CRM Marketing Strategies That Drive Results

In marketing, understanding your customers is key to all those campaigns, advertising, and dollars spent towards keeping current customers happy and gaining new ones.

What if you could take away the guesswork and get the cold, hard data behind where your customers come from, how they behave, what moves them through your company's purchasing funnel, and more? Hint: CRM marketing software lets you do that!

Instead of making up a customer persona (or personas) based on what you think your customers are like, you can make one based on what you know they are like.

Instead of creating campaigns that you think will resonate with your customer, you can create campaigns that you know will resonate with them (ok, at least have a WAY better chance at being successful, a marketing CRM  marketing won't make you a mind reader).

What is a Marketing CRM?

A Marketing CRM is a data-driven platform that helps marketers create meaningful customer relationships and improve their marketing strategies. CRM marketing automation marketing aims to build personalized customer experiences by leveraging customer data, including past purchases, interests, and behaviors.

Marketers are focused on reaching target customers through campaigns like email, social media, and content to move customers through the buying process.

However, knowing the best channel for reaching high-quality leads and customers can be difficult at the best of times, especially if you don't have an organized and clear view of who your customers are and how they respond to your attempts to reach them.

A marketing CRM helps marketers understand their customers and gives them the tools they need to execute the strategies and tactics that reach those customers.

For example, drip campaigns or drip marketing allow you to send various marketing messages, from email to SMS, to customers at the right time.

Drip campaigns

Drip campaigns are typically set up in your CMS, allowing you to target a specific customer segment through email or SMS messages. Pretty handy for keeping your business at the front of your customer's mind!

And drip campaigns are just one example of what a marketing CRM can do for you and your business. There are a lot more uses that align with the marketing goal of reaching your customers, which will be explained in more detail throughout this post.

Correlation Between CRM and Marketing

While the CRM tracks, manages, and stores customer data, marketing takes that data and creates advertising, blogs, emails, SMS texts, business VoIP, and other communications to reach and convert more customers.

In today's connected world, customers expect instant and consistent communication when they want it, and it's up to marketers to provide it.

But if reaching customers properly means pushing relevant content their way, it's tough to do that without a full understanding of who your customer is.

By using CRM strategies to track your customer journey through different sales funnels such as SEO and Social Media, you can gain invaluable knowledge about your customers' wants and needs.

You can then use this data to create meaningful customer personas that accurately reflect who you should target with your marketing campaigns - increasing engagement rates, building better relationships, and ultimately growing your business.

CRM Automation Marketing Explained

CRM automation marketing is an effective way to improve the customer experience and increase sales. It's an automated process that allows businesses to streamline their marketing, customer service, and other operational processes in one place.

With CRM automation marketing, you can create targeted campaigns, segment customers into different groups for better targeting, automate follow-up emails and messages, track customer interactions, and generate more leads.

Besides automation, marketing automation with CRM is about creating an experience for customers that will make them want to buy from you again and again. By automating processes, your business can focus on providing the best customer service and products possible without spending hours manually managing each task.

A few examples of CRM automation marketing include:

• Automated email campaigns,
• Personalized content recommendation engines,
• Dynamic segmentation, and
• Tailored ad targeting.

These CRM strategies allow marketers to create a custom experience for each customer without manually researching and writing content for every user. By leveraging marketing automation with CRM, marketers can stay ahead of the curve and ensure their messages resonate with their target audiences.

Features and Benefits of CRM Marketing Software

Now that the why's and how's of marketing CRM software have been discussed, let's move on to the specific features and benefits of marketing CRM software.

Since there are way too many features and benefits to discuss them all, the ones highlighted below are the top or main features, along with their benefits, that you should be aware of when considering CRM marketing software.

CRM Campaigns Techniques

At this point, you've moved from the basics of CRM automation marketing to more advanced techniques. To get the best results, it's essential to understand the best practices for CRM campaigns.

And the following are some techniques to get you started:

1. Customize and Streamline Your Email Marketing Strategies

By tailoring and optimizing email marketing strategies, businesses can target the right audience with the tailored message they need. This strategy gives companies a decisive advantage - automated emails personalized to customers' desires, likes, and interests.

Furthermore, with segmentation tools, marketers can easily break down customers into individual groups and hone in on each group's specific needs.

When you correctly identify and understand segments, you can craft tailored emails for each group. Crafting relevant emails for every customer can be time-consuming, but automated emails simplify it. All you need is one quality template that you can easily customize to meet each client's needs.

2. Personalize Your Content for Each Segment

Leveraging segmented personalization empowers CRM marketing teams to understand their customer's unique interests better.

By creating materials tailored to each customer's unique needs, businesses can build more meaningful relationships through engagement that is not only relevant but also deeply personal.

Personalized content allows companies to address customers' concerns and highlight certain benefits or features of a product or service that interest them.

That's not all. Epsilon's research uncovered that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from businesses that provide personalized recommendations based on prior purchases and interactions with the company. This research clearly illustrates the power of personalizing content for each segment.

3. Leverage Automation To Reach The Maximum Potential Of Your CRM

Utilizing marketing automation with CRM can help you achieve maximum sales outcomes while ensuring all necessary tasks are done promptly and efficiently.

