Before discussing the impact of CRM digital marketing you must be familiar with the concept of CRM. CRM or Customer Relationship Management is a system adopted by most of the companies these days for understanding their customers closely so that they can adopt a more personalized and targeted marketing strategy to communicate with their customers.
Earlier previous interactions and transactions were the only means for the companies to collect information about their customers. But with the increasing popularity of social media platforms and availability of data from various other resources to the companies has largely influenced the ways of marketing and communication between companies and their customers through digital marketing CRM. It has been proved through various announcement made in near past by Facebook, a social media network, that the data provided by the users with Facebook will enable the companies to link it with their customer’s data. In this way social platforms have started to be an integral part of traditional CRM strategies.
Thus the use of Internet technologies and communications channels to improve customer relationship management or CRM will lead to digital CRM which will influence the marketing strategies of the companies. Providing information about the habits and preference of the customers to an organization is not the only motive of digital CRM but also to make the marketing and communication with their customers more automated and personalized by sing internet technologies and social media platforms.
The Impact of CRM Digital Marketing
Segmentation of Customers
Digital marketing will allow the organizations to get access to the behavioral activities of the social platforms to increase their information about their customers. In this way organizations can divide their customers on the basis of their behaviors, interests and attitude irrespective of their age group and location. This type of information will enable the organizations to communicate or send messages to their customers on the basis of their interests, attitudes and behaviors instead of their demographic location.
Thus the data received from social platforms will be integrated with the information existing with the CRM tools of the organization to become the part of its actual CRM instead of dividing various types of customers present on social media platforms. This overlaying of the information received from digital social platforms on the existing information with the organizations will provide them more personalized information about their customers.
Thus CRM digital marketing will enable companies to send more personalized messages to the interesting segments of the customers. For instance VIP treatment can be given to prestigious customers whereas people with negative attitude can be treated sympathetically to attract them towards company’s products and services.
Increased Connectivity With Your Customer
The increasing popularity of social media platforms has made it easy for companies to get more and more information about their customers and integrating it with the existing information collected by the traditional CRM tools. The improvement in the connectivity between the companies and their customers has changed the way of interaction not only for the companies with their customers but for customers also with their companies. Instead of direct marketing messages customers today want to interact with the companies. It has become possible only through CRM digital marketing instead of traditional CRM which was based on sales only.
Precaution for Companies About CRM Digital Marketing
Companies should be careful while dealing with the increasing availability of information about their customers as it can disturb their messaging system.
This drawback of digital CRM marketing can be understood more clearly through an example of an American company targeted expecting mothers as its potential customers but its efforts to collect information about would-be mothers were used by other brands for increasing their sales.
The said company provided an ID to its individual customer tracked their transactions closely and in order to understand the behavior and attitude of its customers it employed statisticians and data analysts. They derived interested patterns after testing the data again and again and identified certain shopping features on their basis like Calcium, Zinc and Magnesium supplements are needed by the pregnant women in the first 20 weeks of their pregnancy. The team of data specialists then focused on 25 products that can fulfill their requirement which enabled them to predict about due date of the pregnancy on the basis of their purchase and analysis.
On the basis of these pregnancy predictions and purchase information company started sending incentives and discount vouchers to the pregnant women. But a father went to the company’s local store and complained about the baby vouchers received by his 16 years old daughter.
The store manager felt sorry about the mistake done by the head office and apologized from him. After few days the manager of the store received a call from that father who felt ashamed and admitted that he was unaware of some activities in his home and his daughter was actually pregnant and was expected to give birth to a child in near future.
After this confusion company changed its strategy to send mails to the pregnant women on the basis of the purchase of baby products only. Now while sending mail to their customers they tactfully mixed the information of their baby products with other products needed by the segment of pregnant women.
This example shows that how early analysis of information collected from social platforms about their customers can create confusions in sending massages to their segmented customers. Though company had not broken any law regarding the protection of digital data by using digital CRM marketing but its efforts proved to be detrimental for its relationship with its customers.
Thus the early adopters of CRM digital marketing strategy have taken benefit by recognizing the impact of the power of social platforms on marketing strategy. This truth can be demonstrated through a number of innovative an interesting case studies. But it should be used after understanding the customers and their information before sending any message to them. The increasing availability of digital information can create confusions as discussed in the above referred example.
Michael Taylor
Michael is the Lead Author & Editor of CRMSimplified Blog. Michael established the CRM blog to create a source for news and discussion about some of the issues, challenges, news, and ideas relating to CRM.