As someone who’s been involved in customer relationship management for a good few years now, I’ve always had businesses approach me on how they can improve theirs without breaking the bank.
It seems that everyone knows that keeping healthy relationships with customers and clients is imperative, but not many are too savvy on the best way to go about it.
Even more worrying is that there are companies about with CRM systems in place, yet are not utilising the technology properly. How can we look after our most important assets – the customers who ensure we stick around during this tough economic climate – while remaining cost effective, and more crucially, not targeting the wrong people.
These are my top tips on how to make your CRM work for you:
- Fact – it's much easier to sell to existing customers than find new ones. They trusted to buy from you before so, in theory, should again. If you have a database of previous customers, it makes sense that sending a message to them about new services or products or additional products, has the potential to deliver some great sales. The key is in getting that message out as simply and as cost effectively as possible. See Email Marketing.
- Build your database to your advantage. One of the key benefits of a CRM system is that it holds data on your existing customers. You would expect any basic CRM system to hold at least name, address and email, but where a good CRM system comes into its own is by holding information bespoke to your company. For instance, type of product bought, version number bought, type of product not bought. In this example it would consequently be easy to find the customer who had bought “product x, version number xx”. However, perhaps more importantly, it would be possible to find all the customers who had bought “product x” but not “product y”, or all the customers who had bought “product x, version xx” and now should upgrade to “product x, version xxx”. So give some thought to the structure of your database to make segmenting it easier in the future.
- Make sure it's kept up-to-date. Don’t make it the responsibility of one person to keep it up-to-date – it's everyone's responsibility. So many times when speaking to companies I hear: “Our database person has not updated the database yet”. Your CRM system should be easy to update and everyone should be encouraged to update it, even incentivised to do so. Your database is probably your most valuable asset and why shouldn’t your employees be encouraged to look after it.
- Use your CRM system to send out newsletters or regular messages. It's important that your customers know you are still there and sending out regular messages will help to self cleanse the data in your database. You will be surprised how many responses you get, give it a try!
