Marketing has become more like a sprint. Once you let go of your lead, it becomes difficult to win. To ensure that you win, marketers have to be incessantly working on finding out the next best strategy. One of these strategies is CRM or Customer Relationship Management, which plays an important role in shaping the end product. CRM comes in several flavors, and one of those is Real-time CRM, which, as the marketers say, is probably the most important one for them.
When in an ideal world, a marketer would have all the necessary information that would help him pocket all the customers across the globe. None of his marketing strategies would doom, and customers will respond the way he would have anticipated. Unfortunately, it is not an ideal world, and things work differently here.
So we need to tweak our ideas to ensure that they work. Marketing depends on a lot of factors, and we need to get all of them right to execute a perfect strategy. In this article, we discuss how real-time CRM helps an organization in boosting its marketing game. Let us begin.
Definition of Real-time CRM
It may sound like Real-time CRM is a type of CRM, but it is not. Instead, it refers to utilizing the advantages of the automation software to enable organizations to draw real-time results. The main goal here is to process customer requests quicker without giving up on the quality of the decision-making process.
It is important because unlike in the earlier days, customers now have more ways to contact you and request for answers to his questions. Not only that, these methods aren’t half as time-consuming as the old ones. It makes the consumer expect faster redressal too.
How real-time CRM helps in improving your marketing tactics?
Let us discuss the importance of real time monitoring in terms of marketing results:
1. Gain a full-fledged view of your customer
CRMs are responsible for providing a complete picture of the prospectus to their clients. It helps the marketing team to access any information about the client anytime and anywhere. A report by Nucleus Research suggests that data accessibility can lead to a shortening of the sales cycle by up to 14 percent.
Be it personal information like birthdays, or professional information such as payment information, order history, real-time CRM ensures that you have all of it available when in need. Due to this functionality, it seldom matters which salesperson is catering to the client.
It makes it easier to gauge their buying patterns, the types of products that interest them, or when they are likely to buy certain products. It lets you push in the requisite products via the right channels.
2. Improve customer communication with better data analysis
With CRM, you can gather an unfathomable amount of data for every customer. Not only that, you can then process all of it to understand their behavior and gain significant insights into their life. It will help you to build a relationship with the customer that lasts. In fact, as per a report by Nucleus Research, Social CRM can improve customer retention by a massive 26 percent.
You can further break down the data and create funnels based on demography, purchasing patterns, available income, etc. Such insights are also vital in shaping up your marketing campaigns and ensuring that they are viable, both economically and in driving more leads towards your products.
Let’s take an example.
There is no shortage of people purchasing clothes for no reason whatsoever. While going through the data, if you find a group of such people who are interested in particular clothing, say torn jeans, you can send them regular emails suggesting what their contemporaries are buying. It is not only a great way to engage your customers, but it can also lead to an increase in loyalty from their side.
3. Obtain results that you can measure
When traditional marketing strategies engulfed the market, there were no proven ways to measure the results of any strategy. CRM tool gets rid of such uncertainties by making sure that you get measurable outcomes such as a hike in sales or dip in costs.
CRM can be especially helpful when you are in a contingency or a crisis. Its ability to churn out exact outcome can help you take real-time decisions that are data-backed and safer than the alternatives. Plus, it gives you a higher leeway to avert a significant fall.
4. Send automated emails to your customer
Even though being one of the oldest when it comes to digital marketing techniques, email marketing has been a hard nut to crack even on this day. With the help of the right CRM idea, its effectiveness can amplify several times.
Let us understand how. CRM allows us to create several customer segments based on various pre-defined factors such as buying history, the amount spent, demography, etc. Or you can define your criteria to break the entire customer list into smaller parts. If you want figures to prove its importance, we expect the USA alone over 350 million dollars on email advertising in the year 2020.
It not only allows you to throw customized mails at them, but you can also generate opportunities to cross-sell and upsell your products and services. Say that you bifurcate your buying list based on their buying history. If your product has several ancillary products with a limited life, you can push these products regularly via emails to the customers.
5. Achieve real-time debtor management
Maintaining a free-flowing cash flow cycle is a significant concern for most business houses today. What if we tell you that you can ensure that you get real-time tracking of debtor balances, their payments, and their order history?
Sounds great, right?
Well, CRM makes it possible.
You can keep track of those debtors who owe you money and the products and services that you have sold to them. It would not only make it easier for you to warn them about the pending balances, but it would also point out those who are doing so repeatedly.
As a side note, if you think that these repeat offenders have become a liability for you, you can remove them from your future marketing campaigns to ensure that they no longer receive notifications of the ongoing offers.
The use of CRM in banking is a perfect example of how real time debt management can be done using automated software.
6. Automate your pitch
As you integrate CRM with sales and marketing, you get the option to create several triggers within the software. What it does is it will send a notification to the requisite personnel or a group of staff as soon as that specific action takes place. Organizations can also create such triggers in the entire CRM. It will improve lead visibility and accelerate the sales process.
The takeaway
We hope that you have now got a hint about how real-time CRM is important is amplifying your marketing game. Not just us, a UK-based brand, Evolve Beauty seconded our opinion by saying –
“Customers can be tracked, tagged, emailed, and updated in no time at all. Having an integrated CRM system has streamlined my sales and lead generation by making it easy to communicate with current and potential clients.”
With the help of CRM, you can not only cut your time and energy on useless marketing strategies, but you can instead focus on the more important ones and execute them faster as well. CRM and marketing are a match made in heaven, and you cannot go wrong by trying the combo for your business.
