If you want to drive customer loyalty, achieve customer retention, and ultimately, boost profitability, you need a CRM strategy.
A CRM strategy is the foundation of your customer relationship management. It’s a powerful tool that enables you to collect and use data to develop deeper relationships with your customers by putting the customer at the heart of everything you do.
Why? So you can deliver exceptional customer experience, empower your teams, and increase business revenue.
Your CRM strategy needs to be flexible, adaptive, and work hard for you. And whilst it’s all well and good to have an overall understanding of what a CRM strategy is, implementing the fundamental components that make up a great CRM strategy is what will keep you at the top of your game and ahead of the competition.
Luckily, that’s where we come in! Read on to discover five essential components of a successful CRM strategy…
5 components of a successful CRM strategy
1. Clean data that you can trust
We’ve said it before and we’ll say it again: when it comes to CRM strategy, it all starts with data. Without a doubt, one of the best things about having a CRM strategy is the ability to use data to get to know your customers and drive your decisions. That’s why at Edit we put data at the centre of everything we do.
Whether you’re tracking customer satisfaction, are using data to decide which products and services to offer or are analysing your data to understand which campaigns are hitting the mark and which are way off target, data forms an essential part of your CRM strategy.
However, if you’re going to get the most out of your data – and your CRM strategy, too – you need to make sure you can trust it by regularly auditing your database. Cleansing your database, updating client profiles, and purging old contacts means you can make sure your data is relevant and eliminate any mistakes.
Plus, ensuring your data is up to date also builds trust and shows your clients that they are important to you. Basically, the more accurate your data, the harder your CRM strategy can work, and the more effective your campaigns can be. See – there’s a reason we say it all begins with data!
2. Clever customer segmentation
As we said above, your CRM strategy’s ultimate goal is to help you get to know your customers and their needs. So, once you’ve established an extensive, clean database, you should then use that data to track important information so you can better understand your customers, their wants, and their needs.
By getting to grips with what makes your customers tick, you can segment your customers, uncover trends, identify likes and dislikes, and keep track of what works and what doesn’t. The result? You can begin to predict exactly what they want and when.
It goes without saying that no customer journey is the same, and all of your customers will want to feel special. So, if your CRM strategy is going to work hard for you, customer segmentation is a vital component that will enable you to identify how each customer journey works and ultimately connect to your customers in a more holistic way.
3. Strategic targeting and positioning
By segmenting your customers and utilising your data, you’ll then have the information you need to personalise your communications with them. It’s the difference between reaching out with a “Hi [First Name]” rather than a generic “Hi there”. And with 72% of consumers only engaging with personalised communications, the devil is in this small detail.
Yep, marketing campaigns with a personal touch can ensure your material stands out from the competition – and when you combine personalised campaigns with customer segmentation, you can start to tweak your messaging and really appeal to the needs of your customers.
By sending these tailored messages to your customers, you can nurture your relationships with them and supercharge your marketing capability by creating bespoke, timely marketing campaigns. Plus, by knowing what your customers want you can get straight to the point with campaigns that really resonate, and ultimately deliver a connected experience in today’s hyper-personalised world.
4. Creative content that drives conversations
If you’re going to resonate with your audience and deliver exceptional customer experience, you need your customers to engage with your content – and the best way to do so is by recognising the needs of your customers by creating relevant content that they really want to read.
By doing so, you can boost your marketing capability by creating bespoke, continuous marketing campaigns and messaging that target specific customer segments, transforming your marketing capability. And ultimately, a more effective marketing programme means more conversions than one-size-fits-all strategies that more often than not fall pretty flat.
Basically, the secret to creating compelling customer experiences is focussed targeting, segmentation, and ultimately, personalised content. Customer segmentation allows you to create campaigns that engage with and inspire your customers, so you can put customer experience above everything else.
5. Effective monitoring and evaluation
Finally, you need to monitor your CRM strategy and track the performance of your campaigns to see what works and what doesn’t. By using data analysis to monitor trends, review past performances and identify opportunities for improvement, you can learn from your mistakes and constantly tweak your customer experiences.
In addition, by monitoring and assessing engagement levels, you can find out the best performing campaigns and templates and identify what content engages your clients, enabling you to create, schedule, and publish powerful, value-added content to the right people at the right time.
Let us transform your CRM strategy
Here at Edit, we like to think we’re experts in CRM strategy. When you enlist our team to help with your customer relationship management, we’ll strip everything back to your core objectives so we can create bespoke CRM strategies that actually work. We’ll then use data and smart analytics to drive our approach and create powerful, transformational CRM strategies that empower you to build stronger relationships with your customers.
If you want to find out more how our team of Editors can help with your CRM strategy, contact us today to learn more.
