Why Should You Use a CRM? (Examples & Best Practices)

Customer relationship management (CRM) software can help you manage relationships and interact with customers– from marketing communications to customer service inquiries and issues.

CRM tool examples include those that can help you create workflows to ensure emails make it to the right person at the company, improve personalization in marketing campaigns, and collect data based on customer actions on your website and email campaigns.

Simply put, CRM software can be used to manage relationships with customers throughout the entire customer lifecycle, from their first interaction with your brand to checkout and beyond. Examples of CRM use may include segmenting audiences to send them targeted marketing messages or building internal workflows to notify employees of recent communications.

Customer relationship management can also be used to organize your contacts effectively. Depending on the type of business you have, you may have customers, suppliers, vendors, and partners.

CRM allows you to organize these individuals into segments to help sales teams manage their communications in one easy-to-use dashboard. So whether your goal is to find and attract new customers or improve customer service efforts to boost retention rates, CRM can help.

7 Reasons to use CRM software

Customer relationship management systems are effective tools for everyone in an organization, including sales, customer service, marketing, and other departments, helping you manage internal and external relationships and workflows.

Therefore, CRMs are ideal for all industries, including everything from logistics and warehouse management to service industries, B2C, and D2C businesses, helping all businesses of any size drive growth by accomplishing more. Here are a few benefits of CRM software and why your business should use it:

Improved customer service

Customer relationship management includes providing exceptional customer service by promptly answering customer questions, concerns, and complaints to prove you care about your customers.

With CRM software, you can build better customer relationships through contact management, storing customer information in one easy-to-use dashboard, and responding to customer interactions across different channels, including social media, email, and chatbots.

By storing customer data, including recent purchases, actions they’ve taken on the website, and previous communications, your sales team will have everything they need to care for your customers and improve satisfaction.

Enhanced customer retention

Repeat customers are essential to your business. You can improve customer retention rates and customer loyalty by providing exceptional customer service and improving customer satisfaction.

As you may know, it’s more affordable to retain customers than to attract new ones, so building customer loyalty should be an important part of your marketing strategy. High customer turnover can be detrimental to a business, so retention is necessary if you want to promote business growth. CRM software allows you to analyze and track customer data throughout the marketing funnel to market to them more effectively.

Increased sales

CRM software can be a valuable sales tool by streamlining your sales processes, automating key tasks and workflows, and keeping your customer data in a centralized location. If you use your CRM for sales, your salespeople can track customers through the sales funnel, take notes on what was discussed on recent phone calls, and find new ways to sell products and services to them.

Data tracking

CRM software collects data to help you understand your customers and create more personalized sales and marketing campaigns. With detailed analytics, you can contextualize data and form actionable insights to improve campaigns based on everything you know about your customers.

Lead nurturing

Customer relationship management allows you to nurture leads more effectively. Unfortunately, the sales process can be long and complicated, but your business has many opportunities to communicate with potential customers, and sales CRM software can manage the entire process.

CRM software examples may include sending employees alerts when they should communicate with prospects, tracking customer interactions, and automatically sending leads emails.

Automated customer segmentation

Many businesses have hundreds of contacts they have to sift through every time they send a marketing email.

However, with customer relationship management software, you can automate customer segmentation through workflows that allow you to group customers together based on certain criteria, such as recent purchase history, interests, buyer stage, demographics, and more.

Improved internal communication

While your business must continue to communicate with its customers, internal communication is just as important. A CRM tool helps employees effectively communicate with one another to ensure customers get the best possible service.

For example, if a customer service representative starts assisting a customer, a new customer service representative can take over after reading the previous messages to offer a unified experience that improves customer retention. In addition, with alerts, emails, and messages within one system, employees will always have the information they need.

Different functions of CRM solutions

There are several types of software available, and what’s best for your business depends on the key CRM features you need. However, what’s most important is knowing what CRM can do for you. Here are a few CRM examples of different functionalities you may need:

Manage customer communication

CRM software allows all customer communication to happen in one place. Whether it’s a phone call or an email, you can keep documentation about each customer service inquiry to help sales reps or customer service reps offer better service.

Automate workflows

CRM allows you to automate many internal processes, including scheduling emails, sending alerts to employees, and categorizing or segmenting customers based on various data criteria.

With CRM software, you can save time in almost any department by optimizing different processes within your organization to help employees focus on more important initiatives like marketing and customer service.

Categorize leads

Identifying and categorizing new leads can be difficult if customer data isn’t collected in one place. A CRM system can help you add new leads automatically and categorize them based on pre-set criteria, allowing sales reps to focus on the right leads and prioritize different opportunities to close deals faster, offering better nurturing to improve the customer experience.

Marketing automation

Customer relationship management shouldn’t only focus on sales; it should be used to help you attract warm leads and customers to your business through various marketing goals, including email marketing, social media, SEO, and digital ads.

A robust CRM system can help you manage your campaigns in one place and measure their results against sales to see which strategies perform best.

Customer relationship management best practices

Using a CRM can improve all aspects of your business, but it must be implemented correctly to help you maximize your efforts. Here are a few considerations to make the most out of your CRM system:

Choose one that fits your needs

Some small businesses don’t need a robust CRM to manage their customer relationships, while some need more capabilities. If you end up choosing a CRM with features you don’t need or use, you’ll still pay for them, so you must research different options and their capabilities to ensure you’re not overpaying.

Train the team

Everyone using the CRM solution should be trained on it. Don’t let them try to learn it on their own because, depending on how it’s set up, it can get confusing. You should have different sales processes for how workflows should be set up to help everyone use the CRM correctly. Some CRM providers may offer training, or you may have to learn everything you can and train employees yourself.

Use automation

Automating repetitive tasks can help save your employees time. You can set up workflows to automate everything from alerts to campaigns and integrate different tools with your website to prevent the need for data entry. For example, you can integrate forms on your website with your CRM to collect customer data and segment customers based on the information they entered.

Measure everything

CRM tools provide you with tons of data you can use to measure everything from the effectiveness of your sales team to sales data, like time to close deals. With metrics, you can optimize different processes based on real-time data and improve the customer experience from the inside out.

Use a CRM to create better marketing campaigns

Customer relationship management is important for businesses of all types and sizes, so you must collect and analyze customer data and use CRM software to build and manage relationships to provide exceptional service. As a result, CRM can improve your sales and marketing efforts, customer satisfaction, and retention rates.

Mailchimp’s free CRM software for small businesses allows you to connect your data to manage contacts, create segments, and understand customer data to create personalized campaigns that work.

Automated workflows will enable you to set up your triggers and send emails to customers based on specific segments and criteria. Mailchimp makes it easy to effectively target customers based on demographics, actions they’ve taken on your campaigns, and sales data. Try Mailchimp today.