CRM Top Tips

Invest in a CRM software

Developing a CRM strategy is important but alone, it won’t get you very far. To be successful your CRM strategy needs to go hand in hand with a CRM software or system. The CRM strategy will outline and guide your approach but the CRM system is where the action happens. If you don’t already use a CRM software, don’t worry they’re fairly simple to set up. Mailchimp is perfect for SMEs who are just starting up but as your CRM demands grow you may want to look at something with broader capabilities like Hubspot.

Be relevant

If your emails aren’t relevant, you might get people unsubscribing or worse, marking them as spam which will reduce your accounts deliverability. You want to be talking to the right person, about the right thing, at the right time.

There’s a number of easy ways to do this within CRM.

1. Personalise your emails. Customers are far more likely to open and engage with an email that uses their name. This can be done really easily by inserting ‘tags’ in your emails. For example, where you insert the tag [firstname] in your email, each recipient will see their own name. Clever!

2. Segment your customers. Your CRM software should allow you to segment customers by their activity. Using this information you can then tailor the communications for each group. For example, we have been able to target customers who have only bought a sample kit and offer them an exclusive discount as an incentive to repurchase.

3. Automate your CRM. As your business grows it will become more difficult to keep on top of your communications with each customer. Make use of automation to make sure you’re sending relevant messages to people at the right time. A great example of this is setting up an automated welcome email with a discount code that goes to anyone who joins your mailing list, these emails often drive high revenue.

Be mobile compatible

Make sure to preview your emails in both desktop and mobile format before you send them. Today around 81% of emails are read on mobile!

Cover all grounds

As well as anything you send out via CRM, customers receive a number of transactional emails and these often have the highest open rates by a long way. Don’t forget about them! You can turn them into beautiful customer communications and new opportunities to engage customers and drive revenue.

Review and reassess

Keep a close eye on your clicks and open rates to get an idea of what’s working well and what isn’t and then use this to get better!