Customer expectations are at an all-time high. And if you’re going to delight your customers, you need a solid CRM strategy.
Implementing a CRM strategy enables you to build long-lasting relationship with your customers so you can enhance customer loyalty and increase your ROI by putting your customers at the heart of everything you do.
The importance of having a CRM strategy is no secret. In fact, it’s no coincidence that the revenue of CRM businesses has increased by 393% since 2010 as more and more companies fight to deliver the best possible customer experience.
But with more people embracing the power of CRM, how do you know if your CRM strategy is up to scratch? And if it’s not, how can you get the most out of your CRM system and create a powerful strategy that works hard for you?
4 ways to transform your CRM strategy
1. Identify your vision and goals
If you’re going to transform your CRM strategy and ensure you get the most out of it, firstly you need to take things back a step, strip everything back, and determine exactly what it is you want to achieve from your CRM strategy. After all, without clear goals in place, you won’t be able to assess the success of your strategy.
Yes, you want to improve your customer relationships – that’s a given. But how? And why? Is it because you want to decrease churn? Or increase your sales? Do you want higher quality leads? Or do you want to better map your customer journeys? Whatever you want from your CRM, you need to know what it is you want to achieve before you get started.
By identifying a clear vision and goals and outlining your key outcomes, you can begin to build – or rebuild – your CRM strategy from the ground up, taking it back to basics and analysing as you go to make sure everything you do has a purpose.
2. Clean up your data
If you’re going to transform your CRM strategy, you need to use your data to inform your decisions. And if you’re going to get the most out of your data, you need to make sure you can trust it by ensuring it is clean, relevant and up to date.
The success of your CRM strategy begins and ends with your data. In fact, one of the best things about having a CRM strategy is that you can use your data to drive your decisions – so it’s important to make sure you can trust your data by regularly auditing your database.
A data audit enables you to get to grips with the state of your data, so you know what it is you’re working with. By cleansing your database, you can update client profiles, purge old contacts, and make sure your data is as accurate as possible so you can eliminate any mistakes.
Doing so not only arms you with the information you need to create powerful campaigns, but it also builds trust with your clients and shows them that they are important to you. And with so many companies competing to deliver the best possible experience, it makes sense to get ahead from the start.
3. Use your data to delight your customers
The aim of your CRM strategy is to improve your customer relationships and deliver an unbeatable customer experience. So, if you’re going to delight your customers, you need to use your data to segment them so you can get to know who they really are and what makes them tick.
By using your data to track your customers’ wants and needs, you can begin to really understand their behaviours and connect with your customers in a more holistic way so you can deliver personalised, powerful marketing campaigns that they want to engage with.
Having identified what it is your customers want, you can inform your strategy and make sure you are delivering continuous, targeted marketing campaigns, communicating with them in the right way and sharing relevant content that they want to read, where they will read it.
Plus, by providing consistent messaging across all consumer platforms and channels, you can deliver a consistent, unified brand experience. This in turn enables you to build trust with your customers, nurture your relationships, create compelling experiences, and ultimately decrease churn.
4. Monitor and evaluate for continuous improvement
Do you remember we said at the beginning you needed to identify your goals in order to revisit your strategy and review what has worked so you can optimise your next steps moving forward? Well, it’s time to do just that.!
When it comes to an effective CRM strategy, it’s important to be flexible. Your strategy is a work in progress, and it probably isn’t going to be perfect from the very beginning. And that’s absolutely fine – as long as you are willing to be flexible, make improvements, and keep transforming your strategy as you go.
Your CRM strategy isn’t a simple item that you can tick off a list and move on from. It should be constantly evolving as your business continues to grow and change, which is why you need to use your data to find valuable, actionable insights and keep honing your strategy as you go.
Knowing what doesn’t work is actually just as valuable as knowing what does work if you’re going to keep optimising your CRM strategy and continue moving forward. So, by tracking the performance of your campaigns you can check back against your initial goals to monitor your progress and see what has worked and what hasn’t.
Essentially, 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 strategy to deliver optimum experience and improve your strategy over time.
Discover transformational CRM with Edit
When you work with Edit, we will strip everything back and use real data to inform our decisions, helping you to deliver seamless customer journeys and reach your customers in the right way, at the right time.
By using data to drive our approach, we can create bespoke CRM strategies that truly work for you. This audience-first approach means that you reach your customers in the right way, at the right time, transforming your CRM and ultimately resulting in better sales, more effective campaigns, increased ROI – and of course, exceptional customer experiences.
Sound good? Contact us today to find out more about how our team of Editors can help you to implement a CRM strategy that works hard for you.
