The keys to successfully reaching existing and potential customers are building a comprehensive and robust customer information database and maintaining strong customer relationships. Before the digital age, direct Alba marketing tactics included door-to-door sales, telemarketing, fax marketing, and direct mailing. While these tactics may offer a measurable and a cost-effective way to acquire customers, they are difficult to scale in terms of reach and coverage. In the digital age, the efficiency of direct marketing has grown tremendously. Information and communication technologies, such as email, text messaging, and digital subscriptions allow marketers to reach existing and potential customers at scale with minimal extra cost leveraging the power of digital information management system. Companies are increasingly integrating their customer relation management and direct marketing functions. In this lesson, I will focus on the application of CRM and marketing automation software in digital marketing. According to salesforce, a leading CRM software provider. CRM is a technology for managing all your companies relationships and interactions with existing and potential customers. When people talk about CRM, they are usually referring to a CRM software system that helps companies organize customer information, streamline communication processes, and improve profitability by reducing redundancy. A CRM solution helps you manage your organization's relationships with individual people, such as customers, service persons, and suppliers throughout their life cycles, including finding new customers, winning their business, and providing support and additional services throughout the relationship. Many companies use spreadsheets to store customer data. This is an inefficient way to organize and manage customer information. First, spreadsheets can get lost and become outdated. A spreadsheet will become more and more difficult to manage as it grows bigger. As such, the value of maintaining this spreadsheet diminishes as the size and the complexity of the dataset grows. Spreadsheets are also not secure. Information can easily be copied or stolen. Then the more people that share and update information on a spreadsheet, the less secure it becomes. But if you secure the spreadsheet by limiting access, the value of having a spreadsheet again decreases. Traditionally, individual members of the sales team would record and update their own customer contexts. Such a practice not only hinders collaboration but also may lead to mistrust and unhealthy competition among team members. A customer database increases in value when everyone works together on populating it with data. Here are several reasons why a CRM system can be a great asset to your marketing team. First, it allows you to easily register, organize, and manage your leads and contacts. A good CRM system allows you to create multiple categories for your contexts, such as existing customers, lost customers, prospects, suppliers, influencers, and inactive customers. You can also divide customers based on life cycle and target them with different marketing strategies and messages. Additionally, a CRM system allows you to closely track all customer communication from everyone within the organization. This can avoid redundancy in marketing efforts from different teams. For example, alumni of a University may get approached by their former department, college, and the University for gift-giving and guest speeches. Without a CRM system, they may receive multiple versions of similar emails, letters, and brochures soliciting from different offices. This is not only wasteful but a sign of being disorganized and desperate. Third, a CRM system can improve your email campaigns by creating, and more importantly, tracking the performance of different messaging strategies to different types of customer over time. For example, you can tailor your marketing messages to reach individual customers based on your previous communications at scale, whether you're running an email campaign or trying to convert individual buyers with personalized communication. A CRM system allows you to focus on the customer and plan your marketing strategies accordingly. Marketing automation refers to software platforms and technologies designed to help marketers manage multiple online communication channels, such as email, social media, and websites, and automate repetitive tasks. Marketers commonly use marketing automation software to schedule and track marketing campaigns, especially email campaigns and mass business to customer communications. Marketing automation systems allow you to easily segment prospects into appropriate mailing lists based on their past interactions with your company or their interests and preferences. They also allow you to automatically send triggered emails at the time when a person is most interested in your products or services. One of the biggest advantages of using a good marketing automation system is collecting and utilizing comprehensive Customer Intelligence. Recent advancements in AI-powered automation solutions, such as IBM Watson, can connect and make sense of large amounts of consumer data at extremely granular levels to build accurate customer profiles and deliver personalized communication and experiences automatically. Once a campaign has ended, a marketing automation system can also generate analytics, showing its performance by tracking customers' actions at all touchpoints. Although CRM and marketing automation systems may look similar, they cater to different roles in the marketing process. The primary focus of marketing automation systems is less on customer relationship management, but more on following a prospect top of the funnel activities, such as when they visit your website, open an email, read your blog, or filling out a form. It also handles and tracks the performance on large-scale marketing communication campaigns. But once the prospect has progressed through to the bottom of the funnel and eventually becomes a customer, a CRM system becomes more relevant. CRM stores information like how long a contact has been a customer, records of any purchases they have made in the past, the dates and notes of any phone conversations you've had with the contact, a record of inbound emails they have sent to you or your sales team and more. Most marketing automation solutions allow users to sync their data with a CRM system so that all of the prospects activities are accessible through one solution. Many companies sync the information both ways so that their marketing team knows what's going on in sales, and their sales and customer service teams know the history that marketing has had with the prospect or a customer. Together, marketing automation and CRM systems can work in concert to help the digital marketers today to effectively reach and efficiently manage their relationships with existing and potential customers at a large scale.
