The relationship between marketers and customers shouldn’t end once a customer has made a purchase. Marketers should find ways to continue nurturing relationships with their customers in order to maintain brand loyalty and create a powerful brand experience. Customer Relationship Management systems help make this happen, but all too often marketers don’t use these systems to their fullest extent.
CRM systems are powerful tools for sales teams that are capable of tracking customers. By utilizing these systems, marketers are able to assess the contact that customers have with a brand. All contact efforts are carefully tracked in a contact record, making the information easier to access. In all reality, CRM systems should make a marketer’s job much more effective. However, one of the problems with CRM systems within marketing research is that these systems are not being used to their fullest potential.
Most CRM systems are used primarily to create email lists. While this is useful, CRM systems are capable of so much more. Marketers can use CRM systems to chat with customers, create ads, utilize social media tools and send out email marketing campaigns. CRM systems also allow marketers to track the customers that are engaging with a company’s marketing efforts. There are some specialized CRM tools that marketers should put more of an emphasis on in order to manage customer relationships.
One under utilized form of CRM that marketers should focus on is combining CRM software with eCommerce functions. Combining these resources would be useful for small business that focus on selling products online. Because many of these small online businesses may not have brick and mortar stores, the CRM platform in this case would have to put a heavy emphasis on social media marketing.
A second major focus for marketers should be social and mobile CRM platforms. These extensions help create a more dynamic product by allowing marketers to focus on customer engagement from anywhere and at any time. By uniting social data and CRM data, companies can be better equipped to see customer interactions with a brand on any channel and gain greater insight into who they are. Social CRM platforms also prepare companies to better interact with their customers. It is a win/win situation for both the company and the customer, and for this reason marketers should focus more of their efforts on learning about specialized CRM technologies.