Power Marketing with CRM Software

on 25 Nov 07 by Dan

Using customer relationship management software within your business really gives you some power in your marketing.  The old way of marketing is to send the same marketing message to all of your leads or customers.  The new way of marketing is to customise each message being spoken to your customers and leads depending on what you know about them.

Customers these days are savvy and smart, they are bombarded with all kinds of marketing messages throughout a single day.  How are you going to communicate to them effectively?  How can you make sure they take notice of you?

Well, with a CRM system, you can hold important information about your customers and leads.  As each customer interacts with your business, your CRM system can keep a record  of what was spoken about or what they were looking for.  You can then use this information when marketing to your customers.

Let's use a simple example.  One of the services that you provide to your customers is technical support for your product.  When a customer gets in contact with you, Leopard CRM tracks whether the conversation was tech support related.  Over a year, your business probably handled hundreds, maybe thousands of technical support related queries.

Your business is expanding, and so you decide to add a section to your website that features a knowledge base for customers as a resource when they need some technical help.  Having this as a first point of call for customers helps to lower the number of technical support queries your staff need to handle.

Now, this is a great marketing opportunity.  Customers love to know that you're looking after them, and building them a knowledge base is just the type of thing that you want them all to know about.

The old way of marketing would be to draft an email or letter and send out the one email to all of your customers.  All of your customers would then know about your new gift to them, but you can do better than that!  If you're using a customer relationship management system like Leopard CRM, you have information about your customers that you can use to let tham know that not only are you looking after them, but that you know them and you're listening to them.

Using the new way of marketing, you could customise each message you send to your customers based on their history with your business.  For customers who have called for technical support in the last year, you could say to them:

"Thank you for calling us this year for technical support.  We have listened carefully to you and our other customers, and whilst doing this, we have realised that some customers are calling with the same question!  We thought that a great way to help our customers more would be to create an online knowledge base for these questions.  This means that you can use this to get your questions answered sooner in the future!"

Leopard CRM helps you to create a marketing campaign focusing on these particular customers through its Advanced Search functionality.  Here is an example search to find all the customers who have called for technical support throughout the year:

This gives you a targeted marketing message to your existing customers.  It lets them know that you're really paying attention to them, and that you value their business and their time.

Of course, you still want your other customers to know about your great gift to them:

"It's fantastic that you haven't needed to call us for technical support.  We'd love to hear about any problems that you have that you may not have told us about, we're always looking to improve our products.  If you ever do need technical support in the future, we have created an online knowledge base so that you can get an answer to your question as fast as possible.  We know your time is valuable, so we want to make sure that we help you get back on track as soon as possible."

Leopard CRM makes it easy to identify these customers also through the Advanced Search:

A powerful CRM system can really enhance your relationship with your customers.  Take a look through the site to see how easy it is to use Leopard CRM and have it really transform your business.  Please get in touch with us if you have any questions, we're always happy to help.

Find out more about CRM software.