In business, everything starts with a plan. Be it your yearly budget, a new product, or online marketing - you need a strategy. Customer relations is no exception to this rule: you'll find it a lot easier to develop and manage your relationships with customers if you rely on a good plan. But how do you develop one? You can start by examining your options. Here are just a few of the top CRM strategies for 2021 that you should consider.
CRM strategies - what are they and why do you need one?
CRM stands for customer relationship management. It can be used for a strategy, a process, or a piece of software. As a strategy, CRM is the philosophy your business adopts for building and maintaining relationships with customers. In terms of a process, CRM refers to the specific steps you take to acquire leads, personalize the customer experience, offer customer support, guide customers down the sales funnel, inspire customer loyalty, and otherwise manage customer relationships. As a piece of software, CRM is the technology that allows you to conduct these steps and turn your philosophy into reality.
The strategy is, therefore, the first step of the process. It will help streamline and scale your sales process, provide your customers with a better experience, make your employees' jobs easier, and give you better, more data-driven insights to base your decisions on.
Top CRM strategies for 2021
There is no one-size-fits-all CRM strategy. No two businesses are exactly alike; therefore, no two businesses will have the same needs and goals regarding customer relationship management. So when you start working on your business plan, you'll need to consider multiple alternatives. Presented here are just some of your options - you can choose to use one of them, combine a few different ones, or find something completely different. But current trends say that 2021 is the year to focus on:
Targeted marketing
You're not going to win anyone over if you treat them as just a number. Instead, you want to make each prospect, lead, and customer feel special. And that starts with a personalized experience. There are many practices that you can adopt to target specific people or groups individually. One popular option is to include names in emails you send out - instead of "Dear customer," say "Hello John".
Another thing you can do is segment your customers. You could, for example, group people based on where they are in their journey; if they're just learning about your business, send an informational message, but if they've shopped with you before, skip this and inform them about discounts. Finally, you'll want to focus on social media marketing and branding. This is the best way to interact with customers directly and one-on-one, ensuring a truly unique experience.
Improved content marketing
Content marketing is a very popular way to promote a business. It can take many different forms, from blog posts to short videos to infographics. But it's not enough to just stay on top of marketing trends to succeed with it; you need to provide content that your target demographic will actually respond to. To do that, you need to understand your potential and current customers. That's where a CRM strategy helps - more information about your customers leads to a better understanding of their needs leads to more relevant content.
Tracking customer behavior and interactions
A good business plan depends on having the right data. Think about it: you grow your business by increasing the number of happy customers, and you improve customer satisfaction by giving your customers what they want; that requires knowing what they want first. You could, of course, ask them directly through a poll or questionnaire on your website. But your best bet for honest and extensive information is observing how your customers behave online and tracking interactions they have with your business. Luckily, CRM software can make this step incredibly easy. CRM software will collect data from multiple sources (including your website, customer service channels, and social media) to give you an in-depth analysis of who your customers are, what they do online, what type of content and marketing they respond to, and more.
Customer service integration
It's no secret that good customer service can be the difference between losing a prospect and gaining a loyal customer. But changing the mind of an individual customer is not the only benefit of good customer service; if you build a brand as a caring business that will do anything to provide an excellent customer experience, you'll achieve higher levels of trust, legitimacy, and loyalty. And all that starts with offering excellent customer service. A CRM strategy will undoubtedly help you with this. It'll inform your and your employees' approach to interactions, define how you respond to problems, give your representatives different levels of autonomy, help your agents better understand customers, and help you keep track of any recurring issues you may want to address. So make sure to consider customer service as a part of your CRM approach - it pays off.
Loyalty programs
Gaining new customers is incredibly important if you want your business to progress and grow. But too often, we focus on this aspect of customer relationships alone. The truth is that you must keep the existing customer base as well if you want to succeed long-term. Customer retention ensures that you always have a base of customers to rely on, makes your marketing efforts easier and more successful, and ultimately earns money. A CRM strategy that focuses on existing customers can, therefore, be very beneficial. One of the easiest yet most effective ones is to implement a loyalty program. You can offer discounts or gifts when customers spend more on your products - they'll keep coming back and you'll keep making a profit.
Implementing quality CRM strategies
Getting informed about the many CRM strategies that are on-trend right now is just the first step. You then need to choose the most suitable strategy for your business and, more importantly, find a good way to implement it. This requires that you consider the other two aspects of CRM: the process and the software. What are the exact steps you will take to turn your philosophy into practice? And which technology can help you take those steps faster and more easily? These are the questions you will need to answer next.
