Some might argue that marketing is all about creativity, while some consider it a rather tedious process.
So, is marketing only about being creative?
Well, I am taking the middle ground here. Sure, you need a well-structured marketing strategy and an understanding of the market to develop your strategy efficiently. But on the brighter side, they are just the foundation of a successful marketing campaign. Much of the rest is your unique creativity.
Now that that is settled, let us try to understand what marketing is. Sometimes people tend to define marketing as selling or advertising. While those two guesses are not entirely wrong, marketing does include a little more than that.
Marketing includes research, marketing segments, designing and creating landing pages and email campaigns, product distribution, promotion, customer satisfaction, and more.
Companies that successfully balance creativity and analytics in their marketing efforts are twice as likely to achieve above-average growth compared to their peers.
With CRM, you can create the perfect balance between creativity and analytics. This makes your part of the job easier, more effective and fact-based.
Why Is CRM Important in Marketing?
Simply put, CRM software improves your relationship with current and potential customers by giving insights into a customer’s purchase or issue history.
It helps you understand the customer better based on their preferences and behavior, making it easier for the marketing team to use their creativity according to customer preference.
Customers prefer to hear and see what they like.
One such example is Spotify wrapped– At the end of every year, Spotify releases a curated playlist with all the songs its customers listen to by sending them notifications with quirky titles. It’s safe to say that I downloaded Spotify only to judge my music taste at the end of every year.
Similarly, if your marketing strategy revolves around the customer’s preferences, it becomes easier to convert potential customers into loyal customers.
How Can CRM in Marketing Benefit Your Business?
Improved customer understanding
With LeadSquared CRM’s 360-degree customer information, you can learn more about your customers.
You can analyze customer data, such as demographics, preferences, buying behavior, and interaction history. This is more practical and efficient than shooting your shot in the dark.
This centralized data allows your sales, marketing, and service team to have access to all important information. Instead of all three teams working on three different products, you can increase the impact of the marketing campaign if all three teams focus on the same product.
Increased sales efficiency
Thanks to the insights provided by the CRM system, your team can prioritize leads through CRM-integrated marketing campaigns based on the customer’s level of engagement and interest.
This increases conversion rate and overall sales efficiency.
According to research, CRM usage significantly enhances sales performance, with 75% of sales managers reporting increased sales and potential boosts in sales conversion rates by up to 300%.
Smart use of resources
Targeted marketing strategies can yield higher ROI than clueless, broad, non-targeted campaigns.
You can reduce marketing costs and increase income by focusing on promising leads.
For example, say you run a clothing retail store. If your sales team finds an increase in winter coat sales and the marketing team is only focused on promoting the autumn collection, then resources and efforts are wasted.
Instead, if both teams work with the data to promote winter coats and create personalized winter collection ads for existing customers, retention rates will increase.
Customer retention
As discussed earlier, CRM marketing strategies help retain customers.
A loyal customer making five purchases a year is better than gaining a new customer who makes one purchase.
By keeping the customers engaged through personal communication and targeted messages, you can increase customer retention and lower churn rates. CRM systems have been shown to increase customer retention rates by 27%.
Now that you are aware of the benefits, let me guide you through a few features that will help make your marketing campaign more creative and efficient:
CRM Features to Improve Marketing Campaign
Campaign builders
Let’s be honest. We are more likely to click on campaigns that are easy-going on the eyes than open a regular email. Email campaign templates allow you to easily edit and change colors, fonts, and images to your liking.
With your creativity and the ease of the existing templates, you can create the marketing campaigns of your dreams!
With LeadSquared, you can create catchy email campaigns that intrigue your customers. You can select templates, personalize campaigns, and send campaigns.
With CRM, you can personalize email campaigns and make the customers feel seen.
Personalized email campaigns based on CRM data show a 14% higher click-through rate compared to non-personalized campaigns.
