Spend wisely, invest in a CRM system…  Improve efficiencies and track marketing activities.  Every campaign and event needs to be measured and leads need to be kept hot.

CRM provides marketers with robust data and ability to segment data efficiently, helping to target marketing campaigns.  Every marketing campaign starts with a collection of data.  It’s so frustrating when the data is spread across the organisation or worse still needs to be collated as it simply isn’t in a format that can be shared easily.

CRM offers so much more than contact management, it has the ability to revolutionize marketing campaigns.  CRM is used to tailor messaging to engage the right targets, enables marketing to distribute leads to the sales teams, track leads and how marketing fitted in to track return on investment.

Using CRM, marketing teams can automate lead nurturing for cold leads as well as managing those hot leads and keeping them hot.

Benefits of CRM for Marketing Teams:

• Visibility to track leads and campaign effectiveness
• Have marketing templates and collateral held in a central place to encourage brand consistency
• Align marketing and sales teams to ensure that no leads or opportunities are slipping through the cracks and also that marketing campaigns are being followed up effectively
• Ensure you are speaking to your customers every 30 days – this can be tracked through CRM
• Automate processes such as nurturing leads.  An increase in retention of 5% of the customer base can help profits between 25 – 75%
• Identify up sell and cross sell opportunities and target campaigns specifically
• Understand what marketing campaigns or events are working by clear tracking.

There are add ons and accelerators that are also specific for the Marketing function:

For GoldMine users there is a Direct Marketing system that feeds back to GoldMine – GoldReach.  GoldReach is a system that captures who has clicked through, read, unsubscribed, received etc. your direct mail.  Each customer record is then tracked back to GoldMine and follow up calls can then be made.  No need to insert data in manually against each record…

For Microsoft Dynamics CRM there is an event manager accelerator.  Caltech have implemented this for other customers and it is a popular accelerator choice.  Event Manager plans, creates, executes and reviews events.  Delegates can book themselves onto the event using a link.  This Microsoft accelerator was designed as a result of working with several event organisers.