Automation within your CRM system offers various opportunities, such as:

• Features
• Description
• Data Collection & Organization
• Streamlines data collection and categorization, making it easier to track marketing activities.
• Lead Management & Segmentation
• Facilitates automated lead scoring and segmentation for more targeted, personalized campaigns.
• Campaigns & Communications
• Enables automated emails and other communications to ensure that prospects receive the right message at the right time
• Analytics & Insights

Provides detailed insights into customer behavior so you can make more informed marketing decisions.

Findstack found that sales productivity can increase by an impressive 14.5% when companies use marketing automation with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Incorporating CRM automation into your business will undoubtedly bring it to the next level and maximize its potential!

4. Analyze Customer Data and Optimize Campaigns According to the Results

By diving into customer data, you can uncover patterns and trends in their past that you can leverage to customize your marketing approach.

This technique involves gathering customer data from multiple sources, including surveys, purchases, website traffic data, social media activity, etc., then analyzing it using analytics tools like segmentation or predictive analysis.

After identifying patterns and trends in customer data, you can adjust your CRM strategies to target leads better and drive higher conversion rates.

5. Use A/B Testing To Discover What Works Best For Your Audience

A/B testing (also known as split testing) compares two versions of a campaign with different elements to discover which performs better in terms of engagement or conversion rate.

It involves taking two versions of a page or element within a page (A and B) and sending them out simultaneously to different audiences to compare which version gets a better response.

Companies use A/B testing for everything from email subject lines or CTA buttons to website design elements such as font size and color schemes.

By measuring the performance of each element against key metrics like click-through rate (CTR), time spent on page (TSP), or bounce rate (BR), companies can determine what works best for their audience so they can optimize future campaigns accordingly.

Top 10 CRM Marketing Strategies and Tactics

It isn't just all about sales and customer service, the data that your CRM collects about customers can help you formulate strategies that touch every aspect of marketing.

We already know that a CRM is essential to your marketing strategies and tactics, but let's be honest, the reason that you're here is that you're looking for ideas.

1. Organic Content Marketing

Content marketing is all about producing educational and relevant content tailored to the right audience. Branding, product and company awareness, credibility, and reputation can all be tied to content marketing.

A CRM can help exponentially with content marketing strategies and tactics. The better you understand your customer and what moves them through the awareness, consideration, and decision phases, the better content you can produce.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What does your customer search for? Which words do they typically use? These are important questions for determining how to optimize your website, from technical SEO to the copy on each page.

A marketing CRM that integrates with a search engine optimization tool like Ahrefs or Semrush can help you target specific keywords, phrases, and topics that your customers search for every day.

3. Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing

Similar to search engine optimization, if you understand which words and phrases your customers use in searches, you can better target your pay-per-click advertising efforts. Yes, it's important to bid on branded keywords at the very least, but you can gain a lot of traffic in a short amount of time if you bid on the right keywords.

Like organic SEO, CRM integration with keyword tracking and measuring tools can help you strike gold with keyword bidding.

4. Email Marketing

Imagine having email management software where you've painstakingly created segments and rules to manage your contact list. However, you still get daily emails from frustrated customers who are receiving communications they shouldn't be (e.g. sending an English email to a french customer).

With CRM integration, not only can your email lists be updated automatically when data for a customer is added, updated, or changed (avoiding frustrated customers hitting the unsubscribe button) but you can also schedule certain communications to be sent at the right times.

For instance, if a customer signs up on your website, you can schedule an automatic confirmation email. Or, if a customer abandons their cart before purchasing, you can send a reminder email to encourage them to check out. The best part is that you can create these templates in advance, then set it and forget it!

5. Social Media Marketing

Psst. If you aren't already using a social media management system for creating, scheduling, and publishing social media posts and ads, you're missing out.

Taking a social media management system and integrating it with a CRM just takes everything to the next level:

• You can use customer data to show you which social media channels to target. For example, if your sales team sees that the majority of qualified leads are coming from Facebook, you can put more focus on creating content for your Facebook audience.
• You can get a bird's-eye view of what your company's reputation is online
• Incoming comments and messages go to one inbox for easy management
• Track the performance of campaigns and advertising easily
• Social listening

Most social media management systems have a cool feature called social listening. Social listening allows you to track hashtags, keywords, and even specific social media accounts so you can have a pulse on what your customers are talking about. Social listening can be a very useful feature to help you create customer personas, marketing strategies, and understand your company's overall reputation online.

6. Account-Based Marketing

When marketing and sales work together on a growth strategy to create personalized buying experiences for specific customer accounts, that's account-based marketing.

Your CRM is the main tool for account-based marketing because it holds all the information you need about the specific account you want to target. Now you can take a closer look at that customer and create a personalized experience that will be sure to resonate with them. See how having everything in one place makes such a difference?

7. Referral Programs

Word of mouth is great for marketing, so it's no surprise that companies use referral programs to entice their existing customers to recommend products and services to their friends and family. Referral programs are a winning marketing strategy that top eCommerce companies use all the time to gain new customers.

Referral programs can work in a variety of different ways, from giving existing customers coupons or discount codes that they can forward to friends and family through email or social media. You've probably received an email or DM from a friend with a good discount for a product or service and decided to buy based on that referral.