CRM, or customer relationship management, involves managing interactions with existing and potential customers during the sales process. It encompasses strategies and approaches using data to build and enhance customer relationships. The term usually refers to CRM software or technology.
What is CRM Software?
CRM software is a tool that helps businesses gather, organize, and analyze customer information. This system aids in better managing customer relationships.
When data for potential and existing customers is stored in a CRM system, it tracks information across every touchpoint in the customer’s journey.
This includes details shared through forms, marketing campaign engagement, customer support interactions, and buying patterns. Such data helps you cater to customer needs, build better relationships, and market smarter.
CRM software can help your business grow. Organizations in all industries are adopting CRM technologies and reaping the rewards. More than 64% of companies say CRM tools impact their business.
What Does CRM Software/Systems Do?
In short, CRM systems serve as a hub for organizing and understanding valuable audience data and insights. They provide tools needed to collect and manage information about people who are important to your business.
This function can look very different across departments. For example, CRM can:
- Help sales reps quickly see past interactions and purchases before making a phone call.
- Provide support teams with background and contact information to offer excellent customer service.
- Give marketers access to details to better target their campaigns.
Organizing and understanding CRM data insights is crucial for any customer-facing role. As the importance of audience information grows, so does the amount of details businesses must track.
With many online channels and multiple customer engagement methods, data often gets siloed in different tools. This fragmentation makes it difficult to get a complete picture of your customers and engage with them meaningfully.
That’s why businesses of all sizes and industries turn to CRM tools to create a central hub for audience reports. This helps them understand who their customers are and what they want, building stronger relationships as they grow.
CRM software also helps them engage with potential customers, save time through automation, increase customer engagement, and close more deals.
According to Nucleus Research, the average ROI on CRM is $8.71 for each dollar spent.
Why is CRM Important for Marketers?
As a marketer, you gather valuable information from each campaign you send and every resulting customer interaction. This includes clicks, views, and purchases from new, existing, and prospective customers.
Understanding your customers is one of your most valuable resources for enhancing marketing and sales to grow your business. Effectively collecting and organizing this information reveals key insights about customer preferences: their favorite products, what they seek, effective messages, and areas needing improvement.
The sooner you start capturing, organizing, and analyzing data through a CRM platform, the sooner you can use it to enhance customer experience and build more and better customer relationships.
Do Small and Midsize Businesses Need a CRM Tool?
CRM isn’t just for large enterprises or Fortune 500 companies. Startups and small companies with 10 or more employees can also use a CRM.
Using statistics to improve customer relationships is essential for businesses of all sizes and niches. There’s no better time to manage contacts effectively than when you’re just starting.
As soon as you establish an online presence for your business, you will start collecting valuable information about your customers and potential customers. CRM helps lay a strong foundation for building and tracking these relationships.
It collects data about their preferences and sets up marketing automation for consistent, personalized touchpoints over time.
CRM doesn’t need to be a full-time job. Whether you have a small sales team or are a solo entrepreneur using occasional marketing campaigns, putting your data to work helps keep you on customers’ radar, find new sales opportunities, and save time.
It also enables you to make informed decisions about where to focus your budget, reaching customers on their preferred channels. So, whenever they’re ready to purchase, they’ll think of you.
Top 4 CRM Features for Small and Midsize Businesses
If you’re just starting to manage customer data, you won’t need the same CRM features as a large enterprise. Your CRM needs will vary based on your online business’s functions and scale, but there are a few key essentials for any small business marketer to consider.
The basics of CRM for small businesses include:
1. A central hub for audience data
Small businesses need a centralized location to gather all customer information: contact details, phone calls, sales activity, customer satisfaction, etc.
Creating a single source of truth helps organize customer experiences and insights. This helps identify patterns such as where most of your audience lives and which messages they engage with most.
2. A seamless connection to your key marketing channels
For businesses with small or no sales teams, marketing plays a crucial role in selling products or services and should be highly tailored. Managing audience data separately from your marketing channels complicates turning insights into personalized communication and risks losing information.
Identify key channels for reaching customers, and ensure your CRM tool seamlessly integrates with these channels to collect reports efficiently.
3. The ability to test, learn, and iterate on campaigns
As a growing business, understanding your audience and their preferences is crucial. Look for a tool that helps you easily track channel performance, gain insights into audience interactions, and use this information to adjust your campaigns effectively.
4. Tools to help you grow
Once you’ve started collecting audience data and learning more about your customers, you’ll want to use that information to reach potential new customers and improve loyalty.
For small businesses with limited budgets and resources, audience data is crucial for maximizing your marketing efforts. It helps you anticipate who will likely buy and focus your resources where they’ll have the most impact.
Benefits of CRM for Small Business Marketers
Finding a CRM tool that meets your business’s needs, even if it’s just the basic criteria mentioned above, can provide immediate benefits for small business marketers. Building a solid CRM foundation allows you to:
- Get a better sense of who you’re marketing to. By creating a central location for customer reports, you gain a clearer picture of your audience. This allows you to track any changes as your business grows and evolves.
- Send the right content to the right people. Using data to target your messages ensures you send relevant content to customers, increasing the likelihood they’ll stay engaged. For small businesses, tailoring messages to specific segments is crucial to avoid overwhelming your audience and effectively positioning your brand.
- Use your data to find new people to engage with. By creating campaigns based on your existing audience knowledge, you can identify those most likely to appreciate your offerings. This enables you to target campaigns more effectively, maximize your budget, and boost sales productivity.
- Discover new ways to connect with people who share similar interests. With all your data in one place, you’ll identify patterns in your contacts and their preferences. Understanding audience trends makes it easier to develop new strategies for engaging with your audience and enhancing your campaigns.
Understanding how a CRM system works will help you manage customer relationships, improve sales and marketing efficiency, streamline communication, and enhance customer satisfaction by centralizing data and automating processes.