CRM for Marketing

How a Marketing Department can use CRM to improve efficeincy

By Robin Wilding
Updated: June 20, 2011

Implementing a CRM strategy in a marketing department can add valuable business intelligence—and be the competitive edge a company needs to stay ahead of the competition. Marketing departments are generally focused on a few on-going tasks: customer surveying, competition monitoring, branding, create customer acquisition campaigns, liaise with other departments, and manage a budget and ROI—and most of these needs can be met and managed by implementing a CRM solution.

Customer Contact and Surveying

A CRM is best known for the ability to create deep and lasting relationships with customers—by giving you capabilities to do things like sending out birthday wishes when your customer or vendor's special day comes around. You can also use your CRM to segment your database into different groups, including special customers, new customers, and sensitive customers—this will help you to create more targeted communications. Also once a mail-out is complete you can use your CRM to track interest that may have been generated via the mail-out

Of equal importance to a marketing team is the ability to monitor your customers-- a critical element to understanding the successes and failures of your marketing campaigns. A CRM solution gives you the ability to track and record your contacts and results with your clients.

Liaise with other Departments

One of the most disjointed relationships in companies is the rift between sales and marketing. While these two should go hand-in-hand they rarely communicate in any meaningful way. When a CRM strategy is implemented company wide you can use it to funnel leads to the sales department, you can also communicate with other departments that may be involved in projects or campaigns you are launching.

Manage a Budget and ROI

Within CRM you can manage your vendors in addition to your customers. Via vendor relations management you can help keep your department on budget for multiple projects by tracking the progress of campaigns and their costs within the system—in doing this you can be aware of when you are approaching the limit of your budget, BEFORE you go over budget.

By tracking your successes and failures you have the ability to measure ROI in a tangible way. You can also use the analytic and reporting tools to created detailed reports for your superiors regarding the ROI you receive on each project.

Create Customer Acquisition Campaigns

Within a CRM solution you can create campaigns using software specially designed to help you plan and track tasks and activities, manage literature, and measure response. Using a CRM can help marketing professionals manage the multiple campaigns that they juggle at any given time—without crossing any of the information. It is also a huge time saver as you can create campaigns based on templates instead off starting from scratch each time.

Having the ability to do a trial campaign within a specified group, to test the effectiveness before you fully launch, will increase the efficacy of your campaigns.

A CRM will ensure that a campaign is followed through its life cycle, from start to finish. The ability to create tasks, note and reminders will ensure that every loose end is tied up, and the reporting tool can help you later analyze the overall success of the campaigns. Through bulk mailing lists and groups you can communicate with your team or other departments regarding the campaign as well.