According to the Direct Marketing Association, 20% of marketers consider data to be a critical element of creating a lead generation strategy. Conflicting, incomplete, and outdated data prevents marketers from understanding the characteristics of their target audience.
In turn, CRM systems provide marketers with access to the necessary information and thus help them build a more successful lead generation strategy. Let’s take a look at how this happens.
CRM helps to more accurately define the buyer’s portrait
If you want your marketing efforts to bring you new customers, you need to create effective, targeted content. However, to make your marketing communications useful, relevant, and personalized, you need to know as much as possible about your potential buyers.
Ideally, you need to identify the demographic and filmographic characteristics of your audience, as well as their specific pain points, needs, and desires. Creating a buyer persona—a fictional image of the ideal customer—is an integral part of the marketing planning process.
CRM greatly simplifies this task, as the system stores the data necessary for each stage of the process.
The starting point for your ideal buyer research is to analyze those who have already purchased your product. Scan your database to gather the following information about existing customers:
Who first contacted you from your client’s company?
Was there immediate communication with the individuals who make the final purchasing decision?
Are they the company’s primary contact person?
What role do they play in the company?
Do they have a manager to whom they report, or do they make decisions independently?
Create a survey and share the link to the web form with your customers via email or messenger. Link the web form to your CRM system and all their responses will be automatically added to the database. You can then use your CRM to segment customers by industry, job title, or any other relevant parameter. Group customers with common characteristics into separate folders and highlight key commonalities.
CRM helps to form the right line of communication
It’s not just about who you’re selling to, it’s also about how you’re selling. For your marketing content to resonate with your target audience, you need to make sure it’s relevant to their needs. It’s critical for you to be on the same page as your customers and provide them with the exact content they need at every stage of the purchase.
Speak the same language as your customers. Don’t brag about your knowledge of professional jargon that your audience won’t understand. At the same time, if your potential customers communicate exclusively using niche-specific telegram data terminology, feel free to include it in your communications.
CRM as a data source for lookalike audiences
Don’t underestimate the power of paid advertising. If you play your cards right and target the right audience, you can get a lot of new customers pretty quickly. Platforms like Meta (Facebook and Instagram), Twitter, and LinkedIn allow top 10 ecommerce trends for 2024 you to target similar audiences to reach people who have something in common with those already in your database.
After all, you already have some great customers in your CRM — why not use them as a reference for your search? All you need to do is import your CRM database into your social media advertising dashboard and set your desired audience similarity percentage. The system will highlight users closest to the imported contacts and show them your ads.
How CRM helps sales managers improve customer engagement
CRM expands lead generation opportunities
The more channels you include in your lead generation strategy, the more leads you will receive. However, with more lead sources comes bfb directory more work. With each new communication channel, the task becomes more time-consuming. To simplify it, delegate some of the management to your CRM system.
Most modern CRMs offer integration with third-party applications, thus allowing users to automatically enrich the database with leads from LinkedIn, create new records from incoming emails, or link online chats like Intercom and Facebook Messenger to the CRM system.
NetHunt CRM integration with LinkedIn to enrich the database
NetHunt CRM integration with LinkedIn
In addition to all of the above, you can also increase the number of new customers in your sales funnel through web forms on your website. The beauty of this strategy is its extreme versatility. You are not limited to just one type of web form. On the contrary, they allow you to collect leads that interact with your feedback form, newsletter signup box, and more.
CRM automates routine sales processes
According to research, modern sales professionals spend only 34% of their time on actual sales. The lion’s share of time — the remaining 66% — is spent on manual data entry, proposal creation, and other routine tasks that distract them from closing deals.
All of this negatively impacts team productivity. There’s an inverse relationship between the amount of time salespeople spend manually entering data and the number of leads they acquire. The more time they spend manually updating lead and customer data and nurturing leads, the fewer sales they make. It’s simple.
Modern CRM solves this problem by offering advanced sales automation functionality. This not only saves time, but also allows you to get cleaner data, without duplicates.
Additionally, you can also set up automated email chains for leads to convert them into paying customers faster. Here is an example of a lead nurturing workflow automated by NetHunt CRM.
Automated lead nurturing process
Automated lead nurturing process
CRM allows you to personalize cold mailings
Despite all the innovative strategies and approaches, cold email marketing still remains one of the most effective ways to attract new customers.
Cold emailing is a scalable outreach strategy
However, the last advantage of cold emails is only available to those who have a dedicated mass mailing tool. Otherwise, you will spend a lot of time composing individual emails and hitting the “Send” button without getting the desired result.
Most modern CRM solutions offer at least some basic marketing functionality. You can use your CRM to send mass emails to cold leads, or you can automate the entire emailing process. Simply set up a sequence of emails that will be sent until you get a response and determine the lead’s interest. Let your CRM do all the hard work for you.
Additionally, you can segment your audience by a number of parameters and use macros to send emails with personalized elements.
First and last name of the leader: Hello, {{Name}}.
Lead Position: For {{Sales Managers}} like you, our CRM will help…
Personalized Suggestions. We understand that {{reason for rubbing the ice}} was an issue.
Among other things, an email marketing CRM also allows you to track the effectiveness of your email campaigns. Unlike regular email marketing software that doesn’t integrate with your CRM, an email marketing CRM gives you the ability to immediately see the impact of each campaign on changes in your sales funnel.
CRM improves customer service
If you want to attract more customers, you need to provide top-notch customer service . It’s crucial that you respond to inquiries in a timely manner and engage with every lead that enters your sales funnel as quickly as possible. Otherwise, they’ll give your competitors an edge. Here are two statistics you need to know.
Long response times can increase customer churn by up to 15%.
Responding within the first minute can increase conversions by 391%.
The best way to speed up responses is to set up automatic lead allocation between sales managers and manager notifications in your CRM. This can be your competitive advantage and convince a lead to become a paying customer.
How CRM helps product managers improve customer engagement
One of the rules for successful customer acquisition is to involve every employee in the process of creating and improving the product. If satisfying customer needs is the top priority of your business, you will quickly gain recognition from your target audience and enjoy an influx of new customers. CRM systems are a great source of information about what customers want from your product and how you can improve it.
Product managers can use CRM data to prioritize and focus on developing features that are most in demand by their target audience. They can filter the database, create filters with customers who have left, and study the reasons why they stopped using the product. Reason for attrition is a clear indicator of which features – and their absence – were frustrating for customers.
How CRM helps C-levels improve customer engagement
As a department or company leader, you must monitor the overall strategy of your business, including your customer acquisition strategy, and make adjustments as necessary.
If you see that a certain lead generation strategy is not as effective as planned, review it and reduce the effort spent on its development. If the strategy is producing the desired results, understand what exactly contributes to success and scale those actions.
Automated reporting in CRM helps you track your business’s sales performance, understand your strengths and weaknesses, and find opportunities to engage customers more effectively.
Imagine you see that one region is leading in terms of closed deals. You can adjust your business priorities and develop a go-to-market strategy for that specific region to get more customers. You can hire a regional sales team, spend more advertising budgets, and attend local events.
If every employee in your company is working towards the same goal.
Conclusions
CRM systems are a powerful tool, as they enable better customer engagement and increased efficiency. They analyze and segment the audience, and managers can create appropriate marketing campaigns, automate communications and sales, and enrich the database with new leads.
