Top 10 CRM Marketing Strategies That Drive Results

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In marketing, understanding your customers is key to all those campaigns, advertising, and dollars spent towards keeping current customers happy and gaining new ones.

What if you could take away the guesswork and get the cold, hard data behind where your customers come from, how they behave, what moves them through your company's purchasing funnel, and more? Hint: CRM marketing software lets you do that!

Instead of making up a customer persona (or personas) based on what you think your customers are like, you can make one based on what you know they are like.

Instead of creating campaigns that you think will resonate with your customer, you can create campaigns that you know will resonate with them (ok, at least have a WAY better chance at being successful, a marketing CRM won't make you a mind reader).

Want to learn more? Want to know the ways of marketing CRM? Read on!

What is a Marketing CRM?

A Marketing CRM is a data-driven platform that helps marketers create meaningful customer relationships and improve their marketing strategies. CRM automation marketing aims to build personalized customer experiences by leveraging customer data, including past purchases, interests, and behaviors.

Marketers are focused on reaching target customers through campaigns like email, social media, and content to move customers through the buying process.

However, knowing the best channel for reaching high-quality leads and customers can be difficult at the best of times, especially if you don't have an organized and clear view of who your customers are and how they respond to your attempts to reach them.

A marketing CRM helps marketers understand their customers and gives them the tools they need to execute the strategies and tactics that reach those customers.

For example, drip campaigns or drip marketing allow you to send various marketing messages, from email to SMS, to customers at the right time.

Drip campaigns

Drip campaigns are typically set up in your CMS, allowing you to target a specific customer segment through email or SMS messages. Pretty handy for keeping your business at the front of your customer's mind!

And drip campaigns are just one example of what a marketing CRM can do for you and your business. There are a lot more uses that align with the marketing goal of reaching your customers, which will be explained in more detail throughout this post.

Correlation Between CRM and Marketing

While the CRM tracks, manages, and stores customer data, marketing takes that data and creates advertising, blogs, emails, SMS texts, business VoIP, and other communications to reach and convert more customers.

In today's connected world, customers expect instant and consistent communication when they want it, and it's up to marketers to provide it.

But if reaching customers properly means pushing relevant content their way, it's tough to do that without a full understanding of who your customer is.

By using CRM strategies to track your customer journey through different sales funnels such as SEO and Social Media, you can gain invaluable knowledge about your customers' wants and needs.

You can then use this data to create meaningful customer personas that accurately reflect who you should target with your marketing campaigns - increasing engagement rates, building better relationships, and ultimately growing your business.

CRM Automation Marketing Explained

CRM automation marketing is an effective way to improve the customer experience and increase sales. It's an automated process that allows businesses to streamline their marketing, customer service, and other operational processes in one place.

With CRM automation marketing, you can create targeted campaigns, segment customers into different groups for better targeting, automate follow-up emails and messages, track customer interactions, and generate more leads.

Besides automation, marketing automation with CRM is about creating an experience for customers that will make them want to buy from you again and again. By automating processes, your business can focus on providing the best customer service and products possible without spending hours manually managing each task.

A few examples of CRM automation marketing include:

  • Automated email campaigns,
  • Personalized content recommendation engines,
  • Dynamic segmentation, and
  • Tailored ad targeting.

These CRM strategies allow marketers to create a custom experience for each customer without manually researching and writing content for every user. By leveraging marketing automation with CRM, marketers can stay ahead of the curve and ensure their messages resonate with their target audiences.

Features and Benefits of CRM Marketing Software

Now that the why's and how's of marketing CRM software have been discussed, let's move on to the specific features and benefits of marketing CRM software.

Since there are way too many features and benefits to discuss them all, the ones highlighted below are the top or main features, along with their benefits, that you should be aware of when considering CRM marketing software.

Examples of Marketing CRM features and benefits:

Feature

Benefits

Lead management

  • Track where quality leads come to more efficiently focus marketing efforts
  • Automatically send leads to sales
  • Categorize leads based on your criteria

Drip campaigns

  • Send the right message to a customer at the right time automatically
  • Make your time go further with templates

Marketing automation

  • Fewer mistakes (a message is written once instead of over and over)
  • Appointment reminders, notifications for reviews, social media inbox, and more
  • Always get an up-to-date view of the customer

Analytics

  • Keep track of goal and metric progress
  • Understand performance and why
  • Understand customer actions and behaviors

Accessibility

  • Information is located and viewable in one place
  • Information is easy to access

Content management

  • Produce relevant content easier and faster
  • Monitor content performance
  • Personalize content for target audiences
  • Create, post, and manage content from one system

Segmentation

  • Group customers into categories for more focused communications

Call tracking software

  • Gives you insight into which campaigns are working and which are not
  • Gives you a better understanding of which marketing channels drive calls

CRM Campaigns Techniques

At this point, you've moved from the basics of CRM automation marketing to more advanced techniques. To get the best results, it's essential to understand the best practices for CRM campaigns.