In addition to all the creative email campaigns you can make, CRM provides email subject line analysis. You can know which subject lines got you the most open rates.
By understanding the emails that get the best CTRs and response rates, you can plan future strategies to improve your campaigns. Advanced email analytics lets you see which emails are doing well and replicate their success.
WhatsApp marketing
WhatsApp has an impressive 98% open rate, significantly outperforming traditional email, which has a modest 20%.
With WhatsApp marketing, you can have conversations with potential customers in real-time. People are more likely to open marketing campaigns sent through WhatsApp, hence the increased read rate.
Personally, I prefer reading marketing messages sent on WhatsApp over emails because I can open them on the go.
With WhatsApp integration, you can send important sale notifications, order details, personalized welcome messages, etc
You can also set up autoresponders to answer the queries immediately.
Automated marketing
This can be considered as the finale. Remember how we talked about CRM helping bring the creative side out by assisting with other important tasks? Well, so this is what it does:
CRM marketing platforms do the hustle by understanding your prospects, building customer relationships, increasing ROI, and making email campaigns easier.
Through CRM, you can capture leads automatically, sparing you from manually tracking all potential and present customers.
It segregates your leads based on their location, age, products, or any other category you are interested in. This ensures personal and reliable communication with your prospects.
You can reach prospects through a channel of their choice—email, WhatsApp, text messages, or phone calls—based on their activities, interests, or queries.
To make things easier, here is a list of a few marketing automation tools that will benefit your business:
Marketing Automation Tools that You Should Try
1. Leadsquared
With 2000+ customers worldwide, LeadSquared makes the marketing process easier and more efficient. It has features such as:
- Lead nurturing – With this, you can create drip campaigns to nurture leads until they are ready for sales. You can segment your list to send personalized and relevant messages.
- Marketing attribution – See how well your campaign performed, monitor sources with the highest returns, and track touchpoints that lead to conversations.
- Triggered Communications – You can send messages to your prospects based on their activity on your campaigns.
- Easy Integration – Ensures real-time data sync between your marketing and sales tools. In addition to this, you can connect tools you love in just a few clicks.
2. Saleshandy
As the name suggests, Saleshandy helps make marketing and sales more efficient and easier.
You can track the activities of your prospects and their engagement with the emails to see if they have clicked, opened, or interacted with your email.
It offers centralized email templates, making it easy for the marketing team to speed up the emailing process.
The best part is that you can use their free version and later get the paid version with more complex tools.
3. Hubspot
Hubspot is an all-in-one tool for automated marketing.
It assists in creating a list of tasks required to attract more target audiences. It also provides a user-friendly, intuitive interface that is suitable for marketing specialists without any prior experience in this software.
HubSpot provides useful analytics and reporting features to make marketing more efficient and helps with building landing pages without any IT support
Be it micro start-ups or large enterprises, this tool works for everyone.
4. Mautic
If you are a start-up or a small business looking for something that goes easy on the pocket, then Mautic is the one.
Mautic is known as a small business automation tool in the market.
This tool offers many customizable features and allows you to make unlimited integrations.
Since it offers open-source marketing automation, so it can be integrated with other platforms like WordPress.
As long as you have a professional to set up the platform, Mautic is an affordable, user-friendly option for small businesses.
5. Hootsuite
With Hootsuite, you can boost your social media performance.
It enables you to manage all your social media platforms within one program. You can also use it to post updates, connect with contacts, and review responses.
With Hootsuite, you can design, schedule, and publish content for all your networks from one dashboard. This is helpful for beginner or intermediate social media managers, as it assists them with analytics.
Conclusion
Integrating CRM software can significantly increase the effectiveness and quality of your marketing strategy. As the marketing landscape evolves daily, CRM is pivotal in fostering lasting customer relationships and achieving sustainable business growth.
Whether you’re a small or large enterprise, investing in CRM improves customer retention and increases overall marketing ROI, making it a crucial asset in today’s competitive market.
