Changing face of CRMs for Digital Media

Customer acquisition has more or less been the primary focus of big business up until now. Their main focus has been on getting more and more customers, instead of focusing on those they already have. It costs to acquire a customer, and hence you need to ‘keep’ them. So how does one go about this task so as to ensure that you have a recurring return on investment on customer acquisition?

This is where CRMs – specially tailored for the digital media – come into the picture. While the question as to whether to focus on retention of acquisition does depend on the stage a company is at and the type of industry it operates in – CRMs have traditionally been the means of storing your customer database and performing business activities like invoicing, emailing and keeping notes. However, more businesses are realizing the importance of being able to collect data about their customers and use that data effectively in order to increase revenues.

CRMs in today’s digital media economy have shifted quickly to cater to this requirement. While customer acquisition is quite well understood, retention as a marketing technique can be more of an art. Retention is less standardized and more variable depending on the type of business you are in. Add to that the continued rise of data enabled mobile devices and smartphones. This is having a huge impact on that take of brand loyalty and how the backend CRMs handle it. Apps on phone to order services have pioneered the concept of customer retention and have seen massive benefits from it.

Digital Marketing/ Media CRMs leverage the data collected from different direct and indirect sources and use it to constantly engage the existing customers through digital communications (emails, newsletters, offers, push notifications, messaging etc.).

While choosing such a CRM for your business, keep the following things in mind:

1.    Email Marketing Integration – The ability to be able to integrate third-party, feature rich and robust email marketing vendors.

2.    Integrated Web Forms – The ability to capture information directly from the customer and into the CRM. Landing and contact pages for rapid data collecting data also help prevent transcription errors.

3.    Customizable Reporting – It should give your marketing department robust features for custom reporting and modeling. Being able to quickly help analyze collected data.

4.    Tagging – Tags add on to the idea of data organization. Single words or short phrases could be manually or automatically appended to your customer data for easier search and filtering.

5.    Social Media Integration – Since a lot of your customer are going to be extremely active on social media, it should be able to exploit this potentially huge and low-overhead channel.

We at RationalSelling, use an efficient and highly customizable CRM system (CRM4u). We are experts at creating means of collecting customer data and designing automated campaigns for customer engagement and retention. Top it off with a set of detailed customizable reports and we can keep a tab on all interactions with our customers, down to an individual level.

To learn how to implement this cutting-edge, lightweight power tool to your marketing arsenal, talk to us right now!

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• Written by Mansi Jain for RationalSelling