And the following are some techniques to get you started:

1. Customize and Streamline Your Email Marketing Strategies

By tailoring and optimizing email marketing strategies, businesses can target the right audience with the tailored message they need. This strategy gives companies a decisive advantage - automated emails personalized to customers' desires, likes, and interests.

Furthermore, with segmentation tools, marketers can easily break down customers into individual groups and hone in on each group's specific needs.

When you correctly identify and understand segments, you can craft tailored emails for each group. Crafting relevant emails for every customer can be time-consuming, but automated emails simplify it. All you need is one quality template that you can easily customize to meet each client's needs.

2. Personalize Your Content for Each Segment

Leveraging segmented personalization empowers CRM marketing teams to understand their customer's unique interests better.

By creating materials tailored to each customer's unique needs, businesses can build more meaningful relationships through engagement that is not only relevant but also deeply personal.

Personalized content allows companies to address customers' concerns and highlight certain benefits or features of a product or service that interest them.

That's not all. Epsilon's research uncovered that 80% of consumers are more likely to buy from businesses that provide personalized recommendations based on prior purchases and interactions with the company. This research clearly illustrates the power of personalizing content for each segment.

3. Leverage Automation To Reach The Maximum Potential Of Your CRM

Utilizing marketing automation with CRM can help you achieve maximum sales outcomes while ensuring all necessary tasks are done promptly and efficiently.

Automation within your CRM system offers various opportunities, such as:

Features

Description

Data Collection & Organization

Streamlines data collection and categorization, making it easier to track marketing activities.

Lead Management & Segmentation

Facilitates automated lead scoring and segmentation for more targeted, personalized campaigns.

Campaigns & Communications

Enables automated emails and other communications to ensure that prospects receive the right message at the right time

Analytics & Insights

Provides detailed insights into customer behavior so you can make more informed marketing decisions.

Findstack found that sales productivity can increase by an impressive 14.5% when companies use marketing automation with a customer relationship management (CRM) system. Incorporating CRM automation into your business will undoubtedly bring it to the next level and maximize its potential!

4. Analyze Customer Data and Optimize Campaigns According to the Results

By diving into customer data, you can uncover patterns and trends in their past that you can leverage to customize your marketing approach.

This technique involves gathering customer data from multiple sources, including surveys, purchases, website traffic data, social media activity, etc., then analyzing it using analytics tools like segmentation or predictive analysis.

After identifying patterns and trends in customer data, you can adjust your CRM strategies to target leads better and drive higher conversion rates.

5. Use A/B Testing To Discover What Works Best For Your Audience

A/B testing (also known as split testing) compares two versions of a campaign with different elements to discover which performs better in terms of engagement or conversion rate.

It involves taking two versions of a page or element within a page (A and B) and sending them out simultaneously to different audiences to compare which version gets a better response.

Companies use A/B testing for everything from email subject lines or CTA buttons to website design elements such as font size and color schemes.

By measuring the performance of each element against key metrics like click-through rate (CTR), time spent on page (TSP), or bounce rate (BR), companies can determine what works best for their audience so they can optimize future campaigns accordingly.

Top 10 CRM Marketing Strategies and Tactics

It isn't just all about sales and customer service, the data that your CRM collects about customers can help you formulate strategies that touch every aspect of marketing.

We already know that a CRM is essential to your marketing strategies and tactics, but let's be honest, the reason that you're here is that you're looking for ideas.

1. Organic Content Marketing

Content marketing is all about producing educational and relevant content tailored to the right audience. Branding, product and company awareness, credibility, and reputation can all be tied to content marketing.

A CRM can help exponentially with content marketing strategies and tactics. The better you understand your customer and what moves them through the awareness, consideration, and decision phases, the better content you can produce.

Find hidden keyword opportunities

Think about how you do keyword research. You use keyword research tools like Ahrefs, Moz, and Semrush. You look at competitors. You look at Google search results. You might even ask your customer support department what topics customers tend to discuss when they are on the phone with support (this is a good idea).

Keywords might be easy to come by when you're first developing your company's content marketing strategy, but it does become more difficult over time when those low-hanging fruit keyword opportunities are all used up.

