CRM Marketing Strategy To Drive Sales Revenue

For the purpose of this post, I’m defining Marketing Strategy to mean the analytics that complement the work done by the Database / CRM Marketing team and the influence that those analytics can have on Sales and Marketing programs. This article isn’t about Brand, Creative, or Media Purchase. It’s also not about Social Media, SEM or SEO. Just to be clear, I’m writing about using Data, Technology, & Analytics to reach out to customers and prospects, improve program results and drive revenue. Generally my recommendations are specific to Email Marketing, but may also be applied to Direct Mail or TeleMarketing.

Marketing Strategy should be the heading under which your company defines it’s analytically based sales programs. But you don’t need a fully developed internal analytics shop to be strategic. In fact, that isn’t the first step at all. First, focus on your data. It doesn’t matter how good your analysts are, they won’t be effective or efficient if you give them low quality data to work with.

So, let’s begin with the data. The following three areas of Marketing Strategy rely on Data Governance, so for my opinions there read up on Lightweight Data Governance.

Opportunity Analysis

If your data isn’t clean, you can’t get a feel for how well you are doing. For instance, duplicates in your data when analyzed in aggregate cause double-counting within buckets, double-counting across buckets, and general noise that diminishes the value of analytics and modeling. If you have the same company listed as both a customer and a prospect, and they both fall in the same industry or geography, your analytics driven programs will fail.

The solution is to develop a source system down approach to gathering data for your Marketing Strategy work. If you collect the data with reporting and analysis in mind, downstream processes will benefit. So work with your Sales, Service and Finance teams. It will take them an extra few seconds to correct the problem. Every customer facing employee should spend a few seconds each time they speak with a customer to ask, “Is our contact information for you still correct?” That change, which may require a culture shift that starts with the executive team, will dramatically improve program results.

Targeting and Personalization

Do you use Marketing Strategy and leverage data to drive campaign results? Test and Learn is a sneaky term for Marketing Strategy. It sounds less expensive, so use it.

Your content should be specific to your target’s business problem. It should be tailored to their purchase history, or lack thereof, and include next (or first) best product or cross-sell specific messaging. You should personalize the email to the targets name, title, company name, and other fields in your CRM system. If you have analyzed the lift generated by personalized vs. non-personalized messaging, you understand the need to target your emails. 

When you segment targets and personalize the subject line and body content of your emails, your open and click-through rates will increase significantly. Also, your opt-out rates will go down. The quality of these key fields must be monitored and improved to take advantage of that lift.

Compliance and Customer Interaction

If you are not familiar with CAN-SPAM, read my take on your responsibilities as an email marketer. You are required by law to do a great job at managing email opt-outs and confirming that your business is transparently represented in your email marketing. Even forgetting about email compliance, you should still consider the customer impact of bad marketing. “Mark Goloboy or Current Resident” = Trash Can. Trash Can = Poor return on direct mail spend. Read: Not enough revenue to justify your program.

So how do you mature your processes quickly to take advantage of the potential sales impact of Marketing Strategy? You must develop quality processes that remove bounced emails from your lists and opt-out all instances of an email address when requested. You also need to be sure your sales reps are honoring your opt-outs. Lastly, you must review your data for patterns of Sales or Service rep entered garbage. What’s the most frequently occurring word in the First Name field of your contact records? I bet it’s not “John.”

Data Acquisition

Whether you are in B2C or B2B Marketing, there is value in purchasing reference data for your existing customers, and lead data for prospecting. How much value is there? You need to test purchases from different vendors to determine that. There’s no other way. Buy a small list. Or better, ask a list vendor for a free list to test. They aren’t selling a lot now. Take advantage! Then predict ROI by scaling the results and associated spend across your whole universe of customer and prospect data.

You can also measure the impact of cleaning, de-duplicating and referencing your data to a standard set by testing those processes against a statistically significant sample of your customer data. Again, you may be able to get some of these services for free by getting into a competitive sales situation. Your prospects ask you for this, right? Mastering this customer data requires assistance and cooperation from Sales, Marketing, Customer Service and Technology, which means Data Governance.