Before understanding the types of sales data, CRM software can offer for data-driven marketing, let us understand what CRM software is in the first place.

What is CRM software?

Customer relationship management (CRM) is a technology that comprehensively manages your company’s relationships while strengthening your relationship with your customers and prospects. The goal is to improve business relationships to grow your business.

CRM tools can be used to manage customer relationships across their entire customer lifecycle, spanning marketing, sales, digital commerce, and customer service interactions.

Considering the rewards a CRM offers a business, its adaptation is widespread. According to Grand View Research, 91% of companies with 10 or more employees use a CRM.

5 Ways Sales Data From CRM Software Can Boost Your Marketing

1. Finding The Target Audience

CRM software helps businesses locate their most potent prospects and customers. You can segment leads and customers into groups according to a wide range of characteristics, such as demographics like age, geographic location, social status, industry, etc. and activities like recent and past purchases, email response rates, social media activity, and personal preferences.

This information enables marketers to create very defined customer profiles or buyer personas and personalize their products, services, and marketing messages to target specific audiences.

Buyer personas are a profile of an average buyer. A business can have more than one buyer persona. Here’s an example of what a buyer persona looks like. CRM software is quite helpful in filling out the necessary details required, as shown in the boxes below.

Image Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/b9BE7qF9fuhNPBKd8

Moreover, marketers can also create targeted business-to-business email marketing campaigns, increasing subscriber numbers, email marketing metrics, and revenue with the best marketing and ad spend.

2. Prediction

According to Resco.net, 74% of companies say CRM technology gives better access to customer data.

Using the historical data of a customer, CRM can help businesses determine their future behavior. Historical data consists of all data from purchase history, returns, store visits to unchanging demographic information like age, gender, location, and more.

All this data is used to map out initial analysis to determine customer trends.

For example, a predictive model can help indicate what will be the next product a customer would like to buy, based on the data on that customer and other customers who have purchased the same product.

3. Recommendations  

Data collected from the CRM helps in building recommendation engines. These recommendation engines are powered by Machine Learning, Predictive Analysis, and AI, wherein they constantly learn about the customer’s behavior and offer them products and services.

This helps in the hyper-personalization of customer experience and also increases cross-sales and upsells.

For instance, Amazon’s “Frequently bought together” feature is driven by recommendation engines that help with cross-selling and upselling.

A person shopping for shoes would be cross-sold jeans, t-shirts, and sunglasses by showing them recommendations of the same.

In the case of upselling, the similar shopper is shown shoes of more expensive brands along with the one they are looking for.

Image Source: https://images.app.goo.gl/ogTtT8Jz9doFhbi1A

4. Personalization

According to Statista, 90% of consumers in the US find the idea of personalization appealing. And according to SmartInsights, 63% of consumers will not buy from brands that have poor personalization.

CRM software first helps you to segment leads according to different criteria. You can then create unique, personalized marketing campaigns for different leads.

You can use CRM data to create personalized messages that include their name and a personal message along with content tailored for their taste to thank them for their support and patronage over the years.

Spotify is a great example of how it uses data to offer its listeners a highly personalized experience.

Spotify’s “Discover Weekly” is a curated playlist of tracks that it thinks a given user will like. It works like many other recommendations and personalization platforms, largely with the help of an algorithm that determines a user’s “taste profile,” based on their previous listening behavior and the most popular playlists among the entire Spotify audience. Here’s a simple diagram of how it works:

Image Source: https://qz.com/571007/the-magic-that-makes-spotifys-discover-weekly-playlists-so-damn-good/

5. Abandoned Purchases

Research from Salesforce states that CRM software can increase sales by as much as 29% while improving sales forecasting accuracy by 32% and improving sales productivity by 39%. Precious CRM data can help your cold leads and unhappy customers.

You can use your sales data to target lapsed customers effectively by gaining insights into what products they are interested in, at what price point they want to purchase, and what was their reason for not going through with the purchase.

You can inform customers and tell them all about your latest products or offer them an incentive (like a discount or free shipping) to make another purchase. A good CRM tool can help you with data like purchase likelihood and customer lifetime value, help you identify the customers who are most (or least) likely to repurchase from you and get an overall estimate of how much they will be willing to spend.

Final Words

CRM software helps you make successful business relationships, stay connected to customers, streamline processes, and improve profitability by leveraging the power of data and giving you greater visibility into customer insights.