The role of CRM in a solid marketing strategy

A strong CRM turns customer data into better marketing

10 min read

✓ Centralise customer data — capture and organise interactions across every touchpoint
✓ Automate customer journeys — trigger personalised responses based on user behaviour and lifecycle stage
✓ Integrate CRM with your website — connect forms, emails, downloads, and campaigns into one system
✓ Improve lead quality — use customer insights to deliver more relevant messaging and increase conversions
✓ Choose the right CRM — select a platform that fits your business goals, workflows, and growth plans
✓ Start simple and optimise over time — refine automation, reporting, and customer experiences as your business evolves

The customer is always right—this old adage still rings true today. Irrespective of your approach to business development and whatever strategy you put in place, if business success stories have one thing in common, it is that it is essential you put your customers at the centre of your decision-making process, else, you’re headed for disaster. And central to this, is a Customer Relationship Management program (CRM).

Whether it is retaining old buyers or attracting new ones, you need to integrate different customer relationship and customer advocacy action plans into your marketing strategy. How you do that needs to be based on a few different things. To help you out, we’ve compiled a run-sheet of sorts. Check out our tips below.

But first, what is CRM?

It would be slightly remiss if we did not check we are all on the same page. Just to clarify, when we talk CRM solutions, we are not just using a definition in keeping with the Salesforce definition: “… a technology used to manage interactions with customers and potential customers.” We take it slightly further and see CRM as the use of different integrated technologies, strategies, and customer advocacy platforms, created to help businesses and organisations improve their sales, profitability, and customer service using past and existing customer data.

And how is customer data collected?

When customers interact with your company –  be it through email, chat, website, phone, or even via various social media platforms, a well-developed CRM system will compile these interactions as data points. These points are then recorded against a profile, allowing your company to make decisions as to what best next step to take in order to drive the desired outcome.

How do you determine what to do next?

Over time, through doing the things you do, you have developed an innate insight into what signs point the way to a likely sale and what other ones point to a potential lost sale. This data and knowledge can be taken and fed into automated strategies, thus meaning when a customer does X, the CRM knows that E+A is needed to turn a potential customer into a sale and that you need to do C+E+N to ensure that the sale is not lost forever.

Embedding CRM into your digital marketing strategy and then into the website

If you have a CRM system in place, the simple question is, are you leveraging it to its full potential? Specifically – and not surprisingly given what we do as an agency – we mean are you embedding it into your digital strategy in such a way as to create customised campaigns targeted to those users with similar profiles?

Your marketing efforts will be more concise and reap better returns if and when you evaluate which phases your potential customers are at and how to lead them forward through the process and not lose them. We are talking about refining your messaging and imagery in different email streams, tightening your customer advocacy program, knowing when to offer incentives, and just being smarter with campaign timing so as to improve the quality of your leads and your number of conversions. All driven with the intent of boosting your sales and profitability (or returns if you are a NFP. In fact NFPs often have more to gain from a well executed CRM program as it can reduce cost of acquisition significantly).

There are a plethora of ways in which your company can benefit from a CRM system embedded into your website and other digital marketing platforms. Whatever the system, think of two different (in very general terms) streams you need to control – Data capture and trigger responses.

From a data capture perspective:

• How are you defining who a lead is?
• How are you capturing the information and where are you storing it? Is it a lead form, a phone call, a competition entrant, a website download etc (all of these are good starts)
• Also think about how you identify that lead next time, or on a different platform (no use having a CRM if you can’t identify the same user across different touch points).
• You then need to categorise this data so you have a number of defining rules.

With that determined, then you need to consider your trigger point so you know how to respond to a lead and when. Consider things such as

• Does action in-store lead to an email, or does a phone call push out a thank you etc.
• How long should you wait between getting someone’s sign up data and sending a thanks
• What loyalty programs do you have in place which add value and retain customers?
• When do you consider a lead lost, or how do you know when to keep pushing?

Ultimately, this all then need to be translated into meaningful implementation across all touchpoints, inclusive of your website, because if it isn’t integrated into your site, you are wasting the opportunity to tie up all of the valuable market data you have and enjoy a seamless and more intelligent way of analysing the data and leads generated from all of the activities of your buyers and prospects.

So now, do you embed a CRM tool into your website?

While different CRM providers offer unique solutions, you need to keep in mind that there is no one-size-fits-all approach to CRM integration. You must ensure that the CRM you pick matches your business type and your needs. Are you a small business? A cooperative? A large-scall e-commerce shop? A non-profit organisation? Do you operate your business offline? Fully online? Do you use a website only to get leads and conversions or do you also employ different social media networks to promote your brand? All these you should keep in mind to find the right CRM that will work best for your business model.

Next off, make a list of the workflows and processes in your website that you want your CRM to automate. Is it notifying your sales team of new leads? Is it sending emails to potential customers who visit certain landing pages? Being able to identify important process that need CRM support will help you streamline your processes and respond better to any behaviour your customer is doing.

If you do not have one in house you can speak to, find and then sit down with a CRM expert to identify the most ideal CRM integration solution for your business.  Always keep your most pressing needs in mind and visualise what you want your system to achieve to ensure that you and your CRM team’s expectations and goals are aligned. Some of the common objectives you can go for might include:

• Eradicate manual processes and improve your team’s productivity
• Improve the quality of the leads generated online
• Faster response times to customers’ queries, thus promoting better customer service
• Higher conversion rates
• Intelligent data that can easily be analysed
• A better understanding of individual customer profile, thus building better relationships and more targeted campaigns

A real-life example: our WordPress ONTRAPORT integration work for The Landscape Association

When we first met with The Landscape Association (a member organisation) they had multiple and disparate systems in place which they used to manage different functions. The issue was, there was no one centralised source of truth, nor a single view of customer (defined as members and would-be members as well as the general public). Working with them we defined that they required a unified system to manage all their functions, tie all their data together and ultimately simplify matters for staff and customers alike. We were commissioned to create a single digital platform that minimised data handling, membership renewals, event management and eradicated to the largest extent possible, any errors.

Our team’s recommended solution required the implementation of a new CMS and front-end website which integrated seamlessly with their new member management platform (ONTRAPORT), managed their ticketing sales and integrated with their back end accounting systems.

Through a year long process, we worked to tidy their data, define their membership interactions and develop workflows which would achieve all the above. Through the implemented system, they can monitor upcoming membership renewals, see how many people have registered for events, see revenue snapshots against different filters, monitor interactions between staff and their members and create email updates that go to all or even just a defined audience. Furthermore, there are a number of built-in triggers that automate multiple processes (both in the sales process and in the lead generation process), allowing staff to concentrate on what they need to, not on making sure the system works.

You can read more about our work with the TLA in our case study.

Time to invest in a solid CRM integration to your WordPress website

Platform integration into a WordPress website might sound easy but it takes an analytical mind, strong technical skills, and strategy to successfully fill in the gaps and simplify seemingly complex functionalities and workflows involved in running a business online.

At Three Piece Marketing, we understand that bringing value to your consumers while maintaining a responsive and highly visible website are key to a good digital presence. If you are keen at improving your WordPress site and want to discuss how you can achieve your business goals through it, speak to one of the 3PM team today.

Or if you are just researching and looking to build your arsenal, let us give you one piece of advice: start simple, build-up and keep refining.