When you’re looking to grow a small business, your marketing strategy is one of the most important things you need to consider. However, even though e-marketing can be a fantastic tool for businesses looking to make more of what they do, it’s important to be careful with the action you take so it has as much impact as possible.
This is why it is so important to consider customer relationship management whenever you are working on anything to do with e-marketing. This is particularly important for small businesses, as it is likely much of your business depends on high quality customer service and understanding your market base.
Companies like SAGE offer CRM software is something that can help you to coordinate your e-marketing campaigns and target your marketing at the right customers. This really matters because marketing incorporates many different departments of your business – the finance team need to know what’s going on for their accounts, the sales team need to be in the loop so they know exactly what to sell and your customer service staff need to know about the topics that are currently relevant to your customer base.
This is why a good CRM system will help you so much: it helps to centralise all your e-marketing information so communication between teams is made easier and more manageable. Employees can also use the software to track the progress of marketing campaigns so they know what action needs to be taken and when – you can also generate reports based on your activity, which can be a useful measure of your success.
Also, as you are probably aware, targeted marketing can be much more effective than a mass mail-out sent to your entire contact list. After all, your customers are likely to be a diverse bunch, with different interests. If, for instance, you are looking to market a particular product, you could use your CRM software database to identify the customers who have purchased something similar in the past and use them as the base for your campaign.
Good CRM systems also typically integrate e-marketing functions so you can carry out much of your work within the software, which is another useful management tool. For example, you could collate different groups of customers to send different emails to, and utilise marketing templates to form the material for your campaign. You can then utilise the report functions of your software to track issues such as your email click-through rate and determine your ROI.
Anyone reading this will undoubtedly be familiar with the internet, so you will most likely also be aware that often, using the internet can end up as something of an advertising overload. This helps to illustrate just how important it is for your e-marketing to be targeted and relevant to your customers, rather than just another generic advert on the internet. CRM solutions might not be able to guarantee all your customers will respond to your e-marketing, but they can certainly help ensure that you are sending the right message to the right people, giving your small business the best possible chance of marketing success.