A marketing CRM helps you find hidden keyword opportunities by analyzing customer data. For example, what if you took all your customer's text messages, live chats, and emails and made a word bubble to help you identify keywords that you didn't think of before? That's just one strategy that might help your content shoot up in search results.

Optimize image and video keywords

One example of how a CRM can help your content marketing is by helping you optimize your image and video keywords for Google's rich results. Here's an example of Best Buy Canada showing up in Google's rich search results for “best smart tv”.

Best smart tv - search results

Rich results are the search results you see at the top of Google search that range from images to video clips. As you can imagine, rich results get a higher click-through rate than regular search results.

2. Search Engine Optimization (SEO)

What does your customer search for? Which words do they typically use? These are important questions for determining how to optimize your website, from technical SEO to the copy on each page.

A marketing CRM that integrates with a search engine optimization tool like Ahrefs or Semrush can help you target specific keywords, phrases, and topics that your customers search for every day.

Ask customers how they found you online

One strategy is asking your prospects how they found your business. If they found you on Google or another search engine, ask them what they typed into the search engine and what enticed them to click on your business over another.

Identify technical SEO improvements

It's tedious to go through every page of your website and figure out what improvements can be made from a technical SEO standpoint. Thankfully, most CRMs either include or can be integrated with tools that allow you to perform quick technical SEO audits on your website, saving you time and helping you increase your domain authority.

3. Pay Per Click (PPC) Marketing

Similar to search engine optimization, if you understand which words and phrases your customers use in searches, you can better target your pay-per-click advertising efforts. Yes, it's important to bid on branded keywords at the very least, but you can gain a lot of traffic in a short amount of time if you bid on the right keywords.

Like organic SEO, CRM integration with keyword tracking and measuring tools can help you strike gold with keyword bidding.

4. Email Marketing

Email Marketing

Imagine having email management software where you've painstakingly created segments and rules to manage your contact list. However, you still get daily emails from frustrated customers who are receiving communications they shouldn't be (e.g. sending an English email to a french customer).

With CRM integration, not only can your email lists be updated automatically when data for a customer is added, updated, or changed (avoiding frustrated customers hitting the unsubscribe button) but you can also schedule certain communications to be sent at the right times.

For instance, if a customer signs up on your website, you can schedule an automatic confirmation email. Or, if a customer abandons their cart before purchasing, you can send a reminder email to encourage them to check out. The best part is that you can create these templates in advance, then set it and forget it!

5. Social Media Marketing

Psst. If you aren't already using a social media management system for creating, scheduling, and publishing social media posts and ads, you're missing out.

Taking a social media management system and integrating it with a CRM just takes everything to the next level:

  • You can use customer data to show you which social media channels to target. For example, if your sales team sees that the majority of qualified leads are coming from Facebook, you can put more focus on creating content for your Facebook audience.
  • You can get a bird's-eye view of what your company's reputation is online
  • Incoming comments and messages go to one inbox for easy management
  • Track the performance of campaigns and advertising easily

Social listening

Most social media management systems have a cool feature called social listening. Social listening allows you to track hashtags, keywords, and even specific social media accounts so you can have a pulse on what your customers are talking about. Social listening can be a very useful feature to help you create customer personas, marketing strategies, and understand your company's overall reputation online.

6. Account-Based Marketing

When marketing and sales work together on a growth strategy to create personalized buying experiences for specific customer accounts, that's account-based marketing.

Your CRM is the main tool for account-based marketing because it holds all the information you need about the specific account you want to target. Now you can take a closer look at that customer and create a personalized experience that will be sure to resonate with them. See how having everything in one place makes such a difference?

Here are some quick strategies for account-based marketing:

Personalized email campaigns

Let's say you have customers in the construction industry that you haven't marketed to in a while. Since your CRM has already segmented those customers into a category based on industry, why not send them a personalized email campaign to spark interest in your company?

Follow specific social media accounts

Do you see your customers interacting with a specific account on social media? It might be a good idea to follow that account and note what terminology and jargon they use, what topics they talk about, and who interacts with them.

7. Referral Programs

Word of mouth is great for marketing, so it's no surprise that companies use referral programs to entice their existing customers to recommend products and services to their friends and family. Referral programs are a winning marketing strategy that top eCommerce companies use all the time to gain new customers.

Referral programs can work in a variety of different ways, from giving existing customers coupons or discount codes that they can forward to friends and family through email or social media. You've probably received an email or DM from a friend with a good discount for a product or service and decided to buy based on that referral.

Here's an example of an effective referral program from MeUndies:

Referral program

Source

As you can see, they've made their referral program straightforward and easy to use. What most likely happens here is that someone enters their email address, and the CRM automatically triggers a referral email to be sent which the customer can then forward to whomever they want.

