In any business there are two things that really matter; revenue and costs.
If you can grow your income without letting your costs increase disproportionately then you can make a profit, it’s that simple.
Not surprisingly, most businesses do their best to increase their sales and hence their revenues, but it is an unfortunate fact that many businesses become increasingly inefficient as they grow. So if you want to avoid that same trap, wasting money is a no-no.
That’s where CRM (customer relationship management) comes in.
Quite simply, CRM is all about managing your business processes effectively, in order to keep your customers happy. It applies to practically any business, but in this post we will explore a few common uses which can save you money:
1. Cut Out Your Losing Channels
One of the most important things that a good CRM solution allows you to do is track all of your marketing costs in the same place as your sales data.
Whether you sell thousands of products or have just a selection of clients there is value in this.
It allows you to categories costs by marketing channel and you can directly attribute revenue from each sale or invoice to the marketing channels that produced the sale.
This means that you don’t have to rely on guess work, you can see which channels are producing more than they cost and which channels are losing you money. Cut the loss makers and reinvest your money into profitable channels – simple!
2. Revive Hidden Profitable Channels
Of course, cutting loss making channels can be a mistake because sometimes there is hidden profit. This is particularly true for channels such as Adwords and PPC.
Fortunately, if you use it correctly, a CRM system can track customers for their lifetime.
So every time a customer comes back, your CRM system will allocate that income back to the original marketing channel that produced the customer…
By tracking lifetime value you can see which campaigns are truly profitable and how long they take to become profitable. So if 6 months after a PPC campaign the channel suddenly tips into profitability, you might decide to revive the campaign and utilize a channel that your competitors abandoned long ago!
3. Stop Losing Repeat Customers
Most small businesses do a pretty poor job of email marketing, which is a shame because repeat custom is a potential gold mine. What’s cool though is that you can use a CRM system to automate tasks such as emailing customers after a purchase.
In fact, depending on the system you choose, you can automate a series of emails and segment customers based on how they found you or what they bought.
4. Save Lots Of Man Hours
Finally of course is the time that you can save doing all of this stuff.
Some CRM systems start off fairly basic, but if you want to put in the time it is possible to have everything integrated so that your marketing stats, email response rates and even finances are in the same place.
This saves you getting that information together manually and makes decision making so much easier, so you don’t need to waste time wondering what to do and finding the data to do it.
And with everything integrate and automated you will save lots of time.
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