Nowadays, having a comprehensive marketing communication stream is one of the cornerstones of good business. It’s an essential ingredient in order to conquer customers’ hearts and win their loyalty. Taking the first steps in the digital marketing world can be extremely challenging, but it’s a very fruitful path. To succeed in this task, here are few rules to guide you on your path to building a solid CRM.
Identify your business’s weaknesses
In the early stages of creating a CRM funnel, the first question that arises is “where should I begin?”. The best answer is to try to understand where the holes in your bucket are.
For instance, it would be great to get more new customers, but is it really worth it considering most of these new purchasers will churn immediately? Isn’t it a waste of good acquisition money? It can also be great to reactivate your churn customers by a wicked reactivation funnel, but what is your ability to retain them when they’re back? Isn’t this a waste of your time, trying to reactivate customers you can’t retain?
Mapping these holes isn’t an easy task. To better understand your business’s weaknesses, you’ll need to have an in-depth analysis, that will able you to focus on the most important areas.
The optimal way to go with is having an industry benchmark. This kind of comparison with the entire industry may help you figure where your low hanging fruits are. The understanding that you have a weaker area that marketing can improve can help you focus and answer the question of where to begin.
Once you find your weaknesses, you’ll be able to start focusing on the most important KPIs of your business and to gradually expand to different areas where you’re already happy with, trying to improve them as well.
Take advantage of emotional occurrences
When creating a CRM marketing funnel, you should be mindful of the basics. Look for the obvious emotional occurrences on your customers’ journeys. I’m talking about birthdays, wedding anniversaries, but also registrations dates, first purchases, etc. These straight forward triggers create great opportunities to communicate with your customers.
As these actions are dated it should also be easy to execute campaigns for them: Is today one of your customer’s birthday? congratulate him. Is it his first purchase? Don’t forget to say thanks.
The two key factors in these trigger-based campaigns are to figure what are your customers’ emotional occurrences are and to plan the way you want to address these emotions.
Outline your funnel
In today marketing landscape, one communication point is usually not enough. Our ability to create a sequence of campaigns will allow us to better achieve our goals. A funnel of campaigns is a great way to communicate several messages with the same vibe or topic and can assist once an offer or a message wasn’t effective enough.
What should guide us when planning a funnel is, of course, the objective. Unlike the common thought that ‘another purchase’ or ‘more revenue’ should always be our target, for some cases, funnels can have other objectives. Such as brand awareness, increasing the value of future purchases or even introducing our customers to other departments and offering abilities.
After setting the objective, try and break it to the number of campaigns you should execute. Think about the timing and the iterations between one message to another. Having an analysis of your existing customer-base can help you decide what should be the right order for these communications.
The importance of the sketch
This is the easiest way to plan a funnel, create a flowchart diagram. Flowcharts are an easy-to-understand tool you can share, they are easy to handle and to change.
Aside from enabling us to get a clearer picture of our marketing strategy, the marketing diagram allows us to expand the plan through different channels, offers or any kind of customers traits. Many mature companies in terms of marketing are starting to lose their grip when having hundreds and thousands of campaigns sent daily.
The most basic tip for a marketer facing the challenge of building a CRM strategy and marketing plans is to start small. In order to have a solid, understandable, and flexible marketing journeys, you have to set your fundamentals correctly and to have confidence in it. Then, gradually you’ll find yourself with a prospering marketing plan.