CRM

What is one of the most important things for a company to have? Customers, right, and how do you keep those customer? By making sure you are developing the customer relationship. I am going to tell you a few ways you can do this, its not hard, in fact its quite the easy process, but its also one that never ends. You need to always be looking for ways to improve and enhance the customer relationship if you want your business to continue to be successful.

Internet companies, need to take a transactional approach to developing this relationship, since they don't have direct contact with the customer. I think it is a little bit harder to develop a relationship with someone you couldn't pick out on the street, but it's still possible to do and be successful at it.

First, let me begin by telling you what customer relationship management or CRM is all about. CRM is the practices, strategies, and technology that companies use to build up their customer relationships with consumers and also retain that customer base. The process is a continuous one; it never ends, with every new customer the process starts over again. 

Customer relationship management is made up of three different elements. They are, strategic, operational and analytical, with different requirements. You need to build each step to get each element correct.

To get the strategic part started you need to identify who your customer is. Social media can play a big role in this step of the process, by doing research of who your customer base is and gathering individual or household name, plus addresses. Once you have this information you can then divide them into different groups based on their needs, actual value, and their potential value. Interactions with the customer are the key to this step and you can accomplish this by seeing and understanding what the needs of the customer are. You will also  need to make sure you are keeping track of the data for each person and household, and make sure the data is up to date and current.  Once you do that you can customize how you deal with the customer; for example, giving specialized offers that are only good for valued customers, but since you value all your customers, this research will help you determine the ones who are more loyal to you.

The next steps in the process are the operational and analytical ones.  This is why the research done in the first step of the process is so important because you need to make sure that you have a good customer database to focus on. If you don’t have an up to date database, you could be wasting your time by sending information to someone not interested, yet on the other hand, an accidental message may gain you a new customer to add to your database.

The customer database is used to divide and analyze customer profiles to help with sending the right emails and newsletters, to right customers; you don’t want to send an email about air conditioners to someone who lives in Alaska, or a loyalty coupon for space heaters to someone living in Arizona.  It also helps with marketing display advertising, and can help to predict what future marketing programs should be. This step uses response marketing to help determine all these things. 

The analytical element is where you take the information you have gathered in the customer database and use that to develop programs or predictive models to use in your marketing strategy. This is another reason why you need to keep the customer database current.

As anyone who has been in business can tell you, you are never done with customer relationship management.  It is an ongoing process since you are always going to get new customers and with each one you need to doing research on them and putting the information into the database that is constantly updating. You will also need to do this to maintain the customer base that you already have.  This may seem like a lot of work, but by using the information you collect will help to ensure you are using the right marketing tools. Each new person or household adds another dimension to the process. It’s like a merry go round, it just keeps going round and round, as long as you’re in business, you will be dealing with the CRM process.

I work for a credit union and we have a process in place to build our customer relationships and retain them. This process is called the 2-2-2 process. When we open a new account for a new member, we send them a Thank you card by the second day of opening the account. We then give the member a call two weeks after open the account, to make sure things are going well and if they have any concerns or issues that I can help with.  We then follow up with a call two months after the opening of the account, once again checking to see if they are enjoying the benefits of our checking products. Many of the new members I have opened accounts for have been very impressed with this process. We also call on our new members that come to us from an indirect lending program. I call them, Welcome them to the credit union, give them the closest location to their home and also give them a direct number to me and my branch should they have any questions.  When I do any of these processes I input notes into their account so it’s kept in a database to use as a follow up and marketing tool. I have had great success in gaining and maintaining new members with these procedures.

CRM is a very real and vital aspect to any company; you can’t get very far without following the steps. 

5 Key Ways to Build Customer Relationships. (2005, April 30). Retrieved September 20, 2015

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What is customer relationship management (CRM) ? - Definition from WhatIs.com. (n.d.). Retrieved September 20, 2015.

Quinton, S. (2013). The digital era requires new knowledge to develop relevant CRM strategy: a cry for adopting social media research methods to elicit this new knowledge. Journal Of Strategic Marketing, 21(5), 402-412. doi:10.1080/0965254X.2013.801611

Building Consumer & Business Relationship thru Email Marketing

 It seems like everyone today has an email account, several in fact, one for business, one for personal and if you’re like me one that I give out to places I know will just be sending me spam! 

How can a business get you to open their emails, the ones you send to the spam address?  How can they improve their email marketing relationship to make you happy to receive their emails? Well read on and hopefully I will be able to help with this dilemma! 

Creating an email that is going to catch the eye of the reader. You need to be able to make them want to open this up and read what you have to offer instead of hitting the delete button. It’s not as easy as you think! Campaign Monitor, which is an email marketing platform, launched a product called Canvas which is a new way to create emails instead of the traditional layout. This will hopefully make the email more appealing to the consumer. Canvas was also created with the mobile user in mind. More and more consumers are doing everything mobile and moving away from the desktop way of doing things. Canvas also allows users to use a flexible style of email that can catch the brand. 

When developing your email campaign there are certain steps to follow:

1.     Build or obtain an email list, you can do this by either a permission-based list, or rent email lists. 

2.     Profile and segment the list

3.     Establish a communication time

4.     Develop specific program objectives

5.     Write compelling copy

6.     Structure your email to be receive and opened.

7.     Create links to further information

8.     Make it easy for  viewers to take action

9.     Test and revise the email

10. Measure results

11. Integrate learning into next email program. 

I didn't realize till I took this course that I actually do this for the emails that I create and send at work. 

I work for a credit union and I use email as a way of communicating with our new members. We have a product that allows car dealers to have our credit union finance new loans for customers. I would say about 95% of these are not existing members of the credit union. I get a list of these new members that are around the area of my branch location, and I reach out to them. I first call them, and like most all of us these days, people are on the go and don't have time to talk about what I can offer them, this is where my email marketing skills come into play. 

I try and personalize my emails to each member I send out, by that I mean I don't just do a generic one. In the few minutes that I do get a chance to speak with them, I verify all their information and get permission to email them. I then look at the information we have on the member such as credit score, age, employment, if I have it, and then determine what products I should market to them. I of course let all of them know about our free awesome checking accounts that we have that actually pay you every time you swipe your debit card. I then personalize it by telling them the different credit cards we have along with the perks. I also include our locations and let them know we are part of the shared branching network. It is kind of hard to create a catchy subject heading, but at least by speaking with them first, letting them know I will be sending them an email hopefully makes it so they open it. I also include my name, direct line, title and have our logo on the email, so if they forget they know when they open it, that it’s a legit email. Since I work for a credit union, every email I send is sending secure. I have had quite a few members contact me back most by email, letting me know that they are interested in what we have to offer and either request more information, or let me a know of a good time to call them. So far I think we have developed a very successful email campaign for these new members. We also have a generic email we can send out to those we can’t reach by phone, I tweak these by adding my personal information in them and by including by own personal welcome to the credit union. 

5 Trends to Defining Email Today

Internet Marketing: Integrating Online and Offline Strategies, 3rd Edition