Customer relationship management (CRM) has been a hot topic for some time—and for good reason. There’s an ever-growing number of statistics touting the ROI of CRM. But what does a CRM system actually do? And how can getting started with CRM help reach your marketing goals?
Here’s what you need to know about CRM systems and how to get started.
What does a CRM system do?
At the highest level, a CRM system is a group of tools that streamlines processes, improves communication and manages interactions with customers and potential customers—all in support of increasing profitability through improved productivity and related efficiencies.
How can a CRM system help me with marketing?
How a CRM system will help achieve your marketing goals depends on a two key factors: what type of business you work for and your marketing objectives.
That said, there are some CRM functions that are pretty close to universal, including:
Contact Capture
This includes the systems and processes that you use to get contacts into your contact database. At first, this might include uploading contacts from a spreadsheet, followed by one-off manual additions resulting from networking or prospecting activities. But hopefully, it won’t take too long before you’ve moved away from spreadsheet uploads to integrated website forms and perhaps even call centers to capture the enormous number of leads that you’re generating through the various marketing campaigns that you’ve implemented.
Contact Management
You likely have lots of contacts—but not all of them may be qualified contacts. CRM can help you manage your contact pool and distribute content accordingly.
For example, when adding contacts through list uploads and one-off manual additions, ask yourself whether these contacts would expect to receive marketing email from you. If there’s any chance the answer is no, you’ll need to make sure your database is set up to distinguish between “subscribers” and “nonmarketing contacts.” Not doing so is likely to result in poor engagement and even spam and junk complaints, potentially leading to poor sender scores and deliverability issues.
Additional best practices in contact management include reclassifying contacts that are unengaged or unsubscribed as nonmarketing contacts and deleting any email addresses that have resulted in a hard bounce.
Email Communication
When getting stated with CRM, you’re most likely to engage contacts through a single email newsletter and one-to-one sales communications. But over time, through database segmentation based on categories like job function or interest, you can deliver content specifically targeted to each segment. This improves engagement and positive sentiment towards your business, potentially increasing the odds of upsell and cross-sell opportunities.
Further, through buyer’s journey mapping, database segmentation and the identification of key evaluation criteria for each audience segment, you can begin to combine content strategy with automation to deliver more sophisticated communication strategies, such as drip campaigns and nurturing campaigns.
Marketing Automation
This CRM functionality improves productivity through the automation of mundane repetitive tasks and allows employees to focus on more strategic work. Examples include automatically sending a piece of gated content requested through one of your lead generation campaigns, a follow up email to a contact or offering to set up a Q&A meeting related to a product spec sheet they may have just downloaded.
What does a CRM system cost?
This question is similar to asking, “What does a house cost?” Are we talking about a one-room cabin with an outhouse and no electricity, or a palatial estate with cutting-edge technology and exquisite design?
The cost of any software system depends on your business requirements. At Motion, we work with you to understand your short-term and longer-term plans for the way you intend to use CRM, and then recommend a solution that works within your current budget but is also scalable so that you’re not forced to migrate to a new system a year later.
It’s important to know that most, if not all, CRM platforms are priced on a software as a service (SaaS) model. That pricing is largely based on:
- The features you need
- The number of contacts you have
- The number of seat licenses your team will use
So, in terms of setting a budget, if we assume that you’re just getting started, and only have a handful of contacts, a CRM subscription could cost you less than $100 a month. As the functionality you need grows, along with the number of contacts in your database, so too will the cost of your CRM.
Finally, when budgeting for a CRM, don’t forget to factor for the cost of the resources needed to effectively utilize the CRM. This typically includes resources for strategy and setup, as well as ongoing content development and deployment, database hygiene and campaign analysis.
Is a CRM system hard to implement?
There are definitely some more technical aspects to setting up a CRM, but those aspects are minimal, typically revolving around the integration of other systems. For most companies getting started with CRM, implementation simply involves connecting your website lead forms to the CRM so that your leads flow directly into your database. The good news is that most of this work can be implemented by nontechnical resources experienced with the implementation of CRM strategies.
How do I get started with CRM?
1. Pick a partner.
Unless you have an in-house team that’s experienced in CRM strategy and implementation, I would definitely recommend finding an experienced CRM partner. What immediately comes to mind is the old saying that warns against being pennywise, but pound-foolish.
Certainly, having experienced technical resources that can quickly and easily handle those system integrations is important. However, it’s the strategy piece that will set you up for success. So, look for a CRM partner that is also a strategic marketing partner, experienced in delivering integrated marketing programs.
For CRM, this includes developing content for CRM that demonstrates industry thought leadership, highlights your product differentiators and aligns with the key evaluation criteria for all of your target audiences (identified during audience research and buyer’s journey mapping), while simultaneously supporting your SEO content needs by ensuring that the same content and corresponding meta data is appropriately injected with your SEO target keyword phrases.
2. Approve your strategies.
With a budget in place, the next thing we need to do is validate which strategies we will employ during the initial phases of your CRM program. The strategies that are chosen will dictate content needs and the specific functionality required to deliver each strategy.
3. Develop your content.
After the strategy is approved, it’s time to get started with content development. Starting the content development at this stage greatly improves the likelihood that it will be ready to build out in the CRM after we’ve chosen a platform and begun the implementation.
4. Gather and prioritize requirements.
Again, your approved CRM strategies dictate the specific functionality required to deliver each strategy. This is part of the larger requirements documentation exercise that’s necessary to figure out which CRM is right for you.
During this process, we’ll also work with you to simultaneously prioritize your requirements so that we know which functionality to eliminate first if everything identified won’t fit in your budget.
5. Evaluate platforms.
Once requirements are gathered, we choose a set of options that are in your stated software budget, evaluate them based on the requirement that we’ve gathered, and provide a recommendation for the solution that best meets your needs.
6. Implement your solution.
As soon as the platform recommendation has been approved, we get started with the administrative and strategic aspects of setup. This includes database segmentation, creation of any custom parameters needed, contact upload, building out of HTML email templates, subscription list setup and integration of website forms, gated content automations and anything else needed to deliver the identified strategies.
Ready to get started with CRM? Reach out today to see how our dedicated team of experts at The Motion Agency has helped its clients deliver results through CRM strategies and how we can help you achieve—and exceed—your business’s marketing goals
