CRM and Data Insights

Digital Marketing - Study Notes:

What is a CRM?

You can use a customer relationship manager (CRM) application tool to manage all your business relationships with existing and potential customers.

In essence, a CRM is a database. You can use it to store contact information, such as the names, email addresses, and phone numbers of past customers, existing prospects and leads, and other business contacts. As you record most of your sales and commercial activities in a CRM system, it’s often the single source of truth for the sales and marketing functions of a business.

When combined with campaign and website traffic data, a CRM provides a clear picture of the full digital sales cycle of a business, with all its customer touchpoints. It helps digital marketers come to better conclusions, decide on effective courses of action, and optimize performance overall.

For the most part, the data contained in a CRM is collected online – on your website, social media channels, or campaign lead forms. CRM systems are useful for e-commerce businesses as they help online sellers manage and segment their customer data and email lists. They’re also useful for businesses who generate contact requests or collect leads to sell to over the phone. As with all data collection, the accuracy of the data you collect will impact the types of insights you can draw from it.

Better decision-making

By tracking interactions and creating reports, a CRM system helps you make better, more informed decisions.

CRMs often bridge the gap between online lead generation activities and offline sales conversations on the phone or in person. At scale, the data in your CRM can provide insights into different pathways to conversion and identify sales patterns. All customer interaction points – from the initial interest expressed by a lead to the final sale made by a customer – are tracked and can be reported on over time. This can help pinpoint customer trends and unearth valuable insights.

In modern CRMs, channel source data is recorded and associated with contact details. So, you can see which channels and campaigns drive leads, as well as how many of those leads become sales. This is useful information that can help you make decisions in relation to channel planning, budgeting, time, effort, and resource prioritization. You can focus your efforts on the channels that drive most leads and sales.

Social CRM

Social CRM is a collaborative, tool-based strategy that focuses on customer engagement and interactions.

Often, digital marketers will combine and compare CRM data with platform and website analytics data to create a holistic view of all customer interactions. You can do this by importing analytics and platform data into your CRM and combining the data streams in a business intelligence tool or spreadsheet. The goal is to create a complete picture of all channels and touchpoints that drive the sales and revenue recorded in your CRM.

Moving from the marketing side to the sales side, it's important to acknowledge that there can be multiple stakeholders involved in any purchase decision. With a social CRM process, you identify the people ‘around’ your target buyer who interact in the decision. By creating relationships and associations between the data and contacts in your CRM, you’re able to report on and engage your leads based on their relationships with other stakeholders.

Stakeholders might include the people who report to your target buyer (such as their team members) and the person who your target buyer reports to (such as their boss). By identifying associations between the data in your CRM, you can match customer touchpoints to stakeholders and make decisions that streamline the sales process.

Value of social collaboration

You can use social media channels to create and test relationships and associations between the various data points in your CRM system. This a great starting point for building a solid social CRM framework.

By connecting with professional social platforms such as LinkedIn and LinkedIn Sales Navigator, you can:

• View external social networking data and associations within your CRM that relate to leads and sales pipelines.
• Gain real-time insights when contacts take an action on a website, in email, or on social channels by setting rules within the CRM that send you new information about customers and events.
• Acquire new data from social networks, chatbots, instant messaging, and public and group sites.

Because professional social networks such as LinkedIn tend to be updated regularly by the target buyer, they provide the CRM with a feed of fresh data which can lead to better decision-making, campaign planning, sales, and reporting.