CRM enrichment, is, in short, regularly replenishing your customer knowledge base. It’s an important part of maintaining good customer relations, and in our opinion, it is an absolutely essential aspect of marketing. But why? Why is it so important for marketers to be concerned with enriching their CRM, whether that means a specific software or...
CRM enrichment, is, in short, regularly replenishing your customer knowledge base. It’s an important part of maintaining good customer relations, and in our opinion, it is an absolutely essential aspect of marketing.
But why? Why is it so important for marketers to be concerned with enriching their CRM, whether that means a specific software or simply you and your team gathering knowledge based on your relations and interactions with customers?
Discover Does Your CRM Provide a 360-Degree View of the Customer?
The answer to this question is: marketing and CRM are both all about knowing your customer. When you work to actively enrich your CRM, whether by sending out surveys, tracking site visitors, or employing other intelligence gathering techniques, you are gaining insight and customer knowledge that is essential for creating successful marketing campaigns.
Knowing Who You’re Talking To
As a marketer, you are focused on reaching your target audience and making your message resonate. You need to understand who your target customer is:
- What they do
- Why they are interested in your product
- What their motivations are for using your content or being on your site.
Some marketers even go so far as to fill out complete buyer personas that cover specific details about a hypothetical client, from their favorite food to their greatest professional challenges and goals.
Buyer Persona Example
This is because understanding what makes your customers tick is the difference between a successful marketer and an unsuccessful marketer.
CRM enrichment can only help a marketer on this journey to understanding their customer. When a company performs CRM enrichment through surveys, they are investing their time and energy into collecting customer knowledge. This customer knowledge can be anything from a customer’s positive feedback response after a visit, or a record of all phone conversations had between a potential customer and a sales rep. Customer knowledge CRM’S are extremely useful for sales teams who need to track their conversations and each interaction, which is why the vast majority of companies now use CRM for their sales teams.
However, it is arguably even more essential successful marketing. These records of conversations and survey responses help paint a picture of who this person is so that a marketer can figure out what language to use when speaking to them, what communication channels are best to reach them, etc.
Gathering customer knowledge and then analyzing that customer knowledge to make better marketing decisions is the main benefit of investing in CRM enrichment.
Focusing on the Customers You Have
CRM enrichment is also all about knowing your current customer as opposed to focusing on potential customers, and this is important when considering where one should be putting their marketing efforts. Marketing should be just as much about customer retention as it is about reaching new audiences.
Why? Because your current customers are a marketers most valuable asset, and considering that 67% of consumers site bad experiences as reason for churn, keeping them happy should arguably be a marketers main goal. CRM enrichment keeps the focus on customer satisfaction – and that means lower churn, increased Lifetime value of a customer, and improving customer retention by up to 27%.
If you are a marketer, you should care about your company’s CRM enrichment efforts solely because those efforts are effectively influencing your churn rate –not to mention your brand identity, customer loyalty, and ROI.
Making The Most of Your Metrics
As with most metrics, CRM data is essentially useless if it isn’t properly analyzed and applied to make the company better. Data gathered from customer satisfaction surveys and automated enrichment efforts should be organized and assembled by the marketing team and analyzed with set objectives in mind. It is your job as a marketer to set these objectives and figure out what you want this data to tell you.
- If you have access to customer satisfaction survey responses, you may use them to better understand how your customers think and communicate, and identify certain customers who are not only very satisfied with your product, but willing to take the time to fill out a survey and sing your praises.
Discover our Complete Guide to the Net Promoter Score (NPS)
- If you have access to the automated contact information of your customers, you might use this to determine the demographic of your target audience and better understand the age, gender, and profession of the audience you are trying to reach.
No matter how you decide to use the information, it is your job to make sure that the data in your CRM is not sitting in there being wasted, but instead helping you to make informed, smart, expertly-guided marketing decisions.
Marketers have to keep track of a lot of different moving parts, but taking the time to invest in CRM enrichment is a decision no marketer should hesitate on. Not only does a well stocked CRM make a marketers job easier by providing necessary details on the customers they are trying to reach, it opens the door to new marketing strategies by giving important data and insight that can be analyzed and used to create new campaigns and better understand the successes and failures of past marketing efforts. Don’t overlook the power of your CRM.
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