You built it, but they still don’t come. 5 reasons why your CRM program may be stumbling.

You were sure it would happen – that brilliant customer relationship management program you created was the answer to your prayers, and the tools you used to create it are essential to its success, platforms you can’t live without: analytics, your ESP, social listening, and your company’s CMS and eCommerce solutions.

But as marketers, do you know which relationships those platforms really serve? Is the data they collect sufficiently aggregated and analyzed to better understand the individual customer? To be truly effective at leveraging the full power of your CRM initiatives, you want to be certain that the customer relationships you need to nurture are flagged at the first sign of intent to purchase (or if you’re in the TV game, intent to view), and that you can stay with them throughout their buying or viewing cycles. To do that, you have to pivot your frame of mind from broadcast to narrowcast, and along with it, the way you use your toolset.

1. “Our email and social tools don’t tell me which customers or viewers are most valuable.”
   ESPs, social listening tools, and publishing suites are great at fundamental customer communication and content management, but they aren’t made to handle more robust functionalities like lead scoring and grading, nurturing, segmented campaign management, and behavioral reporting. Marketing automation platforms with social connectors are designed to better integrate with your other existing platforms (CMS, analytics) to provide these additional capabilities — without losing any of the data that you already have.
2. “Our loyalty and CRM initiatives aren’t automated. The process for identifying a potential high-value customer, keeping them engaged, and moving through our channels is laborious and hands-on.”
   Many marketing teams are struggling with how to create a process to keep customers engaged and moving through buying cycles. With automating technologies, customers can be flagged for relevant content delivery based on their activities. Further, once you establish a system for scoring and grading customers, it makes that delivery easier by allowing marketers to identify which assets and people are higher performing (and therefore which should be given the most weight). That makes the job of identifying your highest-value and most loyal customers – your brand ambassadors – more standardized and automated, and increases your chances of long-term loyalty and engagement.
3. “We track customer activity, but how do we connect the dots between visits to our website, Facebook pages, click-thrus on banner ads, and responses to our emails? Without that, we don’t know how these actions contribute directly to revenue.”
   Without a way to measure the aggregate effectiveness of your CRM and other marketing efforts, you’re left guessing when it comes to planning your next campaign. When your systems are integrated through smart connectors, and include centralized data management & reporting, you gain far better insights into all of these customer actions & how they intersect, your cost per transaction, the number of activities completed as a result of specific campaigns, revenue (or viewership) generated during a specified time period, and more.
4. “We’d like to do more personalization, but it’s labor-intensive. How do we integrate all the data we have to make meaningful personalization decisions?”
   With no efficient, scalable way to target or segment leads, or to incorporate external data sources to create more personalized, relevant customer experiences, your CRM program is forced into a “one-size-fits-all” approach. Fortunately, today’s marketing technologies allow you to segment leads by a variety of criteria like location, gender, job title, purchasing or digital viewing patterns, social & other web-based activity, and more. Using these segments, you can send out highly targeted communications with meaningful content relevant to particular segments, and even 1:1 to individuals.
5. “We’re so resource-constrained. We can’t take on any new technologies or CRM initiatives.”
   Certain marketing tools – like email automation platforms – are actually great tools for marketers with limited resources. With the ability to automate many manual tasks like drip & nurture campaigns, landing page development, reporting, and baseline email marketing, technology can decrease time spent on more tedious tasks and increase the time available for pursuing more strategic CRM initiatives.

Katharine English is a Transformer-in-Chief with substantial experience ideating, creating, developing and deploying digital products and solutions designed to deliver better customer experiences and drive engagement, loyalty and revenue.

I’ve helped brands create winning strategies that have been consistently effective at converting prospects into buyers and brand loyalists. I can show you how to win customers in The Cyclone.

Follow me: @KEnglish