Takeaways from the Latest CRM Marketing Trends
Customer Relationship Management (CRM) pertains to all practices and strategies involved in your interaction with your customers. In the contemporary data-driven world, you can now package these into an integrated CRM software solution, which forms the bedrock of your CRM marketing. A sufficiently capable CRM software will help you with everything from lead generation to your marketing campaign strategy, augmenting all aspects of your sales cycle. (Source)
To maximize the benefits derived from CRMs, your teams need to know the latest trends in CRM marketing and how you can best deploy your software solution to provide your customers with a state-of-the-art experience. We are here to help you with that. Here are some salient trends unfolding in the world of CRM marketing.
Rise of automation and A.I.
In both customer-facing and agent-facing contexts of CRM marketing, there has been a steady offloading of tasks to increasingly sophisticated automation powered by A.I. Forbes has reported that 53% of enterprises adopted some form of artificial intelligence with their CRM systems.
Organizations are automating their customer experience (CX) via various tools that can automatically respond to customer queries, engage them with further follow-ups, and enable zero contact resolution strategies with minimum agent intervention. This allows them to scale up their presence, engage more people, and convert more leads with the same amount of human resources. (Source)
At the other end of the spectrum, your agents can spend more time doing meaningful work if they can automate the mundane, non-productive aspects of their jobs. Intelligent automation pairs context and action perfectly to be able to take care of repetitive work. Agents can utilize several specialized assist bots to augment their capacity and robotic process automation (RPA) to connect various lengthy backend processes they need to execute. (Source)
Embracing the benefits of automation and A.I. has helped teams dramatically cut down their agent needs and consequently save a proportional amount of capital, training hours, and office space. For businesses looking to expand their marketing operations, this has been an in-trend solution to their scaling needs.
A focus on mobile and user-friendly interfaces
Work cultures around the world have witnessed an upheaval in the past few years. Traditional office-centric work is slowly giving away to a trend of remote working arrangements as employees become more mobile. The current COVID-19 pandemic has hyper-accelerated this trend by pushing the world into quarantine. If your teams cannot function and collaborate in remote contexts in this day and age, then it is safe to say your business is dead in the water.
In 2020, mobile CRM marketing is no longer optional. It’s a requirement if you want your staff to keep selling, no matter where they are. Any modern CRM service will have a seamless multiplatform experience between desktop and mobile environments, offering fully fleshed out apps that are required by your agents to carry out their jobs without any compromises. (Source)
It is also vital that these systems be straightforward to use, with an intuitive UX. Having a well-thought-out interface cuts down the learning curve for agents and makes them more efficient. When your workers can do what they want, whenever they want, with minimum effort, your business benefits in the long term and become more resilient to critical events that might otherwise threaten it.
Active social media engagement and Omnichannel Marketing
Having a social media presence has become vital to generate and convert fresh leads. In 2020 the customer does not come to you. You go to where the customer is. Having an active social media strategy has occupied an increasingly larger share of the marketing pie. Different users have different preferences. Your target audience might be spread across multiple social media sites, various established instant messengers like WhatsApp, Line, etc. Being present in a platform familiar to the user allows numerous ways for them to find you and buy things from you.
A CRM platform becomes an intuitive hub to integrate and unify these fragmented communication channels and traditional channels like phone and email to be managed by a single suite of integrated solutions. Utilizing your CRM as a backend to help you optimally use all of your channels and ensure a unified customer experience across them is referred to as omnichannel marketing. (Source)
Deploying omnichannel engagement has demonstrably improved customer retention rate averaging at 89%, compared to 33% for companies with weak omnichannel customer engagement. Your staff can engage with all communications from a unified platform. Furthermore, you can connect integrations like automation, as mentioned earlier, live chatbots, and RPAs to run point for your CRM marketing efforts.
You can use AI-powered implements to understand what visitors want and send contextual answers to their queries. You can set up custom flows that cater to specific use cases. You can deploy proactive chatbot-led campaigns simultaneously to your combined audience across your marketing functions and consistently deliver a positive CX no matter where you encounter your customer. (Source)
Creating a bespoke, end-to-end customer journey
Contemporary marketing philosophy sees customer relationships with a holistic view, seeking to provide a comprehensive experience right from their initial point of contact with the brand. A state of marketing report found that 84% of customers “believe the experience a company provides is just as important as its product and services.” All the previous trends mentioned above are used in tandem in CRM marketing to curate every aspect of the customer’s experience with a brand throughout the relationship’s lifecycle.
Every chat interaction, every live call, every website visit, every campaign mail click-through of each customer can be logged in the backend via CRM and used to present a unified CX. Bots can be used to initiate speedy communication and collate pertinent information. A live agent speaking to a prospective lead can utilize past transcripts and usage behavior to pick up where the customer was left with minimum friction. Automation can ensure that all customer data is continuously updated and organized with ongoing interactions. (Source)
The mesh of information garnered from these tools can be used to plan more effective marketing strategies. For instance, if a customer frequently abandons their cart during checkout at your business website, an integrated CRM marketing system can identify this pattern of customer interaction, classify them in a segment of churning leads, and then attempt to reduce friction in the lead conversion by generating a personalized offer targeted at them via chat or their current email address. (Source)
Customers can be segmented in sophisticated ways by tracking their past communication and activity, which can be utilized to craft personalized and relevant strategies to their interests. By providing the right information at the right time, you can increase value and improve your conversions. (Source)
When done correctly, CRM marketing can help ensure that your marketing strategy is a closed-loop. You can enact a range of strategies across all channels until your leads become customers. You can follow their journey and intelligently intervene with automated nurture campaigns to create a conducive environment for maximum conversion. For this reason, using CRM marketing to craft an end-to-end customer journey has become one of the hottest trends in recent times. Being up to speed on this trend has become particularly important in this era of fragmented, online interaction.
You can find more information and a wide variety of CRM solutions on the CRM category page in the NachoNacho SaaS marketplace. And for centralized management of your CRM tools, as well as all other SaaS subscriptions your business uses, sign up with NachoNacho, the SaaS subscription management platform and marketplace.
