In the CRM space I work in, the middle market, CRM doesn’t mean customer relationship marketing. In fact, marketing is often the forgotten child.
Having mostly worked in the mid-market, I haven’t been as exposed to well-defined marketing machines. But when I do, they almost always work with different systems than their peers in sales and service.
In these cases, I don’t see how you can say that your marketing is based on a customer relationship. Having many functional customer relationships means many possible marketing outcomes…and total customer confusion, low customer value, and minimal customer loyalty.
A company that is functionally isolated, where the business units, the product groups are departments that do not communicate in a planned way, has what are called silos. Each silo operates with its own set of procedures and goals, as they don’t know what the others are doing.
Many years as a CRM consultant have reinforced my belief that an effective CRM implementation is more than a technical checklist. It is also more than just a software and feature focused project manager with all the special accreditations and certifications. You can be super efficient with the latest implementation methodologies, but if you’ve missed the boat as a consultant to your client, what value have you actually delivered?
Integrating Marketing with the rest of your business
Having an effective marketing strategy is the key to the success of any business. As part of the CRM strategy, customer relationship marketing is one of the supporting pieces. Knowing your customer is critical to building the products and messages needed to keep them loyal. Gathering this knowledge spans the organization, not just the marketing department. Therefore, functional silos within your organization can create problems when each has its own set of messages and goals.
If you don’t believe in extending customer loyalty because all customers eventually churn, you’d probably agree that current value and some other definition of potential value can be improved. Doing either requires building a cohesive and comprehensive strategy that provides the consistent and timely collection of data needed to market effectively.
How to get started in customer relationship marketing
If you want to get the most out of your marketing efforts, there are some basic foundational truths you need to keep in mind. Since decisions are made based on the information that is collected about your customers, you need to have the basics in place:
* Maintain customer demographic information
* Track interactions with your customer; such as web visits, emails, phone calls, responses to newsletters, etc.
* Registration of responses to marketing campaigns.
* Track sales or other business monetization methods over time
The benefits of customer relationship marketing
who what when
Mileage will vary with each company, as everyone will make their own competitive decisions. Theories abound, such as demographics being the key to everything or analyzing customer activity will reveal everything. No matter how you decide to implement your strategy, there are 3 key benefits you should strive for when analyzing incoming information.
* Know what you will say in the future
* Know which customers you will tell
* Know when you need to say it
Marketing is an investment, like many things. And when you invest, you expect the highest return possible. Therefore, throwing all your money in one direction at once is a guaranteed path to failure. You will have wasted your resources and end up not knowing your customer better.
Using a customer relationship marketing strategy can certainly improve your business by targeting the right message, to the right customer, at the right time. This makes them more likely to respond by sending a unique message and tells you that you are on your way to a better two-way relationship.
Wouldn’t everyone like to know when a customer is about to jump ship and act quickly to turn the situation around? This is what effective relationship marketing looks like