How a CRM Can Help with Your Next Marketing Campaign

Often times, CRMs are associated only with sales, but CRM actually stands for Customer Relationship Management, and understanding and connecting to your customers should be a big part of marketing. So, how can a CRM help you with marketing? Using a CRM software, you can instantly learn everything you need to know about your customers, and that information is very useful because it means that, with an email marketing tool, you can create campaigns that are sent at specific times to a very targeted group of customers. Once you have your campaigns automated and targeted, instead of spending time simply running your campaigns, you can use it to learn what’s working and what’s not.

So, what’s the process for creating a campaign with an integrated CRM and marketing automation? Let’s take a look:

Step # 1: Plan

Before you can see how a CRM benefits you, you need to plan your project. At this stage, you will analyze who your target group is and what content you are providing them with. For example, you could send out a monthly newsletter with helpful hints, or you could put together a short-term campaign for a promotional item or a big sale. CRMs will be useful in most campaigns and marketing efforts, but if you don’t know the end result you’re looking for, it’s hard to put it in place.

Step # 2: Production

Once you’ve figured out your goals, you can target your audience and design your mailing and marketing materials. You can add text, images, and links to landing pages. You’ll design mailings and landing pages so links on the mailings will lead customers to landing pages, which will help you make sales. Remember, once you’ve automated your processes and put in some great links, even newsletters are sales opportunities. Using a CRM, you’ll then be sending out these mailings to specific targeted customers who are likely to respond to your information and click on your links.

Step # 3: Follow Up

A huge benefit of CRM softwares integrated with eMarketing is the ability you’ll have to easily evaluate your campaign and automate functions based on what you learned, yet often times marketers fail to complete this last step. Instead of just sending out campaigns and hoping they perform well, you can look at your mailing report and figure out what’s working and what’s not. Here, you will be able to see what your readers are clicking and what content they prefer. When you have a picture of what your readers are interested in, you can modify content accordingly. You can also keep track of people who click specific links and tag them for later action or send specific content to people who have identified certain interests. When you use a CRM and automate your marketing process, you’ll have more time for the evaluation stage, so make sure you use it to keep refining your processes.

It’s clear that with automation and evaluation completed through a CRM your campaigns can run much more smoothly and you can produce some great targeted results. If you have any questions about how to get started implementing a CRM into your workflow get in touch and we can chat about how marketing automation could be best used to grow your business.