Leveraging customer engagement data can help you make the right decisions to drive your business toward profitability and growth. The trick is knowing how to store and manage the data in ways that are advantageous to your team.
The best possible repository for your data is a decent CRM system. But that’s only the start of the process to make the most out of all your hard-won data.
Only when your CRM system is fully aligned with your entire MarTech stack can you have any confidence in having a “single view of the truth” to inform your business decisions.
What is Data Analytics in CRM?
Your CRM system collects vast quantities of customer, sales, and marketing data. Data analytics transforms that information into something that can inform your entire marketing and business strategy.
A well-maintained CRM system will tell you who your customers are and how they have engaged with your previous marketing campaigns, sales activities, and customer service touchpoints, highlighting personal preferences, individual behaviors, and their current position in their customer journey.
Why Should You Use Data Analytics in Your CRM Strategy?
Analyzing the data in your CRM system helps you break down and understand the information stored in your business so you can make intelligent business decisions about future campaign strategies and other business priorities, including product development and the allocation of resources.
This process is about taking the guesswork out of your marketing campaigns and removing the risk-heavy strategy of relying on luck to run your business. Unsurprisingly, when you build campaign strategies on reliable, hard data, you might find yourself getting a whole lot luckier.
Track Trends
While nothing is guaranteed in business, good data analytics can help you track trends and react accordingly.
For example, suppose a campaign is underperforming for a particular audience segment when the data tells you it should be doing better. In that case, you can quickly pause, optimize, completely re-work, or even abandon your strategy for that segment before wasting too much time and money. Similarly, if a campaign is doing well, you can pour more money and resources into expanding it to beat expectations.
The Benefits of Using Data Analytics in Your CRM Strategy
The good news is that you don’t have to dig too deep to enjoy the benefits of using data analytics in your CRM strategy. Even the most rudimentary exploration can yield:
Improved Customer Insights
Every customer engagement tells you a story. Why make an educated guess about their preferences and buying habits when the data tells you everything?
Increased Revenue
Knowing who your customers are and what they like makes it easier to guide them toward making a buying decision.
Improved Customer Retention
Customer loyalty is hard won. Better understanding your customers’ needs and preferences makes it easier to build long-term customer relationships that drive Customer Lifetime Value (CLV).
Campaign Optimization
Your campaign might be well-targeted and perfectly timed, but you could miss your objectives if your messaging or call-to-action (CTA) falls short. Careful data analysis combined with essential marketing strategies like A/B testing can help you optimize your campaigns to maximize their performance.
Identification of Market Gaps
Could the customer engagement stored in your CRM system highlight potential new opportunities? You may be generating leads in a location you’ve never worked in. Or maybe competitive offers are being highlighted in customer support calls. Could this be an opportunity to explore new products or service offers and enter new markets?
Enhanced Reporting and Analytics
Once you start digging deep into your data and seeing how this information can help you make marginal (or even significant) gains in your business, you’ll want to do more. Remember, data analysis will only be helpful if you have the resources to do something with it, so take your time and move at a manageable speed for your business.
End Goal Identification
If you can access good data, setting your future marketing objectives will be much easier. Businesses that don’t have access to historical data will need to play a longer game. This process will include lots of trial and error while carefully monitoring your analytics to learn what works and what needs optimizing until you have a more solid base to build your end goals.
How to Implement Data Analytics into Your CRM Strategy
There is a simple seven-step process to implementing data analysis into your CRM strategy:
- Define Objectives: We talk about this a lot. If you don’t set objectives for everything you do in marketing, you’ll never know if you’ve been successful or not.
- Gather Data: Whenever possible, try not to build your marketing strategy based on assumptions. Therefore, it’s essential to start looking for data to build your marketing campaigns around as early as possible. If you have to guess, use incoming data to refine your strategy.
- Analyze Date: You don’t need to wait until the end of your campaign to start analyzing your data. Analyzing live data gives you the opportunity to nudge your campaigns in the right direction.
- Use Insights to Amplify CRM Strategy: Knowledge is power. Once you understand the direction of travel, you can commit additional resources (time, money, people) to campaign strategies and ramp up operations.
- Monitoring: Just because something works today doesn’t mean it will work tomorrow. Carefully monitoring your live data will ensure you don’t waste resources on a strategy that no longer works.
- Pick the Right Tools for Your Business: Gathering and analyzing live data is a complex task without the right tools. If you still use spreadsheets to analyze your data, you risk playing with old, out-of-date, and potentially corrupt data.
- Educate and Train Your Team: Access to actionable data only works if your team knows what they are doing with it. This means teaching them to use the technology available and understand what they are looking at. Remember, everything your team does with that data should be 100% focused on your marketing objectives – so it’s essential they know what direction you are heading in.
The Takeaway
Every business generates data. That data can be used to help you reach your goals while reducing risk. However, unrefined data can be overwhelming. Your business must have the right tools, strategy, and understanding to maximize the opportunity stored in your CRM system and broader MarTech stack.
To learn more about how the marketing experts at emfluence can help you make the most of your data and create an actionable plan to help you meet your marketing objectives, contact us today at expert@emfluence.com.
