Businesses of all sizes consider CRM software as a near-vital tool because of its ability to make communications more consistent, efficient and relevant.
CRM (which stands for “customer relationship management”) software gathers customer interactions in one central place to improve the customer experience and overall customer satisfaction. Simply put, it helps businesses manage, track and organize their relationships with customers. CRM software stores customer data, such as user behavior, how long someone has been your customer, any purchasing records and potentially notes on sales interactions. This data can then be used to optimize your digital marketing strategy and processes.
Because this type of software tracks the behavior and actions of your current and potential customers, it can then guide that consumer through your sales funnel, depending on how you decide to set it up.
It simply makes all of your customer interactions that much more effective. So, it’s not surprising that about 91 percent of companies with more than 11 employees now use CRM software.
Not convinced? The following are six benefits your small business can have by using CRM software.
Improved customer service
At the heart of CRM software is the intention to improve business-to-customer relationships.
Your CRM manages and organizes all your contacts while gathering important data points, such as demographics, purchase records and previous messages across all channels. This information is then easily accessible to anyone on your team who might need it, which ensures that your customer service representatives can easily understand every customer they interact with and reference past interactions, which provides a better experience for the customer.
In other words, access to relevant customer data empowers your customer service representatives to earn greater customer satisfaction.
Check out our six ways to improve customer responsiveness to boost your customer service even more.
Increased sales
Because CRM software can streamline your sales process with automation of key tasks and analysis of sales data within the same place, this can clearly help increase both your sales and productivity.
Lead nurturing, for example, can be an arduous and complicated process, but your CRM software can automatically manage this process, while also sending your team alerts for when they should reach out to the potential customer. You can then ensure that you’re getting the right messages out to each contact based on his or her buyer behavior and actions.
It’s all about establishing a step-by-step sales process that can easily be tweaked along the way as needed to optimize for sales.
See our 16 tips to help increase your sales conversion rate for inspiration.
Boost your customer retention
Customer retention is incredibly important for your business. Just a 5 percent increase in customer retention can lead to at least a 25 percent increase in profit.
Customer retention is about maintaining your current customer base and increasing loyalty by offering better products or services and other benefits.
You can use your CRM software to encourage repeat business from your customers by leveraging your CRM’s automation features and behavior tracking to identify both issues and opportunities with your customers.
Check out our six tips to improve your business’s customer retention rate.
Contextualized data
It’s one thing to have analytics, it’s a whole other thing to have context with your data. That’s the power of CRM software, which typically offers built-in analytic capabilities so that you can better understand the data available with actionable steps that you can take.
Metrics include click-through rates, bounce rates and demographic information, among others. These all can help you judge the effectiveness of your digital marketing campaigns and pivot as needed. And the visualizations of data that many CRM software options provide can help as well.
Better productivity and efficiency for your team
Because CRM software uses automation technology, menial tasks (such as email drip campaigns) no longer have to be handled by your and/or your team. That means that you can then focus on other tasks, such as creating content.
CRM software also helps ensure that no tasks slip through the cracks. You can rest assured that all important emails are always sent to the right people.
Organization leads to better customer segmentation
Having a list of even just a few hundred contacts can be unwieldy and overwhelming. This is especially so if you have thousands of contacts.
CRM software can automatically segment your contact lists based on the criteria you set so that you can find and message the ones you want at any given time. Sorting can include gender, age, location, buyer stage and so on.
It’s all about getting the right message to the right person at the right time.
In conclusion
Clearly, CRM software can help streamline your customer interaction and sales efforts. Make sure that you thoroughly research available CRM options before committing to one. What features do you need? How much does it cost? Is it user-friendly?