With a CRM's automation and ability to segment customers, you can set up a referral program that works for your business and sit back and watch as the number of new customers grows.

8. Event Marketing

Regardless of whether an event is in-person or virtual, the ability to gather data related to the event is crucial for effective marketing. Not all CRMs have robust event marketing tools built-in, but thankfully event software integrations are available most of the time.

With a CRM behind the scenes of your event marketing, you can gather valuable data like registration numbers (even if people register from different sources), attendee information, website clicks, and more.

9. Conversational Marketing

Conversational marketing is meant to encourage dialogue with customers quickly so that questions can be answered, issues can be solved, and anything preventing them from moving forward in the sales funnel can be eliminated.

Chatbots on websites are one example of conversational marketing. 45% of businesses use chatbots on their website, with that number growing daily. The idea with chatbots is to facilitate real conversations with customers to create a personalized and effective experience for them so an issue can be solved as quickly as possible, whenever the customer needs it—even if they need support outside of customer service hours.

10. Business SMS

Business SMS

Business SMS or business text messaging allows you to gain more touchpoints with customers or leads, thus increasing the chance of a sale.

Similar to email marketing, your CRM can automate messages to be sent to specific customers at specific times to keep them interested and engaged. For example, sending a discount code to a customer when they pass your business's brick-and-mortar location. You can also create and save templates that can be personalized for each customer.

Some CRMs even allow for automated text responses, so when a customer messages with a specific sentence or keyword, it triggers an automated response. Automated responses are useful for booking and confirming appointments, confirming receipt of a package, and more. Automated responses can save your customer support and sales teams time while still moving customers through the sales or support process.

CRM Marketing Examples

As you've read, multiple CRM strategy examples can help you optimize your CRM marketing and automation with CRM. From automated emails and text messages to personalized segmentation and targeting, there are plenty of ways to streamline customer relationships.

And before we summarize everything we have explored, let's look at a few CRM marketing examples in use.

1. Wells Fargo Customer Feedback Management

Customers genuinely appreciate when they have various options to get in contact with a company. Wells Fargo is a shining example of how businesses can adequately handle customer relations.

For instance, many Wells Fargo customers contact the company through social media accounts. They are immediately responded to by its sophisticated CRM system that tracks inquiries left on these channels.

Rather than abandoning customers, Wells Fargo agents can immediately detect the engagement and promptly provide an appropriate response. This bank also utilizes cutting-edge cloud CRM software to furnish superlative customer service and streamlined efficiencies in all its operations.

2. Amazon's Targeted Marketing

In recent years, Amazon has swiftly become the most preferred online shopping outlet. One of the key components contributing to their success is their CRM system. Amazon can instantaneously tailor shoppers' individualized experiences using customer data collected during purchases!

When shopping on Amazon, you'll need to create a personal profile so they can monitor your purchasing behavior and browsing history. This way, they can tailor their marketing campaigns specifically for you based on what you're likely to prefer.

Furthermore, with just one click of a button, you can configure your account to make purchases in the blink of an eye. This is Amazon's most sought-after feature, and customers love it for its speed and convenience when checking out.

3. Apple CRM

Customer Relationship Management is an integral cornerstone of Apple's success strategy and its continued growth. If you've ever used any device from Apple – chances are good that you have had to sign up for one!

An Apple ID is a must to take advantage of the various services Apple offers, like iMessage and FaceTime. Registration with this account grants you access to great features that come with being part of the Apple family, such as downloading apps from the App Store or utilizing iCloud storage.

By creating a unique identification number for each user, Apple can keep track of music and movie preferences and provide tailored recommendations while making the experience hassle-free.

What's in it for them? Well, such data is essential to understand customer behavior which helps with effortless yet highly targeted marketing strategies. How convenient!

CRM automation marketing is the key to a successful business, and these examples of CRM strategies show how companies can leverage CRM technology to make sure they keep customers engaged and coming back for more.

That way, businesses can keep their marketing strategies up to date, leading to more satisfied customers!

Summary

We all want to understand our customers better. It not only helps you help them, but it also increases your sales, company reputation, helps with brand recognition, and positively impacts your company's bottom line.

Marketing CRMs give you many tools and insights into your customers and prospects to enhance your understanding of how they move through the purchasing process, what support they need, and more.

A marketing CRM can help you with every aspect of your marketing, from content marketing to events to paid advertising.

In short, a marketing CRM gives you a bird's-eye view of your customers so you can tailor your marketing efforts to reach them more effectively. Book a demo with Ringy today to see how we can help you do exactly that.