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Ways to get a customer overview for your future marketing strategies?

When a customer interacts with your brand you’ll want to have enough information available to provide them with a great experience. This is important, as is your ability to prioritize customers in a way that enables you to get the best return on your time’s investment. These are just a few of the reasons you’ll want to make sure your company is using Google CRM software today. Of course, there are also several other reasons why this tool will have a great, positive impact on your business.

Register all Relevant Customer Interactions

Unfortunately, despite what you think, not every customer is created equally. There are some who place a drain on your customer service resources although they spend very little money on buying your products or services. The opposite is also true in that you’ll find other customers who conduct business with you frequently and have a strong impact on their market. When you use customer relationship management (CRM) tool to register all your relevant customer interactions you can prioritize these customers, their sales, and how much effort you put into marketing to them.

According to Super Office, there are several things you can and will want to, track here. They include:

• Phone calls: These should be recorded by the CRM for all employees who interact with customers over the phone. After all, this is when customers typically raise issues and even if your sales team can quickly and easily solve them, you may still need to review the phone calls later.

• Emails: Important emails from customers, prospects, partners, and suppliers should always be archived so they become part of your company’s communication history. This is especially true when there’s a valuable project or sale on the line since you never know when someone on your team could benefit from accessing the information.

• Prospects and customers: When someone fills out a form on your website to get in touch with you it’s a sure sign that they’re interested in your product or service. At this point, it’s important to do everything in your power to show them how this can benefit them. Of course, this is easier to do when you have everything you need to be located in one centralized system.

• Sales: You’ll want to be able to control your pipeline and have your team see where people are therein. This will help them not interfere with the work that their other teammates are doing. It also helps you know that none of your prospects are slipping through a crack somewhere in your pipeline.

Share Customer Interactions across Departments

With CRM software you have all your sales, marketing, and customer service information in one central database. This not only includes phone numbers, addresses, and the date when you last made contact, but it also includes what was discussed, what the follow update is, and the status of any open items. All this important information can be used to manage, measure, and keep track of your customer’s marketing, sales and customer service activities. By tracking these things, you build a better customer experience upon which loyalty is built. You also make it so nobody can finger-point or play the blame game saying that someone isn’t communicating with them, implementing the right campaigns, or causing customers to become disgruntled. Instead, everyone can make quick, well-informed decisions regarding everything from up-selling and cross-selling to improving the quality of customer communication and responsiveness and coordinating sales and campaigns.

Anticipate, Predict, and Plan for the Future

KissMetrics points out the fact that creating a plan for future customer engagement is just as important as having an immediate plan of action. The best way to do this is by using your CRM since it puts your customer experience team in the right mind frame to respond to your customers, especially when they’re dealing with stressful or challenging situations.

A CRM is a great business strategy because it stresses the importance of maintaining good ongoing relationships with your customers. According to TrustRadius, there are two core elements at the heart of this strategy. They include:

• Your customer communication is synchronized among all your business units. This allows your sales, marketing, and customer service teams to all get on the same page.

• All the touch points throughout your customer lifecycle are recorded. This allows you to track, automate, analyze and optimize all your customer interactions. You’ll even be able to track the history of each of these individual customers.

MarketingProfs says this is beneficial as it allows you to do several things, including:

• Combine data sources so you can create a strategy that lets you get closer to your customers. Armed with a holistic view of your customer you can create any number of strategies to reach out to them – including using social media to your advantage.

• Customize your marketing based on the detailed information you’ve obtained. This way you’ll know when your customers are likely to need your products or services again. You can then send them messages at the right time and based on their unique situation. Through these messages, you can point out things like your brand’s value proposition and how it fits with their philosophy, productivity, quality, cost of ownership, and the support they can expect from you.

• Use competitive positioning, especially when your customer is using a different brand currently. Here you’ll want to speak to your brand’s specific strengths through the most effective channel. Based on the situation this could be through events, advertising, direct mail, online, or in person.

• Measure how everything has worked. You can base this on the sales data that you’ve directly linked to your marketing expenditures. This ROI data will show you that targeted sales perform better. With predictive tools in place, you can then build even more successful marketing programs in the future. Just make sure you always evaluate every aspect of every marketing campaign you implement.

Clearly, having a customer overview is important. Now that you can understand its impact on your future marketing strategies it’s time to use a CRM to create one for your business today.