What is Customer Relationship Management?

Customer Relationship Management or CRM has received a bad press over the years, with over zealous salesmen and companies selling over-specified and over-priced systems to a business community that was struggling under the technological battering of computerisation.

Beneficial to the customer

Have it or not, but a good CRM system is of great benefit to the customer. If you have built a good understanding of your customer – i.e. a relationship – you are more likely to send them relevant communications, about products and services they are interested in and more likely to buy.

One of the great tools CRM systems can provide is the analysis of a customer’s propensity to buy a product or service. If you have ever used Amazon, you will know that they display products that other have bought with the product you are looking at, increasing the chance of cross-selling to the customer. This is not scientific, but it does increase sales.

A very simple CRM system would be a contact database. Do you know all the communications that go out to a customer from every one of your staff?

The marketing art of the opt-in

The CRM packages you can buy allow you to record customer information like never before. But, before you launch into communicating with your customers, remember, you are bound by the GDPR (previously the Data Protection Act) in some form or another. The general rule of thumb is – get your customers to opt-in, and allow them to opt-out when they want to.

With the backing of our sister company – Jack Marketing Solutions™ – we can help you determine the best methods to increase your opt-in rates, segment and target your audiences better, and make better use of the purchase and sale of lists.

Glossary: Contact Database, CRM Systems, Cross-selling, Customer Communications, Customer Consent, Customer Insights, Customer Relationship Building, Customer Relationship Management (CRM), Customer-centric Marketing, Data Protection Act (DPA), General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR), List Purchase & Management, Opt-in Marketing, Opt-out Options, Personalisation, Propensity to Buy, Relevant Communications, Sales Enablement, Targeted Marketing.