What is CRM?

According to Jason Kulpa (2017), “customer relationship management (CRM) is all of the activities, strategies, and technologies that companies use to manage their interactions with their current and potential customers. CRM helps businesses build a relationship with their customers that, in turn, creates loyalty and customer retention. Since customer loyalty and revenue are both qualities that affect a company’s revenue, CRM is a strategy that results in increased profits for a business. At its core, a CRM tool creates a simple user interface for a collection of data that helps businesses recognize and communicate with customers in a scalable way (Kulpa, 2017).

A CRM system helps businesses keep customer contact details up to date, track every interaction, and manage customer accounts. It improves customer relationships and Customer Lifetime Value (Salesforce, 2022). It allows companies to collect, store, and analyze customer information for business purposes. 

When do you need a CRM Strategy?

There comes a time in the life of every organization when growth needs to be handled with strategic decisions. You might have too many business leads or sales agents to understand. Or you might find that your support is overwhelmed with customer requests for better service.

How Does a CRM Help?

• Learning what customers are buying and why they are buying your products. Able to have a system with all customer information stored in one palace so that any department handling the customers can meet the customers’ expectations.
• It allows the company to have a one-stop place for information from possible customers or leads to see the activities the customer has participated in.
• Ensure all information is obtainable in a one-stop place and data is easier to understand.
• It helps companies to have overall knowledge of the customer and can build relationships and loyal customers.

CRMs for eCommerce

In the age of E-Commerce and Omnichannel retail, merchants focus on improving customer experience in brick-and-mortar and online stores as a competitive advantage. Integrating commerce and CRMs help increase online sales from new customers and repeat sales from existing customers. The connector passes all customer data and attributes from your online store into your CRM, including:

• Order Information
• Recent Activity
• Browser Type
• Abandoned Carts
• Lifetime Customer Statistics
• Average Order Value

Some of the things you can do with an eCommerce – CRM Integration 

• Automate and personalize offers
• Abandoned cart nurturing 
• Upsell, cross-sell, and reorder emails 

Types of CRMs & What they Offer

There are hundreds of CRM tools available on the market. A CRM is the foundation of your business, so you must choose the best CRM to enable your success. Today I will provide insight on some of the tools. 

Hubspot CRM

Hubspot is a popular CRM system designed for digital marketing and cross-border sales. Hubspot is optimized for managing and executing online campaigns with competent data organization and accurate time synchronization.

They offer Contact management, Deal management, Task management, Email tracking and notifications, Email templates, and scheduling, Document sharing, Meeting scheduling, Email integration (Gmail and Outlook), and Live chat.

Salesforce

Salesforce is one of the most popular CRM software used. Salesforce has an extensive suite of CRM products for you to choose from. They offer business type, role, need, and industry solutions. 

Zendesk

Zendesk Sell is a comprehensive software solution for companies looking to generate faster lead response times, expand to generate more new leads, and increase overall annual revenue. It enhances sales teams’ productivity, processes, and pipeline visibility.

Do CRMs Work?

Brauer knew their customers were curious about the story behind Brauer products and the rich history of homeopathy, and content marketing seemed the natural solution. They wanted to be able to provide all the answers to their customers’ questions, as well as start branching out into creating blogs and guides to living naturally. 

Their combination of WordPress, Shoppe, and MailChimp created a ton of data that had to be manually managed within a web of spreadsheets. Their contacts database kept growing without the ability to segment it easily. Because none of their systems interacted with one another, real-time, closed-loop reporting was a fever dream. Brauer’s marketing could only estimate the impact of its digital marketing. 

Read More about the Brauer Hubspot Case Study

With all this in mind, Brauer started searching for a technology solution that would allow their marketing efforts to address the business goals of:

• Growing traffic, revenue, and customer engagement
• Creating a profitable eCommerce revenue stream
• Removing dated technologies and replacing them with a powerful, integrated solution

Using HubSpot’s suite of tools, Brauer increased its database by 325%, social media traffic by 573%, and email click-throughs by 175%. 

Do you need a CRM?

The short answer is yes! Customer relationship management software is a tool to organize your contact info and manage your relationship with prospective customers, clients, and other contacts. They’re address books on steroids. CRM apps can help you make orders out of the chaos of interactions, letting you focus on customers. 

Disclaimer: The ideas and opinions expressed in this blog post are solely my own and are not representative of any current or previous employer. Any similarity to any actual company, organization, or individual is purely coincidental. This blog post is written to provide general information and does not intend to violate any non-disclosure agreement or confidentiality agreement.

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References:

Brauer increases the database by 325% with HubSpot. HubSpot. (n.d.). Retrieved September 12, 2022, from https://www.hubspot.com/case-studies/brauer 

Chaffey, D. (2019, October 15). The Perfect Martech Stack? – dave chaffey digital marketing. Dr Dave Chaffey : Digital Insights. Retrieved September 12, 2022, from https://www.davechaffey.com/digital-marketing-trends/the-perfect-martech-stack/

HubSpot. (n.d.). What is CRM? HubSpot. Retrieved September 12, 2022, from https://www.hubspot.com/products/crm/what-is 

Kulpa, J. (2022, April 14). Council post: Why is customer relationship management so important? Forbes. Retrieved September 12, 2022, from https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesagencycouncil/2017/10/24/why-is-customer-relationship-management-so-important/?sh=146b9e4c7dac