Customer Marketing Through CRM

Technology advances occur daily so it is no surprise that businesses often struggle to implement and take advantage of CRM strategies. When choosing a solution that works for your business consider the criteria that matter most to your company. The problem with reading an article or looking up CRM software is that it does not provide real world experience that can help your business determine how CRM can be effective. Review these tricks for getting the most value from CRM.

Identify your supports

Most businesses typically have several different departments that may share some information but function as a separate unit. For example, a company that sells and designs footwear is likely to have a sales team, an administrative team, a design team, product support team and an accounting department.

Though billing and sales both require client information, what they do with this information is different. The sales team may use this information to call a client and up sell a product or too follow up with a client after a purchase. While the accounting team may use this information to bill a client's credit card, complete monthly invoices, run reports and determine the amount of company profits that can go towards advertising.

Though each department access customer information, each department has a different purpose, if you implement a CRM platform for every department in a business but do not take the time to consider how it relates to a particular support system, it will be less effective. In some cases, it could even cause your business to lose potential revenue, as employees and customers register anger and frustration over how a new technology that was supposed to make their lives simpler but only made everything more difficult.

Use CRM solutions for a particular support needs

Once a business understands their CRM needs, they can choose solutions that make the most sense for their business. For example, a company with a large administrative department may struggle with paper based filing systems, even losing customer information in the process. By using CRM resources that compile client information in one spot administrative departments can focus their energy on other tasks.

When using CRM solutions sometimes the best approach is to put your business right in front of the customer. For example, a popular TV show could use customer feedback marketing too encourage viewer participation and interaction in the show. The show could choose to hold a contest and ask fans to vote online or by mobile, reality competition shows like American Idol, utilize CRM doing every episode. Instead of the judges determining who stays in the competition fans are able to vote for their favorites and millions of fans choose to cast their vote every week.

Customer feedback marketing goes far beyond getting fans to vote for their favorite competitor, after brining the show to the customer, the Web site link is used to get the customer to seek out additional information. Through use tie in products, an online store, the option to review additional footage not seen on TV and find out more about their favorite contestants customers through the Web site, new and existing customers are reeled in.