Customer Relationship Management
In this lesson we will discuss the use of Customer Relationship Management, or CRM, within your business.
We know that marketing is not not just about selling, it is about the customer. The customer is ever present before, during and after the sale, and as marketers we are acutely aware of how important the customer is.
To that end, we want to build relationships with our customers. We want to know them, to understand them. We want to know what might motivate them to buy our product or service over our competitor, or indeed inhibit them from doing so.
Building good relationships with our customers will help promote trust and confidence is us and our product or service. It can help to ease our customer through that difficult final stage of the sales funnel and can encourage that same customer to return again and again.
So what can we do to help us with relationship building? Well, CRM is used for relationship marketing as a way of maintaining and building long-term relationships with customers. CRM is a process that is often managed by software, indeed there are many vendors whose business is built on developing CRM software, but you can use tools that are already available to you that will help to manage relationships like tracking customers contacts, purchases and other sales related activities, logging calls and other communications, and calendaring.
The main benefits of CRM to you might be:
- they are a way of gathering marketing information
- you can use them to help you develop marketing strategies
- effective use of CRM can encourage brand loyalty
Where are CRM systems used? Well, if you have a loyalty cards, that entire system is managed by a CRM. All of your purchases are certainly logged, but communications and other relevant data may also be tracked to give the retailer a better view of who you are that feeds into their efforts to encourage become a repeat customer.
Next Up
Next we will spend some time working out how you might assess market opportunities for your new products and services.