CRM For Marketing

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***tier3square.shtml***CRM for marketing is a confusing way to put it because the acronym CRM stands for more than just Customer Relationship Management.  If you do a few searches at Google, you'll see that it can also stand for customer relationship marketing.

In my view of the world, and I admit that it's just one way to look at things, marketing is a part of the complete CRM definition. If we set it aside on its own, we defeat the purpose of a comprehensive customer-centric approach to business.

Marketing, Sales and Service must all work together to achieve increased customer loyalty. Therefore, CRM for Marketing makes sense just like CRM for Service makes sense.

I'm glad I could clear that up!

My Take on the Middle Market

Marketing modules have been a component of middle market CRM software for 10 years now. While they started out as nothing more than a way to manage basic marketing campaigns, they have certainly matured.

Basic campaign management was simply a way to create an entity through which you could track costs and activities. They could also help you segment your contacts or leads for a particular campaign; or simply track an expected target population figure. Then it fell upon the sales and service staff to input the responses against the campaign so some basic metrics could be generated.

Unfortunately for most of these organizations, building and managing campaigns was anathema to these smaller sales departments.

Did I mention that most of these organizations seem hesitant to create an independent marketing department?

So what usually happened, as I saw it, was the pure excitement over the ability to do something they weren't gonna do! It was interesting as I went back to sites a year or two later and noted that there was only one complete campaign entered, and then a partial campaign and that was it. Two campaigns! And no real responses entered. And it was apparent that crm for marketing, in general, was a strange idea since it usually fell on shoulders of the sales department, and this usually led to a sporadic delivery of a confusing newsletter.

The more matured marketing tools that have been introduced into middle-market CRM solutions reflect a close look at what marketing organizations like to do....collect data from all sources. That's why we now see integration to third party tools that can manage a bulk email marketing campaign online. These tools are nice because they allow smaller companies to look bigger with well designed email templates.  They can also track clicks to links that are embedded in the emails and synchronize these back to the CRM database.

But here's the problem.  Once again I've seen the sales department, or someone designated as the marketing person, flounder with this because they have no real message. When you don't know what you should say, marketing can become a very laborious project.

If I didn't know what I wanted to say on this website, I know that I wouldn't be able to sit down and write this. Everything I write is wrapped in the planning and strategy blanket so that theme runs through every article. Can ya tell?

The bottom line here is that if your message is inconsistent, or inappropriate for your audience, your responses mean nothing. Embedding trackable links into emails with no forethought, is also pointless. The sole reason for doing this is to help you segment your customers by what interests them. This information should be used down the line to send targeted information, or offerings, to to each segment (that's the simple version).

To sum it up, CRM for Marketing is an effective tool that is underutilized by the middle market companies I've worked with in the past. And this is probably a good thing, since having an efficient way to look confused is probably worse than sending no message at all. It's time to develop a CRM strategy and derive a unified marketing message from it. You don't need to be a Fortune 1000 company to put your customers first!

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Let's Get to the Heart of CRM for Marketing

Bulk Email Marketing Campaign

Email Marketing Software

Postcard Marketing

Database Marketing

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