way to customise promotions and special offers;
- Create a more personalised and pleasurable shopping experience;
- Get ideas on how to create new products or services;
- Use the data you have gathered to create interesting and shareable content.
Marketing successfully
Now that you know more about your audience, put 100% into marketing for them. Save time by using CRM automation. For example, you can set up automated emails or messages to different regions based on the time they are most likely to view them.
Dedicated CRM software comes with additional features such as selecting relevant customers for certain promotions.
How data collection works – the role of CRM software
Gathering and storing large amounts of customer data and using it to market your products or services more effectively may seem like a very complex process. Now it doesn’t have to be this way thanks to the multiple CRM software options available to you.
Nowadays, creating a successful CRM strategy without automation tools is impossible to imagine. A basic CRM software functionality and capability checklist includes:
- Contact management
This allows users to organise contacts into groups so the organisation can better cater to them.
- Customer segmentation
No marketing campaign will produce the expected results without proper customer segmentation. Customer segmentation tools organise customer data coming from various sources and divides customers into groups sharing similar characteristics, such as buying patterns or age.
- Customer opportunity management
This is a tool allowing you to identify customers that are most likely to convert. Also called lead scoring, the feature helps you streamline marketing teams and optimise sales processes.
- Lead management
This technology enables businesses to follow up with leads based on a variety of factors.
- Reports
Top CRM software should always include the possibility to generate reports. This allows users to view statistics in a visual manner and to have access to real-time data updates. Reports ultimately enable users to make data-driven decisions.
- Sales analytics
The hard data from past campaigns, collected from social media, website traffic, and polls can be used to create better sales campaigns in the future.
- Mobile CRM
Having access to your data using a mobile device can turn out to be crucial when you are on the go and need to make decisions fast to benefit your business.
- Chat integration
Being able to chat with employees and partners from the same user interface where you provide customer support, helps you save time and never miss vital information.
- Email marketing integration
If you don’t require a standalone, robust email marketing service you may be satisfied with email features provided by a CRM application. However, many CRM products offer the possibility of integrating separate email marketing systems so you don’t have to import information to your CRM.
- Case management
If you want to focus on your relationship with a certain customer, reliable CRM software can provide you with the tools to manage each customer case individually, in a secure environment.
- Quote and order management
Easily create quotes, manage orders and inventory. Such tools improve order processing capability and ultimately your relationship with customers.
- Sales performance management
Sales managers need to see what aspects of a sales team are working well and which need improvement. CRM platforms provide tools for managing the performance of sales, identifying issues and addressing problems efficiently.
- Projects and Tasks management
You can serve your customers well only when you manage your employees with the same level of dedication.
For instance, a customer’s request will remain in pending status unless your employees know who should work on it. Tasks management tools helps employees work better starting with the simple fact of assigning tasks and making sure they are completed on time.
- Workflow automation
You can’t afford missed follow-ups, yet keeping track of every interaction can be labour-intensive.
The solution is very simple: automate. Your business hours will be more productive with a CRM system finishing routine tasks for you. Sales routines can be automated and their performance analysed by AI. A single workflow can contain multiple actions without missing the point on anything.
How we can help
Your business can benefit from the advantages provided by the latest CRM software starting now. It is time to start performing data collection like a pro by using tools such as Zoho.
Visual Marketing Australia can assist with marketing automation and CRM systems as we are an authorised Zoho partner. We provide all 40+ Zoho applications and can implement them directly into your business. Contact us now and let us know how we can help you with data collection and a CRM system!
