Customer relationship management (CRM) brings multifaceted benefits to your company and its various departments. Especially when it comes to the customer lifecycle and CRM, the possibilities are endless.
But CRM does more than just support your customer service team. In this article, we’re giving you the inside scoop on how CRMs impact marketing, sales, and customer service teams to help your business thrive.
Interested in implementing CRM into your business strategy today? Get in touch with your friends at Nutshell today to start a free trial of our all-in-one CRM, or attend a live demo.
What is the customer lifecycle?
The customer lifecycle refers to the journey a customer takes from when they first interact with your brand to after they make a purchase. There are five basic stages to the customer lifecycle:
Awareness/Reach: In this stage, a person realizes they have a problem and begin searching to find a solution. This is when businesses should be advertising themselves as a solution.
Acquisition: The Acquisition stage is where the person begins interacting with your brand and seeing all you have to offer. Now, they’re a lead you can follow up on.
Conversion: Here, your lead has made the decision to purchase from you. Now this person is now a paying customer. But here comes the fun part—retaining that new customer.
Retention: In this stage, you want to do what you can to encourage your customer to remain loyal to your brand. This means offering support, promotional and exclusive customer discounts, and any other incentives to encourage continued loyalty.
Advocacy/Loyalty: In the final stage, your customer makes additional purchases after the initial one and becomes a valuable asset to your business. Here, they can help promote your brand through word-of-mouth advertising and drive new leads to your business.
Though there are five stages, the customer lifecycle is nonlinear. Rather than a one-off journey, you want your customers to continuously circulate through the lifecycle and become loyal customers.
What is CRM in relation to the customer lifecycle?
CRM is an invaluable tool when it comes to the customer lifecycle. Your CRM gives you insight into the habits of your leads and customers, helping you to paint a more detailed picture of your customer base. With it, you can map your customers’ journey and identify things like:
Weak points in the customer lifecycle that need improvement
Common customer behaviors
Understanding the details of your customer lifecycle puts you on the path toward better managing your leads within your sales pipeline and converting more leads through well-timed, top-notch customer service.
Benefits of CRM
When it comes to sales, marketing, and customer service, CRMs can bring a few different benefits to your brand that make it an incredible asset to have.
Targeted marketing campaigns
The role of CRM in marketing is quite simple: it’s your inside man. Your CRM is constantly collecting valuable customer data through interactions online and with your sales team.
With this information, you’ve got the inside scoop on your target audience’s habits, behaviors, likes, dislikes, etc. You can create more targeted marketing campaigns with this data that better appeal to your ideal customer, resulting in higher conversion rates.
Rather than bombarding your leads and customers with generic ad and email campaigns that don’t have much flair to them, you can create and launch targeted campaigns that are personalized toward different segments of your audience.
Not only does this help your conversion rates, but it makes your customer feel valued. Even just personalizing an email ad with a person’s name can make the recipient feel as though you’re looking out for each of your customers. In turn, that person could give you unmatched brand loyalty that keeps your sales on the up and up.
Increased sales
With enhanced marketing techniques that better appeal to your audience, you have the potential to boost your sales. Who doesn’t love that?
Did you know that CRM applications can help increase a business’s sales by up to 29%, and even improve sales forecast accuracy by 42%? A CRM system helps you get a clearer picture of your current sales efforts and their results, allowing you to make well-informed decisions about how to better sell to your customer base.
Accurate sales forecasting can help marketers and sales personnel get a better idea of how current marketing efforts could affect future sales and adjust strategies accordingly.
Improved customer service
Just like marketing, the role of a CRM in customer service is to act as the inside man. With information about all of your leads and customers on hand, your customer service and sales representatives can deliver quality customer service to each and every person they talk to.
Not only that but with customer information just a click away, each customer interaction is personalized, making for a memorable, positive experience that customers will associate with your brand for a long time.
Experience the benefits of a CRM with Nutshell
The benefits of CRM don’t stop at better sales, customer service, and marketing—Nutshell’s CRM can improve your entire work environment by promoting better team coordination, cooperation, organization, and productivity. See for yourself what Nutshell has in store for you when you implement our intuitive CRM into your marketing, sales, and customer service strategies by starting a 14-day free trial of Nutshell.
