The State of the Connected Customer report found 88% of customers think the experience a company provides is as important as its product or services. The key to creating that great customer experience? Personalisation. Fifty-six percent of customers expect offers to be always personalised and 73% of customers expect companies to understand their unique needs and expectations. Their demand is clear: stop treating us like numbers, start treating us like individuals.

To meet these demands, marketing and advertising campaigns have now shifted their orientation from a ‘product-first’ approach to personalisation, where brands pay attention to the unique needs of their target audience. To develop an effective marketing strategy that engages customers on a deeper level, a CRM software is your best bet.

What is CRM?

Besides being a system to collect, store, organise and analyse customer data, CRM software now acts as a critical information hub for customer-centric processes that unite sales, service, commerce, IT, analytics, and marketing. 

CRM helps you manage marketing campaigns, identify sales opportunities, and store customer and prospect contact information all in one convenient location. You can also make data about every customer interaction accessible to anyone at your company who might need it — providing a 360-degree view that helps you deliver those seamless and connected experiences.

Why make CRM your digital marketing software priority?

Your marketing teams can leverage granular customer information from a CRM system to run powerful campaigns across all marketing channels. In a general sense, a CRM system can help you: 

• Get a better idea of the target audience by using customer data to create segmented groups based on past transactions, browsing patterns, purchasing behaviour, and demographics. Access to such data lets you move beyond superficial audience groupings, allowing you to define your target audience in more useful ways and produce marketing material that connects with them more strongly.
  
  Membership-based hospitality group Norths Collective used Marketing Cloud to target specific audience segments with automated personalised messaging. Mothers, for instance, were found to be the primary decision makers when it came to family entertainment, so Norths Collective connected with that persona based on age, gender and historical behaviours. Since using CRM to introduce segmented personalisation, email open rates have grown from 18% to 56%.
• Ensure cross-team alignment to function as a cohesive team, communicate crucial data and customer information, and streamline all phases of the buyer’s experience.
• Automate routine tasks and speed up other time-consuming yet crucial work. Automation can perform data entry, update contact records, send follow-up messages, create and manage workflows, and much more.

4 Ways CRM can help create more powerful digital marketing campaigns

1. Plan your campaign better

CRM digital marketing uses a 360-degree view of the customer. It considers browsing habits, social media engagement, online purchase history, and other indicators. This data lets you understand the customer on a deeper level, including their behaviour, goals, and pain points. You can then create targeted marketing campaigns that are tailored to their demands.

2. Create personalised content on different channels

Using the data provided by a CRM system, you can provide customised, specific content and offers across channels.

For example, you can use first-party data from your CRM in email marketing campaigns to:

• Change content in real-time
• Create customer-specific CTAs
• Set up segment-specific email sequences

While creating specified ads, CRM data can be used to inform activities related to:

• Promoting highly-targeted campaigns
• Featuring relevant ads for a target group
• Retargeting customers with ads based on their browsing activity 

In social media marketing, CRM data helps to:

• Keep tabs on platform-specific customer engagement activities
• Create on-point, topical and unique content based on customer interest

Spotify Advertising, for example, has used Marketing Cloud to enhance account engagement and build unique customer journeys from real-time and historical data through preferred channels like email and social media. Using Salesforce, Spotify Advertising has significantly decreased time to access marketing campaign data by 95%, from six months down to seven days.

And with Tableau, Spotify Advertising can access actionable insights and real-time updates to actively communicate with clients about their advertising needs and where they are experiencing roadblocks.

3. Reply to customers promptly

A cloud-based CRM system lets your reps access client data in real-time from any location, without being bound to a desk or server network. While working in the office or on the job, employees can interact with clients and potential clients through mobile devices, enabling them to respond to inquiries on the go.

4. Measure your performance

With a CRM, you can gain real-time insight into customer reactions to your brand’s content. This instant evaluation of advertising effectiveness helps you optimise campaigns while they are running. You can also deploy analytics to assess the overall impact of your campaigns and determine the changes to make in the future. 

Generative CRM will raise the bar even higher. It can, for example, design visually appealing, personalised ads to target specific audiences, build predictive models to forecast customer buying behaviours, and create influencer campaigns. Salesforce has leveraged this remarkable technology in Einstein GPT, the world’s first generative AI for CRM.

Start using CRM today to transform your digital marketing strategies

A robust advertising and digital marketing strategy is built on powerful customer data and analytics. This helps enhance personalisation, and positively impact the outcomes of campaigns. 

With the help of a comprehensive CRM platform such as Salesforce Customer 360, you can unite your business around the customer. Salesforce Customer 360 is a unified platform that consolidates all your data to create in-depth customer profiles and establish a single view of every customer. It enables you to integrate data from all sources in one location, letting teams have shared views of clients to make better, quicker decisions and meet customer demands.

Read more

• The 6 Best Examples of Personalised Marketing
• The New 3Ps of Marketing: People, Personalisation and Privacy
• Data Driven Companies Perform Better by Almost Every Metric — Here’s How to Become One of Them