Achieve More with Personalized Marketing

How many times a day do you receive advertising e-mails and newsletters? And how many of them do you read? One, possibly two – if at all. To be honest: We have not been able to cope with the mass of e-mails we receive daily for a long time. We had to learn to distinguish the important from the unimportant. But how do you do that? In a fraction of a second we can recognize what is of interest to us and what is not.

Your task in marketing is clearly to jump this hurdle. Even with a subject line adapted to the needs of the reader and an unerring first sentence, you can arouse interest and encourage further reading. How can you achieve this? Very simple: By personalizing your e-mail.

US marketing expert David Meerman Scott says that personalized marketing is all about delivering value to the user at exactly the right time.

With personalization, we don’t bombard our target group with irrelevant content, but we deliver value exactly when it’s needed. This is how it works!

In this article, we show you how CRM software can help you personalize your marketing content and what benefits CRM can bring to your marketing. Here are our 7 tips.

1. The Good Old “Know Your Audience” and What CRM Software Has to Do with It

In 0.45 seconds Google delivers over one billion results on the keyword “Know your Audience” for the German-speaking world. This is undoubtedly due to the relevance of the term. There is hardly a marketing article where this guiding principle does not occur.

What you need in marketing is as much relevant information about your target group as possible. A CRM software can develop into a real treasure chest. In your customer relationship management system you can create and maintain detailed profiles of your leads, prospects, customers, suppliers, etc. With just one click you can link your contact person to the company, add contact data, position and, if necessary, other individual characteristics. Of course you know who is the decision maker, who is open-minded and who is rather sceptical.

Thanks to the history of a CRM system, you can see which products your customer has bought and also which ones he has been interested in in the past. This gives you a comprehensive picture and you can use this information for your next targeted marketing campaign.

2. Segment Target Groups Faster & Better

Do you recall? The search for the keyword “Know your Audience” yielded over a billion results. Definitely too many for your planned marketing campaign. So you have to segment your target group.

Segmentation is a process of breaking your target groups into smaller groups. This can be done according to various parameters. The principle of segmentation is that each group should have at least one, preferably several, common factors. This can be a geographical feature, a customer journey phase (need identification, information search, comparison phase, etc.), preferences (how does your target group want to be contacted?), purchases (what purchases have they already made?), etc.

As a result, segmentation allows you to personalize the content in the best possible way. The targeted approach increases the probability that your message will be positively received by your audience.

In B2B business, segmentation is based on criteria such as industry, company size and current needs. Whether you want to address your e-mail campaign to the top or middle management depends on the goal of your campaign.

For a retail business, for example, it is important to segment a target group based on its geographical location. For example, an advertising campaign for an invitation to a special presentation will only be sent to customers from a previously defined radius.

The CRM software enables you to select your target group based on several parameters. The more information you have for your created contacts, the better you can segment your target group and as a result address them in a targeted and efficient way.

3. The Be-All and End-All of a Personalised Marketing Campaign

One of the most important aspects of personalization is the individual adaptation and focus on the content. Your message must be created in such a way that it resonates with a customer segment on a granular level.

Once you know who you want to address and have segmented your target group according to pre-defined criteria, get ready to personalize your marketing message.

“Dear customer”, “Hello”, or other impersonal addresses are taboo for a successful marketing campaign. With a modern CRM system you address your leads and existing customers only by name. But a CRM software can do more for you. According to selected parameters, you can adapt the text modules of your e-mails for each segmented group. For example, you know exactly which customer may need consumables again or where maintenance is due. Perhaps the last purchase was made quite a long time ago and you fear that your customer is looking for a new supplier. Use this knowledge for your targeted and personalized marketing!

4. All Information in One Place

With a CRM system you can store all collected customer and prospect data and track every interaction. The marketing team can analyze the existing data based on this comprehensive information:

No detail is too small for the professional handling of customers. Every little detail helps us to better understand our target group and their needs, and thus to plan a better and personalized marketing campaign.

5. Better Analyse Data and Act in a Targeted Manner

Without CRM software, the marketing departments of many companies only have access to very inaccurate data. Or it is enormously tedious to collect relevant information when it is – as is often the case – distributed across multiple platforms.

With CRM software, your lead and customer data is collected in one place. Analyses and reports are available quickly and are resilient. Would you like to know which A-customers have not placed an order in the past month so that you can target them? No problem. CRM software can provide you with this information within a few moments. On this basis you can then plan effective and targeted marketing campaigns.

The evaluation of completed marketing campaigns is also very easy. Because you can easily see whether incoming leads or inquiries are due to your marketing or sales measures. This allows you to identify gaps in your current marketing strategy and correct them promptly.

6. CRM Integration with Other Systems

CRM integration enables the optimal connection and seamless functioning of your CRM software with other software applications in your company. It does not matter whether it is an e-mail service such as Microsoft Outlook, Gmail or an e-mail marketing software such as Inxmail or CleverReach. Such systems and platforms are easily integrated into a powerful CRM system.

Since marketing is known to use multiple platforms, it would be optimal if your CRM solution offers a coupling to multiple platforms. This makes it possible to control all marketing activities from one platform.

7. Optimize Up- and Cross-Selling

Up-selling refers to the technique of convincing the customer to buy a higher-quality product than originally planned. Cross-selling, on the other hand, is about encouraging the customer to buy related or complementary items.

With CRM software, you have all the information you need about your customers and their buying behaviour. Use this knowledge to offer your customers selected products and services. In this way the CRM system helps you to increase your sales with up-selling and cross-selling techniques.

Conclusion

Nobody wants to waste time reading unimportant information in today’s often very turbulent professional life. It is therefore crucial for marketing to make target groups aware of their messages in a pointed way. The keyword “relevance” or relevant/personalized content is a trump card that marketing has in its hand. Only with relevant content can your marketing team generate attention from your target group in the era of mass mailings and spam. Using the right CRM software will help you meet this challenge. You can more easily anticipate the needs and wishes of your prospects and customers and cleverly align your campaign accordingly. So you are prepared in the fight for the attention of your audience!