CRM Functions and Features That Help Grow Your Brand

Why do businesses need a CRM?

As a business owner, it’s crucial to have a comprehensive understanding of your customers. When you know what your customers like and don’t like, you can tweak your products and services to better appeal to them.

Having a CRM solution can give you insight into your customers’ information, so you can improve your customer lifetime value, build better relationships with your customers, and reach your business goals.

Having a CRM system can help your business increase the number of leads you have, which can hopefully convert to more customers and boost sales for your business.

A CRM platform can also improve your customer interactions because it gives you insight into what products or services your customers like, what they need in the future, and what they’ve already purchased.

If you’re a small business owner looking to expand your business and grow your customer base, having a CRM platform is a necessity.

Why is CRM important for marketers and sales teams?

Having a CRM platform is important for all businesses, but especially marketers and sales teams. There are a lot of CRM functions that marketers and sales reps can use to improve the entire sales process.

CRM systems can give your sales team valuable insight into customer data, which your marketing team can then use to improve their marketing tasks. A CRM system can also increase the number of leads you have coming in, which can help marketers with customer acquisition.

In order for your customers to have a positive experience with your business, they want to know that you’re taking their preferences into consideration, and a CRM solution can help you do so.

CRM systems can help you gain knowledge about your target audience so that you can create personalized marketing campaigns that are geared toward them. You’ll be able to track the clicks, views, and purchases of both existing and potential customers so you can improve your marketing efforts in the future.

Overall, CRM functionality can help to align your marketers and sales team to improve your sales process and drive revenue for your business.

10 key CRM features all businesses need to use

CRM systems can help you accomplish your long-term business goals. But which CRM software features should you use? If you want to grow your brand and reach new customers, you need to take advantage of these 10 key CRM functions:

Marketing automation

Marketing automation is one of the most important CRM software features you could have.

Marketing automation software allows you to automate various marketing activities that would otherwise be time-consuming and tedious. But marketing automation can also help you accomplish more in a smaller amount of time, as well as create more personalized experiences for your customers. This can help your sales team with contact management and improve the overall efficiency of your business.

Audience segmentation

It’s likely that you have a lot of different customers, so you need a way to separate them, which is exactly why you need a CRM system that offers audience segmentation.

Audience segmentation is a great way to separate your customers into different groups based on their characteristics. By segmenting your audience, you can better manage your marketing campaigns and create campaigns that are specifically targeted toward each group.

This will help to ensure that all marketing campaigns are personalized rather than sending out the same campaign to all your customers.

Customer data

One of the main benefits of using a CRM system is being able to get a deeper insight into your customers’ information.

With a CRM system, you can see the products your customers have purchased, what they liked and disliked about the products, and what they’re looking for in the future.

Based on this customer data, you can also personalize your marketing campaigns to be better suited for your target audience and improve your customer interactions.

Organization

As a small business owner, you have a lot of information you’re dealing with on a daily basis, so you need a way to organize everything, which you can do with CRM functionality.

With a CRM, you can easily organize your customer information so you can get a better understanding of their wants and needs, which will help to build customer loyalty. There are several CRM tools you can use to organize your data, such as with segments, tags, and groups.

Customization

Every business is different, so it’s important that your CRM solution can cater to your unique business needs. For example, you can customize pop-up forms to work for your target audience or create customized labels for your contacts.

Overall, you want to choose a system that offers various CRM tools so you can customize different areas of your business depending on how your business deals with customers.

Customer service

Part of having good customer relationships is being able to communicate with them and being there for them when they need help. So, it’s important to choose a CRM that offers customer service automation capabilities so that you can stay on top of your customer satisfaction levels.

With a CRM system, you should be able to set up chatbots or a customer service ticketing system so that your customers can easily access customer service representatives when they have questions.

Integrations

It’s likely that you use another software to manage your business. Maybe that's e-commerce software or scheduling software, but either way, you want to be able to integrate third-party software into your CRM.

That way, you can do everything from the same place rather than having to switch back and forth between different platforms to accomplish a task. Having third-party integrations in your CRM solutions can help to improve the efficiency of your business and, therefore, increase sales.

Mobile-friendly

Sometimes you might find yourself needing to work on your phone. When that happens, you definitely want your CRM software to be mobile-friendly.

While the majority of the time you’ll probably be working on your laptop, it’s important to choose a CRM tool that allows for easy access on the go.

Analytics

In addition to organizing and tracking your customers’ data, you need to take it a step further and actually analyze that data. Having analytics and marketing tools with your CRM software will allow you to better understand your customers so that you can make more informed decisions for your business.

Streamline data

You likely have a lot of employees working for your company, so you need a way to streamline your data so that everyone can easily access it.

Fortunately, with a CRM, streamlining data has never been easier. Being able to streamline your data helps to keep everyone on the same page. This will also help to align different teams because everyone will have access to the same data and can work together.

How to choose the right CRM software for your needs

As a small business owner, it’s crucial that you have a solid understanding of your customers. If you don’t know your customers, how can you know if your products or services are what they want?

But in order to understand your customers and manage customer relationships, you need to have the right software–like a CRM tool.

Every business has different needs, which is why it’s important to choose software that offers all the CRM tools you need to store and manage your customers’ information and improve your sales processes.

If you’re looking for the best CRM software that does all of this and more, check out Mailchimp.

Mailchimp is a marketing automation platform and email marketing service that offers free CRM software that you can use to improve your business processes.

With Mailchimp, you can organize and manage your customer data all in one place to build customer relationships. Mailchimp will help you better understand your customers, so you can improve customer satisfaction and build a loyal customer base that supports your business through and through.