How Your CRM Can Engage and Expand Your Customer Base

To grow your business you must understand your customer and what they want or need from your company. It’s also vital to ensure you are engaging with them to keep them interested in your products or services. A customer relationship management tool, or CRM, can help you to acquire new customers, retain existing ones, and understand their valuable feedback. 

Keep reading to learn more about how a CRM system can take your business to the next level. Roadmap Agency Inc. is a HubSpot partner, so we use their CRM as an example frequently, but most modern CRM systems will have similar features. 

Acquiring Customers 

First, you can use your CRM to collect data on how customers discover you. You can accomplish this in a few ways:

• Connect your ad accounts and website analytics to the CRM. Doing this allows you to see the traffic source contacts came from when they come to your website, and the action they took, like a form submission or e-commerce transaction.   
• Another simple but powerful way to collect data about your customers is to add a field to your forms to ask how they heard about you. While it is easier to have a drop-down, you may get some surprising answers if you leave it free-form for people to provide feedback in their own words.
• Create a sales playbook and ask for client feedback during the discovery phase. Include questions like, how did you hear about us, and what prompted you to reach out? — straightforward is always best when asking for client feedback.

You can use this stakeholder information to create customer personas, which will help determine where to target your efforts to acquire more similar customers.

And of course, remember to create KPIs (key performance indicators) - you can't improve what you don't measure. Create reports or dashboards (depending on your CRM) to track new customers by their source and other buyer behaviours that you can use to make decisions.

Engaging Customers

Typically, at any given time, only 5% of your target audience is active in-market or in the research and comparison phase of the buyer journey. This means you need to capture those buyers who are in-market and nurture the remaining 95% who are not yet ready to purchase or are unfamiliar with your brand — so when they are ready, they will pick you over a competitor.

How do you engage contacts who are in-market?

HubSpot allows you to create Audiences for ads, emails, or personal outreach, to re-engage contacts who have taken any initial steps with you. Other CRMs are likely to have a similar feature but may call it by a different name. 

Using these Audiences, you can gradually feed contacts information relevant to them wherever they are in their buyer’s journey. Personalize your marketing emails and sales messages to address their frequently asked questions. Suggest content on your blog based on webpages or other pieces of your content they have already engaged with. 

Pro tip: Look at company size as an indicator of whether your sales and marketing teams should try to find other buyer influencers and decision-makers at your prospect's company, or provide relevant information for other decision-makers to their initial contact. 

A lot of decision-making happens on the dark web or dark social. This is any user behaviour that cannot be tracked through website or social analytics. For example, if someone shares a link without tracking tags or shares a social post privately with a coworker. To counter this, set up trackable URLs and connect your social accounts to HubSpot to track those vanity metrics like impressions and engagement. Then see if you can find patterns between social engagement and your leads.

How do you engage contacts who are out-of-market?

Out-of-market engagement is about being top of mind and community building. Start by assembling an email list and segment this audience based on where they are in the buyer's journey. You can base this on how frequently they engage with your messaging or the types of content they engage with. 

Next, build your following on social media, including your personal LinkedIn. By growing your audience and making frequent, relevant posts, you're building brand awareness for when they become in-market. Measure your audience growth, engagement, and how long it takes for someone to become a customer on your KPI dashboard.

Retain and Expand

Using a CRM with all your customers’ information on marketing, sales, and service allows you to customize their experience throughout the buyer's journey, including after they have become a customer.

Give your customers moments of "aha!" where they see the value in their decision to purchase from you. Some simple ways to do this include:

• Send personalized emails at relevant times, like a welcome email that outlines how they can make the most out of their recent purchase. Or if they have a meeting in the books with a sales rep, don't send a marketing email with a call to action to book a meeting.
• Keep notes pinned on service tickets to avoid customers having to re-explain their concerns.
• Set up a notification if a key client hasn't heard from your team in a set amount of time, so you can reach out to ensure they are still satisfied.
• Get customer feedback through personal emails or automated surveys at specific times after purchase.
• Use filters to create upsell lists. For example, in Hubspot, you can apply a filter to see which customers have not bought a specific service from you. You can then use that list for 1:1 emails or to send a marketing email to create interest in other products or services you offer.

These are just some ways you can use your CRM to acquire, engage, retain, and expand your customer base. We'd love to discuss how a CRM can help your business grow - book a complimentary discovery call to discuss your CRM implementation.