Sage Blog

Why E-marketing and CRM are more effective when used together

CRM expert, Duncan Wood

I have been recently working with Dan Ogden of Swiftpage on our presentation “CRM and eMarketing – the targeted marketing dream to create more qualified leads” for next week’s Technology for Advertising and Marketing (TFM&A) exhibition and thought it would be good to share some of it here; of course it’ll be even better to pop along and see it in person on 1^st March at 3pm in the CRM Theatre!

Customer Relationship Management and Enterprise

Customer Relationship Management, or CRM as it is more commonly referred to, is a pretty well understood term and business strategy. However, CRM software can be somewhat of a battle to implement within the enterprise especially if it is only about one particular aspect of the business. The simple truth is that people only naturally champion things that they believe in. The challenge for any CRM project is to find the business objectives of people across the enterprise and provide the tools to make it easier. I think the combination of E-marketing and CRM is a highly potent cocktail of business value that can deliver such tools.

Why CRM?

The main reason people use CRM is to help them manage and improve relationships with both current and prospective customers and suppliers. Once CRM is embedded into an organisation’s integral business processes then a highly illuminating insight is revealed about what works and what doesn’t work in a business strategy. Hopefully with reflection on these insights an organisation can achieve its CRM goals which normally centre around increasing revenue, higher profitability and increase customer satisfaction. The improvement normally comes down to changing and tuning business processes in one or all of the Sales, Marketing, Customer Service areas of the business.

Why E-marketing?

The E-marketing toolset is a fabulous, low-cost way of creating and nurturing relationships within your marketplace. One of the historic problems with Marketing has been cost, potentially stifling creativity and the ability to learn from the audiences responses. E-marketing changes all of that. It allows you to deliver on the theory of best practice Marketing by designing, testing and measuring your ideas on specific target segments of your audience – all done quickly and at very little cost. The solution provides a fantastic way to find profitable relationships and deliver the content a customer is actually looking for in a timely fashion.

Why together?

I love the phrase “data is just data until you do something with it”; CRM and E-marketing together create a mutually beneficial relationship which is why our CRM software, Sage CRM, Sage SalesLogix and Sage ACT! all integrate with Sage E-marketing provided by Swiftpage.  From the CRM point of view E-Marketing helps both the Sales and Marketing departments work closer together and more efficiently – overall it could be one of the key benefits that makes the difference between the CRM project being successful or failing. From an E-marketing point of view CRM provides the critical insight and data to making successful targeted marketing campaigns.

In summary, having a single place where both CRM and E-marketing live provides benefits to the whole ecosystem both inside and outside the organisation using it.

If you’re interested to hear more, and why not register for TFM&A for free online and say “hi” to Dan and I.

Duncan Wood, CRM Expert

So, what’s this all got to do with the customer-relationship software you use and your business’ customer strategy ? 

Let’s start with the software first.  You are likely to be using customer-relationship software  to help your lead prospecting activities.  Capturing names & interests is at the very heart of of customer-relationship software.  Yet, those same prospect records can be greatly enriched through the information available on through Social Media outlets.  Information such as:

• What topics are important to them?
• Who else are they talking to?
• What are they saying experiences (products & more) ?

You can use information from these sites to help enrich a prospect’s record as part of building your  customer relations program.  That’s converting time spent on social media sites into revenue for your business.  Information from these sites can be fed directly into CRM – be that ACT!, Sage CRM or SalesLogix, informing & improving your direct marketing activities.

Relating Social media to your customer strategy – listening for & managing the content.

Your investment in CRM is key to your customer retention strategy.  Ensuring you stay relevant in to customers, both before and after a sale.  But without social media interaction, you can only “know” about the conversations you have directly with them.  What happens when they talk about you in other forums – blogs, forums, social networking sites, etc ?

 Investing time in social media outlets provides you with an opportunity to ‘listen in’ to the conversations being discussed (check out our free guide Connecting with your customers; a guide to social media to help you get started). You can develop an understanding of your customers and benefit from insights within their communities.  Further, with businesses getting more than half of their customers through word of mouth, staying tuned in & monitoring the flow of conversation will give insights to other prospects & encourage the flow across these informal networks.

 Listening in also gives you a chance to improve customer relations when things go wrong for a customer.  By tuning in to relevant conversations, you can dramatically improve your chances of finding unhappy customers quickly and addressing their issues before they do serious damage to your brand.  

 An investment in CRM software is only partially realised without a matching customer strategy.  Harnessing Social Media is an essential part of your business’ customer strategy & key to keeping customers.