Three marketing CRM requirements you should consider

If you want your marketing team to work efficiently and improve their results, there is nothing better than a CRM system. Gone are the days when potential prospects need to be listed and tracked in Excel with masses of the same email sent to the whole group.  

A CRM system can provide your marketing team with so many invaluable tools that will make a world of difference to the way they perform; here we will take a look at just three essential requirements.

1. Segmentation

Are all of your existing clients and potential ones all bunched together in one area with no way of splitting them into districts or other such groups? If you can’t split up your customer database then your marketing team may find themselves moving in ever decreasing circles, sending the same ‘special offer’ or ‘new product’ messages to all and potentially focusing on the wrong ones that do not add the most value; they may end up not only annoying customers but losing money for the company.

Identify and prioritize your marketing CRM requirements with this CRM requirements template

When dealing with masses of data, it is essential that it can be segmented in the following ways and a CRM should be able to do this:

• Quality of data – as much information as possible needs to be entered along with contact information.  By ensuring quality of data, everyone that has contact with customers will be well-informed and not likely to make any embarrassing mistakes.
• Selection of data – data needs to be dealt with so that target groups can be selected, isolated and worked on; staff merely need to enter suitable criteria, run a search and be provided with a list of prospects immediately.

2. Social media integration

Provide your marketing team with the ability to integrate with social media effortlessly, tracking, monitoring and connecting with social media using CRM tools. Customers love this type of  interaction as they really feel that they are getting close to your organisation; if they want to communicate in this way rather than using email or phone, they should be able to.  Track and manage on a global scale with a social CRM, getting a real feel for individual customer needs and wants and keeping customers happy by listening and responding to them.

3. Process automation

Your marketing team will be able to reduce the time spent on admin dramatically if your CRM has a full automation facility, allowing them to save frequently-used templates and reports as well as doing the following:

• Plan – isolate target groups for email and decide on type of content
• Production - design and fill email with text/images
• Follow-up - a report will show who opened the mail, who clicked on links etc. and set reminders for call backs

The CRM will enable your team to produce professional emails, send to the designated groups and then follow up – all with a few clicks and very little manual effort.

Ensure that your CRM has at least these these three functions and empower your marketing team to work far more productively and successfully.