Should a CRM be the foundation of your company’s marketing efforts?

Do you get emails from Amazon and Netflix? These are the giants of the business world, yet they seem to pop into your inbox every week. Log in to Netflix, and you’re sure to get a few notifications enticing you to watch another film.

Sometimes, you’re surprised at how uncannily accurate the emails are. And you click into a new title without thinking about how it got there. On a base of millions of customers, Amazon and Netflix have made it a high art. The volume of emails and promotions they send out on a daily basis is staggering. Think about how they’re tracking purchases and viewership.

The goal is daily engagement. Since the effort is to keep you coming back to the platform, it is managed with intelligence built from your selection of purchases or the movies and serials you view.

The only way things can be managed at this scale is with a sophisticated CRM at the backend, where the profile about your interests gets richer over time and helps the companies drill down to find what you’re likely to be interested in.

With HubSpot CRM, marketing efforts become sharper

One of the biggest reasons to work with a CRM is to scale the business. Most communication within a company is only with active prospects, who are a small part of the potential base. And if each salesperson is working with their list of customers, the company does not get the benefit of the interactions. Or the learning.

With a CRM, you own your customer relationships. You don’t have to rely on lists or data from other sources. That truly gives you power.

Let’s take a simple example. If a company used paid digital media to get 100 leads a day, only 5-10 of them may be active prospects. It is important to log the details of the other 90-95 contacts. They are the people who have at least heard about your company and expressed interest. That’s the starting point for building a relationship.

It is quite possible that this will be passive, and the contacts may not respond at all to communication. But they must keep hearing from you. Think of your CRM as a radio station from which you periodically send a stream of broadcasts to your audience. 

Never stop expanding the effort to build the list. It’s like a mutual fund SIP, where you consistently put in the effort every month. The payback over time can be exponential if this is well managed.

HubSpot’s CRM helps you automate the process of reaching out and maintaining contacts with customers. It may well begin with a few hundred contacts and then expand to have thousands, if not hundreds, of thousands every year. With automation, the effort to reach hundreds of people is the same as reaching one million people. That’s where the magic of the CRM comes into play.

HubSpot’s CRM helps you understand why customers buy

Customers' reasons for buying are varied. At a real estate company targeting customers in a certain locality, some customers bought an apartment because it was close to their places of work, and they wanted to reduce the commute. Others were looking to get away from the hustle and bustle of the city but wanted the conveniences. Then, some wanted to extend the time their children stayed at home when they attended professional college.

You have to leverage the CRM to get the most out of it. The more you use it to profile, understand and interact, the more the company stands to gain.

The ads spoke of the size of the apartments, the location, and the group's track record. However, in personal communication over email, it is possible to add these little nuances from CRM to help people make decisions that take months, sometimes years. And the company needs to reach out to prospects on a consistent basis.

In a B2B product category where orders are placed periodically, keeping communication lines open and informing customers of new features and product advancements is critical. The more customers hear from the brand or are incentivised to visit the website, the better brand recall grows – as well as the preference for purchase.

HubSpot’s CRM outreach helps drive references and recommendations

Some products may have long sales cycles and only be bought once every few years. In this case, companies may believe that they need a fresh set of leads every time. 

That’s where HubSpot’s CRM integration includes marketing, sales, and service departments to keep the dialogue going. Satisfied customers are far more likely to provide references and recommendations. 

That, in turn, drives down the cost per lead. Every business has a long-term objective. The only way to achieve this is to expand the base of interested prospects broader and deeper and understand their motivations.

With planning, a routine to communicate and the points to be touched upon can be established. HubSpot’s CRM becomes the command centre from which all customer touchpoints can be mobilised.

When companies the size of Amazon and Netflix can leverage CRM worldwide, it follows that companies hitting growth speed bumps will benefit from having the right tools to reach out to prospects and customers.

HubSpot’s CRM helps you build a marketing engine you can leverage for years. As the customer and prospect base expands, you can use it to grow, drill down and segment customers at any stage of purchase.

Uniting marketing, sales, and services across a single platform confers numerous benefits and facilitates the collaboration of all departments.