How to Boost Your Digital Marketing with a CRM Software

How to Leverage a CRM for an Experience-Driven Marketing

The companies leading the way today are those that have grasped the importance of customer-centric marketing. This type of marketing places customers at the center of all campaigns, based on the information available in the company’s CRM. This data mining isn’t just a buzzword, it’s the secret to your growth. A study by Forrester shows that companies that claim to be experience-driven grew 40% faster and increased customer lifetime by more than 60% compared to non-experienced ones.

Very few companies bring all of their tools and tactics together in one CRM, which often leads to confusing customer experiences, distributed data, and an inability to know what is working well or not so well in managing their relationship with their customers.

Three Paths of Marketing Success with a CRM

Whether you are a marketing professional or a business manager, a CRM can help you deliver a great user experience through three fundamental pillars. These are to be taken into consideration in each of your digital campaigns:

• Segmentation: to ensure that your contacts hear a message adapted to their needs;
• Contextualization: so that your contacts clearly understand your message and the benefits associated with it;
• Personalization: to make your contacts feel engaged, valued and understood throughout your message.

Segment Your Contacts to Ensure the Relevance of Your Communications

The average consumer is bombarded with promotional messages and sees between 6,000 and 10,000 ads a day. Unbelievable? Think about the last time you browsed on your phone: how many ads did you see? How many of them did you consider irrelevant? How many came to harm your experience on the site you were viewing? We bet this week alone, you closed at least one webpage because advertising ruined your online experience and you ignored dozens of ads, if not hundreds, because they didn’t match your profile and your interests. As a marketing professional, why would you want to reproduce this experience for your consumers and invest your budget in assets that will be ignored?

You know it better than anyone, when a potential customer does not feel that the message is directly related to his reality, he will ignore it. This is why segmentation is vital when it comes to creating a successful marketing campaign. It allows you to target your contacts according to their profiles and to create specific lists of current and potential customers based on their interests, their needs, their disposition to buy, actions they’ve taken on your site, and more.

For example, you could segment your database to target your clients that are in the third month of their current contract with your company. You then offer them an enticing promotion that complements their existing service. Or you can offer them the opportunity to attend a training to optimize the use of your service.

With segmentation, you could also target every potential customer who has visited your pricing webpage more than once in the last 30 days by sending them a promotional code.

Obviously, the same message would not work for the two groups listed above. But by knowing who you’re talking to, you can create marketing campaigns that are tailored to your customer’s needs and adapted to where they are in the buyer’s journey. As a result, each of your contacts will receive a message that they are likely to welcome, because it solves a specific and unique problem for them. If you don’t understand your customer, you can’t deliver the content they need, when they need it, in a way that works for them.

Contextualize Your Message for a Better Customer Experience

Every consumer goes through three key stages before making a purchase: awareness, consideration and decision.

Depending on your product or service, the time required per individual to go through these stages varies. A hungry person at the end of the day will go from awareness to deciding to order on DoorDash faster than a CFO looking at a new ERP to manage all the processes of a multinational company. The first purchase will be made in a few clicks, the second could take months.

While the length of the journey may change from one person to another, one principle remains: you’ll need to create content for each stage of the buying journey to help your consumers along every step of their purchasing decision.

Before the above-mentioned CFO becomes aware of the existence of your product, he must first recognize that he has an unsolved need. Then, he will seek a solution from a number of options, ranging from integrating a new tool to designing a custom solution. Your goal is to create useful and relevant content so that your target persona, in this case the CFO, finds you at all stages of their decision-making process and sees you as an expert and potential supplier.

Put yourself in the buyer’s shoes and ask yourself what information the CFO would need if he were in the beginning, middle or end stage of the buyer’s journey and create the content accordingly. The example below demonstrates three types of assets you could create to help the CFO in their decision-making journey for a new ERP.

By using the buyer’s journey to target your leads with your CRM, you can ensure that they get messages relevant to their context. Just as you’re unlikely to propose on a first date, you also don’t want to offer technical content to a potential client when he just discovered that he has a need. You have to build your content strategy around the path to purchase in order to send useful information, at the appropriate time, which will attract the buyer rather than imposing your product on them too soon.

To ensure that your leads and clients receive communications that are aligned with their context, you will need segment contacts based on the information collected. For example, with the data from your CRM, you can display on your website different information to your visitors depending on whether they are in the awareness, consideration or decision stage of their journey. This should significantly improve your conversion rates.

Personalize Your Content to Engage Your Customers and Provide Them with an Excellent Experience

By using a CRM, you will also be able to create personalized experiences on each channel. Content personalization continues to be the best way to deliver an exceptional experience to your audience and set yourself apart from your competition. With so much new content being released every day, it’s harder than ever to get your personas’ attention, and more importantly, to keep it. Everyone agrees: the more you customize, the more likely you are to be noticed and taken seriously.

Effective personalization means more than greeting someone by their first name in an email. This technique might have been innovative ten years ago, but today’s consumer will not be very impressed. By taking a look in your inbox, you can probably spot the generic automated emails that you’ve been sent.

But how would you react if you saw a message from your gym mentioning the benefits of combining the services of a kinesiologist and a nutritionist to optimize the results of your training, a few weeks before the renewal of your subscription? If in addition, the email offered a unique promotional code to current members so that you can benefit from these services at a lower cost, would you be tempted to set up an appointment with these health professionals? You already need to renew your gym membership, why not take full advantage of the situation and work to bring your physical performance to the next level?

Good personalization also means sending relevant messages, in a timely manner, using the appropriate language, tone, and topic. True personalization occurs when your site adapts to the visitor by recommending articles that the latter has not yet read, or by displaying personalized offers according to their interests. It’s also when you have different Calls-to-Action (CTAs) for existing customers and prospects, or when your site’s chat bot not only remembers the name of your client, but also of his representative. This is all possible thanks to digital marketing integrated with a CRM.

While contextualization ensures you don’t lose a conversion by going too loud too soon, personalization ensures you’re sending the proper message to your prospects, while giving them the feeling that you’re talking to them directly.

Alright, this all sounds like it makes sense to you and your team, but now you’re asking yourself this great question: where to start ?

First you will need to find a CRM that will best suit your business needs. Contact a web agency that can help you find the right CRM quickly and implement it within your company. If you already have a customer relationship system, but it does not make optimal use of data to allow you to segment, contextualize and personalize your content in place, a web agency can also help you transform your current CRM to adapt it to the buyer’s journey of your personas. This would allow you to improve your marketing activities. By using simple, yet powerful and effective tools of a customer experience driven system, you can undoubtedly expect to generate more revenue in a sustainable and profitable way.