Customer relations monitoring (CRM) software gives your marketing and sales team valuable data on every lead. Besides storing personal information about prospects, such as their name and email, CRM software reveals how people engaged with your company.
It’s a precious source of information. As you might expect, a comprehensive analysis of CRM data can benefit your business. Keep reading to learn how to use CRM data analysis to improve sales campaigns.
1. Helps Identify the Right Customer
Your CRM gathers demographic and interest data for prospects. It also shows customer touchpoints to see which marketing channels played an important role in the customer journey.
When analyzing your CRM data, you should review:
- Purchases: try to identify your core customer base. What are your most profitable products or services?
- Customer data: are there demographic similarities between your customer base? For example, income, sex, age, etc.
- Customer journey: Which channels do your audience engage with? Which channels appear to be the most important in the customer journey?
Analyzing your CRM data will help you better understand your customers. A better understanding of your audience, interests, and pain points will help your marketing and sales teams create effective content at every stage of the customer funnel.
2. Reduces Your Marketing and Sales Costs
A better understanding of your customers will help you reduce customer acquisition costs. You’re more likely to create a higher converting landing page, for example, if you understand customer motivations.
But how would you know what resonates with your audience? Well, go back to your ‘right customer.’ Here’s what you’d want to be looking for:
- The age, gender, and location of your most engaged leads.
- Your leads’ interests: You can determine this by seeing what email newsletters your leads have opened, among other practices.
- Notes from your sales team: These notes will give you insights that the numbers don’t reflect.
The more data you collect, the better understanding you’ll have of your customer. Emphasize this in your guide to SaaS marketing or your B2B or retail promotion plans, whichever applies: the more data you have, the more specific your buyer personas are. These, in turn, can help you run tailored sales and marketing campaigns.
But don’t be satisfied with the results of your efforts. Constantly audit and iterate your campaigns.
There are various tools to help you analyze the success of your digital marketing efforts. For example, you can look at how people engage with your landing page by analyzing Google Analytics and reviewing heatmaps or screen recordings. You can act on new insights by running A/B or multivariate tests to optimize your conversions.
3. Improves Your Email Marketing
If you’re doing email marketing without a CRM, you’re doing it wrong. Your CRM will help you determine where each of your leads is in the sales pipeline. A sales acceleration tool such as Clevenio does the job by speeding up the sales process, as a result, the prospect becomes a customer much faster. An optimal email marketing campaign will have content that engages prospects at different stages of the journey.
To improve the results of your email marketing campaigns using CRM data, you should:
- Segment your email list according to where they are in the customer journey.
- Create email drip campaigns for different stages in the customer journey.
- If you’re able to collect the age and interests of your leads, you need to craft newsletters that will resonate with your email lists.
- Monitor engagement metrics. That will help you understand what content engages your audience.
Whether you’re a start-up or a global conglomerate, you should be using CRM software for your email marketing campaigns. Utilizing audience data to make smarter decisions is key.
Verify email address entries on your email list before you hit that send button, too. You want to make sure your emails reach your intended recipients.
Don’t forget to complement this strategy with the best practices for email marketing. So, personalize your subject lines and optimize your email’s preview text.
4. Enables Better Sales Forecasts
A CRM can help you create your quarterly sales reports. The first step for effective forecasting is gathering data from all your disparate sources and pulling them into a centralized database. That can be a difficult task.
Most businesses, for example, have a complex customer journey. People engage with a company across multiple marketing channels. You need to track how they engage with your company. You also need to account for things like Customer Lifetime Value, customer purchasing habits, and the quality of your customer service.
Gathering all of your data together in one place will help you:
- See how people engage with your company
- The number of people at different stages in the customer journey
- Assess things like customer lifetime value and purchasing habits
- Historical performance records
Reviewing this information will improve sales forecasting. You will be better able to use data to assess how your business will be performing in the next quarter.
An understanding of performance is critical for a company. After all, it’s difficult to make budgetary decisions if you have no sense of what the future looks like.
5. Refines Your Customer Service
A CRM is essential for customer experience, not just sales. Since a CRM is a database of all your leads, subscribers, and customers, your database may also contain historical data about customer complaints and queries.
Whether you intend to use a cloud call center or a full-service customer contact center, a CRM will help your team track customer issues. Here are some things you can do with your CRM as you optimize customer service.
- Keep records of phone calls with leads.
- Monitor important customer service metrics like average handle time
- Organize and resolve ongoing issues and new tickets properly.
- Use CRM data to train your customer-facing staff on dealing with specific segments.
You may even create an FAQ page or train a chatbot with your CRM data, further refining your customer service. Any improvement in your customer service will likely positively impact your brand reputation and reduce customer churn.
In Closing
A CRM keeps track of how and on which channels people engage with your brand. Analyzing the demographic of your most engaged leads will allow you to identify potential customers. Overlaying these demographic insights with an understanding of customer pain points and drivers enables you to create more effective sales and marketing material.
A better understanding of your audience is critical if you want to improve customer acquisition and reduce the cost of acquisition. You can use CRM data to ensure that your content resonates with your target audience. You can also use CRM data for forecasting and reduce customer churn.