What is the Role of CRM in Marketing? Definition & Examples

Summary: CRM in marketing can be leveraged to segment the audience for developing personalized marketing campaigns. Let’s learn about other benefits of using CRM in marketing below.

The right marketing strategy can help in boosting sales and growing the customer base. On the other hand, a poor marketing strategy can impact on your business reputation and also cause significant financial loss.

Therefore, creating an effective marketing strategy is crucial for business benefits in the long run. To do that, you need reliable CRM software. By using CRM, you can store and analyze customer data to create effective marketing campaigns that boost conversion rates.

In addition to that, marketing CRM can also help you in segmenting your customers and measuring the effectiveness of your marketing campaigns. Keep on reading to learn more about the role of CRM in marketing and how marketers can leverage it to increase revenue.

What is the Role of CRM in Marketing?

Marketing teams can greatly benefit from the use of CRM. It not just helps them to understand their customers but also lets them improve their marketing campaigns based on customer interactions. Here are some other ways CRM in marketing can benefit your business:

• Supports Multi-channel Marketing: Comes with the multichannel marketing feature to create and manage marketing campaigns on various channels like email, SMS, social media, web, and so on. This helps in generating leads through various channels.
• Social Branding: Lets you track your brand mentions, react to them, measure social media campaigns, monitor customer activities, etc. This data enables you to identify what works the most for customers and what can be done to improve social media presence.
• Customer Segmentation and Targeting: Can easily collect a lot of information about your customers like their personal info, purchase history, buying trends, previous interactions, etc. This enables you to segment your customers and create customized marketing campaigns accordingly.
• Data-driven Marketing: Lets marketers gain valuable insights through the marketing data presented via graphs, charts, and diagrams. All the data provide the effectiveness of marketing campaigns in the form of various statistics. This enables you to easily allocate the campaign budget and resources. Further, it also helps in identifying high-performing marketing campaigns to increase ROI.
• Managing Inbound Leads: There are various ways through which you can generate inbound leads like eBook download, a call, and a live chat conversation. A CRM can help you in identifying how many leads you are getting every month and comparing them to sales to understand whether you are getting high quality leads or not.

CRM Features to Improve Marketing Campaigns

The right CRM software will help you to improve your marketing campaigns and efficiently store all the customer data in one place. Some of the common features that should be there in a CRM for marketing include:

• Contact Management: The CRM can be used to store information related to customers including their gender, industry, location, email address, etc. All this information can be used to create personalized marketing campaigns for customers.
• Lead Generation: Through CRM, you get access to the leads data in real time that you can use to create proper follow-ups for leads throughout the sales procedure. This helps you in creating follow-ups till the time the lead makes the first purchase.
• Opportunity Management: Through CRM, you can keep track of all the deals made with clients by analysing the existing and potential customers in the sales pipeline. Therefore, helping in identifying the opportunities to boost sales and revenue.
• Sales Forecasting: The software will analyse the company’s historical sales and marketing data to identify upcoming profitable opportunities to boost sales.
• Social Media Integration: Through integration with multiple social media channels, CRM lets you post engaging content, measure KPIs, communicate with customers, etc. Further, you can also track the competitors’ activities to improve your social media marketing.
• Mobile App Support: Through support for a mobile app, you can easily access customers data, sales information, marketing campaigns progress, etc., in real time from mobile. Further, you can also update customer details on the go with the mobile app.

Example of CRM in Marketing

Here are some popular examples where CRM has been used to in marketing across different businesses verticals:

• Coca Cola’s ‘Friendly Twist’ Campaign

Coca Cola has recently launched a ‘Friendly Twist’ campaign where the freshers were provided cokes on their first day in college. They were allowed to open bottles only when the cap was clicked with different caps.

This enabled students to create bonds and communicate with other members on the first day of college. The CRM helped them in creating the campaign by gathering and analyzing information about students taken from the college.

• Airtel “Open Network” Initiative

The “Open Network” initiative was launched by Airtel to help users learn about the network coverage along with the signal strength for various regions in the country. This initiative was made available to customers via a CRM tool to maintain transparency with users.

CRM software storesd all the customer data and details about this initiative were sent to customers. Moreover, customers’ feedback for this service was collected and stored in CRM directly.

• IndusInd Bank Launched “Fingerprint Banking”

IndusInd bank has launched “Fingerprint Banking”, enabling customers to complete their transactions via fingerprints than passwords.

Through CRM software, the bank studied their consumer behavior on remembering complicated passwords and the history of failed transactions. Therefore, CRM helped them to understand their customers better and provided fingerprint banking to eliminate the hassle of remembering passwords.

Conclusion

CRM is an indispensable tool for marketers to expand their presence and grow their customer base. From storing customer data, segmenting them to creating personalized marketing campaigns, everything can be done from a single solution.

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