3 Key Uses of CRM Software for Modern Marketers

In recent years, business organizations have prioritized the development of Customer Relationship Management (CRM) software, as the foundation of real customer relationships. Each company seems to be investing immense capital to the development, customization, and maintenance of a unique CRM, either by an in-house development team, or with an independent software solutions provider. Thus emerges the question of why a CRM has suddenly become so important to the management of business organizations. Is the development of customized CRM applications worth the cost, to a business organization today? Ideally, a CRM serves three primary purposes for a business organization. These are:

1. Systematic management of customer support platforms
2. Automatic management of sales programs, strategies, and frameworks
3. Evidence-based management of marketing programs, strategies, and processes

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Components of Modern CRM Software

One key thing to note with modern CRM software is its transformed purpose in a business organization. At their onset, CRM software exclusively focused on the management of customer relationships, thus the name Customer Relationship Management. Then, CRM focused on systemized programs to offer customer support, integrate public relations, respond to customer feedback, address customer complaints, and analyze customer behaviors. Even today, CRM still provides a business organization the powers of social listening.

Gradually however, CRM started broadening its scope. Soon, an innocent marketing aim became a part of CRM where customer support and engagement slowly served two purposes namely engage and relate with the customer, and then to market the organization and its products/services. CRM thus enabled the formation of customer relationships that would eventually serve as a foundation for marketing success. Then, either because of how successfully the addition of a marketing goal to CRM emerged, or for other reasons, CRM software then started including a sales platform. Today, CRM has even been embedded into email messages by sales teams.

Modern CRM software thus integrates the three arms of customer support, marketing, and sales into a singular platform. Before exclusively reviewing the three main uses of CRM software for modern marketers, it is important to highlight, first, the structural design of a CRM. In essence, it is the architectural design determines what it costs to build a CRM software today. Modern CRM software simultaneously handles:

1. Profiling and categorization of customers (potential or current customers), based on their personal details
2. Strategic knowledge-based systems that employ customer data to seek for, build, and sustain customer relationships for the long term
3. Synchronized communication channels with potential and current customer base to maintain collaborative relations through chats, emails, social media platforms, calls, and messaging
4. Increased security protocols and procedures to safeguard customers' and organization's personal and financial information, particularly in e-commerce transactions
5. Strategic and automated systems of operation for a company's marketing events and programs, sales initiatives, and customer service
6. Customer behavior analysis with automated software grids upon input of customer data, to inform future sales, and marketing processes, a trend notable by recent service delivery firms

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Significant Marketing Functions of Modern CRM Software

1. Customer Profiling and Segmentation

A business organization relies on several interlinked departments that mutually perform to enable each other towards sustainable profitability. The research and development team will propose a new product line for the organization, and then forward that to the management. The management will then engage the marketers to determine whether the product is needed by the market, whether the product has adequate potential for profit, and whether it compares competitively with similar or near-similar products in the market. If approved by the marketing team, the designers will develop a creative brand name and look of the product, before it heads to the production team.

To deliver on the relatively complex mandate, marketers rely on strategic analysis of market dynamics. Marketers must therefore use the customer data accumulated and updated by CRM in customer relationship management to inform the complex analysis of the market that the business organization needs to sustain profitability. Marketers need to understand potential and current customers, profile their characteristics, analyze their behaviors, and segment them to precise brands as target markets. To markers, relying on super-charged CRM software provides the raw material they need to deliver their mandate in a business organization.

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2. Market-Based Analysis

Following from the foregoing function of CRM, in customer profiling and segmentation, comes an extremely crucial marketing job. It is also important to highlight that marketers' obligations do not end with approving a potential brand. Rather, the marketing job starts there. Indeed, after their approval, the product is manufactured, and then, the same product will find its way to the marketing department. The primary task will now be determining how to present the product to the market, when, to who, and where (market analytics). The single most essential responsibility of a marketing department in any business organization is market analysis.

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For the new product, marketers will have to select the target market segment by matching the cost, brand identity, social-economic factors, market characteristics, and many other factors to the new brand. Even after presenting the product to the market, marketers will still be engaged in extending the market reach of the product, attracting new customers, sustaining current customers, and modifying the brand's identity or its presentation in favor of increased profitability. Remember, the same marketing department is not only working for the new product. Rather, marketers work for all other products the organization has already placed in the market, progressively. Using market analysis, marketers will exploit CRM to:

1. Understand how to develop brand identity aligned with customer preferences and needs, and thus become customer-centric in their business offers
2. Observe significant trends in the market based on current customer behavior
3. Relate customer behavior with their profiles
4. Understand customer priorities and preferences
5. Determine performance of previous marketing campaigns
6. Calculate potential and current cost-benefit analysis of all products in the market (Return on Investment)
7. Conceptualize how to boost the appeal of a brand to new customers, based on current customer data
8. Design a way to sustain a brand's customer base with optimal loyalty, again based on current customer data from a watch-and-repeat perspective etc.

3. Automatic Event Management

Finally, based on the CRM-sourced research on customer profiling and segmentation, followed by complex but accurate market analytics, the next task that marketers need the CRM software is to implement their research findings. Now the marketers know who to target, how, when, where, and using which message for optimal customer appeal, and loyalty. What they now need to do is to transform the research to sustained and ever-growing profitability for the business organization.

Thus comes in the era of strategic marketing campaigns. The markets will use multiple, progressive, strategic, and creative marketing events to attract new customers and sustain current customers. Understandably, some experts refute the use of the word 'management' in CRM, since customer relationships are not managed but nurtured. If the marketers fail in this one task, all the work that has gone in to the creation of the brand, and by every department, will be worthless. CRM software is critically essential for markets in event management for several purposes, including:

1. Shaping new marketing events on the results of, and customers' perceptions of previous marketing events
2. Observing customer behaviors and resolving any concerns positively
3. Basing a marketing event on customer needs, preferences, and trends sourced from customer support
4. Publishing event details and event-related information
5. Critical financial analysis for Return on Investment
6. Assigning the marketing team members to specific events
7. Maintaining mutual communication and engagement with customers, between marketers and with other department in the organization during specific marketing events

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In conclusion, it is clear from the foregoing discussion that, CRM has evolved from offering exclusive management of customer relationships, to integrate sales and marketing components. Focusing on the marketing arm of modern CRM software, it is also evident that the customer data usually generated in normal customer support operations can be a critical and essential raw material for successful marketing tools. Using this customer data, CRM automates event-based marketing and overall marketing strategy of a business organization. Using the details of current customers, CRM enables marketers to target potential areas of increased sales, mainly by accurately identifying and profiling new market segments and new customers. While CRM software may primarily prioritize the management of customer relationships, as its name implies, modern software have been customized to use these foundation of customer relations to create, boost, and optimize the marketing agenda of any business organization.