No matter how big or small your business is and no matter which industry you’re operating in, the fact of the matter is that no business can survive without customers.
Being able to attract customers to your business has always been extremely important. Still, it becomes even more so in this day and age, where the modern business market is oversaturated.
Managing to find ways to make your business stand out from the crowd is not easy. But with the help of some useful tools, you can easily bring more exposure to your business and boost its recognition.
One of such helpful tools is definitely CRM (customer relationship management) software.
CRM systems will not only help you stay on top of your customer relationships, but they can also help you improve your organization, particularly if you’re running an eCommerce business.
With that being said, let’s explore some of the ways CRM systems can help your business reach success and some ways in which you can use CRM systems to improve your eCommerce content marketing.
Why rely on the help of CRMs?
As mentioned previously, customer relationship management software can be of great help for any modern business. For any business, it’s not only important to know who your customers are, but it’s also key to understanding what they’re after when it comes to business interactions.
By understanding who your customers are and learning more about their needs, expectations and overall behavior, it will be significantly easier to connect with them on a deeper level.
The more satisfied your customers are and the better the relationship you manage to establish with them, the greater the benefits your business can expect.
Knowing that it’s about seven times more expensive to try and acquire a new customer than it is to retain an existing one also provides just another reason to try and cater to your customers as much as possible.
The relationship between CRMs and content marketing
At first glance, it may not be too clear how CRMs can help your eCommerce content marketing efforts. But if you consider that both customer information and content marketing will help boost your sales, if done right, the relationship between the two instantly becomes more obvious.
In the world of marketing, content is king. It helps you promote your offer, bring more value to your business, build up your brand reputation and helps you establish yourself as a professional in the industry.
Aside from this, high-quality content will also bring more value to your audience.
The better the content your audience can interact with, the more inclined they’ll be to do just that. And the more your audience interacts with your content, the easier it will be to encourage them to decide to purchase.
On top of that, with the help of an online marketing agency and your sales team, you can easily assess the effectiveness of your marketing strategies through CRMs.
How to use CRMs to improve your eCommerce content marketing?
In eCommerce, content marketing plays a huge role.
As mentioned previously, quality content will offer more value to your customers. For instance, when a customer is looking to purchase something online, they will most commonly look the product up on search engines.
If your content is well-optimized and of high quality, potential customers will easily come across your brand with the help of SEO.
Additionally, by being able to learn more about your offer through quality content, it will be far easier for your potential clients to make a purchasing decision. That’s why any eCommerce business must create high-quality content.
With that in mind, however, your content simply won’t do you much good unless you can see whether or not it actually brings any value to your audience.
With that said, here are some ways you can use CRMs to improve your content marketing.
Focused targeting
The first way in which CRMs can help you improve your content marketing is by offering you the option of focused targeting. What this means is that, with the help of CRMs, you can easily target your potentially most profitable leads and focus more attention on them.
Simply put, not all leads will require the same amount of attention. The ones that are simply there to browse your offer and nothing more won’t bring your business the same value as your repeat customers will.
So, with the help of CRMs, you can easily pinpoint your most lucrative leads and slightly shift the focus of your content to cater to those leads more specifically.
Segmentation
Segmentation is another important aspect of online marketing.
By being able to predict your customers’ moves rather than simply react to them will bring more good to your business.
By analyzing the way in which your customers interact with your content, you’ll gain a better insight into which type of content actually yields the best results. That way, you can easily segment that type of content in particular and pay more attention to it.
Therefore, with the help of CRM systems, you’ll be able to analyze your customer behavior, segment the content they seem to respond to the most and focus your efforts on creating more content of that sort.
Help with building content strategy
Additionally, CRMs can significantly help businesses with coming up with viable content strategies.
Based on your customer behavior and the way in which they respond to different types of content, you’ll be able to determine which strategies work best. That way, you can easily discard the strategies that are simply not working in your favor.
Wasting resources on something that doesn’t bring value back simply doesn’t make sense. So, rely on CRMs to see which type of content works best for your audience and develop strong content strategies that will cater to your audience’s needs.
Personalized content
It’s a well-known fact that customers generally respond better to personalized content. This doesn’t only include the content you choose to put on your blog or social media, but it also involves specialized and personalized offers, promotional emails and such.
Just like it is important to personalize your business, and you can easily achieve this by hiring a reputable design agency in Miami, it’s also important to offer your customers content that feels specifically designed for them. That way, you can create a deeper connection with your customers, which will only positively affect your business.
Lead scoring opportunities
Another thing worth mentioning is that not all of your leads are equal. That’s why it’s extremely important for every business to be able to score its leads.
With the right CRM systems, you can easily track your leads as they move through the sales funnel and see which of them have the potential to bring the most value to your business.
Even though lead scoring is not an exact science, and customers may end up surprising you in the end, it will still provide a general idea about which customers are more likely to do business with you.
Retargeting options
As mentioned earlier, customer retention plays a huge role in any business’s success. This is even more true when eCommerce businesses are concerned.
We’ve previously mentioned that acquiring new customers is significantly more expensive than retaining the existing ones. And, more importantly, returning customers will generally bring more value to your business than new customers will.
With that in mind, just because you’ve managed to attract your customers in the first place doesn’t mean that they will keep coming back on their own.
Instead, you will constantly need to reshape and reinvent your content to keep customers interested. Needless to say, quality CRM systems will simply shine here.
Social listening options
Just like it’s important to create quality content and keep track of how your customers interact with it, it’s also important to listen to what they have to say – not just regarding your content, but your brand as a whole.
With CRM systems in place, you can easily stay on top of your social mentions and see if the content you put out there really resonates well with your audience.
By staying on top of your social mentions, you’ll be able to create content that your audience will respond better to, and that will drive more engagement.
Needless to say, more engagement will bring more value to your business in terms of more satisfied customers, more leads and more sales.
Reusable blueprint
In the world of online marketing, just because something worked in the past, that doesn’t mean it will work the same the next time around.
However, CRMs can help you gain a better understanding of why something worked in the first place. This insight is simply invaluable as it leaves room for creating a reusable blueprint you can rely on the next time you’re about to create a piece of content.
By knowing what worked in the past, you can easily reshape it to fit the current needs and standards. That way, you can still somewhat rely on a previous trend but reshape it to fit the current environment.
These were just some of the ways in which you can use CRM systems to improve your eCommerce content marketing.
The better you understand your customers, the easier it will be for you to offer them something of real value.
Ellie Northcott is a long-time marketer, currently working as a freelancer in Miami, Florida.
She is also a passionate writer and loves to explore new, innovative and digital news.
In spare time she is an eco activist.